This Is Likely an Essay That Becomes a Sermon That Devolves Into a Rant.

Lemme just put on my preachin’ duds for a hot minute.

Okay, I’ll probably lose some of you as subscribers and followers, and for that I am sorry. But here we go. I can’t bite my tongue any longer.

Last week Louisiana passed a law mandating the Ten Commandments be on display in all classrooms in every public school in the state.

In a word, I’ve never seen such performative bullshit in all my life, and I’ve been around a while. But performative bullshit seems to be the name of the game now among far too many who have taken the name “Christian” and who use that name as a battering ram.

This is clearly a test case. Conservatives in other states stand at the ready to emulate Louisiana’s embarrassment. The ACLU has already rightly stepped in to call out the complete and utter unconstitutionality of the law. Cool, cool, cool and the courts can figure that one out. Not my area.

My concern, as a person of floundering faith but who still has one foot in the game — my ever-growing concern is and has been the absolute twisting of and manipulation of the story, the message, the person, and the mission of Jesus. The darker underbelly of this perversion is, of course, the unholy and entirely unAmerican bid to bring this country under the thumb of Christian Nationalism.

I gotta say, idolatry is one helluva drug. For those who worship power, money, and more power, Jesus has become a dreadful inconvenience. It’s no wonder they want to shove him in a closet or stuff him under a bed. His words of peace, his call to love the neighbor, his pointed critique of greed and hypocrisy directly as well as through parables are as good as intolerable accusations, so, hurry up and escort him out the back door and let’s trot out our Jesus doppelgänger and put an AR-15 in his hands, and let’s make sure he’s completely ripped, as if Mary started him on steroids in his teens, let’s give him biceps that prove he could trounce Satan in a WWE smackdown.

This monstrous aberration they do in the name of the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God. The one well-acquainted with grief. Just. Stop. FFS, stop.

As many noted on various social media platforms after the law passed, how curious that the focus is always on the Ten Commandments but never Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount or Luke’s even more scandalous¹ Sermon on the Plain.

It appears it’s far more important to check off the to-do list by displaying a list of religious rules (did I mention performative bullshit?) that others are supposed to follow (describing an ethos that *cough, cough* far too many well-known church leaders and idolized politicians cannot even begin to live up to) than to live in the grace that brings transformation and, let’s say for example, make sure poor children have access to summer food assistance.²

Listen, this isn’t about politics, except it is, since the religious right has opted for this marriage made in hell, but that’s a rant for another day.

In a recent interview with NPR, Russell Moore, formerly a top official with the Southern Baptist Convention and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today was asked about his alarm that Christianity is in crisis. (He wrote a book about it.)

“MOORE: Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching — turn the other cheek — to have someone come up after and to say, where did you get those liberal talking points? And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would not be, I apologize. The response would be, yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak.”

Moore was booted from the SBC, by the way, because he had the unmitigated gall to criticize the former president and to call out the SBC’s criminal mishandling of the denomination’s massive sexual abuse crisis.

We are in the Upside-Down for sure, and apparently in an era of post-shame, but I, for one, cannot stomach the hypocrisy of placing biblical directives for children to learn and emulate, while at the same time many of those children will watch their parents cast ballots for individuals who blithely step all over the very precepts of truth, fidelity, and the obligation of compassion and mercy to neighbor and stranger alike.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming soon, but this one’s been eating at me. I could say more, and I probably will. If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for hanging in.

Go here for Part Deux.

1. Scandalous because Luke’s version has Jesus saying, “Blessed are the poor,” while Matthew softens it to “…the poor in spirit.” And Luke’s Jesus includes blessings and woes, much as an Old Testament prophet would announce. Also, in this context none of this matters since NONE OF IT BELONGS IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL.

2. “According to USDA numbers, about 594,000 children in Louisiana would have benefited from Summer EBT this year.” One official who was in favor of rejecting the federal funding explained, “…families deserve a pathway to self-sufficiency.” Isn’t that just what Jesus would say? “Let the little children come to me, but only when they can pay their own way.”