If you didn’t read Part One, you can do that here.

As a person with an active and somewhat sociopathic imagination, I probably enjoy thought experiments more than your average bear. Things like, “If you found out that Skip Bayless needed a bone marrow transplant and you were the only living person who was a match, would you choose to die by self-immolation to deny him your sweet, life-giving marrow?” Or, “If you were the dad fish in Finding Nemo, would you actually search for your lost fish offspring, or rather use the sympathy of others to parlay your way into all sorts of strange fish ass?” I’m pretty sure we’ve all had these thoughts at one time or another.

But as thought experiments go, no unanswerable hypothetical has had legs quite like those of “What Would Jesus Do?” During the ‘90s and early-aughts surge of “cool Christianity,” when youth pastors were getting frosted tips and repurposing secular songs as praise anthems — Lookin’ at you, “Bless the Broken Road” — the WWJD bracelet was a constant and cynical reminder that Jesus is watching as you commit crimes against fashion. I once even hooked up with a girl who removed her WWJD bracelet just as we were getting handsy. I wanted to tell her that it probably doesn’t work that way, and that her childlike innocence was just so hot, but it didn’t really seem like an ideal teaching moment.

There are all sorts of reasons why the WWJD bracelet is fascinating to look back on now, even as the once-booming cottage industry is drying up, but chief among them is this: for such a conspicuous and garish statement that the bracelet made, it truly said virtually nothing about the person making it. Everyone wearing a WWJD bracelet took it to mean something different, and projected their own ideas and biases on poor old Jesus. Maybe you wore one ironically. Maybe you wore one because wanted people to think you were a better person than you actually were. Maybe you’re like the lady in our church who had a WWJD license-plate holder, and didn’t think it was the least bit paradoxical that she totally faked speaking in tongues every fucking Sunday. Different strokes, right?

Of course, truly thinking through a literal WWJD prism is all sorts of trouble, and that’s why the trendiness of the whole thing was so hilarious for misanthropes such as myself. Show me a person who can claim to confidently know what Jesus would do in any given situation, and I’ll show you a goddamn fraud. Unfortunately, the fact that we can’t possibly fathom what Jesus would do if he were a living, breathing human does very little to dissuade us from trying. Whether it’s abortion or war or raising minimum wage, you can bet that the good “people of God” will have something to say about it, and they’ll even quote 2,000-year-old scripture to gain leverage.

This leads me to ask a particularly dodgy question: by trying to answer what Jesus would do when faced with our contemporary situations, and when we use the bible to justify reactions that couldn’t possibly have been considered by whatever 1st-century Svengali was writing, are we actually creating a “Jesus” construct from whole cloth, with nothing but our own human trappings to support whatever Frankenstein’s monster it eventually becomes?

To answer that, I’d like to take you back to the year 2005, and to the strange and twisted tale of Terri Schiavo.

As with most religious holidays, my experience with Easter is a little different than that of most people. For civilians, Easter generally means that you’ll watch the final round of the Masters while bitching about how Cadbury eggs used to be awesome but are now terrible. For the Sjostroms, however, it meant that you partied with your high school friends until 5am and had to keep your head perfectly still during the Easter morning service to keep from spraying a half-digested Chalupa all over the pew ahead of you. I even remember one fateful morning when I shook Dad’s hand after church, only for him to direct me to “Never show up to my church smelling like whiskey ever again.”

On Easter Sunday of 2005, I’d decided to be a little more respectful of my parents’ wishes, meaning that I showered prior to that morning’s service. Davy and I took our usual position in the rear of the church, better for analyzing which nubile coeds were new to the congregation, not knowing that we were about to get a solid dose of right-wing infiltration into the headspace of my dear old Dad.

If memory serves, the sermon was touching on the timeworn Easter themes — everlasting life, resurrection, that sort of stuff. Toward the end of the sermon — a time when Dad famously goes in for the kill, regularly moving even famed jerks like me to tears — he started ramping up the emotion and vigor, and it was a real master class in selling the drama. “If God can raise His Son from the dead, if He has power over the grave, He can save you. He can save your kids. He can save your family.” He was knocking it out of the park, and he knew it. Then, really feeling himself, he upped the political ante. “And if God can and has raised His Son from the grave, I’m telling you here today, he can save Terri Schiavo.” Oh, no.

Davy and I looked at each other, silently agreeing that all those dinnertime Fox News sessions had finally laid waste to a good man’s better judgement. He couldn’t be serious, could he? Could he actually believe that God and Jesus, two friendly white guys with agreeable facial hair, would let a woman’s brains turn to mashed potatoes over 15 interminable years only to pull the mother of all gotcha moments to prove their power? More to the point, was Dad aware that he was essentially acting as a political cudgel, and that he’d picked a side in an argument that was completely unwinnable?

