Jesus Christ, Made In Our Likeness

[lpetrich]

Not just physical likeness, but also social and political and ideological likeness.

Samuel Perry on X: " Ever notice folks ..." / X

Ever notice folks on the political left & right both claim their views represent those of Jesus? In our new study, we ask adults to rate Jesus on the left-right spectrum & find ratings are almost all about politics & almost nothing to do w/being religious or even Christian. 1/

For example, we find the leading predictors of whether you place Jesus further left or right are your own ideological identity and Christian nationalism, and this is true for Christians AND non-Christians alike. And religiosity doesn't really matter much. Why's that important? 2/

It helps us understand causal direction. If folks became conservative BECAUSE they view Jesus as conservative, we'd expect those who ostensibly care more about being like Jesus (very committed Christians) to show a stronger association. But we don't. Rather we find whether... 3/

...you're nominal Christian or NOT a Christian, the link between ideological identity, CN, & where you place Jesus is basically the same. So it makes more sense to conclude the association is explained by projection. Jesus is left/right-leaning cuz YOU are left/right-leaning. 4/

This argument is consistent with what social theorists (Spinoza, Feuerbach, Durkheim) and social scientists have supposed for a long time. In fact, here are two studies that approach the topic with similar conclusions.

You can find our study here.

As always, if you can't get past the paywall, shoot me an email and I'll send you a pdf ASAP. My address is in the cv in my profile. 6/End

Then,
Samuel Perry on X: "Incidentally, ...." / X

Incidentally, I find the only pushback on this idea comes when somebody accuses *us* of doing this. We often assume political opponents are just projecting their ideology onto Jesus. Not us. OUR understanding of Jesus is objective. He's definitely not our partisan sock puppet.

Doing theology requires humble awareness of our own tendency to project. A theme in Lewis's A Grief Observed is his awareness that when dead loved ones are no longer physically present to be real, complicated people, we inevitably reduce them to caricatures reflecting our baises.

I prefer to recognize that Xenophanes was right about this issue. Some 2,500 years ago, he noted that people tend to imagine deities in their likeness, blacks like blacks, Nordics like Nordics. Also, if they could, cows like cows, horses like horses, and lions like lions.

 

[lpetrich]

 Xenophanes

Fragments of Xenophanes - Wikisource, the free online library

(10) Since all at first have learnt according to Homer. . . .

(11) Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. R. P. 99.

(12) Since they have uttered many lawless deeds of the gods, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. R. P. ib.

(14) But mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form. R. P. 100.

(15) Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. R. P. ib.

(16) The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair. R. P. 100 b.

Black people make gods that look like black people, Nordic people make gods that look like Nordic people, and Mediterranean people make gods that look like Mediterranean people.

For his part, he thought that there is a single god that is very unlike us.

(23) One god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought. . . . R. P. 100.

(24) He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over. R. P. 102.

(25) But without toil he swayeth all things by the thought of his mind. R. P. 108 b.

(26) And he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither. R. P. 110 a.

 

[lpetrich]

IMO, that is much more plausible than the conceit that one finds in Genesis 1:27 in the Bible:

• KJV: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
• NASB: So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
• NIV: So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
• NET: God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 NET;NIV;KJV;NASB - God created humankind in his own image, - Bible Gateway

Both sexes in the likeness of a male being???

Also, we are a social species, and God is all alone, one of a kind.

