Good Jesus/Bad Jesus: Understanding the difference in the age of Donald Trump
“Christianity” is a label applied to two radically different religions that both claim the same name. These two different religions can be identified by who they worship: Bad Jesus on the one hand, or Good Jesus on the other. With the pending presidency of Donald Trump upon us, understanding the difference has suddenly become vital.
Most Americans and Europeans, whether Christians or not, are at least somewhat familiar with Good Jesus. He’s a figure who reportedly counseled that we love our enemies, that we turn our other cheek when confronted with violence, that we give away our belongings in order to tend to the poor, to in general, as recently quoted by President Obama, tend to “the least of these” (Matt 25:40). [1]
The religion most commonly understood as Christianity, however, is based to a much greater extent on Bad Jesus. This religion is rooted in John 3:16 (that verse held aloft at football games, chalked onto sidewalks around the U.S., and painted on the sides of cars by those especially zealous in their missionary zeal) and the shockingly violent book of Revelation, a nightmarish tale dramatized in the “Left Behind” books and movies. In this religion, you engage in some trivial professions of faith in an unseen invisible sky friend and are magically granted eternal life in paradise, and as a delicious plus, your enemies get eternal torment in a future lake of fire. Bad Jesus, the Jesus of John’s Gospel (the last written and farthest removed in time from the historical Jesus), imagines himself as an incarnated god who pre-existed the creation of the cosmos and shows no interest in the poor or oppressed, and indeed counsels that the needs of the poor be ignored so his feet can be anointed with expensive oil (John 12:3–8). He is depicted as having two rich patrons, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. This is the Jesus embodied in the Christianity of James Dobson, Jerry Falwell (Sr. And Jr.), Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer, Calvin Beisner, the Koch Brothers, and a long string of TV preachers. Indeed, the badness of this Jesus is his chief virtue. The Baptist preacher and Trump fan from Texas, Robert Jeffress, explained that he and his fellow evangelical believers support Trump because they want a “strongman” for president, and would “run from” any candidate that embodied the peaceful virtues of Jesus as recorded in some New Testament passages. He elaborated:
“Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek. Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.” [2]
The other Christianity, the one based on the Good Jesus of the common perceptions of Christianity noted above, is based especially in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31–46). Here, the divine is embodied and literally resides in the oppressed and downtrodden (people and planet), and service to the oppressed is the primary measure of individual righteousness. This Christianity is utterly indifferent to whether or not you believe in an imaginary sky friend. You can believe in such a god, or not. Your deeds are the measure of your moral standing. This is the Christianity of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers, the Nuns on the Bus, the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other activists, and the Social Gospel emerging in the 19th century and dedicated to bringing about divine righteousness “on earth.” It is the environmental Christianity of Matthew Fox’s “Mother Earth Crucified,” and of Thomas Berry, who understood the Cosmos itself, understood through natural science, as “the primary scripture.” This Christianity is also rooted in the exhortation to compassion found in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), and his command to the rich young man to “sell everything you have and give [the proceeds] to the poor” (Mark 10:17–31; Matthew 19:16–30; Luke 18:18–30). It is easy to see why Republicans detest this Jesus. In its contemporary form, the Republican party has increasingly become a band of reverse Robin Hoods, people who rob the poor to increase the wealth of the rich.
The new Republican Congress was sworn in this week, January 3, 2017. With aid and pseudo-pious cover from evangelicals who worship Bad Jesus, they are now working to enact a final solution to the problem of poverty by denying food, shelter and especially health care to those people they deem undeserving of those three things. They aren’t planning on putting them in boxcars. Taking inspiration from Reagan while Governor of California, they will seek instead to simply kick the weak to the sidewalk and then let nature be their executioner. They cloak this moral depravity in fetus worship and the “sanctity of marriage,” their code phrase for anti-LGBTQ bigotry.
Republicans will show their love of Bad Jesus in many ways in the weeks, months, and years ahead, and will try mightily to get us to ignore Good Jesus. They’ll of course occasionally pay a little lip service to their duty to the poor, but their church is for what sociologists of religion call “supernatural compensators,” namely, obtaining a blissful paradise in the hereafter for as little possible cost now, something Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famed Protestant theologian and martyr to the anti-Nazi cause, called “cheap grace.” For these disciples of Bad Jesus, letting the poor have access to heath care, shelter, or even food, is just too costly. Ironically, they, and House speaker Paul Ryan, now take their marching orders from the atheist philosopher and bad novelist, Ayn Rand, who taught that the poor are just parasites to be starved into oblivion.
As the Republican war on people and on the earth is waged, they can be counted on to lift up the banner of Jesus and their Christian piety. When they do, ask which Jesus are they lifting up? Which Christianity? Good Jesus or Bad Jesus? Good Christianity or Bad Christianity?
