Of course the Crap Christians lie about Jesus -- it's good practice for lying about everything

by Ken

I'm just catching up with a remarkable post written last week by our friend Mike Lux, one of the founding bloggers at OpenLeft and the author of one of Howie's favorite books, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.The piece, which obviously expresses one of Mike's abiding unhappy fascinations, appeared on HuffPost and is called "How Do Christians Become Conservative?"

He stakes out his turf:

I was raised in a church-oriented home, and I write about religion a fair amount. This isn't because I am conventionally religious: I decided about four decades ago that since there was no way for sure about the nature of God or the soul or all that metaphysical stuff, I wasn't going to spend much time thinking, caring, or worrying about it. If that sends one to hell, at least I'll be there with a lot of my favorite people. But I still have the social and moral teaching I learned from my upbringing embedded in me as a core part of my value system, and I still know my Bible pretty well.

That's why I am always puzzled by how people who claim to be followers of the Jesus I read about in the Bible can be political conservatives.

I suspect that many (most?) DWT don't need Mike to explain what he means, but a whole lot of mystified and now pretty steamed Crap Christians haven't a clue. He explains:

if you actually read the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus' main concern in terms of the people whose fates he cared about was for the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast. Comment after comment and story after story in the Gospels about Jesus relates to the treatment of the poor, generosity to those in need, mercy to the outcast, and scorn for the wealthy and powerful. And his philosophy is embedded with the central importance of taking care of others, loving others, treating others as you would want to be treated. There is no virtue of selfishness here, there is no "greed is good," there is no invisible hand of the market or looking out for Number One first. There is nothing about poor people being lazy, nothing about the undeserving poor being leeches on society, nothing about how I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps so everyone else should, too. There is nothing about how in nature, "the lions eat the weak," and therefore we shouldn't help the poor because it weakens them. There is nothing about charity or welfare corrupting a person's spirit.

What there is: quote after quote about compassion for the poor.

Mike goes on to hit some of the highlights of Jesus' compassion for the poor -- and, more, his credentials as "a really serious class warrior -- he wasn't just into helping the poor; he didn't seem to like rich folks very much," with supporting citations. Which leads his to this crucial paragraph:

I have never heard a conservative Christian quote any of these verses -- not once, and I have been in a lot of discussions with Christian conservatives, and heard a lot of their speeches and sermons. The one verse they always quote (and I mean always -- I have never talked to a conservative Christian about economics and not heard them quote this verse) is the one time in which Jesus says that "the poor will always be with us." The reason they love this quote so much is that they interpret that line to mean that in spite of everything else Jesus said about the poor, that since the poor will always be with us, we don't need to worry about trying to help them. Apparently since the poor will always be with us, we can go ahead and screw them. But Jesus making a prediction that there will always be oppressive societies doesn't mean he wanted us to join the oppressors. By clinging desperately to that one verse in the Bible, and ignoring all the others about the poor and the rich, Christian conservatives show themselves to be hypocrites, plain and simple.

I've left out way too much. It's a beautiful piece, rich and chatty and enveloping; you really have to read it. What I've cherry-picked are the nuggets that led me to an honest-to-gosh realization.

Whenever I discuss religion, I try to be careful to pay tribute to the genuinely inspiring religious people I've known of and known, people who have led lives of utter admirableness inspired by their religious faith. And then there are all the other religious types.

The realization Mike's piece led me to is that people tend to approach religion for two very different reasons, which correspond to the two classes of religious folk I've just described. There are, on the one hand, people in search of ethical and spiritual guidance in order to lead better lives. And then there are the ones who already know what kind of humans they are -- vile, debased ones, with no values but greed and selfishness, who are looking for some psudo-spiritual claptrap to dress up their degraded existences.

Okay, there's a third class: the unthinking sheep who sign up to feel that they belong to something, somewhere, and especially to be told how to lead their lives. They have been suckered, by the Crap Christians, into assuming an air of ethical superiority that is totally at odds with their actual beliefs and, all too often, actions. But people who choose to foreswear thinking and accepting responsibility for their own life choices can't wriggle out of responsibility on that technicality.

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