I like this response:
Earthen Vessel on X: "@profsamperry There have been so many times where I wanted to ask someone, "Do you ever find it strange that God always agrees with you?"" / X

 

[lpetrich]

In Our Own Image: How Americans Rate Jesus on the Ideological Spectrum - Samuel L. Perry, Joshua B. Grubbs, Cyrus Schleifer, 2024

How can Americans on the political left and right both claim their views represent those of Jesus? Using nationally-representative data in which Americans rated Jesus on the left-right ideological spectrum, we assess what characteristics are associated with Americans’ ratings and consider arguments about causal ordering. Competing expectations are drawn from “images of God” research and research showing political identities influence Americans’ religious characteristics. Focusing on Christians first, the strongest predictors of where Christians place Jesus was their own ideological identity followed closely by views on Christian nationalism. No other religious, racial, or partisan characteristics were associated with where Christians place Jesus. For insights on causal direction, we interact religiosity measures with ideological identity and Christian nationalism, finding identical patterns regardless of religious commitment. We also run models to see if patterns differ for non-Christians and the influence of ideological identity and Christian nationalism are nearly identical. Given that Americans’ ideological placement of Jesus has little to do with their own religious identity or commitment, findings lend more support for the theory that Christians and non-Christians alike project their own ideological identities and views about Christian nationalism onto Jesus rather than such characteristics following from stable images of Jesus.

How Christians reconcile their personal political views and the teachings of their faith: Projection as a means of dissonance reduction | PNAS

The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “fellowship” issues (e.g., taxation to reduce economic inequality and treatment of immigrants) and liberals acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “morality” issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). However, conservatives also claimed that a contemporary Jesus would be even more conservative than themselves on the former issues whereas liberals claimed that Jesus would be even more liberal than themselves on the latter issues. Further reducing potential dissonance, liberal and conservative Christians differed markedly in the types of issues they claimed to be more central to their faith. A concluding discussion considers the relationship between individual motivational processes and more social processes that may underlie the present findings, as well as implications for contemporary social and political conflict.

Xenophanes's Law, as I like to call it.

 

[lpetrich]

Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs | PNAS

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

More evidence of Xenophanes's Law.

 

[lpetrich]

Was Jesus a leftist or a rightist? – POLITICO - December 24, 2021 4:01 am CET

It was mainly in the modern era that Christianity became tied predominantly to one side of the political spectrum, as Christian Democratic parties in countries like Germany or Italy made a point of representing religious values, while in many cases socialists and communists embraced a secular, often anti-clerical worldview.

Europe’s more recent upheavals have produced a new cohort of political parties taking up the banner of Christianity as part of identity politics.

The 2007-2008 financial crisis and the 2015-2016 migration crisis created “in large sectors of the public opinion a widespread feeling of decline and triggered a mood of fear and suspicion against globalization, liberalism, foreigners … in short, against the idea itself of an open society,” said Iacopo Scaramuzzi, author of a book on how populists have used Christianity.

“All these politicians started pretty suddenly to use Christianity and Christian symbols in a very instrumental way, in order to reassure their constituency,” he added.

The politics of these new movements often has little to do with faith. Populist politicians are rarely devotees; in many cases, they even don’t have a traditional family: Trump and Salvini are divorced; Meloni is an unmarried mother. And in Europe at least, their constituencies are getting more secular.

The embrace of religion is often less about faith than nostalgia. They “recognize Christianity as a common language, an aura of tradition, a comfortable memory of a golden past, when there was no European Union, no gay marriage, no Muslims in the city,” said Scaramuzzi.

Jesus, he said, becomes reduced to “an identity marker.”

 

[lpetrich]

One Jesus for liberals, another for conservatives | Johnjoe McFadden | The Guardian - Sun 4 Mar 2012 16.30 EST

Love thy neighbour, so long as he is not an illegal immigrant. Blessed are the poor, so long as they are deserving. And, though it may be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than to pass through the eye of a needle, multimillionaires should have no problem passing through the door of the Oval Office.

...
A study led by Lee Ross of Stanford University in California has found that the Jesus of liberal Christians is very different from the one envisaged by conservatives. The researchers asked respondents to imagine what Jesus would have thought about contemporary issues such as taxation, immigration, same-sex marriage and abortion. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christian Republicans imagined a Jesus who tended to be against wealth redistribution, illegal immigrants, abortion and same-sex marriage; whereas the Jesus of Democrat-voting Christians would have had far more liberal opinions. The Bible may claim that God created man in his own image, but the study suggests man creates God in his own image.

