The Bible: Time for a Modern Evangelical Rewrite
Come on, fellow Christians, we knew this was inevitable. Why just this Sunday I was at the grocery store and encountered a lovely woman– early sixties, white, clearly dressed in her church clothes– brazenly shopping the busy store without any sign of a mask, and making open, challenging eye-contact with every person she passed.
This is who we Christians are now. And it’s high time we embraced it.
The only problem is the Bible itself. Unfortunately, it no longer represents today’s American evangelical Christian. This is a little awkward, what with all those verses about loving one’s enemies, and obeying authorities, and humility, and peacemaking.
Sheesh. I mean, who wrote this stuff? Some limp pinko long-hair?
Honestly, the gospels themselves are deeply problematic. As modern evangelicals know, all of our hope is in politics. We absolutely have to win the country back from those secular humanist Demoncrats. Anyone who doesn’t understand that it’s always the most important election in our lifetime is a wimpy coward, a whiny moderate, or Mitch McConnell.
But the Jesus in the Bible is way too apolitical for us Americans now. The people of his time desperately wanted Jesus to be a political savior. And over and over he told them that God had a bigger plan than just, say, freeing the Jews from Roman occupation.
Instead, Jesus told them to give to Caesar what was Caesar’s.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine him saying to evangelicals today: “Give to Biden what’s Biden’s: your respect; your tax dollars; your submission to his authority. And give to God what’s God’s: your ultimate hope and trust, your worship, your unflagging devotion. Those don’t belong to any president. Not even Trump. Only to God.”
Friends, that flag just don’t fly in today’s American Christianity.
Or what about the apostle Paul? His comments to be “all things to all men that some might be saved” is seriously, deeply problematic. It’s almost like he’s suggesting we set aside political differences for the sake of the gospel.
Does Paul seriously expect us to find a way to be liberal–to respect liberal values– when we are talking to a liberal so we might eventually be able to share God with them??
Maybe Paul could do that back in his day, when all he had to worry about from his political enemies was imprisonment and execution. Paul never had to deal with your gay liberal niece on Instagram.
So I think you can begin to see why it’s high-time the Bible got a modern evangelical retooling.
Now before you doctrine wonks get your purple neck-ties all in a knot: we aren’t talking about a total re-write. Some parts of the Bible are still just fine and dandy. The whole Sodom and Gomorrah bit is just fine as-is. We especially like the smiting parts of the Old Testament.
But let’s be reasonable: if the liberals can talk about the Constitution as a “living document” and re-imagine it in their own image, then surely we can do the same with the Bible.
So just to get things started, I went ahead and re-wrote the Beatitudes. It’s a work-in-progress, but let me tell you, once I got started, it really wasn’t all that hard.
Read it over, see if it doesn’t perfectly capture today’s modern American evangelical, and represent the kind of red, white, and blue kick-ass Christianity that we can all hang our MAGA hats on.
And for that sixty-something mask-less church lady at Giant Eagle: you just keep right on truckin’, big sister. Covid might kill you and your family, but that’s a small price to pay for FREEDOM.
The New American Evangelical Kick-ass Beatitudes
- Blessed are the Republicans, for theirs is the kingdom of making America great again.
- Blessed are the openly defiant, for they shall KNOW THEIR RIGHTS.
- Blessed is Trump, for ye shall have no other presidents before him.
- Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after conspiracies, because wake up, sheeple.
- Blessed are they who return hate for hate, because screw that whole “turn the other cheek” thing.
- Blessed are the pure in ideology, for they shall cast out the RINOs.
- Cursed are the peacemakers, for they’re too gutless to fight the people we hate.
- Blessed are they who turn their religion into a perverse caricature and receive mockery for it, for they shall call it “persecution”.
G. Norman Lippert's Shiftlock 