December 23, 2013
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Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly defended the Republican Party’s
spending cuts for SNAP by effectively declaring Jesus would not support
food stamps for the poor because most them are drug addicts. If his
insensitive remark is inconsistent with Scripture, which it is, then the
question becomes why do talking heads on the right get away with
proclaiming what Jesus would or wouldn’t support?
The answer is simple: Conservatives have not read the Bible.
The
Right has successfully rebranded the brown-skinned liberal Jew, who
gave away free healthcare and was pro-redistributing wealth, into a
white-skinned, trickledown, union-busting conservative, for the very
fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are astonishingly
illiterate when it comes to understanding the Bible. On hot-button
social issues, from same-sex marriage to abortion, biblical passages are
invoked without any real understanding of the context or true meaning.
It’s surprising how little Christians know of what is still the most
popular book to ever grace the American continent.
More
than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible.
So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country
believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to
data from the Barna Research group. Surveys show that 60 percent can’t
name more than five of the Ten Commandments; 12 percent of adults think
Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife; and nearly 50 percent of high school
seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A Gallup poll
shows 50 percent of Americans can’t name the first book of the Bible,
while roughly 82 percent believe “God helps those who help themselves”
is a biblical verse.
So, if Americans get an F in the
basic fundamentals of the Bible, what hope do they have in knowing what
Jesus would say about labor unions, taxes on the rich, universal
healthcare, and food stamps? It becomes easy to spread a lie when no one
knows what the truth is.
The truth, whether Republicans
like it or not, is not only that Jesus a meek and mild liberal Jew who
spoke softly in parables and metaphors, but conservatives were the ones
who had him killed. American conservatives, however, have morphed Jesus
into a muscular masculine warrior, in much the same way the Nazis did,
as a means of combating what they see as the modernization of society.
Author
Thom Hartmann writes, “A significant impetus behind the assault on
women and modernity was the feeling that women had encroached upon
traditional male spheres like the workplace and colleges. Furthermore,
women’s leadership in the churches had harmed Christianity by creating
an effeminate clergy and a weak sense of self. All of this was
associated with liberalism, feminism, women, and modernity.”
It’s
almost absurd to speculate what Jesus’ positions would be on any single
issue, given we know so little about who Jesus was. Knowing the New
Testament is not simply a matter of reading the Bible cover to cover, or
memorizing a handful of verses. Knowing the Bible requires a scholarly
contextual understanding of authorship, history and interpretation.
For
instance, when Republicans were justifying their cuts to the food stamp
program, they quoted 2 Thessalonians: “Anyone unwilling to work should
not eat.” One poll showed that more than 90 percent of Christians
believe this New Testament quote is attributed to Jesus. It’s not. This
was taken from a letter written by Paul to his church in Thessalonica.
Paul wrote to this specific congregation to remind them that if they
didn't help build the church in Thessalonica, they wouldn’t be paid. The
letter also happens to be a fraud. Surprise! Biblical scholars agree
it’s a forgery written by someone pretending to be Paul.
What
often comes as a surprise to your average Sunday wine-and-cracker
Christian is the New Testament did not fall from the sky the day Jesus’
ghost is said to have ascended to Heaven. The New Testament is a
collection of writings, 27 in total, of which 12 are credited to the
authorship of Paul, five to the Gospels (whomever wrote Luke also wrote
Acts), and the balance remain open for debate i.e. authorship unknown.
Jesus himself wrote not a single word of the New Testament. Not a single
poem, much less an op-ed article on why, upon reflection, killing your
daughter for backchat is probably not sound parenting.
The best
argument against a historical Jesus is the fact that none of his
disciples left us with a single record or document regarding Jesus or
his teachings. So, who were the gospel writers? The short answer is we
don’t know. What we do know is that not only had none of them met Jesus,
but also they never met the people who had allegedly met Jesus. All we
have is a bunch of campfire stories from people who were born
generations after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion. In other words, numerous
unidentified authors, each with his own theological and ideological
motives for writing what they wrote. Thus we have not a single
independently verifiable eyewitness account of Jesus—but this doesn’t
stop Republicans from speaking on his behalf.
What we do
know about Jesus, at least according to the respective gospels, is that
Jesus’ sentiments closely echoed the social and economic policies of
the political left. The Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount read
like the mission statement of the ACLU: “Blessed are the poor, for
theirs is kingdom of heaven,” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall
inherit the earth,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Jesus also said,
“Judge not he who shall not be judged,” and “Sell what you have and give
it to the poor.”
So, when Republicans accuse Obama of
being a brown-skinned socialist who wants to redistribute the wealth,
they’re thinking of Jesus. Stephen Colbert joked, “Jesus was always
flapping his gums about the poor but never once did he call for a tax
cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Romans.”
Biblical
illiteracy is what has allowed the Republican Party to get away with
shaping Jesus into their image. That's why politicians on the right can
get away with saying the Lord commands that our healthcare, prisons,
schools, retirement, transport, and all the rest should be run by
corporations for profit. Ironically, the Republican Jesus was actually a
devout atheist—Ayn Rand—who called the Christian religion “monstrous.”
Rand advocated selfishness over charity, and she divided the world into
makers versus takers. She also stated that followers of her philosophy
had to chose between Jesus and her teachings. When the Christian Right
believes it’s channeling Jesus when they say it’s immoral for government
to tax billionaires to help pay for healthcare, education and the poor,
they’re actually channeling Ayn Rand. When Bill O’Reilly claims the
poor are immoral and lazy, that’s not Jesus, it’s Ayn Rand.
The
price this country has paid for biblical illiteracy is measured by how
far we’ve moved toward Ayn Rand’s utopia. In the past three decades,
we’ve slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy, destroyed labor
unions, deregulated financial markets, eroded public safety nets, and
committed to one globalist corporate free-trade agreement after another.
Rand would be smiling down from the heaven she didn’t believe in.
With
the far-right, Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court
ruling in favor of the Koch brothers' Citizens United, the flow of
billions of dollars from anonymous donors to the most reliable voting
bloc of the Republican Party—the Christian Right—will continue to
perpetuate the biblically incompatible, anti-government,
pro-deregulation-of-business, anti-healthcare-for-all, Tea Party
American version of Christianity.
CJ Werleman is the author of
Crucifying America and
God Hates You, Hate Him Back. Follow him on Twitter
@cjwerleman.
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