This is a continuation of my response to Phil Zuckerman and his article, “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus.” If you are interested, you can find PART 1 here and PART 2 here.

This will be the final installment in my response. Zuckerman’s article is inboxed with my responses in between.

What’s the deal? Before attempting an answer, allow a quick clarification. Evangelicals don’t exactly hate Jesus — as we’ve provocatively asserted in the title of this piece. They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell, and guarantees them a premium, luxury villa in heaven. For this, and this only, they love him. They can’t stop thanking him. And yet, as for Jesus himself — his core values of peace, his core teachings of social justice, his core commandments of goodwill — most Evangelicals seem to have nothing but disdain.

Zuckerman here reveals that he is using rhetoric and twisting facts in order to make his points. It is obvious that conservative Christians do not “hate Jesus,” and Zuckerman finally discloses that he understands this. But what does this say about Zuckerman’s character, if he is willing to headline an article with inaccurate information, that he later openly reveals is inacurrate?

Zuckerman says conservative Christians (who he apparently understands so well), love Jesus because of His precious offer of salvation. And he is correct, that is certainly one reason why we love Him. Indeed, it is the main reason, upon which every other reason is premised.

But Zuckerman also implies that Jesus never taught humanity about this salvation. He says conservatives do not love Jesus “because of what he tried to teach humanity.” But rather we love Him because He died to wash away our sins. But this implies Jesus did not teach people about how to be saved.

Here are a few passages that show us quite a bit of a different picture of the teaching of Jesus on these matters:

Matthew 4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Mark 1:14-15 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

John 8:24 “I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”

In other words, Jesus did have much to say about the improvement of society. But his statements about helping the poor and promoting peace and making the world a better place were all made in the context of saving faith. In other words, as sinners come to Him, the Prince of peace, the world would be transformed, one saved sinner at a time.

In other words, Zuckerman, like many others, pits one teaching of Jesus against another teaching of Jesus. They make it either / or, when the Savior taught it as both / and. It isn’t either Jesus saves OR He improves society. The overwhelming teaching of Jesus in all four Gospels, and as He is interpreted in the Epistles, is that because of personal salvation, the world becomes a better place.

I am pretty sure (though I do not want to be presumptuous) that Zuckerman doesn’t really care that Jesus taught both. Understanding that would mean his article would fall to shambles and I seriously doubt he is willing to go there. So I imagine that apart from a work of grace in his heart, Zuckerman will continue to pit Jesus against Jesus, not because he has any scholarly or factual grounds to do so, but rather because he does not like Christianity and doesn’t seem to care much for Christian people either.

And this is nothing new. At the end of World War I, the more rabid, and often less educated Evangelicals decried the influence of the Social Gospel amongst liberal churches. According to these self-proclaimed torch-bearers of a religion born in the Middle East, progressive church-goers had been infected by foreign ideas such as German Rationalism, Soviet-style Communism, and, of course, atheistic Darwinism.

The reason why conservatives decried liberal theology is because it sought to undermine biblical authority and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Each of the movements mentioned in this paragraph could not consistently allow for people who believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation.

And surely Zuckerman knows that it was not merely the less-educated Evangelicals who decried this influence! Shall I list the scholars on the conservative side of that debate? Some of the more brilliant minds of the last century in many different fields? I can’t make this post that long! But surely a few names will make the point: Carl F.H. Henry, J. Gresham Machen, and Karl Barth (not evangelical per se, but not liberal either). Many, many others could be added to this list to make the point that even though there are many uneducated or undereducated Evangelicals, that does not mean the movement itself is uneducated.

In the 1950s, the anti-Social Gospel message piggybacked the rhetoric of anti-communism, which slashed and burned its way through the Old South and onward through the Sunbelt, turning liberal churches into vacant lots along the way. It was here that the spirit and the body collided, leaving us with a prototypical Christian nationalist, hell-bent on prosperity. Charity was thus rebranded as collectivism and self-denial gave way to the gospel of accumulation. Church-to-church, sermon-to-sermon, evangelical preachers grew less comfortable with the fish and loaves Jesus who lived on earth, and more committed to the angry Jesus of the future.

