The Progressives’ More-Christian-Than-Jesus Machine™

By John Zmirak Published on November 22, 2015

For many political progressives (who advocate regressing into socialist dysfunction), Christianity is the Great Satan, a promise of “pie in the sky when you die” slyly designed to distract the poor from their present sufferings, support patriarchal society and excuse Western hegemony. But sometimes you will hear a progressive cite Christianity in a positive light. This happens when liberals dig through our scriptures to find a verse here or there that seems to support their broader agenda of gaining power by attaching themselves to discontented social or cultural groups, championing the groups’ rise to power, and splitting the loot when they win.

If some element of Christianity, shorn of complexity or context, can serve as a cudgel in that fight, progressives are happy to recruit politically progressive Christian thought leaders to wield that cudgel, especially those hungry for crumbs of elite approval. The recruiting efforts have been quite successful, too. How else to explain clergy who march outside of abortion clinics in defense of “reproductive rights,” church charities that favor Muslim economic migrants over persecuted Christians, or safe Western Christians eager to reassure refugees fleeing from ISIS that Islam is a “religion of peace”?

Such Christians surely believe they are merely helping their benighted fellow Christians progress toward a more enlightened and forward-looking form of Christianity; but really they are serving the secular progressive agenda of transforming Christianity from a supernatural religion of power to a eunuch in the palace of progressivism, perhaps under the illusion that this will buy them a place of power, or at least of safety, once the left and its foreign allies have triumphed.

These progressive Christians are deluded. They will face the same fate as “Enlightened” priests and bishops who supported the French Revolution at first, then waited their turns at the guillotine.

Let us try to spare them — and the rest of us — that outcome. It’s the only Christian thing to do. We’ll do it with a bit of consciousness raising.

The More Christian Than Jesus Machine™

The mechanism that transforms Christianity into its hollowed-out parody uses five simple steps:

  1. Identify some Bible verse or Christian tradition that can be seen as favoring your preconceived political views. (Such as “Turn the other cheek.”)
  2. Ignore any Scripture or other evidence in God’s creation that could point the other way, give context or impose realistic conditions in accord with the virtue of prudence. (E.g., The fact that Jesus addressed several soldiers and never told them to quit even the pagan Roman army, or that the apostle Paul said that God gave governments the sword to punish evildoers.)
  3. Present your desired principle as an absolute and unconditional Christian principle: e.g., Christians must be pacifists in war and multiculturalists in peace, refusing to defend their own, their family’s or their country’s interest.)
  4. Accuse those who argue with you of “watering down” the Gospel for worldly or selfish reasons. (Cite examples where Christian Just War principles were abused or ignored, and pretend that these examples disprove those principles.)
  5. Congratulate yourself on the “purity” of your “unconditional Gospel witness.” (Collect approval or outright cash from multimillion-dollar “peace” foundations.)

Through such a process, it’s possible to “prove” that “real” Christians must embrace almost any position, anywhere on the spectrum. Reactionaries in the past employed the More Christian Than Jesus Machine™ in support of slavery, segregation and the Inquisition. But they mostly learned their lesson, as the tactic blew up in their faces and partly discredited the churches that cooperated with it.

Christians who are both politically and theologically liberal have no such worries, since their attachment to historical Christianity is pragmatic or sentimental and, again, there’s the money, which can help to stave off the implosion of a struggling parish, congregation or denomination. Catholic bishops and (mostly mainline) Protestant churches who favor de facto open borders already see their underfunded charities made flush by federal contracts for “resettling” immigrants on American welfare rolls.

If someone calls you on it and points to the fact that your progressive denomination is hemorrhaging members, return to Step 4: Tar those who “cling” to traditional, time-tested accounts of how to view Christ’s commands in context as “rigid,” “Pharisaical,” “xenophobic” or — even worse — “bourgeois.” Then wait for the next check from George Soros and Co. Nice work, if you can get it.

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