For those who might not remember, the Terri Schiavo case was this century’s best example of good Christian intentions run amok. No less an authority on knowing when to call it a day than Jeb (!) Bush passed “Terri’s Law” to keep her alive, which probably requires scare quotes, since we’re really fudging the definition of what it means to be “alive.” For his part, George Bush cut a vacation short to sign an executive order to reinsert the poor woman’s feeding tube, while a nation of armchair quarterbacks did its best to understand why in the holy hell Christians wouldn’t let a braindead woman shuffle off with some goddamn dignity. Asking what Jesus would do somehow was a more pressing question than asking what the woman herself might want, something that only the geniuses at South Park seemed to notice.

Once Terri Schiavo was finally allowed to die, her autopsy revealed that her brain weighed half of what it would have when she initially fell ill in 1990. Her cerebral cortex was destroyed, a process that had begun fifteen years earlier. The medical examiner presiding over her autopsy found that her brain was damaged to such a degree that “no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.” But to those fighting to keep her alive, the argument was that every life is precious, even a life that had all the sentience of a potted plant.

Framing the argument of what Jesus would or wouldn’t do, particularly as it applies to Schiavo and the poor husband who was demonized for not rejoicing every shared glance from her dead, vacant eyes, generally draws from biblical sources ranging from the Ten Commandments to the Sermon on the Mount to the parable of the Good Samaritan.

And here is where we get to the part where we talk about context, and why context absolutely matters, and why all the cheesy bracelets in the world are no match for good old common sense.

For as long as there have been believers, there have been charlatans who willingly twist that belief into something resembling a ransom note. Christianity wasn’t always so mainstream, of course, which is why once-important religious entities such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Anabaptists have largely been lost to time. In the Gospel of Thomas, for heaven’s sake, an adolescent Jesus throws a temper tantrum and just starts killing people for giggles. But do you think this story is ever told in Sunday School? Not at any church I’ve ever been to. The fact is, the bible came together in pieces, and having a maniacal pre-teen Jesus who goes around offing playground bullies didn’t play well in the early church.

The scattershot nature of the bible is crucial to any argument of what Jesus would or wouldn’t do, because his portrayal in the bible (and in the four canon gospels in particular) isn’t all that consistent. The book of John, for example, is one big vehicle of self-promotion — “I am the bread of life,” etc. — while Jesus barely talks about himself at all in the book of Mark. In fact, Jesus doesn’t even mention that he’s God in Matthew, Mark or Luke. Doesn’t that seem like something he’d want to toss in there at some point? “Oh, guys, I’m totally God, BTW. Sure, I can prove it. Hand me that fish. Boom, now it’s fishes. Plural.”

The reason this is important to our whole “What Would Jesus Do?” discussion is because the Jesus we’re projecting our assumptions on is largely built from the writings of four very unreliable narrators. Each was writing for a different audience, and each was writing from a different location. Jesus from the Gospel of John might do something vastly different from what Matthew’s Jesus would.

A common refrain from Christians of all denominations is that the bible is the inspired word of God, and is therefore without error. This is an assumption that is based on a verse from second book of Timothy: “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” Yet, while it’s the first part of that verse that gets repeated ad nauseum, I’d argue that the second half is actually the part that should get the most attention.

Assuming that the bible is to be taken literally assumes that the writers knew the long-term impact of what they were jotting down, which further posits that there is no room for symbolic value to the New Testament. It eliminates the context and intended audience. Isn’t it possible though, that they were actually writing symbolically? That the audience and context were vitally important, and that we’ve been reading it wrong all along? It might have had a pretty nice run as the instruction manual the second half of that verse describes, as opposed to the instrument of division it’s become as an inflexible, black/white landmine.

We don’t know what Jesus would do any more than we know what Terri Schiavo would’ve wanted, or what a persecuted 2nd-century Christian would’ve wanted to hear about this crazy Jesus fellow, or what would compel the bible’s early editors to decide what was and what wasn’t worthy of inclusion in the good book.

That’s why asking what Jesus would do was never the great thought experiment we thought it was, and why a better question might have been, Is acting like Jesus actually what we think it is? It might have produced a more realistic response, even if it looked like shit on a wristband.

As I gear up to turn this blog into a book that I sincerely hope Kirk Cameron reads, I probably will post less lengthy entries in the coming months. Can’t burn up my most sound material, right? But believe me, the best is still to come, and I appreciate all the shares/feedback/encouragement, even if I’m probably too proud to verbally admit it. Follow Pastor’s Kid on Twitter here, or on Facebook here.