Jesus is the topic for today. Some people would say that he should be the topic every day, but they usually carry with them a political agenda, and typically the wrong political agenda. This guy is correct:
From my former @nytimes colleague, a brilliant war correspondent and informed public conscience. pic.twitter.com/E0GmnW59Jg
— David Cay Johnston (@DavidCayJ) August 25, 2021
Unquestionably, Jesus did not "come to accumulate the worst aspects of American imperialism, capitalism, chauvinism, violence and bigotry into the Christian religion." He couldn't have come to do anything to the Christian religion because it did not exist before him.
Neither did Jesus Christ come for any explicitly political reason, especially as "Christ" means "the anointed one." It would be comforting, to secular humanists to believe that Jesus came into the world specifically to cure the sick, aid widows, feed the hungry, and house the homeless. Alas, that Jesus took human form, he himself emphasized, not "to abolish the Law or the Prophets (but) to fulfill them."
People can choose not to believe that was Jesus' aim. But the same book (Bible) that includes that explanation in the gospel of Matthew is the same that attested to Jesus' humanitarian, compassionate ways. To believe the latter is to believe the former; to disbelieve the former is to disbelieve the latter. Accepting only one side of Jesus Christ without the other is a luxury truth does not afford us.
So Chris Hedges has it right, including his apparent lament that the "mainstream" church should denounce Christian political extremists as heretics. They should not do so in the name of left-wing politics nor even to portray Jesus as a sort of love all minorities politician. They should do so because to wrap oneself in the flag of Jesus to rationalize a political perspective is to deny that he came into the world to save sinners thus breaking the enmity between God and mankind. If you wish, choose not to believe that Jesus existed; but you are thereby deciding the kindler, gentler Jesus also did not exist.
Of course, this does not suggest that believing Christians cannot be involved in political issues or even partisan politics, nor that Christian belief cannot inform a believer's political ideology. However, Jesus' point was not to energize conservative politics, nor even to curb it, for which there is much need.
This fellow, with politics probably far more conservative than mine, understands this better than most:
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