The American Duo of Political Christianities
Situating conservative and liberal Christianities within the Church’s broader betrayal of Jesus’s counterculture
American Christianity is as fake as the Trumpian Supreme Court. Both have been politicized.
Indeed, far from being judges with legal or even political minds, the hyper-conservative justices that now make up the majority on the court, thanks to Donald Trump’s three appointments are more like theologians. Likewise, divided in their respective political tribes, most American Christians practice their religion as though they were stage actors. In that respect they’re like the figurehead judges in the SCOTUS nomination process, reading clichés from a script about their respect for legal precedent.
Christianity has been a corrupt institution for a long, long time, since the more industrious, proto-Catholic branch went to war with the Gnostics and scapegoated Jews to appeal to the very Roman Empire that would have executed Christianity’s charismatic founder as a common criminal. Christianity sold its soul as soon as the Jesus movement became an organized religion in the third and fourth centuries.
