On Memes: Or, a Beleaguered Christ meets the Political Machine.
I awoke this morning to a text from my dear and very confused mother regarding the meme above which a friend of hers posted on Facebook recently. She asked if it was true, and if not how I might go about explaining its misconceptions regarding the most famous (and misappropriated) person in the history of the world; Jesus is indeed the most beleaguered and stretched figure out there. Seeing the enormity of the task in front of me, and after speaking on the phone with the beloved and perplexed woman to whom I owe my life I decided a short message might be in order to dispel any myths of partisanship that people might suspect our Lord and Saviour holds.
But first, a primer on the politics of Jesus
It seems that everyone today wants Jesus for their political movement. From the Trumpian conservatives who feel attacked by the mostly non-existent claim of not being able to say “Merry Christmas” anymore (a first-rate issue in the Gospels for sure) to Democratic presidential candidates like Pete Buttigieg who quote the Scriptures to defend progressive talking points on sexual ethics and income inequality, politicians everywhere will swear to Jerusalem and back that their party is the party Jesus would support. Now partly this is because we live in what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “the imminent frame”, which is a way of describing the world in a purely horizontal fashion, where we only account for the natural world and don’t give any credence to transcendent ideals. In other words, the overarching belief in society today is that religion is really just politics disguised with supernatural intent. What religious people (and especially religious conservatives) really want, according to this belief is to impose their values onto our country, shaping laws that fit with their notions of righteousness and piety. Religion is therefore secularized and turns into a party platform for “taking back this country for God.” Now the complicated thing here is that there are those who would want to do exactly this (and there are those for whom the inverse is true, i.e. those who sacralize politics and make certain policies either holy or unholy, sacred or profane), but we don’t have time for that particular discussion here. I want to focus on the claims of the above meme, and how Jesus refuses to be baptized (no pun intended) into any of our political movements.
Now, to start to grasp the enormity of a topic like the politics of Jesus we have to start with two premises: Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, and Jesus does have a kingdom to bring.
When Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate and has to respond to the accusations that he is leading a revolt against Rome, he responds to Pilate’s question of his own kingship by stating “my kingdom is not of this world.” What he means here is that the political machinations of the state (in this case the Roman Empire) are externally enforced. Rome has laws and those laws are enforced on the people under Rome’s jurisdiction. The kingdom Jesus refers to here is a kingdom of the heart, which is to say that is an internally motivated kingdom. That is not to say that his kingdom isn’t a real kingdom, but that his kingdom doesn’t follow the same rules as the kingdoms of this world follow. Kingdoms of this world rule by the sword, Jesus rules his kingdom by the Spirit of God working in the hearts of those submitted to his rule. This means that the kingdom rule (for now) only applies to those whose hearts have been aligned with the heart of Christ, which is a heart geared towards love of God and neighbor. Nowhere do we see Jesus desiring to implement his vision of the good life through brute power or force, and it would sound absurd to try and do so. How exactly would one enforce loving one’s enemies?
But just because we don’t see Jesus wanting to enforce his beliefs through the traditional means of strength and power, he did have beliefs about the well-ordered life. Jesus certainly did have a political program, and it’s called the church. The Kingdom of God is, according to theologian Oliver O’Donovan, “not a mere kingdom, but it is real kingdom.” This is precisely what Jesus meant when he said “my kingdom is not of this world.” Worldly kingdoms exercise their power through the threat of violence, Jesus exercises his through the Holy Spirit quickening the hearts of those awakened to his voice. But this should not dissuade those who follow Jesus from thinking about how the rule of Jesus’ teachings play out in their own lives and in their communities, states, and nations. O’Donovan says elsewhere that “theology must be political if it is to be evangelical”, that is, it must think about how we go about our way in the world if we are to bring the good news Jesus bears to others. So in a way, one could make any number of policy suggestions based on the teachings of Christ, and the church can and should be a model for how those ideas play themselves out in community, but it does not mean that any political or ideological group can say that Jesus would vote with them. That is what we call propaganda.
Jesus started many of his teachings and parables with the phrase “he who has ears let him hear”, which is a way of saying that not everyone will be willing to take heed of his words. Indeed, there are a great many people who find it difficult to even understand what he says. Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." Many people have a vested interest in not listening to the words of Jesus, and so others come along to twist his words and shape into something more palatable to their constituency. Propagandists of many stripes and flavors, be they socialist or libertarian, populist or meritocratic, love Jesus because he is both widely beloved and hard to understand at times. This provides them with fodder for political fights, like the kind we see above, and therefore I thought it helpful to go, line by line, phrase by phrase, and see where this picture of Jesus comport with reality and where it deviates into propaganda. So, as a service to all, a fact-check of the widely popular “Jesus was a homeless Palestinian anarchist meme".
Fact-checking the “Jesus was a homeless Palestinian anarchist meme".
