He’s a Reverend?

December 24, 2004 · Filed Under theology

I generally try to stay away from secular politics in this blog, but on this Christmas Eve, an outrageous collision of politics & theology was reported, and theology, as is quite often the case, took the brunt of the damage.

It looks like, and I mean this is the best possible way, that Jesse Jackson is on the crack…

Per this article at NewsMax.com, the right “Refrund” Jackson has pronounced that President Bush has implemented economic policies that resemble those of the Roman Empire, which forced the baby Jesus into homelessness on the night of his birth…

Jesse also lobbed out these political turds disguised as theological “insights”:

In Bethlehem, his [Jesus] family ended up homeless…
Rome was a wealthy country that left Jesus and Mary and Joseph, in a sense, homeless…
He [Jesus] was born an at-risk baby.

This belies either an incredible lack of theological insight, or an incredible willingness to do political damage at any cost. Or, both.

I mean, “homeless”? Come on! Mary & Joseph were no more “homeless” in Bethlehem than if my wife & I were faced with not having a hotel room when attending a convention in a distant town (i.e., not our hometown).

And Rome was a city. And an empire. Not a country. However, given that what we think of as nation-states didn’t really exist back then, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. It was still a lame attempt at analogy.

Jesus was an “at-risk” baby? Why? Was Mary an addict who spent her pregnancy high/strung-out? I think not! If anything, I would say that Jesus’ birth was, in pure physical terms, probably average/normal for the times. He was no more “at-risk,” in the current context of that term, than any other baby born at that time. Though He certainly was put at risk by Herod — Somehow I don’t think that’s quite what Jesse meant…

I’m not sure what the proper application of the 8th Commandment is, although I think it might be to attribute Revd Jackson’s words to rank ignorance, rather than to calculated misuse of our Lord’s name and willful misinterpretation of the historical record.

While the whole concept of the “separation of Church and State” strikes me as very misunderstood & misapplied, I can confidently state that I’d be all for it if it meant that preachers & politicians had to keep their mouths shut & avoid uttering theological inanities like those regularly lobbed out by folks like Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, etc.

-ghp

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: church, politics, theology