All Christians Need to Repent
We Have all Contributed to Oppression, It is Time to Get Back to Following Jesus
The scene in today’s America is one devoid of basic humanity. People who are drunk on power and indulging their insatiable desire for money are destroying society. It’s terribly traumatic to live in America in the current social and political environment. A good example of what people are capable of when this happens is to look at the story of a certain man named Jesus, from Nazareth.
This guy Jesus was born into one of “those ghetto neighborhoods,” the ones that the middle class people of my city would look at you and say “this is a nice city, except for those neighborhoods over the East side.” I happen to live in one of those neighborhoods “over the East side.” I imagine Jesus growing up here, surrounded by families struggling to pay their rent, utilities, and food, the ones “just getting by.” Jesus lived in my city’s equivalent of “over the East side.”
He was a strange fellow who had some radical ideas that the elite didn’t like. After all, he had grown up with the riffraff. How dare he. They figured that if his movement got enough traction, he could do some damage to their society calling for equality, equity, and peace. He said he had come to be a king of a kingdom that went against the society of the day and which goes against American society today.
So they came up with this plot to do away with Jesus. They took him in as a political prisoner and executed him. Unfortunately for them, the dude did this very elaborate party trick in which he came back from the dead. That wasn’t supposed to actually happen, and since he had resurrected, people believed in him and his movement spread across the empire anyway.
Those early followers of Jesus would be horrified to see our current society, and would be grieved at the idea that we pretend to base anything off of the teachings of Jesus, because really, we don’t. Many of these early Christians died for the cause of Christ, but in America people die because of oppression (which Jesus was against), the love of money and power, corporate greed, unjust systems that fuck over minority populations.
America is not a Christian country and certainly doesn’t live the teachings or principles of Jesus. We are getting further and futher away from anything Jesus envisoned. We lack love, empathy, and compassion. We still think we are more righteous than any other nation on the earth, which is so far from the truth it’s amazing anyone believes it. Society is based on every man for himself rather than community. We serve ourselves and our own interests.
Basically we live completely opposite to the way the strange guy we profess to follow wanted us to. That’s really quite odd. I know at this point some people are muttering “not all Christians,” and sure, that’s technically correct, but Christianity has collectively caused so much hurt that we can’t, as individuals who are attempting to be counter cultural and get back to the things Jesus taught, need to call out our siblings in Christ. American Christians as a group need to repent in sackcloth and ashes. All of us. Even if we are one of the “not all Christians.”
