Perhaps not traditional (yet), but one of my favorite pieces for the season is Jackson Browne’s “The Rebel Jesus”. Written by Browne for and performed here with The Chieftains on their 1991 Christmas CD, the lyrics pretty well cover the shift in Christianity in the past few decades. They certainly apply to the state of Christmas and evangelical Christianity today—where the money-changers that Jesus threw out of the temple have taken over mega-churches to preach the gospel of prosperity. Well, prosperity for them, at least. Guarding the world with locks and guns—check. Guarding fine possessions—yepper. The kill shot, though, is the line about anyone interfering with the business of why the poor are poor: “they get the same as the rebel Jesus.”
If anything, that’s only got worse in the decades since
this song was released. That gospel of prosperity’s added an amendment: if I
can’t be prosperous, please, God, at least make someone else worse off than me.
In the case of a brown baby born in a stable in the
backwater of empire, the idea of churches spending millions to cover up
long-term crimes against the most vulnerable of their parishes, of
televangelists in $3000 suits barely visible behind the pay-by-credit-card
logos and of Bible-spewing maniacs spraying innocent people with death on
full-auto is just surreal.
Moreover, it’s not clear to me when, exactly”, “spread the
word of the good news” morphed into “convert or die.” I mean, Jesus told his
disciples to go forth and preach, but if they came to a town where the people
weren’t receptive, they should move on and “shake the dust from their heels”.
He didn’t tell them to grind the disbelievers into dust.
Maybe it was Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan in 313
CE, which ended Rome’s persecution of Christians. Or Theodosius’s 380 CE Edict
of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman
Empire. But somewhere between Bethlehem and now, when they became the dominant
religion in Western Europe and North America, we got to a woman carrying a
non-viable fetus that endangers her life not being able to receive healthcare
because Texas Republicans and “Christianity”.
And those Republicans on the national stage have the
unmitigated fucking temerity to whine that there’s a war on (white) Christians,
and they need government protection from persecution.
Here’s Browne and the Chieftains, laying it out for us.
©2024 Bas Bleu
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