Recently, political strategist Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist to George W. Bush, as well as one-time Democratic contender for the highly-coveted role of Lieutenant Governor of Texas, now serving a term at MSNBC, made some interesting comments about Jesus, specifically in the context of the continued turmoil from the controversial Florida bill doubly titled “Anti-Groomer” and “Don’t Say Gay”.
I pause and note that I will not be addressing conservativism much in this post. This is for several reasons. First, Mr. Dowd no longer identifies as a conservative. Second, this post is about Jesus. The Incarnation of God in Jesus is largely absent from conservative political conversation, often slipping only in conversations around abortion with His admonishment to “let the little children come unto me.” Instead, conservatives focus their attention on God the Father — “one nation under God,” “in God we trust,” and “God bless America.” Charismatic conservatives will, at times of perceived moral error, prophesy that “God [the Father]” will bring about calamity to the nation of America.
One should hardly be surprised that conservative Christians do not invoke Christ in political conversation. First, Christ is a problematic figure Who sticks in everyone’s craw: conservatives do not have the advantage relative to progressives in weaving Him into their political narrative. Second, conservatives are, by definition, about conserving what has come before. Their adherence to referencing only God the Father in political speech is natural: the father is the root of culture, and conservatives are oriented to preserving culture as it is rather than “changing it” in some progressive fashion. Problematic father-son relationships abound in the collective consciousness: Kronos and Zeus, Agamemnon and Orestes, Laius and Oedipus. While Jesus says that He and the Father are one, and that unity with Him is necessary for unity with the Father, the very fact of His nature as the Son is enough to make a conservative-minded person squirm when He enters the political arena. Conservatives know in their bones the well-trod pattern of sons overthrowing the order of their fathers and are wired to aversion around this dynamic.
For those reasons, this post will focus on Mr. Dowd’s comments to analyze Christ as He is commonly understood by self-identified Christian progressives. I must first caveat that, this post is not a critique of Mr. Dowd personally, but rather uses his comments as a starting point to better understand how Jesus interacted with the politically charged world of His own time, where He fits into politics today, and how we make grave errors in wrongly contextualizing Him. Mr. Dowd’s comments are meaningful to analyze insomuch as he holds some degree of power and influence and in that his position is hardly unique among self-identified Christian progressives, so it is important to properly understand.
Specifically, Mr. Dowd was responding to a broader conversation on an MSNBC segment covering a row between Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow and her colleague Senator Lana Theis, who apparently stated in a fundraising e-mail, after a recent Twitter disagreement between the two over a provocatively-worded invocation prayed by Sen. Theis, that:
“Progressive social media trolls like Senator Mallory McMorrow […] are outraged they [can’t teach can’t groom] and sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year olds are responsible for slavery.”
Sen. McMorrow responded in a now-viral video, stating that Sen. Theis was “dehumanizing and marginalizing” her in these remarks. She stated that she learned from her mother that:
“Christianity and faith was about being part of a community, about recognizing our privileges and blessings and doing what we can to be of service to others, especially to people who were marginalized, targeted, and who had less, often unfairly [and that] service was far more important than performative nonsense about being seen in the same pew every Sunday, or writing ‘Christian’ in your Twitter bio, and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already-marginalized people. [….] People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs are too high, or that teachers are leaving the profession. […] We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives.”
Mr. Dowd stated, when asked to respond to “faith [being used] as a political cudgel”:
“The state Senator who did that to Mallory McMorrow, did it on Easter […] The entire message of the gospels of the Easter holidays was love one another. And I have said this before, and I’ll say it again: If Jesus Christ was alive today, He would be called a groomer, He would be called woke, and He would be called a socialist if He was alive today. If He was speaking the message He spoke in the gospels today about treating everybody with dignity – Jesus Christ hung around with prostitutes and tax collectors. He was nailed to a cross because He spoke on behalf of the most marginalized people in the Middle East. And the idea that a certain segment of our population has tried to capture the faith and corrupt a message that I’ve been a follower of […] all of us […] whether you’re Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or don’t have a faith at all — the message that ‘love conquers hate’ is a message all of us […] should be pushing, but especially the Christians in our country who cannot stand what has happened to our faith.”
Let’s break that down.
“The entire message of the Gospels of the Easter holidays was love one another”
When the disciples burst forth from Upper Room in Jerusalem on the Feast of Pentecost, spreading the Christian virus across the nations within decades, their message wasn’t necessarily to proclaim Jesus’ instruction to “love one another” from John 13:34 as the central tenet of Christianity. Peter says to the crowd in Jerusalem, “Let all Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). This is emphasized again in Acts 5:42: “[The apostles] did not stop teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.”
