A lot of people in our recent election thought they were voting for what Jesus wants. Hate was often named as one of the evils they were voting against. Take a look at the post-election hateful rhetoric of the side who won. Some of them make their orange-haired enemy’s rhetoric sound like an angel from God by comparison. (And that’s difficult to do!) People who follow the real Jesus will be the ones who do a better job loving their enemies.
Jesus and Marx were both on the ballot. Marx pretended to be a follower of Jesus, who cares for the poor and the oppressed. What Marx really wants is power and only power. A vote for his followers will quickly prove to be a vote for those who broke what voters voted for them to fix, a vote for those who created the high fuel prices (emptying the petroleum reserve during peacetime), high housing costs (all that runaway spending in 2021 drove up interest rates), and high everything else, including crime (by decriminalizing it). This is not Jesus’ way. Nor is the rest of the platform that goes with it.
The real Jesus cares enough about the poor and oppressed to insist on rewarding those who produce what we need, and punishes robbery and violence (Romans 13:3). The real Jesus seeks to protect the “least of these,” from the womb to the tomb (no thank you, Canada). The real Jesus teaches that there are only two genders, and preaches a sexual ethic limited to marriage between a man and a woman, or celibacy in singlehood (Matthew 19:4-6).
For some followers of Jesus, immigration policy outweighs all the above. But to cast a vote for a specific approach to immigration that requires you to ignore the rest of the real Jesus is problematic, to say the least. It is better to vote for the vast majority of what the real Jesus stands for, which gives you a much better position from which to argue how we can best love the immigrant. And don’t claim that Jesus was a refugee. His parents went to Bethlehem to obey an inconvenient law, they did not flee to Armenia or Parthia when Herod tried to kill him (they fled to another Roman state), and they went home as soon as the danger had passed.
Next time, don’t vote for the Marxist Jesus. If there is a next time. Marxists think democracy is only a means to a totalitarian end. That’s not Jesus’ way, either (Matthew 20:25-28).
