What a difference a couple of millennia make.
There’s a story about Jesus that all four New Testament Gospel writers record in their accounts of his life.
He’s been teaching a disparate gathering of humanity spread out in front of him. The location is remote, the hour is late, and the people are hungry.
When his students suggest that he send the people away so that they can eat something, the writer Matthew records Jesus as saying:
“They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
The disciples report back the relatively meager collection of bread and fish that they’re able to cobble together, and the futility of the task before them. All the Gospel writers describe Jesus multiplying the resources exponentially and feeding thousands.
MAGA Republican Christians would have hated this.
In fact, they’d have despised nearly everything attributed to him in the Gospels.
In the ninth chapter of his biography, Matthew writes that “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
Trump Evangelicals mock the very empathy the namesake of their faith preached and practiced, and they’d have ridiculed him relentlessly.
Four times in the Bible, the truth is laid out:
Jesus feeds the multitudes in his path.
That’s what he does.
And as striking as that is, equally revelatory is what he doesn’t do.
There’s no altar call, no spiritual gifts assessment, no moral screening, no litmus test to verify everyone’s theology, and no process to identify those worthy enough to earn this free meal.
Their hunger and Jesus’ compassion make them worthy.
And in the two thousand years since then, a good portion of his American followers haven’t just lost the plot, they’ve purposefully flushed it down the toilet.
Donald Trump has supplanted Jesus in the hearts of MAGA Christians, and they now practice a cruel, punitive, exclusionary sickness wrapped in religion but devoid of love for its neighbor.
Watching self-identified Christian politicians gleefully hold the SNAP program hostage while their media mouthpieces, social media surrogates, and church-going rank-and-file assassinate the collective character of the 41 million people who receive those benefits nationwide, I can’t help but believe that Jesus would be sickened by them.
I imagine them violently disrupting the crowd gathered, seizing the bread and the fish, castigating the hungry throng for their laziness, expelling Jesus, and then publicly congratulating themselves for their righteousness.
The sick irony here is that the people continually claiming America is a Christian nation don’t want anything to do with Christ.
These performative charlatans want to establish a theocracy of compulsion that legislates morality, name-drops God, but has open contempt for the vulnerable human beings Jesus cared for—and for Jesus himself.
And the faithful people who call this place home and are genuinely seeking to emulate the Jesus of the New Testament need to be clear in condemning this heresy MAGA Republicans are preaching; this hateful, ugly disdain for those in need that offers no good news for the hungry or the poor or the sick or the vulnerable.
The open-hearted, open-handed Christians here cannot stand by while so many people made in the image of God are slandered and starved by bloated hypocrites wielding privilege and power—because those were exactly the tables Jesus overturned when his feet first touched the planet, and they’re the ones he would be upending right now.
Over and over, Jesus made it clear: food is not something people need to prove themselves worthy of.
This is not about humanity deserving to be fed but about the inhumanity of those withholding the meal.
No one went hungry in the presence of Jesus, and no one should live with food scarcity in a land filled with supposed Christians.
SNAP is an expression of compassion for the multitudes here, for the harassed and helpless crowds whose families call this place home.
And that’s exactly why Conservative Evangelicals want to destroy it.
