These days, when I see one of Kirsten Powers’ bylines hovering over a thousand words or so of self-congratulatory preening, I feel the primal urge to pluck out both my eyes, then stuff them into my ears. (In case there’s an audio track.)

It’s downright un-Christian to walk around tempting people. That was the traditional case for people wearing modest clothing, since Our Lord warned us of the sin of “adultery in your heart.”

The Richest, Emptiest Churches in America

Likewise, He warned us it’s a grave sin to shout at someone, “You fool!”

So isn’t it wrong to write things on a regular basis that tempt people to that sin? The urge is made almost insuperable when the writer strikes the post of easy moral superiority. When she acts as if somehow she’s a steadfast prophet in the desert, challenging the false gods of the powerful. … By goshdarnit just coincidentally supporting the views of the Ivy League, Google, the Fortune 500, the Mainstream Media, and the richest, emptiest churches in America.

That’s what Powers manages in her recent column on the dust-up between Vice President Pence and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The manure-spreading starts with the headline: “Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s countercultural approach to Christianity is what America needs now.”

Whoring After Strange Gods

“Counter-cultural,” huh? Is Buttigieg a member of some offbeat, unpopular sect that is persecuted for its principles? Well … no. In fact, he’s part of the Episcopal Church, a vast real-estate holding company comparable only to the Jesuits for its expertise at whoring after strange gods in vast, tasteful buildings. (In the Episcopalians’ defense, they are at least acting in the spirit of their founder, King Henry VIII.) Buttigieg is joined in a same-sex union to another man. Could you get more respectable than that in today’s America? I suppose only a trans-woman of color wed to a “furry” in a mosque would outclass Buttigieg in elite Intersectionality points.

Buttigieg’s challenge to Pence was a stark one. He claimed that God made him gay, so Pence’s “issue” with him (did Pence say he had one?) was really with “my Creator.” (I often criticize fellow Catholics who make this claim.)

Neither modern science nor I know what makes people gay. (Though I do love the old joke: “My mother made me a homosexual.” “Really? If I buy her the yarn will she make me one, too?”)

I do know that the Jewish-Christian tradition, and its scriptures, have condemned homosexual acts as abominable and wicked for three thousand years or so. Right up until … the early 1970s, when homosexuals and feminists hitched their little wagon to the worthy goals of the Civil Rights movement.

God Must Have Messed Up, But Kirsten Will Fix It

So God apparently has a communications problem. He just let falsehoods kind of … slip into inspired Scripture. Then He let the rabbis, bishops, Reformers, and leaders of every Christian church on earth go right on teaching a blatant, hateful falsehood. Here He regularly and intentionally made a certain percentage of people gay, and wanted them to act on it. To go ahead and get married, in religious rites. But He never sent that memo to His own religious leaders. He let them denounce the hearts’ desires of God’s own children whom He knitted queer in the womb, and deny them marriage rites.

Even when Jesus walked the earth, challenging everything and everyone, to the point where He got crucified. … Christ never mentioned the subject. (Was He just being uncharacteristically tactful? Timid?)

This situation dragged on for more thousands of years. Right up until the moment when secular elites decided to embrace homosexuality. Then, I guess, God saw His chance. He could finally, finally reveal His authentic intentions. His chosen means? Enormous pressure by secular libertines, and persecution by the government. Because, you know, that’s how He always works, isn’t it? By that very same logic, we realize that the early Christian martyrs were thwarting God’s will by refusing to worship the emperor. Oh how much we are learning from brave, brave Kirsten and counter-cultural Peter!

What Jesus Never Mentioned

How Kirsten must have struggled to overcome her native humility when she called journalists “gullible” for listening to the Religious Right as the voice of orthodox Christianity. Since she has claimed to be pro-life, she must have agonized before writing the following:

Buttigieg criticized right-wing Christians for “saying so much about what Christ said so little about, and so little about what he said so much about.”

Let’s parse this insightful formulation: “Saying so much about what Christ said so little about” applies to the religious right’s treatment of abortion as a litmus test for Christian faith, when in fact Jesus never mentioned the issue. That omission has not stopped many right-wing Christians from using President Donald Trump’s anti-abortion rights judicial appointments as the president’s “get out of jail free card”….

Buttigieg’s complete embrace of the Democrats “nine-months-for-any-reason-in-any-state-of-the-union” stance on abortion? It’s insightful! Because Jesus never mentioned the issue. (Jews already rejected abortion, then, of course.) Oddly, He never mentioned dissolving national borders, either. Or government efforts to redistribute the wealth, forcing people to ape Christian charity on pain of imprisonment.

It’s almost as if we have to think rationally about the implications of the whole body of scripture, in the light of how the Church has historically taught what it means. Instead of, you know, grabbing little scraps of verses from here and there, to match whatever MSNBC, and Facebook, and Harvard, are telling us to believe.

I wish the denizens of the Christian left would simply admit it. They are pantheists, who worship not Jesus but the Spirit of the Age. They think that they are the Best Christians in History. Why? For seeing so much farther than the benighted scripture writers, apostles and martyrs of previous centuries. In cold fact, they’re just Caesar’s puppets. And we can all see the strings.