...
Ross and his colleagues suggest that dissonance reduction takes place not only within the individual, but as a collective enterprise. Preachers, politicians and co-believers tend to emphasise and de-emphasise different aspects of the Christian canon; so conservative Americans study the Old Testament with its homophobic rhetoric and eye-for-an-eye morality, whereas liberals look to the New Testament Jesus who was sympathetic to the poor and the meek.

 

[ideologyhunter]

A gazillion sentimental prints, devotionals, dentist office Bibles, etc., etc. have entrenched the visual image of Jesus looking Nordic and a lot like Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class. In reality, he probably resembled a Trumpian boogey man image of an ISIS warrior, who should be kept out of America at all costs.
Conservatives no doubt have a cow when Jesus is portrayed as being anti-wealth and anti-money, which is about the easiest case to make. Or when he's portrayed as pro-socialism, pro-taxation, anti-military, pacifist, pro-feminist, or anti-death penalty. All of those cases are at least presentable, some in a convincing way, IMO. If you're a conservative who bemoans the low savings rate in the typical American household, you can't find any comfort in what JC said about all that.
Liberal Christians no doubt wish JC had said something, anything pejorative about slavery or the reported wars of annhilation in the OT, but it isn't there.
Strange that the supposed God incarnate, come down here to set us straight and make God's nature real to us, can be interpreted any which way, to cohere with any and every political and social outlook.

 

[Lion IRC]

...Both sexes in the likeness of a male being?

Yes.
What's hard to understand about that?
Google search - opposite gender identical twins.
Google search - family resemblance.

You're gnat straining about the word "likeness".

 

[No Robots]

In American media, including social media, it has been taken as axiomatic that Jesus' doctrines bolster reactionary politics, with the Christian Left only begrudgingly acknowledged. People like Perry seem to imply that all takes on Jesus are equally flawed and tendentious, and therefore equally valid. It is up to the Christian Left to continue to push its case for Jesus' doctrines as bolstering radical politics. They must do this in opposition to their political opponents and the media who have swallowed the reactionary line on this subject.

 

[ideologyhunter]

When I'm in the mood, I wear a shirt that says, "Right. Like Jesus would own guns and vote Republican." It gets certain people nutsy cuckoo, but I'm not responsible if Trump loses a voter due to a heart episode.

 

[Politesse]

I'm not particularly convinced by a "both sides" argument that ignores the strength of the claims that the "both sides" are making. You could say the same about almost any topic, that people have created an imaginary figure on the basis of their politics. Dead men are convenient palettes, true, but people have politically divided opinions on living politicians and religious figures as well, and it doesn't take long for a body to cool. Look at Martin Luther King Jr in the memory of plenty of Americans who were there at the time. Was he a tireless, theocratic liberator of Black Americans, or a highly palatable diplomat who just wanted people to "not see race" and stop complaining so much? To me, as with Jesus, there's a very clear and correct answer to that question, summed up in the new old Leftist aphorism "reality has a liberal bias". To get to the MLK Jr that Fox News seems to believe in, you kind of have to have... well, never seen any of his speeches or read any of his writings. To get to Lauren Boebert's Jesus, you must be altogether illiterate and know nothing about 1st century Palestine let alone the early Christian corpus. There are exaggerations on both "sides", sure. If indeed there are sides, there are humans on both of them, and your average human does not enjoy or frequently practice much critical thinking. But that does not make me inclined to treat Joel Osteen and Karen Armstrong as equally credible scholars. Even on the points where we disagree (which are many), I trust that Armstrong has a credible argument based on tangible evidence to support her differing claim. Whereas Osteen would just try to make a charming, polite exit from the conversation as quickly as possible.

 

[DBT]

I know that the far Right GOPsters and Trumpsters believe that God and Jesus is just like them....

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Ten commandments, Thou shalt Not Kill.
Now it is off to Canaan to kill all the Canaanites.
As God commanded.

