I’d like to say I’m shocked.
I’d like to say this is an aberration.
I wish I could tell you that the Conservative Christian canonizing of Charlie Kirk was unexpected; that the hundreds of thousands of professed followers of Jesus pouring into churches, local parks, football stadiums, and social media to engage in performative histrionics are temporarily caught up in some cultic fervor that will soon lift.
Yet, as someone who pastored in predominantly white churches in the South for nearly three decades, this is all sadly on brand.
To anyone paying attention for the past few decades, and particularly during the last ten years, seeing White Evangelicals build idols out of people whose lives and public work are the antithesis of Jesus is something we’ve grown accustomed to.
After all, these are people who have been largely responsible for elevating to the presidency one of the most vile, repugnant, amoral human beings on the planet and contending he is God’s chosen vessel of national redemption.
The White Conservative Church in America has slowly eradicated the compassionate, peacemaking, power-opposing, hypocrisy-confronting Jesus from its movement.
It has replaced his open heart for the poor and the sick with their open contempt for our most vulnerable;substituted his expansive welcome of diverse humanity with a gated community of white supremacy,and exchanged a God who so loved the world, with one who serves America First, and only.
And since MAGA Evangelicals have created and embraced a bastardized, Frankensteined religion made of power, greed, white supremacy, and intolerance of difference, it has needed to manufacture saints who embody it all.
This is why it shouldn’t surprise us that we’re seeing this Jesus-less Church of White American Exceptionalism falling all over itself to anoint as sacred, a man whose words and platform have been completely bereft of the teachings of Jesus, and worse, that flew stridently, condescendingly in the face of them.
This is who these people are. It is what their churches are celebrating. It’s what drives their adoration of the very kinds of people the namesake of their faith would have the harshest words for.
They are putting their kids in ‘I am Charlie Kirk’ t-shirts and waging empty, hollow culture wars because it’s much easier to do that than to actually read the Sermon on the Mount with them and admit that the love, empathy, generosity, and hospitality of Jesus (things Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump fully reject) is the path their faith tradition calls them to.
And if they were to do that, their kids and they would find themselves needing the courage to oppose the systems they benefit from, to loudly reject the false idols they’ve enthroned, and to confront their church’s perversion of the good news of the Gospels for the poor and the sick and the outcast.
Most of all, they would have to flip over the tables of the very heartless, joyless, loveless Christianity that they’ve made their home in.
But sadly, none of this will happen.
They will continue to gaslight themselves and this nation, hoping the decent people won’t see through the cheap veneer of religiosity and patriotism concealing the fear and dehumanization their entire empire runs on.
But we do see through it.
We know the truth.Conservative White Christians will worship serial predators,and career criminals,and neo-Nazi influencers,and race-baiting, supremacist podcasters,and xenophobic nationalist politicians, and homophobic celebrity evangelists.
They defend, obey, and worship just about anybody but Jesus.
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