Op-Ed: Stealing Jesus on Easter

It's Easter, and people are still fighting over Jesus. In fact, some writers observe there aren't two political parties so much as two major religious factions within Christianity, quarreling over what Jesus really meant.

The Right and the Left of the political spectrum claim Jesus belongs to them, according to many of the treatises devoted to capturing Jesus. The Right made the first and early statements of this years ago when the Christian Evangelicals began the process of taking over the Republican Party, according to a book entitled The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. Retaliation came when groups like Sojourners declared Jesus wasn't a right wing politician but an all-loving individual who embraced sinners and saints alike and wanted people to help the unfortunate as He commanded them to do. The political concerns about stealing Jesus were underlined in an article by Todd Huffman in OpEd news. He opened the subject by mentioning how an acquaintance bemoaned the fact the Republicans were stealing God, after which Huffman responded, "At least they didn't steal Jesus." He was, however, referring to the loving figure portrayed in the New Testament. A book by Bruce Bawer entitled Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity written in 1997 became popular in some circles as it commented on the attempts to covet Jesus, as one would do with a possession of sorts. It went on to recite the sins of those doing so and how they hoodwinked people into associating certain fundamental political beliefs with the teachings of Jesus. Jesus became the angry figure of the Old Testament, Bawer's thesis explained, and not the loving God of the New Testament. In the political arena, Jesus was used again, as the Sojourners explain in some of their articles. Politicians began to "out-Jesus" their opposition, discussing who went to church, how often, what the specific teachings of the church might be relative to a certain political belief, what the beliefs might be of a certain pastor and various ideas associated with making judgments. Bawer, along with the Sojourners, went on to say some years ago how this was damaging to Christianity and to politics as well. Pastor James L. Evans said in 2004 how people declare they are Christians as a smokescreen for their frailties, as they don't see the hypocrisy of what they do relative to their profession of faith. He uses the example of stealing DVDs and how a young person had been encouraging the activity while declaring how he was born again. The hypocrisy of making that declaration on the one hand and encouraging stealing on the other was Evans thesis. The DVD in question was the Passion of the Christ.. There are those who declare they need to take Jesus back because the fundamentalists went too far in associating Jesus with political issues, while others say those who argue the matter simply don't understand scripture. The fact remains Jesus was controversial in the Third Century after his death, with the quarrels over the Trinity, as He remains today, affecting political and social interactions even as people celebrate Easter