What’s especially infuriating about white evangelicals rolling over and showing their bellies to the Republican party’s clown car full of fascist-wannabes isn’t just the street magic soul-contortions they must fool themselves into believing they’re not performing, but their remarkable lack of empathy and compassion.

Good Friday and Easter don’t mean that now God can finally love us unqualifiedly because God’s tricked Godself into thinking we’re pure; it means that God loves us too much to let the power of subjugation and oppression be the final word—that in fact, God was determined through Jesus to shine a spotlight on a new world in which peace, justice, and love inevitably and irresistibly overcome violence, injustice, and hatred.

I mean, how else are you going to get through to people who’ve inoculated themselves against the encroachment of the reign of God’s peace and justice—especially since the way Jesus asks people to live stands as a rebuke to the very comfort and stability so many people cling to? 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to follow Jesus after hearing of the recent decision from our friends in the United Methodist Church. Specifically, I’m thinking about what hearing Christians who’ve dismissed the dignity and faith of LGBTQ people must sound like to LGBTQ people when those Christians talk about the “love of Jesus.”

A spiritualized messiah—apart from doing violence to Jesus’ understanding of himself as a prophetic voice announcing a new reign to rival the claims of existing reigns—makes possible the kind of otherwise decent people who, when faced with injustice and tyranny, don’t have the strength and courage to say “no” and “wrong.” However, Jesus the lousy messiah is the perfect model for producing people … able to resist any authority that threatens those who cannot help themselves.

All I’m claiming is that people who follow Jesus—a man killed by plutocrats for challenging a similar system—don’t have any real stake in propping up a plutocracy. Indeed, they have every incentive to undermine such a system.