USA: Religion and politics - One thing you can be absolutely sure about is that Jesus isn’t interested in America’s two-party politics

While being cloistered to the house as part of the stay at home orders, by what seems to be a totally disorganized Trump administration, I started channel surfing America’s political network news circus out of boredom.

As I did I  came across two programs featuring religious leaders passionately discoursing about President Trump and America.

As a European Christian I was naturally interested in the perspectives of my fellow Christians in the US.

I was particularly captured by how the two speakers in the parallel programs used intensely religious language, how they invoked God, how they quoted the Bible and the way they mentioned a whole pantheon of religious themes. But their political convictions could not have been more confusing and idiotic, at least to me.

It was a surreal experience; like simultaneously living in two alternate realities and seeing how Christianity was being weaponized by both the right and the left of American politics.

The Jesus of American Republican conservatives, is a Jesus who sounds like a glorified  version of Ronald Reagan. A Jesus who believes that God helps those who help themselves. A Jesus who rejects biological evolution, but also believes in an economic contest of survival of the fittest.

As to the progressives American Democrats, their Jesus is often described in ways that would probably best fit the long-lost love child of Lenin and Madonna, who grew up to become an environmental activist. Progressive politics trades in a secular Jesus, cleansed of anything that sounds too religious.

Political America should remember that Apostle Paul already way back then had a word of rebuke to America and its attempt to invoke the memory of Jesus to support its politics: “If a person comes and preaches some other Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different Spirit than the one you had received, or a different gospel than the one you embraced, you put up with it so easily!”  you can look this up in your Bible re: 2 Corinthians 11:4-5).

And as a word of warning to the European Christian community, please make sure not to let politically indoctrinated US Christian  "pastors"  and their supporting organizations open "Christian" churches in Europe before making sure not only you, but also your local government has thoroughly checked them out.

EU-Digest