Who Is Right-Wing Jesus?

Although I provided a shorter explanation previously of Right-Wing Jesus, some of you may have skipped past it to get to his really pithy Gospel message. Hahahaha. Sorry, couldn’t resist a self-promo.

So who is Right-Wing Jesus? Simple. He’s the Jesus conservatives hold dear in their innermost core. It’s His Gospel they listen to and not the Good News of Traditional Jesus, who, after all, is far too long-haired radical for their tastes.

Every leftist/liberal/progressive worth her/his salt knows that a great many die-hard conservatives are closely aligned with evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity. The disconnect with that alignment is that those same conservatives hold values and principles that are at direct cross-purposes with mainstream Christianity, such as supporting the torture of accused Muslim terrorists and first-strike warfare as well as adulation of the rich and powerful as favored by God and a striking delight in cutting the WIC Program and school meals for poor children; in this context I have to force myself to not dwell on how much conservatives detest the food stamp program.

The question that occurred to me several years ago was a simple one: how could that be? How could conservatives claim to be strong Christians and hold such remarkably un-Christlike beliefs and values? The answer came to me a week or so ago: the religious beliefs/values conservatives hold dear are primarily those that confirm their ideology. In social psychology that's known as confirmation bias and is also, in my mind at least, combined with more than a little rationalization and cognitive dissonance. In other words, conservatives pick and choose their religion from the Bible to meet and support their ideological preferences. The rest of the New Testament they pay little heed to or interpret it in ways that provide foundation for their values.

To illustrate that very real disconnect between conservatism and Christianity I invented Right-Wing Jesus, who obligingly spouts the amoral garbage conservatives need to believe to maintain their ideology AND their peculiar kind of Christianity.

As a result, you’ll never hear Right-Wing Jesus saying such nonsense as: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Here’s another quote from Traditional Jesus that would never come out of the mouth of Right-Wing Jesus or those of conservatives: “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God. Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Here’s a clue as to why the Gospel of Right-Wing Jesus is so important for liberals/progressives/leftists. Once you understand Right-Wing Jesus, you’ll better understand what motivates conservatives, no matter what they claim to be in terms of organized religion.

All you have to do now is sit back and relax and let Right-Wing Jesus lay it out for you in simple, easy to understand values that are held deeply by American conservatives. After all, those conservatives believe in Right-Wing Jesus with all their hearts and souls and model their lives and cast their votes according His Gospel. Thus, by understanding the Gospel of Right-Wing Jesus you can better understand American conservatives and their drive to eliminate progressives as an effective voting bloc.