By Neil Elliott
Many of us were transfixed by the catastrophic wildfires in southern California in January. And we were dismayed by the cynical political maneuvers that followed. When House Speaker Mike Johnson—an ardent Christian nationalist—announced that any federal aid to disaster victims would have “strings attached,” a dear friend of mine exclaimed, “What kind of Christianity attaches ‘strings’ to aid for disaster victims?!” The question sounds rhetorical, but it deserves a serious answer. What kind of Christianity, indeed? The answer reflects the competing visions in our unofficial religion.
The day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, as she led the national prayer service in the National Cathedral, the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., asked Donald Trump to “have mercy” on vulnerable, frightened people who stood to suffer grievous harm from his intended policies. Trump squirmed in his seat like a naughty schoolboy, then took to social media to whine that the “so-called Bishop” was a “nasty woman” and had led a “boring service.” Sycophants on the religious Right took up the cudgel: she was a “witch,” a “crazy woman,” a “God-hater,” “demonically inspired,” spewing “demonic filth” and "spells and perversion."
As evangelical author Shane Claiborne wrote at Religious News Service, the moment illustrated our time as a "tale of two Christianities," only one of which was genuine: Budde’s Christianity insists that “every person is made in the image of God, and that we should show compassion to children and to immigrants and refugees, both indisputably core theological convictions” of true Christianity. Trump is the figurehead for the alternative, “the heretical cult of white supremacy that is trying to camouflage itself as Christianity.” Claiborne considers MAGA Christianity self-evidently false because it “doesn’t look or sound like the Jesus of the Gospels—who blessed the poor and the peacemakers, the meek and the merciful, who insisted we love our enemies and turn the other cheek, who commanded his disciples to sell their possessions and give the money to the poor,” and commanded his followers to “welcome the stranger. . .”
As an Episcopal priest (full disclosure: I got to know Bishop Budde decades ago when we were both priests in Minnesota), I resonate with Claiborne’s argument. Yes, we live amid two radically different Christianities, and I share Claiborne’s commitment to one of them.
But as a biblical scholar, I’m not sure I hold a monopoly on which Christianity is the truly “biblical” one.
The texts Claiborne invokes place him toward the left end of the spectrum. Indeed, Christian activist Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons identifies that last citation, from Matthew 25, as the banner of the Christian Left in the United States, even as he observes that the Christian Left typically demurs from the language of “Left” and “Right.” Claiborne declares at last that the question is not “who we like better or align with politically. . . . It’s not about left and right, but what it really means to be faithful to Jesus.”
But those on the Christian Right are just as adamant that they are the real Christians, and that people like Budde, or Claiborne, or the Rev. Dr. William Barber and his colleagues at Repairers of the Breach, or everyday liberal clergy like me are more or less complicit dupes of the godless, lunatic Left. I think they’re wrong, but I can’t advance the argument just by reversing that charge.
Over a professional career navigating the stormy currents of biblical scholarship, I’ve developed a Spidey sense for fundamentalist claims of both “Left” and “Right” to be “just reading the Bible.” Such claims ignore and deny the ancient historical contexts in which the biblical texts were written and the contemporary contexts in which we read them.
The truth is, the Bible is a complicated collection of writings from different historical periods. Those writings express different theological and political points of view. The Bible simply doesn’t speak with a single voice, no matter how often or how loudly anyone declares that it does. Notably, it never advocates democracy, the abolition of slavery, or the equality of races or of the sexes or of gender identities. Those causes have been advanced through protracted, often bitter, sometimes violent struggle against people and institutions who could claim the “plain sense” of one or another Bible passage in order to maintain the status quo.
Members of the Christian Right have their favorite texts, as well: strict, and strictly patriarchal, law codes that threaten the disobedient with severe punishments and prophecies of vindication for the righteous. (Let us note that those passages appear throughout the Bible: there’s nothing particularly “Old Testament” about judgment or “New Testament” about love and mercy.) To sanctify the harsh austerity of neoliberal economics, those on the Right will recite 2 Thessalonians—“if any would not work, neither let them eat”! To discredit dissent, they’ll intone Romans 13—“let every soul be subject to the governing authorities”—but only when a Republican occupies the White House. And, if their hero happens to be an utterly immoral, irreligious louche, a convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist, they reach for biblical precedents. Their guy is like Cyrus, the infidel Persian who nonetheless ended the Babylonian captivity or Israel’s own sexual predator David, both of whom were declared God’s chosen instruments by different biblical writers.
When Claiborne observes that the MAGA faithful hardly embody “the Jesus of the Gospels,” it’s by allusion to passages in Matthew and Luke—but not John, where Jesus declares that “no one comes to the Father” except through him, that he and the Father “are one,” and that outsiders—“the world”—simply can’t understand that truth, and therefore stand condemned. Such in-or-out, all-or-nothing sayings—and a web of other verses, carefully assembled from other parts of the Bible—are enough to convince the predisposed that they have a lock on the Bible’s deepest secrets, and that the rest of us—godless secularists—are hell-bound. Our appeal to texts about social justice for the needy strike them as symptomatic of our self-deluded do-goodism, the “sin” of misguided empathy.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean a “both-sides-do-it” equivocation. Marxist thought helps us to understand that MAGA Christians have been encouraged by the echo chambers of right-wing media to align with the cruel requirements of neoliberalism. But Marxist thought also helps us recognize that more liberal churches serve neoliberalism as well, when they refuse to “get political” by naming economic realities, let alone (shudder) by calling out exploitative, racist capitalism as the preeminent evil of our time. If, as sociologist Robert Bellah observed, socialism is America’s “great taboo,” white Christian America survives by observing just that taboo.
The two Christianities competing for the thoughts and minds of our nation are fighting over a dwindling demographic: “white Christian America.” Those two Christianities read the same Bible and appeal to the same Jesus, but in opposite ways. For us on the Left who identify as Christian, it may not help just to profess our loyalty to Jesus or our conviction of the Bible’s authority. We will need to think critically, about ancient and contemporary historical contexts alike, from a vantage point outside the Bible. We will need to stand in solidarity and empathy with everyone working to make this world livable for all of us, beginning with the most vulnerable around us. That commitment may spring from religious conviction—traditionally, Judaism calls it tikkun ‘olam, the “restoration of the world”; the theologies of liberation speak of the “preferential option for the poor”—but it is also, irreducibly, grounded in politics. We need to get used to saying so.
Neil Elliott is an Episcopal priest, a biblical scholar, a member of DSA, and the author of several books on the political interpretation of the Bible.
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