Asking doctrinaire Christians to explain this is always interesting.

 

[steve_bank]

Not just physical likeness, but also social and political and ideological likeness.

Samuel Perry on X: " Ever notice folks ..." / X

Ever notice folks on the political left & right both claim their views represent those of Jesus? In our new study, we ask adults to rate Jesus on the left-right spectrum & find ratings are almost all about politics & almost nothing to do w/being religious or even Christian. 1/

For example, we find the leading predictors of whether you place Jesus further left or right are your own ideological identity and Christian nationalism, and this is true for Christians AND non-Christians alike. And religiosity doesn't really matter much. Why's that important? 2/

It helps us understand causal direction. If folks became conservative BECAUSE they view Jesus as conservative, we'd expect those who ostensibly care more about being like Jesus (very committed Christians) to show a stronger association. But we don't. Rather we find whether... 3/

...you're nominal Christian or NOT a Christian, the link between ideological identity, CN, & where you place Jesus is basically the same. So it makes more sense to conclude the association is explained by projection. Jesus is left/right-leaning cuz YOU are left/right-leaning. 4/

This argument is consistent with what social theorists (Spinoza, Feuerbach, Durkheim) and social scientists have supposed for a long time. In fact, here are two studies that approach the topic with similar conclusions.

You can find our study here.

As always, if you can't get past the paywall, shoot me an email and I'll send you a pdf ASAP. My address is in the cv in my profile. 6/End

Then,
Samuel Perry on X: "Incidentally, ...." / X

Incidentally, I find the only pushback on this idea comes when somebody accuses *us* of doing this. We often assume political opponents are just projecting their ideology onto Jesus. Not us. OUR understanding of Jesus is objective. He's definitely not our partisan sock puppet.

Doing theology requires humble awareness of our own tendency to project. A theme in Lewis's A Grief Observed is his awareness that when dead loved ones are no longer physically present to be real, complicated people, we inevitably reduce them to caricatures reflecting our baises.

I prefer to recognize that Xenophanes was right about this issue. Some 2,500 years ago, he noted that people tend to imagine deities in their likeness, blacks like blacks, Nordics like Nordics. Also, if they could, cows like cows, horses like horses, and lions like lions.

Some 2,500 years ago, he noted that people tend to imagine deities in their likeness

Nothing new under the sun.

 

[steve_bank]

Ten commandments, Thou shalt Not Kill.
Now it is off to Canaan to kill all the Canaanites.
As God commanded.

Asking doctrinaire Christians to explain this is always interesting.

Buddhists say no taking of life under any conditions.

Most historical moral and civil codes differentiate between unwarranted taking of life and killing when justified.

I doubt in the original form and language the 10 Commandments inferred passivize.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

What it means is "Do not kill" is inter-tribal only. Everybody else's ass is up
for grabs. That accounts for Christianity's long history of deadly heresy hunts,
murderous crusades, inquisitions, religious wars and other horrors. The tales of God's
commands to commit genocide and mass murder (mostly faux histories that did not
happen) were ideas Christianity followed, not the 6th commandment.

 

[Politesse]

Does it comfort you to attribute universal human weaknesses and foibles to Christianity specifically? Does it make you feel safer, since you aren't a Christian, and therefore could imagine yourself free from the same failings? Even if, for instance, you also don't really consider it a crime to kill foreigners on foreign soil?

 

[Worldtraveller]

Does it comfort you to attribute universal human weaknesses and foibles to Christianity specifically? Does it make you feel safer, since you aren't a Christian, and therefore could imagine yourself free from the same failings? Even if, for instance, you also don't really consider it a crime to kill foreigners on foreign soil?

Does it comfort you to completely miss the point of the posts?

 

[Elixir]

Does it comfort you to attribute universal human weaknesses and foibles to Christianity specifically?

I don’t think he did that.
The fact that human foibles and weaknesses are integral to Christian dogma doesn’t identify Christianity as the sole cause of such things.