Forum Post: Right Wing Locks Jesus In Voting Booth!

Opinion by John Liming

When I was a young man, Jesus Christ was the center of a vast religious movement called “Christianity” and He and His Words of Wisdom caused souls to be saved and joy to reign in the hearts of believers. That’s how I remember Him!

America was filled with all kinds and varieties of Christian Churches.

There were the Methodists, The Catholics, The Presbyterians, The Churches of God, and hundreds of others.

Hundreds of churches and everyone of them had a slightly different message. But the message of those churches back then—in that time in America—seemingly long, long ago now preached a message that was always centered around The Bible, Jesus Christ, Salvation, Eternity, Joy and Peace, Eternal Life and escape from sure and certain damnation in a fiery Devil’s Hell for the “Lost.” (Those who did not know Jesus as their “Personal” Savior.

Those were fun times! Those were good times!

I used to love to hear the different denominations explaining why their particular little group was the only “True Faith.” It was hilarious! It was pitiful. But, it was traditional— and, it was “Christian!”

People never ever discussed Religion and Politics in the same breath and a church could actually lose it’s tax-exempt status if it crossed the line too far in mixing Christian Faith with Political Activism. Those were the good days! Those are the days to which we desperately need to return. The sooner, the better! Sometime in around the 1960s or 70s (I do not remember exactly) American Christianity began to court a new mistress called “American Exceptionalism” and something new was born from the wedding.

The “Something New” was “Politicized Religion.” Someone on the right side of the political fence got together with a few friends in high places and kidnapped Jesus Christ.

They took Him straight down from the Cross and took Him out of The Tomb and slammed him into the confined prison of a Voting Booth. He has been languishing there ever since, barely kept alive by the crumbs His new Conservative masters allow him from time to time as they try to torture Him into sharing their loathing and hatred of all things Liberal.

As a younger man, I was immersed in a Jesus who was interested in healing the social ills of His time and, by inference, our time as well. The Jesus I grew up with was interested in helping the poor and healing the sick, for example. That seemed to be much of the emphasis of both the preaching of the Christian Message and of the mission of many of the mainline churches.

Today, however, after the incursions of the far Right have more or less dismantled the Social Gospel” that was once the mainstay and Hallmark of Christ and His Church, we see a new and more or less embittered combativeness rising along the lines of a supposed militant “End Times” scenario that not only looks for the return of Jesus, but which seems to couch the expectation of that return in strictly political and ideological terms.

So, according to some interpretations of Scripture and it’s application to the socio-economic reality, I get the idea that the group most involved with the rise of modern “Evangelical Revivalism” with it’s unexplainable fervor for the often bizarre (Seeing visions and receiving special extra-Biblical Revelations) is on a course toward demolishing the Democratic Republic in America and replacing it with some kind of really far out “Fundamentalist-Christo-Fascist” Theocracy ruled by those who embrace a “Literal” interpretation of King James Scriptures and who operate from their gut more than from their heads and are, generally (In my view) nothing more than religious fruitcakes.

Read the rest here: http://www.thejeffersontree.com/right-wing-locks-jesus-in-voting-booth/