MAGAs are NOT Christians

If you support MAGA, you can't call yourself a Christian!

That seems like a bold statement to make, but it's absolutely true. You can proclaim your Christianity all you want, but the logic doesn't follow. The posting below is taken from the substack published by John Pavlovitz, longtime pastor, author, speaker, and activist. I wish I could share it with every member of my ex-church.

When faced with the teachings of Jesus, the venom the MAGA crowd responds with is like vampires to daylight. We feel sorry for them, as they're coming face to face with the sobering reality that their MAGA beliefs are completely inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus. They aren't hearing that news from us — they're hearing it right from Jesus. There are few things that confound and infuriate Conservative Christians quite like the simple, clear, unadorned words of Jesus as documented in the Bible — words that they so loudly and frequently claim to love, believe in, and live by.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)

When you're part of an antagonistic movement built almost exclusively on a self-righteous battle posture; on a theology and politics that require an enemy, an adversary, an encroaching danger, a culture war foe to be brutally defeated — the idea of being a peacemaker really pisses you off. MAGAs don't like peace. They refuse to coexist with it.

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." (Matthew 25:45)

The poor, the outcast, the hurting, the hungry, the homeless, the lonely. Jesus said he literally inhabits the most vulnerable among us, and that the way we treat them is the way we treat Jesus himself. That's a really disturbing reality for the MAGA movement that spends so much of its time denying people healthcare, cutting social programs, assaulting voting rights, and legislatively attacking people for their sexuality or their nation of origin or their pigmentation. The news that (according to Jesus) you’re devoting a great deal of your life to treating him like garbage — tends not to be received too well by the MAGA crowd. But if the shoe fits, wear it.

"For God so loved the world…" (John 3:16)

The world. God loves the world. That includes the planet, the climate around it, the resources within it, the disparate humanity and expansive life upon it. No MAGA "America First" or "Make America Great Again" movements. No "Go back where you came from" nationalistic bluster. No "Don't Tread on Me" middle-finger defiance. If you so love the world as God does, you fight for diversity, equity, and inclusion. You welcome immigrants and foreigners, you demand environmental responsibility, you want more people to have voices, not fewer. The MAGA movement, on the other hand, opposes God.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 22:37-39)

Loving your neighbor. Jesus says unequivocally that this is the priority and the point, and the way we show our love for God is the way we treat other human beings. When Conservative Christians realize that this includes their Muslim neighbor, their transgender neighbor, their Jewish neighbor, their Liberal neighbor, their uninsured neighbor, their undocumented neighbor, their black neighbor — they usually don't react very well. There is no hate like Christian love. When you aren't able or willing to practically or tangibly extend love to such a vast portion of your neighbors in any meaningful way, that is a difficult theological pill to swallow.

Literally nothing is as MAGA as watching a bunch of self-righteous frauds who pretend to give a damn about Christianity viciously attacking a minister preaching about caring for the vulnerable (i.e. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde) at the national prayer service in Washington, D.C. while their rapist-felon "messiah" (i.e. Trump) condescendingly scoffs at her.

We feel sorry for people who want to be both Christian and MAGA. MAGA and Christianity are diametrically opposed to one another. These people think they can be devoted to Jesus and to Trump simultaneously. They can't. They labor under the false assumption that their bastardized, territorial, self-centered white nationalist GOP version of Christianity is remotely of God. It isn't.

So, MAGA friends out there, we're not saying this white Republican theocracy built on power, exclusion, and subjugation that you're brainwashed into and tethered to is anti-Jesus, and that you’re failing him by worshipping someone like Trump, the dictator.

Bishop Budde isn’t saying that, either.

Jesus is saying that.

If you have a problem with that, take it up with Him.

"And if a town refuses to welcome you, shake its dust from your feet as you leave to show that you have abandoned those people to their fate." (Luke 9:5 NLT)