Can You Follow Jesus and MAGA?

A friend and I were talking the other day about how persecuted American Christians feel. We had a good laugh about it, which probably tells you something. The persecution we tend to mean, the offhand comment, the news story about someone getting side-eyed for their faith, is a long way from the persecution Christians actually face in Iran or China or anywhere with a government that means it.

Try the test yourself. Walk into any Starbucks, plant your feet, and announce that Jesus Christ is your Lord and you're proud of it. What happens? Mostly nothing. A few uncomfortable glances. At worst a barista asks you to keep it down for the other customers. And the barista is probably a Christian too, more or less, whether she'd put it that way or not.

That last part is the interesting one, and it's where I want to start.

The water we're swimming in

The historian Tom Holland (the one who writes books, not the one who plays Spider-Man) spent years making an argument that sounds strange and then becomes hard to unsee. The West is so soaked in Christian assumptions that even people who've never darkened a church door think like Christians. We absorbed the morals with the air. We idealize Christian virtues and punish their opposites, usually without noticing we're doing either.

Chief among those inherited instincts is the strangest one of all: that every human being counts. That your neighbor is a human, and so is the stranger a thousand miles away, and both are owed dignity for the simple fact of bearing the image of God.

We treat that like gravity now, obvious and permanent. It wasn't always. For most of human history the circle of people who counted was small, and everyone outside it was a tool or a threat. You probably jumped to slavery just now, and the history there is more uncomfortable than either side likes. The West didn't invent slavery; nearly every civilization had it, and Christians propped it up for centuries with chapter and verse. But the people who finally brought it down, Wilberforce and the abolitionists in Britain, the ones who pushed hardest here at home, made their case on explicitly Christian ground. These men and women bear the image of God, so they cannot be property. That argument won, eventually, against other Christians, which is a sermon all by itself.

So "love your neighbor" is not the natural resting state of human politics. Someone had to introduce it, and that someone was the church. But a thing that was introduced can also be lost.

So what does this have to do with MAGA?

This is where I'll probably lose some of you, so let me go slow, because I'm not trying to score a point.

If you go by the rhetoric, you'd assume the political left is the real threat to the faith, the godless team, the "anti-Christ" side. And the left has its idols. It will happily sacrifice people on the altar of its own causes, and I'm not here to baptize it.

But on the one instinct we just traced, that the stranger counts as much as the neighbor, the left is at least still swimming in the water. It argues, clumsily and inconsistently, that the poor should be cared for and the foreigner treated as human. Which happens to be exactly what God commanded Israel to do, and exactly what He condemned Israel for failing to do.

MAGA, as a posture, has started swimming the other way. The other becomes an enemy to defeat. The foreigner becomes a threat to fear and a problem to remove. To that posture, the people on the left aren't quite people anymore. They're from hell, beyond reasoning with, beyond loving.

And that, not the mere existence of an opposing party, is the thing that should stop a Christian cold. Jesus was not subtle here. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44, ESV). He didn't say tolerate them. He said love them. He set the bar at the exact group we most want permission to hate, and then he handed out no permission.

I know something about being the enemy

I should tell you where I'm standing when I say this, because it isn't above you.

I committed a felony. I went to federal prison. By every reasonable measure I was the kind of man a healthy community wants locked up and written off, the cautionary tale, the one you'd build a wall to keep out. I'd earned all of it.

And the gospel walked straight through that door anyway. Grace came to me while I was still the enemy, before I'd cleaned myself up, before I deserved a single inch of it. "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). He didn't wait for me to become respectable first.

So when I hear a movement of Christians talk about a whole category of human beings as the world once talked about me, something goes cold in my chest. I remember which side of that grace I was on. I don't get to pull the ladder up behind me.

The Jesus they skip

Following Jesus has never been mostly about belief in the abstract. It's being with him and slowly becoming like him, until you find yourself doing the things he did. He announced that the kingdom of God had arrived, that everyone was invited, especially the people you'd written off, and that the moment you said yes you were stuck with a family of brothers and sisters you didn't get to pick. The only violence he led was against the powers of evil. The only people he publicly went after were religious leaders who'd quit caring for the poor.

That Jesus is inconvenient for every political tribe, mine included. But MAGA has a particular allergy to him. When he comes as a lamb, they want the lion. When he says he's gentle and lowly, they reach for the cords and the whip. They love the verse where he tells the disciples to buy a sword and somehow lose the part, a few lines later, where he tells Peter to put it away.

I'm not the judge of your soul. I've been on the wrong end of that judgment, and I have no appetite to pick it up now. But the question in the title is a fair one, and I think we have to sit in it instead of flinching: can you follow Jesus and MAGA at the same time? As far as I can tell they want opposite things from you, and sooner or later one of them is going to bend the other.

I know which one I'd trust with my life. He already proved what he'll do with it.