Unfortunately, Zuckerman’s analysis here does have some truth in it. The prosperity Gospel was born and has become a nasty stench upon Evangelicalism. But to say this view is representative of the majority of the movement is to simply not understand the movement. As a Christian pastor, I see believers continually giving dramatically of their time, talents, and treasure not only for the purpose of evangelism, but to help others and make the world a better place.

As far as the angry Jesus of the future, there are some who focus on future judgment, and all of us should have it in the back of our minds. But this does not seem to be the norm across Evangelicalism as whole. This is not to say that churches have gotten this right all the time. Obviously we need to keep ourselves balanced on all these issues.

By the 1990s, this divine Terminator gained “most-favored Jesus status” among America’s mega churches; and with that, even the mention of the former “social justice” Messiah drove the socially conscious from their larger, meaner flock.

This is just simply not true. I won’t take the time to reiterate the same points over and over again, but do an analysis on how much money conservative churches give (mega, medium, and small) to causes that promote social welfare. It is substantially more than any other group. The “Terminator” version of Jesus is a caricature invented by those who do not understand the movement, who are on the outside looking in with arms crossed, huffing and puffing. But it is simply not the way it is.

In addition to such historical developments, there may very well simply be an underlying, all-too-human social-psychological process at root, one that probably plays itself out among all religious individuals: they see in their religion what they want to see, and deny or despise the rest. That is, religion is one big Rorschach test. People look at the content of their religious tradition — its teachings, its creeds, its prophet’s proclamations — and they basically pick and choose what suits their own secular outlook. They see in their faith what they want to see as they live their daily lives, and simultaneously ignore the rest. And as is the case for most White Evangelical Christians, what they are ignoring is actually the very heart and soul of Jesus’s message — a message that emphasizes sharing, not greed. Peace-making, not war-mongering. Love, not violence.

Now Zuckerman makes a very good point here, and ironically, I agree with him. I do notice (and perhaps even in myself), a tendency to formulate theology in a favorable-to-self kind of way. To pick and choose.  I’m sure Zuckerman does the same thing with his worldview.

But still, Zuckerman makes the mistake of assuming that the true teaching of Jesus is exactly what people on the left side of the political spectrum in our nation promotes. This is simply not true. Nor would I say that His teaching lines up with what the right side of the spectrum holds either.

A careful analysis of the teaching of Jesus will reveal Him preaching an ethic that transcends anything this world has ever seen. It is the Kingdom of God (Matt 5-7), that He rules by the power of His might, and both sides of our current political spectrum will become obsolete when His Kingdom crushes the kingdoms of man.

Daniel 2:44 And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.

Of course, conservative Americans have every right to support corporate greed, militarism, gun possession, and the death penalty, and to oppose welfare, food stamps, health care for those in need, etc. — it is just strange and contradictory when they claim these positions as somehow “Christian.” They aren’t.

Another horrendous straw man to finish out his oxymoronic article. It is oxymoronic because he is using harmful and hateful language to rebuke Christians for the false charge of hating in the name of Jesus.

This last straw man confuses “conservative Americans” with conservative Christians. They are not the same thing. And neither one of them “supports” corporate greed. Neither do they oppose welfare, food stamps, health care, etc. Conservative Americans simply do not want to be coerced by the government to do these things, while conservative Christians work through their churches to bring help and care to those in need.

Mr. Zuckerman, you have the right as an American to write these types of things. But surely your conscious bothers you a little to be so overtly illogical in your reasoning. Right? Maybe just a little?

Your bad reasoning is so overt that I can’t help but think you know what you are doing. You seem to smart to be ignorant of what you are doing. Your arguments hold no water. But that doesn’t seem to matter to you. You apparently hate Christianity, and so you are writing to do your part to obliterate it. I hope I’m not being presumptuous in that last remark, but from what you have written, and the manner in which you have written, it is hard to come to any other conclusion.

So one final question: Why should anyone get their ethical guidance from you?