Dear Jesus, You're Fired From MAGA Christianity

Dear Jesus,We regret to inform you that your services are no longer required.As will happen, changes have occurred in recent months that have now rendered many of your past duties obsolete:Empathy is no longer necessary, with loving your neighbor as yourself deemed a rather wasteful use of current resources and manpower.Turning the other cheek has proven not to be measurably profitable, and we have eliminated it from our Strategic Plan for the coming years, in favor of the trendier, sexier God and Guns campaign.We have drastically reduced funding on your earlier Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, and will instead be focusing on the far more lucrative Fear, Exclusion, and Discrimination programs, which polls indicate our dwindling base strongly favors.We have replaced your Sermon on the Mount with its invitation to humility, compassion, and interdependent community, with Project 2025’s legislated theocracy of compulsion.We've also made large cuts to the Loving The Least of These efforts you originally spearheaded, and allocated these funds to our much more popular Pull Yourself Up By Your Own Bootstraps campaign.Also, given your Middle Eastern lineage, we feel the need to distance ourselves from that part of you, as our predominantly white core audience is uncomfortable with the problematic associations it conveys in the nationalist-friendly climate we've cultivated.As you know, the American people have been choosing our services less and less in recent years, and we need to maximize the smaller market share we now occupy in both the Bible Belt and Rust Belt. Donald Trump gives us the best opportunity to do this, and as his vision and yours are so incompatible, we feel it is best to sever ties and retrofit our programs to better align as to be on message with him.As a result of these and other factors, we are moving in another direction and are hereby eliminating your position, effective immediately.We will still continue with some of the projects you spearheaded, namely the Sunday morning worship services, which are still profitable for us. However, instead of prominently featuring God So Loved the World, these spectacles will now be used to showcase our America First program, which is testing well with our target audience.We will still prominently display the Cross, of course, as this continues to be a powerful and lucrative branding tool with our customers, especially combined with the American Flag and the TRUMP name. We'll also continue to lobby for your name to remain on our currency, for obvious reasons.Rest assured, we will continue to selectively use the Scriptures (though heavily redacted), as they remain invaluable in our efforts to weaponize against the problematic communities, LGBT, people of color, women, non-Christians, immigrants, to name a few. Obviously, our clients love the Bible, just as long as they don’t have to read it.And we'll continue to aggressively showcase the Altar Call/Sinner's Prayer/Salvation from Hell initiatives, as those nicely focus our audience on the afterlife, thus allowing them to be less and less concerned about how they treat people in this life.We hoped to be able to work out a compromise with you, but frankly, all this love your neighbor, feed the poor, care for the sick, welcome the stranger stuff just simply isn’t financially or morally viable for us at this point.Your past two thousand years of faithful service are greatly appreciated, and to show our gratitude for your contributions, we will still mention you as we gather for an hour on Sundays, and we’ll continue to wear you around our necks to sustain the nostalgia necessary to keep the converts, but beyond that, you will not be necessary. As our new boss, Mr. Trump has been known to say—You're fired.We wish you luck with your future endeavors and trust you will have great success elsewhere, perhaps in the Progressive Church, Atheist communities, and non-Christian religions, where your brand of selflessness, sacrificial love, and social justice are still core values.Warmest Regards and God Bless,MAGA Evangelical ChristianityThe Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe