This American Evangelical Christian Church wasn’t the plan.

Well, it wasn’t Jesus’ plan. It may have been Constantine’s plan—but not Jesus’.

Evangelists with a political leader’s ear; publicly shilling for him from the pulpit, influencing a nation’s legislation, wielding power from massive, opulent megachurches, imposing their will and religious preferences on the citizenry—it was the very thing Jesus opposed while his feet were on the planet.

This bastard love child of the Church and the State currently calling itself Conservative American Evangelicalism, would have been unthinkable and abhorrent to Jesus. It is the full antithesis of his life and ministry, and of the grassroots, counterintuitive community he curated in the rural roads, rugged hillsides, rough neighborhoods, and dusty temples where he spent his days.

Christian tradition holds that Jesus rose from the dead, which is a good thing—because the sickness presently being perpetuated in his name in America would have him spinning in his grave, were he in one.

Mission drift happens in all movements and organizations, as time creates distance from its origins and people gradually lose sight of the reason it existed in the first place. In two thousand years, the American Bible Belt’s version of the Church has found itself so far afield of its benevolent genesis, that it would be unrecognizable to its namesake.

Christianity was a movement from the street. It was an organic yeast in the dough, formed in the gathering of the rejected and the marginalized and the poor—led by a homeless, itinerant street preacher and the motley assortment of fisherman, prostitutes, and ex-tax collectors who found affinity in his invitation to love radically and to shun power relentlessly. Without buildings or lobbyists or national boycotts or political position, it became exactly what it was designed to be: an interdependent community that resembled Jesus. It was the visibly different people who tangibly altered the places they traveled in life-giving ways.

Birthed in the heart of the Roman Empire in all its might, greed, and coercive power, Christianity was the humble, compassionate, generous resistance to all of it—and this is the problem we have right now in America if we profess Christianity.

This Trumped-up, whitewashed, Republicanized, politicized, upsized religion currently trying to eat up market share and mandate compliance here is Rome. It is the hypocritical Pharisees. It is the wide road that Jesus said leads to destruction. It is the love of money at the root of evil. It is the very thing Jesus rejected with every fiber of his being—and if we’re to resurrect the heart of this Jesus in this place and time, this toxic religion needs to die.

Christianity as modeled by Jesus was never meant to hold power. It was never supposed to be dominant. It was never about control or brute force or dictating the laws of the land or imposing itself on people’s lives. It was certainly never about cozying up to national leaders with no evidence of regard for humanity.

Someone needs to remind the American Evangelical Church (and the Catholic Church too).

Someone needs to tell the Republican Party.

Someone needs to preach it to the Bible Belt, and to the celebrity pastors, and to the MAGA Christians who don’t realize just how much they’ve lost the plot and just how they’ve become the opposition to the author.

Someone needs to inconvenience these comfortable Christians with the actual words of Jesus.

Earlier this year, my friend Christopher Stroop, a former-Evangelical launched #EmptyThePews; a social media movement to help rid the American Evangelical Church of toxic Christianity, and I’m with him. I’m with him and the disparate collection of religious and irreligious who share a similar burden for people’s well-being. I’m with them because I know this would be where Jesus would be. When witnessing the greed polluting the religion he loved, Jesus turned over the tables and drove the charlatans out. He openly condemned the power-hungry frauds leveraging God’s name to fleece the faithful.

These are such days for us, whether we claim Christianity or see Jesus as worth emulating—or simply want a religion that does no harm, defends the inherent value of all people, and doesn’t get to make the rules.

American Evangelical Christianity in all its bloated, greedy ambition—is the temple table that needs to be overturned and these political bed-making preachers are the Pharisees Jesus called to repentance.

And these days, the Evangelical Church here in this country, in all its supremacy and bigotry and bullying—needs to be reminded where it came from.

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