Here is an interesting story from CNN. It claims that the current dust-up between Trump and the Pope is really more about the Pope trying to discredit the MAGA Jesus. That vengeful, cruel, warmonger Jesus that the MAGAs think makes war and cruelty towards others a-OK.
Pope Leo is not simply challenging Trump. He’s critiquing MAGA Jesus, the version of Jesus some of the president’s followers have often invoked in recent years.
The MAGA Jesus is not the one taught in Sunday School — the nonviolent, itinerant teacher who preached beatitudes such as “blessed are the meek.” He is the
“warrior Christ” — the action-hero Jesus
depicted in the Book of Revelation with eyes like “flames of fire” and “a robe dipped in blood” who leads the armies of heaven while riding a white horse.
This is the square-jawed
Jesus wearing a red MAGA hat whose image is often displayed at
Trump’s rallies. It’s the version of Christianity that Trump
alluded to when he recently said God supports America’s war with Iran.
What’s changed in recent years is that many American fundamentalists and evangelicals prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. This is what Peter Wehner, an author and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, noted in an essay earlier this year
entitled, “MAGA Jesus is not the real Jesus.”
Right-wing movements “are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus,” he wrote. “The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies.”
This kind of Jesus doesn’t arise in a vacuum. This muscular version of Jesus has become increasingly visible because MAGA is not just a political movement; it’s
also a religious movement. It offers Trump as its
“chosen one,” and Israel is the
“chosen nation.”
While I don't believe that there is a "real" Jesus, I do think that MAGA politics has created a mean and nasty Jesus that allows and encourages the cruelty for their twisted political purposes. A MAGA Jesus to support racism, sexism, hate towards those that are not straight white people.
From what I can tell, and I am no biblical scholar, MAGA relies heavily on the crime and punishment, vengeance, retribution and end days parts of the Bible, bypassing the New Testament almost entirely. Ultimately, it’s a death cult and imo, feeds and feeds off of depression. Plus of course all of the greed and avarice. It appeals to people who feel as though, through no fault of their own, all the good things in life have passed them by but there is hope in the next life—after all of the meanies and liberals have been thoroughly punished and condemned to hell.
In fact, they are hoping for liberals what they feel they themselves suffer.
In a way, they have a point. There definitely is a liberal elite ( the conservative elite being held blameless for the exact same and worse prejudices against the great unwashed) in that many of the ‘liberals’ do in fact consider themselves to be smarter, more moral, better informed, kinder, more open and accepting and therefore more deserving. #Notallliberals even on this forum. But, imo, it’s a fair point.
For me, I see it most baldly in the rural/urban divide. Urbanites tend to see themselves as smarter, more ambitious, better educated and much more accepting and sophisticated. Therefore more deserving.
In most states in the US, the majority of the state’s population is contained in urban areas, ringed by suburbs which, as a whole are less liberal and more conservative. Rural areas are sen as being more conservative and therefore more to blame for ejecting conservative legislators/govs and POTUS.
I don’t think that math actually works as well as liberals do. If the larger portion of any state’s population is urban and urban = liberal, one would expect there to be very few conservative victories in many, if not most states.
Why do more rural areas tend to be more conservative, as a whole?
Well, rural areas tend to be poorer, and older. Non-urbanites who work full time are co more likely to fall below the poverty line. Services, including hospital care, are sparser, per capita, and more difficult to access. If you include mental health services, social services to help support families and individuals in need, even sparser.
Yet, for most of us, when we talk about poverty, our minds draw a picture of someone who is black and desperately poor and living in an inner city. Most of the income based services are directed to urban areas.
Rural people feel as though the system ignores them. Policies and laws and agencies that most affect them are enacted by people who are urban based, even if they grew up in rural areas. Those rules and regulations are heavily affected by lobbying efforts of big corporations who care about their bottom lines and stock holders. Environmental laws, tariffs, gas prices, government t support for various industries are determined by forces far away from rural areas and affect them more immediately and disproportionately.
It is far, far, far too easy to see people who are different from us as being more different from us than they really are.
All of us, or at least most of us, want to feel somewhat understood and respected as human beings. We all share basic needs for food, shelter, warmth, human connection, love. We need to quit dividing ourselves into us vs them.