Why is this message so important, that Jesus is the “anointed one,” the long-awaited Messiah of Israel? Because He is the one who has shown the “things hidden since the foundation of the world” in revealing the scapegoating mechanism. We cannot begin to relate to each other properly, let alone love each other, if we do not understand our own instinct to scapegoat and persecute, make ourselves victors in our own stories, and shy away from being victimized by joining a raucous crowd to scapegoat another. All of these elements are extremely problematic, chaotic components of the human psychology which must be reckoned with — and Christ does come to annoy us and reckon with us — if we are to hope for another form of human togetherness that has a cohesive meaning that bears any resemblance to love. Love is the nuclear fallout of Christianity, but it always begins with the bright burst of the bomb that is Jesus Christ, cracking open our old ways of being together so that we can fashion something new.
“If Jesus Christ was alive today”
Note here that Mr. Dowd, who was raised Catholic, was born in 1961, which means it is likely he received catechism and confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s and early 1970s. This not an era of time known in the Catholic Church in America for its rigorous theological training, and Mr. Dowd is one of an entire generation of victims to poor catechesis. While it is entirely understandable that Mr. Dowd was intending to refer to the time that Jesus was on Earth, and differentiating that from our own time, we must reassert Matthew 28:6, a Gospel read over Easter: “He is not here; He has risen, just as he said.” Acts 2:24: “But God raised Him from the dead, releasing Him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for Him to be held in its clutches.”
However forgivable Mr. Dowd’s slip of the tongue — and opinions on Twitter do vary — it is certainly notable. When Christ remains dead in the sense that He is not “alive today,” He becomes a victim of history, and we all know what happens to victims of history: they get appropriated, vandalized, and tortured by the ever-changing shenanigans of the present as we roll on this great hamster wheel of time toward the Eschaton.
The living Christ will brook none of that.
“He would be called a groomer, He would be called woke, and He would be called a socialist”
Jesus would be called whatever words are necessary to scapegoat him. Perhaps that’s those words. Perhaps those are other words. The words themselves are really irrelevant — it’s the scapegoating that matters.
“If He was speaking the message He spoke in the Gospels today about treating everybody with dignity”
It is difficult for anyone, including conservatives, to assert that Jesus did not approach the social outcasts of his own community (and those of pagans as well) in a manner unusual for His time. He violated all sorts of religious and social customs and asserted an “inverted world” in which the last would be first and the first would be last. However, while He certainly touches on the message of human dignity (a concept not known to pagans), He largely seems to emphasize repentance, the Kingdom of Heaven, and segues into frankly strange stories about mustard seeds, yeast, sheep, sowing seeds on rocks, and bridegrooms appearing at unexpected times.
“Jesus Christ hung around with prostitutes and tax collectors”
The question of whether Jesus “hung around” with prostitutes is unsettled, but that is hardly the point. Yes, Jesus approached and socialized with social undesirables. But it is difficult to find an example where He allows them to continue in that which made them socially undesirable in the first place. While He socializes like a liberal, He reacts like a conservative. He seems to want to conserve the people whom He encounters, to return them back to a state that existed previously. The lepers, He heals; the demons, He casts out; the bleeding woman [unable to socialize because of her ritual impurity], He makes whole. There’s certainly no evidence that any prostitute around Jesus, if that was the case, continued her prostitution. So, while Mr. Dowd’s point is not fully fleshed out here, it does fall short in being able to carry Jesus in his argument the way one anticipates. (Nor do I assert here that Jesus is a conservative — but he isn’t necessarily a liberal.)
Then there is St. Matthew the Apostle — the tax collector. The arguments that St. Matthew, in the days before he was a saint, was an efficient tax collector are strong. He likely lived on some percentage of his take, and given the repeated emphasis in the Gospels on his wealth, appears to have been taking in quite a bit.
One has to wonder if tax collections for the region were quite as high after the departure of St. Matthew. We could hardly call Jesus a crypto-bro, but it would not take much imagination to see how Jesus may have been more skeptical of the state, its practices, and its currency than might first appear.
Understanding Jesus and the Powers
Mr. Dowd also states, in his most significant comment from the speech, that Jesus “was nailed to a cross because He spoke on behalf of the most marginalized people in the Middle East.”
While I would not be prepared to argue that this wasn’t one of the reasons that Jesus was crucified, it seems quite a stretch to assert that His kindness to lepers, prostitutes, and foreigners was anywhere near the first reason for His execution.
