What Would Jesus Undo?

America’s Not Losing Its Religion. It’s Weaponizing It.

I don’t care what kind of Christian you call yourself. The shape of the building you worship in on Sundays doesn’t matter. What I care about is what the hell is going on with the souls of Americans. Our spirits. We have lost something. That thing inside all of us no matter how or if we pray that says: this is wrong.

My mother went to a Foursquare church that was the precursor to the megachurches of today. Think The Righteous Gemstones 1980–91. I was baptized on my 12th birthday during a huge Sunday Revival service on a big stage in a sunken hot tub with an entire band and everyone speaking in tongues. There were youth group outings with weird, shitty little rich kids and Walk-Through-The-Bible workshop weekends where the entire congregation of intact families got together in Easter clothes and pantomimed every story in the Bible from Genesis to Revelations. I still know every word to every song on Chuck Girard’s Name Above All Names album. It was TRAD Wife Central.

My dad had a neighbor (probably a girlfriend) who took us to a Baptist church with a choir that used to bring my scrawny white ass to tears. I once married into a giant Catholic family and have been a bride one more time than the Good Book allows. I’ve been wanton and zealous. I’ve cheated and I’ve lied. I downloaded so many fucking songs from Limewire the internal fan on my PC sounded like it was going to either catch fire or launch into space.

I’ve been a Protestant. A Pentecostal. A Baptist and a Catholic. Agnostic and Atheist.

I didn’t attend seminary. I don’t have a theology degree. I’ve never been called abroad on a Mission and I’ve never led a Bible study. But all of my experiences have taught me that it doesn’t matter. I KNOW there is a Higher Power. There are moments in my life that can’t be explained by anything of this world. Punishments and rewards that cannot be understood as anything other than Divine. Do I expect anyone to understand or believe me? No. Nor would I impose my experience on anyone else. That’s the beauty of The Spirit. Of The Soul. It just knows what It knows. It doesn’t care what label your human mind needs. Source. Consciousness. God. Goddess. The Universe. The Spirit doesn’t care if you worship in a giant box on a Sunday morning or meditate on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

I’m not excluding any of our other brothers and sisters in faith here. Everyone is welcome under this tent. I’m only directing this at my fellow Christians because I came up in the same spaces many of you did. I’m talking to the kids who went to Sunday School. The big-haired white mom church kids. The goody-two-shoes who grew up in youth group. The parents who still take their kids to Service and not just on Christmas and Easter. The ones who remember the old knowledge of how to spot a bad man in the clergy and how to walk like a good one passed down like the Family Bible. The ones who still gather together and break bread to honor this spirit that we can’t explain but know we were given. I’m talking to the Christians who are looking around this country and wondering just what the hell we are even seeing. How it all went so sideways. How we all became so divided.

All of us love this country. Our Constitution. What it stands for. How hard every generation had to fight for our freedoms. How that freedom doesn’t mean anything when it’s just for me. Or just for you. It’s your children’s freedoms. My children’s. Freedom is every American’s right because of what all of our forefathers, ancestors and elders have done. Sins and all. I don’t know one American who takes that lightly. I don’t know one actual American who would like to see their neighbor or his family get deported. I’ve never met a real American who wants their own grandmother kicked out of a nursing home because her Medicare and Social Security checks got cut. There is no American alive who wants their co-worker to have to decide between rent and medication for her child this month. No American would ever want their bestie barista to get evicted because he can’t afford his rent increase. Or the new business on the corner to close down because of these fucking tariffs.

This administration is sending legal immigrants to detention camps. Cutting Social Security and Medicare. Slashing the VA. Pardoning violent insurrectionists. They are gutting our public systems and using our tax dollars to protect billionaires. They are running up the debt, crashing the economy and treating people and their jobs like pawns. This isn’t fiscal policy. It’s spiritual rot. The doors to our Republic are being held wide open by billionaire Judases who are stripping away everything we hold to be true and self-evident for 30 pieces of Bitcoin.

Meanwhile, we’re over here arguing over pronouns.

What’s happening now isn’t about liberal or conservative. We are standing on the precipice of a Constitutional crisis that we will not return from if we don’t come together. As Americans. As Christians. As the largest voting block in the country for chrissakes.

This is our country.
This is our spirit.
This is our moment.

We were taught to use our power and goodwill to feed the hungry, comfort the broken. To walk with the outcast. To protect the weak.

And to tell the truth—even when it hurts. Even when we’ll be persecuted. We will not have our faith used as a weapon to blind us. To weaken us. We are spiritual Americans. Not soulless billionaires. WE do the fucking around. THEY do the finding out.

So maybe this Easter, we don’t need another egg hunt. Lord knows we can’t afford it, anyway. Maybe we need a revival. Not the sweaty tent kind with shouting and snakes. The kind where we peacefully gather in the streets. Where we organize with each other to stand up against what we all know this is (coughcoughPoland1933cough) and remind each other what following Jesus meant all those years ago in Bible Study. Before the noise. Before the hate. Before the politics. It’s time to remove the planks from our own eyes so that we may remove the speck from each other’s. It’s time for fellowship. To walk the walk. To consolidate our power for the good of the country. The good of The American People. The good of humanity.

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. - Proverbs 31:8

If you believe in Christ, you already know what He’d do. If you don’t? You still know the difference between right and wrong.

We were raised to love our neighbors, to build our communities, not to vote to destroy them. If you can’t love your neighbor at the ballot box, you have already broken the commandment. You can’t preach love on Sunday and vote for cruelty on Tuesday.

Cruelty is not strength.

Apathy is not patriotism.

And silence? That is not neutrality.

That is surrender.