If you are hesitant to have faith in Jesus and express it these days, I am not surprised. I think many of us already feel burned and the unburned have felt the heat. If we say anything in public it might be on camera for Homeland Security to discover, or some social media coup-collaborator might go after you! For instance, I advertised my research presentation on Facebook and about 1000 people took a look at the post. I put my psychology/Christianity integration work out there and people listened. Despite positive impact, there is one comment I keep thinking about: “Amazing the hate in the hearts of people under the guise of research it simply exposes bias and lack of critical objectivity.”

The comment was another example of DARVO by a rather religious person I rather like – in the flesh, at least. He did not deny Trump is a sociopath, directly, he went straight to attacking me, personally, as someone with hate in my heart pumping out research that lacks objectivity. This was all in the cause of defending the victimized president and his followers. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — that’s how it works.

Golden Trump at the merch site at CPAC in 2021 (AP/John Raoux). Click for source

But Trump is no victim. He even has worshipers. Millions of Americans have faith in him. The comparison has been made for years between how the children of Israel freely combined their gold to make a calf to worship while Moses was up in on the mountain receiving the law and the shocking number of Americans who worship Trump.

I am amazed they so freely give up their rights as Americans under the law. As poorly as those laws protect many citizens in this historic republic of the rich, they are better than nothing. Nevertheless, people follow Trump, who remodels the White house with gold while denying the poor their average-$187-per-person monthly SNAP benefit. Then one of them ferrets me out in my obscure space in the blogosphere to call me full of hate toward the poor president.

It all makes me want to set the next impossible goal in the hope we can apply the truth in Jesus to the present disaster our federal government is creating. So here goes. Here’s another shot at the basics of faith in Jesus tuned for our time.

Love them all

I come from an era when people used to dress in rainbow wigs to get noticed at sports stadiums holding up a signed that said “John 3:16.” I was embarrassed but still approved of their audacity. They were determined to get the basics of Christian faith before as many eyes as possible. We’ve always got to try something.

We’ve got to try something or people might miss the truth in John 3:16: The promise of eternal life in Jesus is made to every single person, everyone, all of them. Love them all. Even love your enemies.

Mexican congressman Braulio Guerra sits atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall that divides Tijuana, Mexico, from California on March 1, 2017. Twitter/@BraulioPRI

This loving includes the immigrants Stephen Miller demonizes. I have been to our southern border where so many immigrants arrive and quite a few scale the wall. It did not take me too long before I was having dinner with a young couple from Honduras who took the risk to try to get into the U.S. with their baby! It was not hard to love them.

Love them in Honduras. Love them in Mexico. And love those strangers when they get into the U.S. by legal means or not. That’s Christianity now and forever. Loving Donald Trump does not take precedence. The U.S. does not take precedence. God loves everyone in the world.

Christian community is adaptable and porous

We just finished the All Saints Day triduum, which celebrates the saints, the “whosoever” who followed Jesus, who are part of the transhistorical body of Christ. I celebrate them in a blog I keep as my online altar of remembrance and admiration.

The history of the church is an astounding story of discernment and inclusion, especially if you don’t emphasize the corrupt parts of it. It’s too bad the over-emphasis on STEM courses is making  such history-keeping obsolete. After the 2008 financial debacle, students started gravitating toward majors they believed offered them greater job security. So, according to my grandson at Pitt, it is hard to find a student who  reads any book these days, much less history books.

The lack of reading apparently includes reading the Bible. According to a 2024 article, from  2011-2021 “Bible Users” — which are people who interact with Scripture in any medium at least three or four times a year (apart from in church) hovered between 50 percent to 60 percent of the U.S. population. But in 2024, the number of Bible Users was down to 38%. That means in the last few years, millions of Americans have not even glanced at a Bible for any significant reason. It shows.

Meanwhile, in China, Xi is cracking down on the wildly adaptable and porous, often underground church, arresting the leader of one large element just before Trump arrived last week. [PBS video]

The Chinese church has continued to grow, even as their government tried to Sinicize it,  that is, conform it to the Communist Party line about what is acceptable Chinese culture. Their perseverance is another example of how the church has grown and changed throughout its history. Christian community has been repeatedly corrupted by men, primarily, since its conception, who have seen it as an opportunity to get some power. But the Chinese, Congolese and Brazilian churches give me hope these days, even as the church in my own country is tied up with a deluded need to protect an endangered past, even tied to a form of nationalism that belies the transnational nature of the church.

The church is always the hope of undermining cruel and corrupt leaders, even the sociopaths who always know the weaknesses in a person or a nation and exploit them. People of faith always upend the status quo because the church never depends on it to be itself; it is the body of Christ in any culture.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem for his last week of upending, he named himself the rejected “cornerstone” and said the kingdom of God would be taken away from the rejecters  “and given to a people who will produce its fruit. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed” (Matt. 21). When the motley crew called the church, the body of Christ in action, produces the fruit of the kingdom of God we are the rock that helps rejecters not get crushed.

Eternal life cannot be caged

The point of having eternal life cannot be reduced to an argument about whether my trans grandchild has been duped by woke fools or by the medical model of solving human conundrums. Love them all. Let them in.

Like John 3:16 says , trust in the risen Jesus transcends the latest expression of lies and greed directing the deceivable. Nevertheless, we have several versions of the Trump Bible, from which he profits. Some people have such a weak grasp of the Bible and the history of the church that they have been duped by the latest tyrant! It is not the first time, unfortunately.

But as all Bible readers know and all church historians can verify, wise men go home another way.  Disciples leave their nets. Centurions can repent of their murders. Women can become the first apostles. Believers like Paul and Silas can sing open their prison doors and save their jailers. Martyrs, like those Rome killed, upend state propaganda. Saints like Francis of Assisi and John Wesley, as flawed as they are, change their corrupted church and violent governments profoundly, starting with their own transformation and dogged conviction.

Eternal life cannot be caged. To experience our freedom and receive our joy, we must act out our faith, no matter the mess in which we find ourselves.

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Today is Martin de Porres Day! Get to know this Peruvian champion of the poor at The Transhistorical Body.

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