What Christianity could have been

A week from today will be Maundy Thursday. This is the day when Christians commemorate Jesus washing his disciples' feet, telling them as he did so that he was giving them a new commandment, to wash each others' feet as he was washing theirs. In other words, to seek to serve others rather than to rule others.

It's been pointed out that out of all the gods, only one ever behaved this way. Only the Christian god behaves like a servant rather than a master. Only the Christian god tells people that service is the holiest thing that people can do. In this moment, Jesus tells us what he wants humanity to be, what humanity could be if we tried.

Can you imagine the kind of world that might exist if Christianity as a whole had really taken that to heart? 

Quick, when was the last time the most vocal self-proclaimed Christians in government advocated for tax money to be spent on helping the poor? When was the last time an Evangelical Republican who ran on a platform of "Christian values" meant feeding people, housing people, taking care of the sick and people with disabilities, treating prisoners well - the stuff Jesus actually told his followers to do? 

Imagine if the people who tell their voters that Christianity is in danger from our culture meant "Wow, we really aren't acting as if the meek are supposed to inherit the earth and our god declared woe unto the rich, we need to do better" rather than "We need to stop treating LGBTQ people as human".

Imagine politicians trying to outdo each other in acts of service. Imagine that the front runner of each party is a quiet, self-effacing person who regularly works at a soup kitchen... rather than the race being a contest of who can be the biggest bastard. Imagine the two parties trying to out-do each other in the amount of spending they want to do on social services... rather than the ones who call themselves "Christian" talking about the people who use social services as if they're leeches who are stealing resources from real people.

Instead: we have what Christianity actually became. We have millennia of history showing that the fruit of the church has always been to concentrate ever more political power into the hands of a few people at the top - who use it to do the opposite of what Christianity teaches. From members of the Borgia family bribing and assassinating their way into the papacy and then hosting orgies in the Vatican; to the Inquisition; to the Crusades; to Southern churches justifying slavery; to German churches enabling the Nazi party; to the current Orthodox church being Putin's puppet; to the cult of Trump as manifest in almost all American Evangelicals... this religion that COULD have been about people striving to love and serve each other, has instead been an instrument to empower the world's worst people to become EVEN worse.


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