cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48166923
James Talarico has been found guilty of quoting Jesus. The sentence he uttered, according to right-wing media, was “demonic” and “blasphemous,” exposing him as a “fake Christian.” Talarico is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas on a platform The New Yorker recently described as basically the New Testament. One Newsmax host accused him of using fake Bible passages.
The passages in question are familiar ones, found in Matthew 22 and Matthew 25. Love God and love your neighbor. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger. They are, in fact, in the Bible.
The right’s attacks on Talarico aren’t about him, or at least not entirely. They’re about a much older argument — one progressive Christianity has been losing in public for 50 years — about whose version of the faith gets to count as real. The answer to that question has consequences far beyond any Senate race. When Christianity becomes a tool of power rather than a challenge to it, it doesn’t just damage the church. It destabilizes democracy. We are watching that happen in real time.
Pete Hegseth quoted a fictional passage and they said nothing.
I don’t know the books and numbers so well, but there’s literally a passage where Jesus says nonsense for five lines, and the pharisees all ponder it in deep contemplation, but he explains to his followers that it’s not what he says that gets people to listen, it’s the authority in which he spoke. Jesus was a confident man. A con man. And it changes the meaning of “Jesus said nothing,” so those who attacked him were idoltarers who just wanted an excuse to be awful people to what would have been perceived to Pontius as a mentally disabled man.