1) Jesus was homeless: This is a clever misdirection of a famous saying from Christ that “foxes have holes and birds of the air have nest, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Jesus, being an itinerant preacher traveled for most of the three years of his public ministry which meant he was not at home, neither in Nazareth his hometown nor in Capernaum which became the base of operations for him (specifically Simon Peter’s house). What the above quote is widely recognized as meaning is that Jesus both didn’t feel at home in this world and he wasn’t accepted by this world either. This becomes vividly clear when he returns to his hometown of Nazareth and is not received there.
2) Jesus was Palestinian: The region where Jesus spent his life and ministry was called by the Romans “Palestine”, which is derived from “Philistia”, the land of the Philistines. But Jesus was an Israelite from the line of David, not a descendent of the Philistines. He has no tribal connection with the modern ethnic group the Palestinians.
3) Jesus was an anarchist: I am at a bit of a loss with this one, as I don’t know where this comes from. Jesus had a rule of life (The Sermon on the Mount) and referred to himself as a king who brings a kingdom. That is antithetical to the concept of anarchy.
4) Jesus held protests at oppressive temples: This one has some truth to it, even if it is used for a iffy rhetorical purpose. Jesus did protest outside the temple, and it was because those selling in the marketplace were oppressing the poor (through charging exorbitant prices for animals to sacrifice) and effectively shutting them out of the Israelite temple system, and therefore the forgiveness they desired. His protest wasn’t the temple system itself (although he would overturn that as well through his death and resurrection), but with the accessibility to that system through iniquitous gain.
5) Jesus advocated for universal health care: The anachronism here is a bit curious. Health care is for sure a modern concept, one that was created by Christians nonetheless. Near the end of the second century there was a plague in the Roman Empire (not the bubonic plague, more likely influenza of some sort) and about a quarter of the population of the Empire died. Most people fled the cities to get away from the disease but many Christians stayed and looked after their sick neighbors, offering them food, water, and blankets. This apparently was enough for many treated to survive, and when the sick woke up and saw who took care of them they were overwhelmed by the sacrificial love they had received and converted. Jesus healed the sick and his followers took up that call as well, even opening the first hospitals, but saying he supports something like Medicare for All is a stretch.
6) Jesus advocated for the redistribution of wealth: This one is in fact true, but from what we discussed above it is clear that he wasn’t thinking of the state administering this (a la Communism) but through the common life of the church together. This is an example of Jesus’ other-worldly kingdom, one where people are made alive to his voice and voluntarily share what they have with others. Again, this is internal motivation not external enforcement.
7) Jesus was arrested for terrorism, tortured, and executed for crimes against the state: No arguments about this here except the designation of the word “terrorism”, which is a buzzword which invokes not understanding but fear. Other than that, it it true that Jesus was arrested for defying both the Jewish religious customs and for calling himself a king (something only Caesar had claim to in the Roman Empire), and was tortured and killed by that state. Jesus’ murder was brutal, public, and cruel, meant to hold anyone who defied the Empire in derision and pain. The paradox of Christianity is that such a great evil produced the one thing we all desire: forgiveness and reconciliation. As George Herbert once wrote, “O all you who pass by, behold and see; Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree.”
8) Given all of that, why would Jesus vote conservative?: This is the punchline, the point, the “gotcha” moment. But this is a repudiation of the whole argument behind this meme. Jesus is powerful and influential precisely because he stands above the fray of our fractured discourse, and to pull him down to our level, to play partisanship is to bleed him of the very thing which makes him so attractive. His kingdom is not of this world, it is a world to come and that eternal city is not run by Democrats or Republicans, it’s run by a suffering servant who radiates self-giving love.
Conclusion: How is this not a theocracy?
For years, in American politics the conservative boogeyman has always been the fiery preacher-politician that wants to institute the Ten Commandments as law and throw all prostitutes, Muslims, atheists, and the whole LGBTQ population in jail. Now while there are certainly those out there who pray for this and advocate for its implementation it has been as close to coming to fruition as Sharia Law has. One enduring and compelling vision of this is in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale and the subsequent hit television show of the same name. In this story a right-wing totalitarian government ran by alleged “Puritans” has taken over a wide swath of the American landscape and instituted such laws on the population, relegating some women to the status of “handmaid”, a position where they are ceremonially raped in order that they may bare children for the barren wives of the governments leaders. This is but one example of the dangers of “theocracy”, and yet wonders if the vision put forth by our well-meaning meme could be categorized as one as well. It is a political vision put forth by a religious leader (the Son of God nonetheless) and it advocates for some radical challenges to the established political order. We are led to believe that the state should advocate and administer this vision, and that it is what our God wants. So, my question remains; how is this not a theocracy? We are all certainly prone to being what Charles Taylor called “cross-pressured”, where we feel pressure both from our imminent surroundings and from some transcendent voice, and we have to navigate how to move forward in the world while dealing with these pressures. But we need more wisdom than the meme, like the bumper sticker before it, can offer. Stephen Hawking once said that the 21st century will be the century of complexity, and we have to be ready to navigate that complexity, not just throw another quote at the wall and hope it sticks.
