MAGA Jesus

It doesn’t matter where I come down on this topic, I’m going to piss somebody off. With that understood, here goes.

You can’t comprehensively write about the topic of Trump and the MAGA movement without sooner or later dealing with the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. I begin by emphasising the word “historical.”

The vast majority of professional historians of ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean consider Jesus of Nazareth to have been a real person in history. They consider him fully formed and fully differentiated from any other persons of that time who accidentally shared his forename.

It has nothing to do with their having a religious axe to grind (though I don’t doubt that some of them do), these scholars assert that Jesus of Nazareth was just as real a figure to history as Socrates. They are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, agnostic and atheist scholars alike.

Furthermore, it is generally agreed among these scholars that Jesus was Jewish, a teacher or preacher in Roman Judea, was baptised by John the Baptist, gathered followers, spoke Aramaic, conceivably could read and write Hebrew, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate around 30 CE.

In life, though an unwashed peasant, Jesus was probably boldly charismatic, on the order of a Julius Caesar. The rest is up to you.

There is no direct evidence that the words of Jesus as quoted in the Bible are accurately portrayed. However, I suspect that many of his purported words bear a close relationship to what he might have actually taught.

For example, it will come as a surprise to some of you, who have half a dozen amusing anecdotes about Sir Winston Churchill floating around in your heads, that most of those anecdotes are pure rubbish. Even so, however untrue they are, they still tell us quite a bit about the wit and character of the man.

I have no opinion to offer about the alleged miraculous deeds of Jesus. Those claims lie outside the realm of scholarship and are unfalsifiable.

So, what do we have to go on? We have a general idea of the kind of things Jesus taught. We know that they must have been sufficiently radical for him to be executed by the Roman overlords of Judea. But it’s a fair bet that whatever Jesus had to say, it was the polar opposite of what we refer to today as “nationalism.”

It certainly couldn’t have been Judaean nationalism, because the ideas attributed to him, however jumbled by time, have to do with loving your God and your neighbour and yourself, not your nation.

And Jesus obviously didn’t preach Roman nationalism otherwise why would the Romans have crucified him? “Make Rome great again” are words Jesus almost certainly never uttered.

We only have to look to our own recent and well documented history to understand what kind of people tyrants kill. Despots will tolerate a thief or a murderer long before they will tolerate a popular revolutionary who speaks of a power greater than the despots themselves. And the more such radicals speak of love and forbearance the sooner they get executed.

All of which is to say, the identifiable figure of Jesus is as unlikely a candidate for MAGA to rally around as Abraham Lincoln. And yet they do both, to their perennial embarrassment and inconvenience.

I have never in my life met a man or a woman who behaves as if the idea of hell was real. It’s little wonder. The notion that one must be submitted to indescribably horrible torture for all eternity for failing to think a certain way is as preposterous as it is an obvious manipulation.

Even so, it’s also little wonder that many in MAGA claim to believe in the myth of hell. The idea embodies one of the ugliest impulses in human nature, the impulse to unjustly and horribly punish other people who disagree with you.

Antipathy for the accumulation of wealth is a thread that runs so consistently through the mythology around the words of Jesus that it strikes me as almost certainly true. It is fully harmonious with what the man probably taught.

I suspect if he had been contemporaneous with Elon Musk, Jesus would have had thunderous condemnation for the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children.

In order to reconcile the Jesus of history with the Jesus of MAGA, MAGA has had to reinvent him. Their Jesus hated stateless immigrants, even though he was one of them. He hated brown homeless people, even though he was one of them. Above all, their MAGA Jesus loved America roughly one thousand and seven hundred and seventy-six years before it was invented.

They do all this in service of a man who is clearly a total atheist. In both word and deed, the so-called “Christians of MAGA” display far more love and reverence for Trump than for Jesus himself.

I don’t know about you, sisters and brothers, but I can think of few things more deeply fucked up than that.

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