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John Pavlovitz: White Evangelicals' Deportation of Jesus
The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz - White Evangelicals' Deportation of Jesus
John Pavlovitz
Dec 26, 2024
It's easy to be fooled by loud things.
American Bible Belt Evangelical Christians have gone all-in with Donald Trump, and in doing so they've had to sell their souls, abandon their namesake, and remove any semblance of Christlikeness from their collective faith expression.
Jesus has been rendered nonexistent in their midst, deported from their gatherings.
Conservative White Evangelicalism in America is now marked by a poverty of compassion and an abundance of cruelty; inextricably tied to the coming Administration, purposefully disfigured and remade in its own ugly image. MAGA Christianity has become synonymous with hostility to outsiders, with contempt for the poor, with privilege and supremacy, with rabid nationalism, with a religion of compulsion.
In other words, practically speaking, Jesus of Nazareth is absent in this supposed community of Jesus-followers and as a former pastor, I've fully grieved it all.
With great sadness I've watched it all unfolding over the past decade; high-profile pastors, Conservative politicians, and once reasonable pew sitters, all slowly succumbing to the seductive pull of power and the cheap high of nationalistic war rhetoric. They've made a series of small or quite substantial moral concessions along the way, leading them here: miles away from their spiritual center—to a Christianity that has no need for Jesus.
/snip
John Pavlovitz
Dec 26, 2024
It's easy to be fooled by loud things.
American Bible Belt Evangelical Christians have gone all-in with Donald Trump, and in doing so they've had to sell their souls, abandon their namesake, and remove any semblance of Christlikeness from their collective faith expression.
Jesus has been rendered nonexistent in their midst, deported from their gatherings.
Conservative White Evangelicalism in America is now marked by a poverty of compassion and an abundance of cruelty; inextricably tied to the coming Administration, purposefully disfigured and remade in its own ugly image. MAGA Christianity has become synonymous with hostility to outsiders, with contempt for the poor, with privilege and supremacy, with rabid nationalism, with a religion of compulsion.
In other words, practically speaking, Jesus of Nazareth is absent in this supposed community of Jesus-followers and as a former pastor, I've fully grieved it all.
With great sadness I've watched it all unfolding over the past decade; high-profile pastors, Conservative politicians, and once reasonable pew sitters, all slowly succumbing to the seductive pull of power and the cheap high of nationalistic war rhetoric. They've made a series of small or quite substantial moral concessions along the way, leading them here: miles away from their spiritual center—to a Christianity that has no need for Jesus.
/snip
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