The Red Letters
Saving the words of Jesus from erasure
In the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire was new to everyone, including the Romans. Some sixty years prior, Pompey Magus had laid siege to Jerusalem and accepted its surrender, ending Judean independence as the Roman Republic entered its death throes. Pompey went on to defeat at the hands of his former ally, Julius Caesar. The great power that ruled over Judea was now headed by an emperor.
It does not require religious faith to be fascinated by this man, this Jesus of Nazareth, who so offended and disrupted an age of political giants and cataclysmic change; who challenged orthodoxies and hierarchies in ways that are felt to this day. Nor does it require religious faith to think his legacy might be an important source of power against the petty Caesars of our own time.
Because there is a new social order emerging, that must be disrupted; a new imperial impulse that chafes against the constraints (real or imagined) of a militarily and culturally dominant republic. Given that his words have lasted 2,000 years, and outlived the Roman Empire that eventually adopted his worship, it might be useful for the secular and pluralist Left to re-engage with the words and the arguments of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
I don’t believe in God, anymore. I don’t think my reasons for losing faith are particularly novel or insightful, so I won’t bore you with them. They have to do with science and reason and the baleful legacy of so much of organised religion. You’ve heard it all before; you don’t need to hear it again from me.
But I certainly did believe in God as a child, and through my teenage years. I might have questioned everything else that smacked of authority - my parents, my teachers, my coaches, my country - but I did not question that there was a loving God, whose will bent the moral arc of the universe towards justice. What’s more, to my mind, God was clearly a social democrat and, likely, a paid up member of the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP).
I had plenty of reasons to believe my God looked and thought a lot like me. My political idols were decidedly Christian. The Greatest Canadian, Tommy Douglas, preached the Social Gospel as ably from his seat in Parliament as from the front of a church. My formative church, the United Church of Canada, was often described as “The NDP at prayer”. Later in life, when I entered professional politics, I worked in the government of, and then the office of, Saskatchewan NDP Premier Lorne Calvert - a former United Church minister, and one of the most thoroughly decent people I have ever met. When I moved to Winnipeg, to work for Gary Doer’s government, some of the first people I met were children and former staffers of Bill Blaikie, the political firebrand behind the Canada Health Act that has buttressed so much of Canada’s commitment to universal, public health care and, himself, a United Church minister.
In how I understood the world, growing up, the language of the Left was the language of God. It never occurred to me that He would not be on the side of the poor and the dispossessed.
But this was obviously not a universal view.
“The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” (Matthew 26:11)
I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. I debated the Bible (and abortion, and homosexuality, and Feminism, and other religious traditions) with my Evangelical friends. I have a lot of fondness for that time and those people. But I witnessed them grow ever more deeply mired in a political movement masquerading as a spiritual revival. I knew my faith was political, but by definition pluralist. They were headed in a different direction.
This was the heyday of the Promise Keepers, the March For Jesus and Christian stadium rock figures like Petra and DC Talk. It was a growing movement, based on the ecstatic experience of mass gathering, that would later be stream-lined and monetised in the Megachurch culture that now dominates conservative Protestant politics.
And that politics has no time for Jesus.
In Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, Tom Holland stresses that the notion of a God who had debased himself - who subjected himself to torture and death; who healed lepers; who consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors; to whom the least of the world were not just equal to, but higher than the great - was “grotesque” to the Roman world surrounding Christ and his chief evangelist after his death, Paul of Tarsus: “Not as a leader of armies, not as the conqueror of Caesars, but as a victim the Messiah had come. The message was as novel as it was shocking—and was to prove well suited to an age of trauma.”
It’s a message that has never sat comfortably with Christian empire, colonialism and slavery. But the political urgency of the conservative church today - to sanctify Donald Trump and demonise the poor, the immigrant, the downtrodden - has propelled that movement to remove the teachings of Jesus from a faith captured by ideology. People like Allie Beth Stuckey, author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, recognise how dangerous Jesus is to the chauvinist political movement they are building. Stuckey is specifically concerned, rightly, that the words of Jesus can be used to support “abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice”.
But even ignoring those challenging cultural issues: They absolutely know there is no serious invocation of the words and teachings of Jesus Christ that can sustain the cruelty of Trump’s imperial ambition, nor his program of kidnapping, family separation, detention and deportation. And yet, religious conservatives make up a huge part of his political support. The lengths they will go to brace themselves against the words of Jesus - not Trump - shows just how powerful Jesus’s message truly is. It terrifies the worst Christian enablers of this cruel moment of rupture, this turn from republic to empire. The cult of Augustus could not have been more servile.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:24)
There is a temptation to make Jesus political in ways that do not sit right with me. I rebel against the notion that Jesus was a kind of classical Marxist guerrilla fighting a Judean junta, backed by some Roman version of the CIA. Jesus is a demanding figure, if his recorded words approximate his teachings even vaguely. He is not offering a political program, in my view, but a moral imagining that requires much of his adherents. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he says in John 18:36. I think those of us who do not believe the more supernatural claims ascribed to him - John 3:16 and all that - should be careful about crowing about the verses we like.
Nevertheless. If we are all, as Holland posits, “goldfish swimming in Christian waters” - so immersed in Christian conceptions of life, death and morality that we don’t even recognise them - then surely, in the broadest possible sense, Jesus’s words are our words. Even we atheists. If there is moral truth to be found in the words of Jesus, it is there to be found. God or no.
In order to proclaim their new Caesar, the mass of conservative Christianity has chosen to hide his words behind the weapon that killed him. In so doing they are killing important, challenging words that belong to us all.
It falls to us, then, believers and non-believers alike, to rescue the words of Jesus.