I’ve been thinking about how Christian Nationalists are hijacking Jesus of Nazareth.
Christian nationalists have invaded our current public conversation and weaponized the Christian faith. Their form of patriotism believes that America was founded as, and should therefore remain, a country built on their version of Christian values. They believe these values, and not the democratic vision enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, should shape our government. They would prefer a world more like the authoritarian governments of our fiercest adversaries than a messy, pluralistic democracy.
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Not surprisingly, these Christian nationalists embody values of straight, white, patriarchal, conservative Americans who, though they are a minority of our current population, consider themselves morally, intellectually, culturally, and economically superior to the rest of us, whom they see as other and inferior and corrupt.
As we learned on January 6th, 2021, they believe that, if necessary, their fight for dominance is not just ideological but violent. When they go to battle, Jesus is a banner carrier for their militant convictions. These two photos reflect the warped vision of Jesus that characterizes such American Christian nationalists:
I can't recognize or revere this version of Jesus.
I grew up with a very different (although no less hijacked) version of Jesus. Reproductions of Warner Sallman’s 1940 painting of Jesus hung in every Sunday School classroom of the huge evangelical protestant church I was raised in. Sallman was the son of immigrants from Finland and Sweden who trained as a painter in Chicago and eventually painted hundreds of portraits of Jesus, but none so popular and influential as this one, reproduced over half a billion times worldwide by the end of the 20th century, which became the basis for the visualization of Jesus for hundreds of millions of people.
Jesus of Nazareth looked very little like Sallman’s portrait. He was, of course, a Middle Eastern Jewish peasant with dark skin and the worn look of a poor person. But as his story and the communities that followed him spread west from Palestine across the Mediterranean countries and then north to all of Europe in the centuries after his death, his appearance in peoples’ imaginations was altered by the communities that believed in him. Their art and imagery depicted their European ideals and by the time of Sallman’s famous painting, Jesus had taken on the lighter skin and European sense of male beauty that reflects Sallman’s northern European heritage.
Just as Warner Sallman transformed Jesus’ ruddy peasant appearance into a portrait of Scandinavian sanctity, so too Christian nationalists have transformed Jesus into a likeness of their own identities and values. Like Sallman's painting, their version of Jesus is a convenient container in which to store their own beliefs rather than an accurate understanding of a radical teacher and prophet.
Christian nationalists want to impose their religious convictions by installing replicas of the Ten Commandments in school classrooms and public court houses. Versions of the commandments are found three times in the Bible: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34:11-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. All three citations are in the Hebrew scriptures Christians define as the Old Testament, not in the New Testament’s Christian scriptures. Jesus never quotes the Commandments nor insists that his disciples follow them.
In June of this year, Louisiana became the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. Photo via the Associated Press.
So why, in the name of Christian nationalism, focus on a list of Jewish ethical standards? It's because the commandments have an authoritarian ring to them that is music to autocratic ears. God is the patriarchal leader who is in charge. These are not suggestions or invitations to conversation, they are COMMANDMENTS. The proclamation of them rings with the voice of authority: Thou Shalt Not! It's clear that the purpose of the Ten Commandments is to set moral boundaries for us, to keep us in line by telling what to do and not to do.
In the New Testament, Jesus is interested in something completely different. His task is to create a Beloved Community, which he called The Kingdom of God, where people of all varieties love, care for, and encourage one another. His most succinct description of this community's life is found in his Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5-7 in the Gospel of Matthew.
The Sermon begins not with a list of commandments but with a list of beatitudes, a list of blessings. In the Sermon on the Mount, God is not defining what we can and cannot do; instead, the Sermon defines who we might be individually and with one another. Compare the tone of these to the tone of the Commandments: Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
Ugh, say Christian nationalists. Such soft teaching. No authority. No boundaries. No Thou Shalt Nots. Just this notion that it is God’s desire to bless us, to love us, to turn our human race into one human family. The Commandments teach us to live out of fear; the Beatitudes teach us to live out of gratitude for our blessings and with compassion for ourselves and for one another. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount would never carry an AR-15. He encourages us not to slaughter or incarcerate the Infidels who believe differently, but to welcome them into our community as we work to find the common good that will bind us to one another.
Not only is this Jesus filled with a message contrary to everything Christian nationalism stands for, he also looks nothing like the Jesus they worship, nor anything at all like Sallman’s portrait. British forensic experts and Israeli archaeologists have collaborated to develop a computer model of Jesus of Nazareth’s face based on forensic anthropology.
This dark-skinned rural Jewish peasant looks nothing like what contemporary Christian nationalists define as the object of their faith and a model for their behavior. The Jesus of the New Testament acts nothing like Christian nationalists. He stands against every self-serving, militant, superior belief that is the foundation of their identity. To them he would be an immigrant, another stranger, another threatening person of color worthy of their suspicion and rejection.
They have hijacked Jesus of Nazareth and turned him into a pale-skinned, militant idol bearing little likeness to the one whose life and death are the continuing foundation of my faith. The task for those of us who are devoted to him is to bear our witness to the authentic Jesus as we work to expand the human community he calls us to create.