I’m sure at least some of you looked at the headline and immediately groaned and dismissed it as impossible and unnecessary. A growing number of people on the left are moving away from Christianity and have no interest in “reclaiming” a religion that they view, at best, as callous, exclusionary, and outdated. Those who talk the loudest about their Christian faith are almost entirely on the far right, and their hypocritical bluster drowns out the delicate, and diminishing, voices of progressive Christians. And there are certainly verses (e.g., Leviticus 18:22) that require so much explanation and justification that it seems like a case of methinks-the-liberal-doth-protest-too-much. But with all of that being said, there is also a moral core in the teachings of Jesus that smoothly melds with the pillars of the Democratic Party’s principles—or at least an idealized version of them.
But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just. Luke 13:13-14.
The treatment of the poor and neglected by the modern-day Republican Party is shameful. Donald Trump and Mick Mulvaney have fought to take money away from programs that help the poor heat their homes in the winter and feed their children in the summer. Those on the religious right often justify their cruelty with platitudes about private giving, but most of that is generally sent to their own church to pay utility bills and staff salaries. And in the case of Republican #1, charity is just another concept that he can exploit to fill his own coffers. Alternatively, the Democratic Party is at its best when it is fighting to provide food, health care, and shelter for, what Jesus called, “the least of these.”
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Matthew 19:24
This verse is a hard pill to swallow for those on the religious right, particularly those who believe in the prosperity gospel. Interestingly, it has been a hard pill to swallow for hundreds of years. The context for the verse is a conversation between Jesus and a rich young man in which Jesus is advising the rich man to “go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor…and come and follow me.” The meaning is clear, but wealthy Christians argue that Jesus meant “cable” instead of “camel” or that he was referencing a particular gate in Jerusalem that was a tight squeeze, but certainly possible, for a camel to pass through. They can’t stomach the idea that Jesus may have had something negative to say about the ostentatious accumulation of wealth. And now the whole Grand Ol’ Party experiment has culminated in the Presidential election of a literal billionaire.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.” Luke 10:33-34
The phrase “good Samaritan” has lost most of its meaning over the past two-thousand years. It isn’t just a story about a man doing a good deed. It’s about a man doing a good deed in spite of deeply-ingrained animosity. It’s a story with a twist ending: no one in Jesus’s Jewish audience expected the Samaritan to be the one to save the injured man. It is about overcoming prejudices and treating one’s fellow man or woman as one would like to be treated, regardless of who that person is or where they came from. The Republicans since Nixon have been nose-to-the-ground focused on their plan to divide and conquer our nation. They categorize and pontificate. They mislead and deceive. And in the age of Trump, they’ve traded in their dog whistles for megaphones. They don’t want us to realize that we’re all the same. That would be a disaster for them.
But what about the homophobia? What about the misogyny? Setting aside Esther and Mary Magdalene and the thorn in Paul’s flesh, there is one sentence spoken by Jesus that overrules all of the citations to 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 6:9 that have been used to justify hatred and punishment for a thousand years. There is one sentence spoken by Jesus that goes to the heart of liberalism. There is one sentence spoken by Jesus that defines the perfect society that we are trying to build:
Judge not, that ye be not judged. Matthew 7:7