I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the arrival of a day you always knew was coming: evangelical Christians have swung so far right, the Bible is now too liberal for them to tolerate.
This isn’t satire or the punchline of a joke. When John Piper, a staunchly conservative Baptist theologian with a decades-long reputation for orthodoxy, quoted a biblical verse about welcoming immigrants, his fellow evangelicals instantly turned on him and attacked him in a wave of berserk fury. Does this show that MAGA Christians are on the verge of abandoning the Bible entirely to push their white supremacist theology?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
In all fairness, the teachings of Jesus as depicted by the New Testament gospels were never popular among Christians. With a tiny handful of exceptions, they never followed his commands to refrain from violence, to pray in private, to give away all their wealth to the poor, or to abandon their families and live as wandering mendicant preachers.
But most theologians, however conservative, at least paid them lip service. This is the first instance I’m aware of where a Christian faced a barrage of attacks and hostility from his peers, not for making an interpretation that others found tendentious, but merely for quoting the Bible. This feels like a crossing-the-Rubicon moment, one where Christians explicitly reject a biblical moral because they dislike it.
Conservative theology erodes this verse away to meaninglessness. In the tortured ouroboros of their interpretation, immigrants are only welcome as long as they obey all of the host country’s laws—including the laws being wielded to say they’re not allowed. It’s a perfect catch-22 of absurdity.
FWIW, it’s a “members only” post.
Yep! But you can sign up for a free account to view it.
Not a paywall, merely a registration wall.
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(I practice internet hygiene, this WP account is very old and I would not make one these days)
The teachings of Jesus have ALWAYS been considered “too woke” by orthodox Christians. That’s why the people who first compiled “The Holy Bible” decided to include the Old Testament — as an
anvilmillstoneanchor to keep all that radical anarchist socialist idealism from going too far.It’s not like this is new: there have been at least a couple of attempts at ‘Conservative Bible Projects’ of new English translations of the Bible specifically to put a modern Republican political spin on it. None of them have ever really worked, partly because so many of the loudest know-nothing-est evangelicals are strict KJV-only Bible readers (which in turn is likely partly because the archaic language makes it easier for people to claim ‘this is what it really means’), but also partly because none of the new ‘translations’ have anywhere near the level of poetic language of the KJV, for much the same reason why people comment about how bad Conservative ‘humour’ is. It’s easier to feel like the older words are inspiring, and none of the people dedicated enough to this to try rewriting the Bible understand language and how other people think well enough to pull that off.
I find that the obvious interpretation of the message of “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” is that everybody is your neighbour for the purpose of “Love thy neighbour as yourself”. There is a history of some Christians looking for reasons to justify a narrower interpretation of neighbour. (No citation to hand.)