Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) bashed former President Trump online and said Christians who support him “don’t understand” their religion.
“I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian,” Kinzinger said on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to Trump’s Christmas post. “If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion.”
Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the GOP, said in his post that “Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.’”
I rather think that Jesus himself would be the gatekeeper here. He’s not a Christian because he follows, values, and embodies precisely none of the values Jesus laid out for his followers, nor any tenets of the actual religion. I know that, and I’m an atheist.
By all means, prove me wrong by going through all the things about Trump that Jesus would approve of. We’ll all be waiting.
The problem is, and a big part of it (but not all of it) is due to Biblical contradictions and lack of clarity, no one follows everything Jesus says to do.
The Skeptics’s Annotated Bible has a huge list of contradictions separated into books.
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/first/contra2_list.html
For example- Should the gospel be preached to everyone?
Sometimes Jesus says yes, sometimes Jesus says not to gentiles or Samaritans, meaning basically the only people the gospel should be preached to is other Jews.
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/samaritans.html
How do you follow the teachings of Jesus when they are that inconsistent?
There is one difference, in that the gospel being preached to only Jewish people is really in the gospels, and instructions to tell everyone are later in there. It could be a matter of “we’ll tell them first, and when they reject it, we’ll open it to everyone”.
All that said, I do think you can take inspiration from what Jesus purportedly says in the Bible without following him religiously or being Christian. Clothing and feeding the poor, showing kindness to your neighbors? I can get behind that.
Frankly, I don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to stop me from being a piece of shit.
Unfortunately it looks like the people who do need that don’t follow their scripture anyway. Conservative evangelicals are antithetical to what their Bible instructs.
They’re really not though. Maybe you should actually read the Bible
I have, which is why I say that. The overall theme of the NT is love for your neighbor and to help the most downtrodden in society. Not only does Jesus say it’s really difficult for rich people to get into heaven, he also says people who don’t help the poor won’t go to heaven.
“I will deny them, and say they did not feed me when I was hungry, and they did not clothe me when I was cold. They will ask when they ever did that, and I say to you, whatever you do to the least of you, you do to me as well.”
Paraphrased, but you get the idea.
You might not, but if you look around plenty of people do. Including the subject of this story.