Jesus was executed by the Roman state. His disciple Judas Iscariot turned Him into the Sanhedrin, who had been seeking to reduce Jesus’ power and influence, and they conspired to have Him executed by the only power capable of doing so. As scandalized as they may have seemed by His behavior, all of that is cover for the fact that He was threatening their power and influence at a time of almost impending destabilization of all they knew. The Jewish client-king, Herod Antipas, was perfectly fine with this arrangement as well because he needed stabilization of relationships with Rome more than anyone.
Shortly after Jesus is arrested, Pilate sends Him to Herod:
Even Herod with his soldiers treated [Jesus] with contempt and mocked Him; then he put an elegant robe on Him, and sent Him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.” (Luke 23:12)
One of the several reasons that Jesus was killed was because He was the scapegoat of the community and its the political powers. It is only when Herod and Pilate can silently agree to scapegoat Jesus that they “become friends”.
It is here that Mr. Dowd must tread carefully on these dangerous spiritual grounds. Mr. Dowd is a part of the powers made manifest in this world, at least to some degree. He has worked closely with people who have held power, and currently appears on national television regularly, a statistical rarity among his fellow Americans, and an opportunity that provides him both position and influence. Anyone who holds political power, or is proximate to it, must read the Gospels to understand themselves as powers and understand the relationship of the powers to Jesus Christ.
Born a Child, and Yet a King
Five days before His arrest, Jesus allows Himself to be declared a king, as He processes into Jerusalem on a donkey:
And as He approached the descent from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of disciples began to praise God joyfully in a loud voice for all the miracles they had seen:
“Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
But some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples!” (Luke 19:37-39)
Jesus references how He is from a place that is “not of this world”:
He told [the Pharisees] “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world.” (John 8:23)
This theme is picked up in Pilate’s arrest of Jesus as relayed in the Gospel of John, when Jesus tells Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36) and that he “would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:11).
As Jacques Ellul audaciously asserts in Anarchy and Christianity:
“Jesus is telling Pilate that his power is from the spirit of evil. […] All powers and kingdoms in this world depend on the devil.”
If Jesus allowed Himself to be declared a king — and did not rebuke His disciples for doing so — and then asserts that He has a kingdom — it certainly sounds like He is far more a challenge to political power than our puppet to assert for it. Indeed, if He does cast Pilate’s power as below His, then we might even mistake Him for a political atheist — one who does not believe in the divinity of politics at all.
Jesus’ relationship to the powers cannot surprise us. We have several thousand years of history on the Gospel writers, offering us all the travails and scars of time experienced across many different forms of government the world over, to educate us on the relationship among the powers, and the powers to the masses capable of overthrowing or supporting them.
The 2000 film adaption of the quirky rock-opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” — a still from which heads this post — is particularly instructive. In it, Pilate is dressed in a style clearly evocative of the military uniforms in the Nazi regime. The film dramatizes from the Gospel accounts Pilate’s hesitancy to have Jesus executed. Prefiguring the widespread pagan conversions to the Jesus Movement, Pilate seems to recognize something about Jesus as not only innocent, but even something more. In Superstar, the Nazi-clad Pilate almost begs Jesus to give Him some reason to save Him, even as the mob calls for His death. It shows the relationship of the powers to the mob, and how the powers are susceptible to meeting the needs and desires of the mob even at the cost of their own conscience — and most especially at the cost of a victim.
Leaving the Politics Movie
As the Orthodox iconographer and symbolic thinker Jonathan Pageau often heralds, the end of the secular-liberal-modern-New-Atheist world is here, and the era of religion has returned. We should find it no small wonder that humans would gravitate to politics as a new religion: it is fruitful ground for doing so. In the United States, there are ritualistic exercises like voting, there are parties and caucuses around which to exercise tribal affiliation, there is tithing to a candidate, who, like a high priest, will then be both deified and held responsible for the sins of the people. The candidate-high priest acts as an intermediary between the unseen god of the future, and seeks to broker goods and returns for the people in exchange for keeping power. There’s something intriguing about this frame of thinking, but it doesn’t seem that the frame is immediately obvious. The religious impulse is more deeply rooted in the human brain than any political one. Given the option, we will reroute politics straight to the religion server.
In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, author Tom Wolfe reports on “the movie.” Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters of Acid Test are obsessed with the concept of “the movie,” this notion of acting like a particular “self” that has a particular “role” — names that lose their conventions and import when one is under the influence, as is the case for the Pranksters throughout much of the book. When the Pranksters interact with a police officer, they relay how he is in “the cop movie,” where the police officer wants to be a police officer while they chuckle at his strangely sober view of seeing the world. To the Pranksters, it is a movie, a false script with little reference to “how things are.”
How can one like Mr. Dowd or a viewer of his who might nod in agreement be persuaded to leave the “politics movie” for something far more interesting? All I can do is part with Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”:
You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?