One of the things that bugs me the most as a Christian is when people try to politicize Jesus. Sure, there are certain ways in which Christianity and politics can intertwine, and I truly believe that my Christian faith informs my political beliefs. But when people try to overlay Jesus onto a political agenda — or vice versa — there’s a problem.
The thing is, we see it on both sides of the political aisle. Let’s face it, during the 2016 election cycle, there was a weird fusion of Jesus and Trumpism that was awfully difficult for a lot of us Christians to square.
On the left, the phenomenon of politicizing Jesus comes in the form of woke Christianity. One of the most recent examples of this is a commercial that began airing around Christmas that tried to equate Jesus with illegal immigrants:
But one of the worst offenders when it comes to trying to make Jesus woke is John Pavlovitz. I try to avoid his articles and tweets because he’s not only so wrong about Jesus and politics, but he’s also terribly smug about it. All you have to do is look at his Twitter feed and see how it drips with nastiness and disdain for anyone who doesn’t fall in line with his social-justice, left-wing vision of Christianity.
In December, Pavlovitz wrote an article entitled, “The Woke, Liberal, Leftist Movement of Jesus.” I didn’t bother with it until last week when the hosts of one of my new favorite podcasts, Unshaken Faith, took it on. Hosts Alisa Childers (who detailed her own struggles with progressive Christianity in her brilliant book Another Gospel?) and Natasha Crain took on Pavlovitz’s arguments and proved why “woke Jesus” isn’t the Jesus of the Bible, which means that he’s no Jesus at all.
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One of the first things that Childers does is explores what it specifically means to refer to Jesus as “woke”:
But as a starting point, just to define terms, a dictionary definition of “woke” is to be aware of and actively attentive to issues of social justice. Of course, Jesus was aware of and actively attended to matters of justice in society. But “woke” isn’t just meant to convey someone who cares about justice. It actually implies a very specific, politically liberal view of what justice means and what it should entail. So to say that Jesus is “woke” is to say that he shares that specific view. That’s a really important distinction, and that’s what we want to look at.
Crain delves into one point in Pavlovitz’s article where he writes of Jesus, “He started a revolutionary underground movement of the people of the street, not a top-down theocracy of wealth and cloistered privilege.”
She counters this characterization of Jesus with the truth that Jesus’ mission wasn’t “just an underground movement of people in the street or simply the marginalized. It certainly included a lot of the outcasts of society, no doubt, but there were Pharisees. There were people in powerful positions. There were people who had more financial means than others, even throughout — after Jesus’ death and resurrection.” She notes that the primary mission of Jesus wasn’t a “revolutionary underground movement.” It was “repent and believe.”
Crain goes on to mention that, when you read the Gospels, “you can’t even get to this social justice warrior Jesus from actually what He says.”
“And I’ve tried to read the text that way to say okay, how are people getting to this that they think that Jesus is just all about what’s going on in society that horizontal aspects of social welfare basically, and you can’t get there? It is a continual call to repentance,” she adds.
That’s what the proponents of “woke” Jesus miss the most from His message: His emphasis on repentance. Jesus doesn’t just want people to come to Him and stay the same. He wants people to come to Him and change by being more like Him.
One of Pavlovitz’s most laughable statements is when he writes, “A multitude of religious people have so fully merged their religious tradition with a political party that they have become the worst of both entities. The partnership has poisoned each. ”
In his eyes, the only people who politicize Jesus are in the GOP. He ignores those people like him who think that Jesus is all about killing babies and letting people mutilate themselves to satisfy temporary feelings.
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He continues, “They have a selectively-small government and a tiny-hearted Church, and neither is very burdened with reaching into the gutters and the margins to care for the vulnerable and the hurting.”
While it’s heartbreaking for sure that too many churches and individuals have shirked their responsibilities to care for others, notice that Pavlovitz leads with the government.
Crain counters that progressive assertion that Christianity equals big government.
“I think that a lot of times progressive Christians take the second greatest commandment really seriously to love your neighbor, but they completely ignore or trivialize the greatest commandment to love God, which is what frames the definition for loving your neighbor,” she says. “But by specifying that other people have other worldviews and do that better than conservative Christians, specifically, he’s suggesting that your view of the size of government and what government does for society is how well you love your neighbor.”
Near the end of the podcast, Childers describes “woke” Christians by citing author George Yancey: “What he discovered was that conservative Christians actually start with their theology and then their politics flows out of their theology, whereas with progressive Christians, they start with their politics, and then their theology flows out of their politics.”
Jesus’ brother James wrote in his letter to the church, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27, ESV).
Jesus didn’t call His followers to let the government take care of everybody. He called us to take care of others, and churches, individuals, families, and businesses do need to step up their game. But the second half of James’ statement is what the proponents of “woke” Jesus forget: we’re supposed to live our lives in a way that makes us noticeably different from the world. And that includes working on ridding our lives of sin, not wallowing in it.
In the end, “woke” Jesus is nothing more than a front for progressive policies that signal virtue, affirm sin, and call for bigger government. None of that is what Jesus really is, and all people have to do is read the Bible to see that for themselves.
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