I Love Jesus Too Much to Join Your Political Cause
It’s been just shy of a month since I “locked” my X account (I still use it to communicate privately with a few people). If you’ve been reading my Substack throughout this month, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m still somewhat paying attention to some of the bigger conversations taking place there, but, compared to how intently I was tracking extremist “Christian” movements on their favorite social media platform over the last few years, I’m pretty well checked-out. Towards the end of last year I finally came to accept that there really is no such thing as “Christian social media,” there’s only politics social media and its culturally Christian sub-genre.
Sure, there are occasional, momentary diversions into theological discussions, but, if they don’t also contain a political angle, they’re unlikely to gain any significant traction. The most popular pastors, theologians and Christian journalists give inordinately more time to angry, often conspiratorial, political musings than the gospel, and they salivate at the opportunity to Christianize that political beef. Nothing shows this more than the ordo amoris discussion, which comes up at least once a month, usually initiated by kinist Christian Nationalists who declare that “rightly ordered affections” demand that we have greater innate love for our ethnic “kin.” Most of “Christian” social media ignored this debate as it’s been happening for years, standing idly by as one side drew impressionable young men into grievance politics and its ultimate ends of the sin of ethnic partiality, only to vigorously awaken when the Vice President briefly referenced the longstanding theological principle, in the context of immigration policy. Now that it was something that could be used to either lionize or demonize the Trump administration, the corners of political social media play-acting as Christian social media took immediate and intense interest.
Ultimately, that’s why I refuse to continue to play along with “Christian” social media. It’s not really Christian, because it’s painfully obvious that Jesus Christ is not its first love.
Though I have political opinions, and though I think our nation, across the political spectrum, is collectively losing its ever-loving mind, I’m far more concerned about the people whom God puts in my path, who need to hear the gospel—and who need to see someone like me care more about them personally than whatever uncontrollable nonsense the world is freaking out about today. I still care greatly about “contend[ing] earnestly for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3), especially in the realm of reactionary false gospels, but I am more convinced than ever that doing so requires decoupling the faith from the polarization of American two-party politics.
The answer to all our problems really is that “Jesus loves you.”