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MAGA Christianity is Short One Jesus

Every day I see people claiming to be Christians.

They are everywhere I turn: on Twitter and on TV and at the gas station and across the street and at family gatherings.

They fill up my newsfeed, usually showing up unannounced to call me a libtard or a baby killer or soy boy—or simply to fly a virtual middle finger and remind me that I’m surely going to hell. Their bios read “CHRISTIAN” and “GOD-LOVER” and “DISCIPLE OF JESUS”—but the words appearing just inches below are made of anger and bitterness and fear. 

I read their snarling, resentful social media posts about “illegals” who are destroying their country—and remember when I served alongside them on mission trips to the very places these supposed immoral threats come from.

I overhear them in restaurants, disparaging with racial slurs the black server who just departed their table, and watch them actively ogle women who walk by—and I wonder how they connect the lines of their lives to the Jesus of the Bible. 

I see them at arena Presidential propaganda rallies, chanting “send her back”—about a Muslim woman they’ve never met and know nothing about: one whose name they probably don’t know or can’t spell.

The emptiness is epidemic.

These now ubiquitous stated disciples of Jesus suffer from a profound and dangerous deficit: they now lack anything remotely resembling their namesake.

They are devoted members of an aging organization suffering from the most extreme kind of mission drift; having lost the plot of its genesis almost entirely.

They are participants of a growing congregation that no longer requires its cornerstone for stability.

They are professed Christians—and their religion is short one Jesus.

It’s pretty easy to spot when people’s Christianity is Jesus-less. 

Jesus-less Christians perpetually need people to earn love. 

They are forever looking for human beings to prove their worth; to show themselves deserving of shelter or care or food or inclusion—to demonstrate their suitability to be welcomed and loved and protected. When Jesus looked at the crowds, he defaulted to kindness: healing people because they were sick, feeding them because they were hungry, comforting them because they were hurting. He didn’t inventory their lives and he didn’t ask them if they were “doing it the right way.” No one had to prove to Jesus that they were worthy of his generosity or affection. His compassion and their need made them worthy.

Jesus-less Christians worship a decidedly inconsistent God.

One minute they are effusively preaching of the massive, expansive, all-consuming affections of a creator who “so loved the world”—the next minute violently sermonizing about America needing to be first. They are in one breath repeating the exhortation to love their neighbor as themselves, and in the next loudly chanting “build that wall.” They want ownership of a maker whose love is global, but quickly default to “taking care of our own.”

Jesus-less Christians are generous with damnation and stingy with grace. 

They are so ready to condemn strangers for their orientation or their faith tradition or their political affiliation—and simultaneously suffer from a profound spiritual amnesia when it comes to the kind of beautiful, open-hearted mercy and love for individuals that Jesus’ life was marked by. They don’t care about seeing people clearly or learning stories, if doing those things might require them to face their privilege or sacrifice their comfort—or to change or feel or help.

Jesus-less Christians are perpetually terrified.

Everything is a threat. They are always in lack. Fear is always running amok in them. Their enemies are forever encroaching. The bad guys are always looming. They are continually in a battle posture and speaking war rhetoric. And this ever-present fear ends up getting transformed into violence and bigotry and selfishness and hatred that is causing good people to exodus from it.

These Christians need Jesus.

I’m fully sick of a God whose agenda is America and whose love is not global—and I think most decent people are.

We are so tired of this empty religion; of people who wield a Jesus they seem uninterested in emulating and unwilling to listening to.

We’re exhausted by the wounds it has inflicted on people—in the name of a God who is supposedly love.

We want a Church that produces fruit that resembles Jesus; one that defaults to compassion, one whose love has no borders, whose generosity know no walls, one whose burden is the poor and the hungry and the invisible.

We want a Christianity that can’t live without Jesus.

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