Since the terrorist attack against the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an earnest but ill-informed trope has insisted that, although the terrorist mob carried crucifixes, bibles, Christian flags, rosary beads, and signs declaring that “Jesus Saves” and “Jesus or Hellfire”, although they said the Christian Lord’s Prayer together before storming Capitol Hill, and although they were heard continuing to pray to the Christian god for the destruction of the US House and Senate within the halls of Congress, the terrorists were somehow not true Christians.
The Dean of the Yale Divinity School, for example, complained that the Capitol Hill terrorists were “a mob hijacking an entire faith”, and declared that ,”Those Christians who continue to be Trump supporters are models of cognitive dissonance.”
Christianity is riddled with cognitive dissonance, of course. The religion is based on a text that, as any text written by various committees over the course of hundreds of years would, routinely contradicts itself. To believe in the message of the Christian Bible is to ignore that the Christian Bible doesn’t have a single message.
The cognitive dissonance of Christianity is manifested by the religion’s liberal subculture as much as by its right wing majority. The Christian text, after all, both promotes peace and genocide, the ownership of slaves and holy poverty. It elevates marriage, polygamy, and unwed motherhood. It teaches the wisdom of both love and divine torture. When progressive Christians declare that the genuine message of their religion happens to support their political value, they’re willfully ignoring what their own holy book teaches, and what the majority of Christian churches preach.
One of the January 6 terrorists was Jenna Ryan, a realtor from Dallas, Texas who screamed, “Here we are, in the name of Jesus, in the name above all names!” before she joined the crowd that violently broke into the US Capitol, killed a police officer and physically assaulted dozens more.
How can anyone seriously claim that Jenna Ryan is not a true Christian? Christianity was obviously at the core of the motivation for her violence, and she’s
In both 2016 and 2020 the majority of Trump voters were Christians, and the majority of Christian voters voted for Trump. Polls taken since the terrorist attack of January 6 show that support for Trump among his right wing Christian base remains strong.
To claim that these tens of millions of people are somehow all fake Christians is the epitome of cognitive dissonance. Instead of continuing the absurd denial of the problem of violent radicalization among American Christians, we ought to be considering the origins of ideological violence within Christianity.
The Violent Jesus
It’s popular among liberal Christians to pretend that the Jesus described in the Bible was a pacifist, but an honest reading of the Gospels reveals something much more Trumpian. Jesus reads like a narcissist, a self-obsessed self-promoter who insisted upon unquestioning obedience by his followers, who went on frequent tirades against his political opponents, and who could not tolerate dissent.
Just as Donald Trump sometimes gives speeches celebrating “peace” and “love”, but at other times threatens bloody death to anyone who crosses him, Jesus had a nasty streak to go along with his softer side. Sometimes, Jesus gave speeches seeming to promote nonviolence, but at other times screamed insults at his own supporters, declared that he had come with a sword, not for peace. Jesus was fixated on arranging elaborate and cruel tortures for people who refused to join his followers, such as burning people in a lake of fire.
Then there was the time he stormed the Temple in Jerusalem. The parallels between the storming of the US Capitol by Christian terrorists and the storming of the temple by Jesus and his followers are to strong for any honest observer to ignore.
The story is told with pride in multiple gospels. When Jesus saw people in the temple doing things that didn’t match his ideology, he didn’t try to reason with them. He didn’t respect their right to practice religion in their own way. He didn’t peacefully petition the temple leaders for a change of policy. Instead, Jesus led a violent assault on the temple, attacking people and their property while carrying a whip.
Does this comparison seem unfair? Consider the long Christian tradition of proudly violent artwork depicting the story of Jesus viciously storming the temple. The story, and these pieces of Christian art, have inspired the violent Christian ideology used to depict the violent attempted coup d’etat of January 6, 2021 as a Christian act of holy war.
Look at the fear and pain that Jesus inflicted upon the people in the temple. Violent Christian ideology views this as a good thing. The Christian artist takes glee in the suffering of the opponents of Jesus. The story and the artwork are a celebration of cruelty, enshrining violence as a sacred Christian ritual.
Jesus believed that he had the right to inflict pain and fear on anyone who disagreed with him. The Republican insurrectionists followed his example. The theological lesson to them was clear: Christians have the right to impose their will on others. To these Christians, self-determination is unholy, and democracy is a tool of Satan.
Christians never question what gave Jesus the right to impose his will on the money changers and their customers in the temple. They ignore the fact that what was happening in the temple was standard practice in the culture at the time, something that money changers, their customers, and the temple custodians all felt was a helpful practice. Jesus didn’t care what other people thought. He simply decided what he wanted, and decided that he would seize power by beating everyone else into submission.
“On reaching Jerusalem, he entered the Temple courts and began driving out those who were carrying on business there, both the merchants and their customers. He also knocked over the desks of the money-changers, upset the benches of the pigeon-dealers.”
When Joshua Black, who carried a weapon into the US Capitol building, declared that “I wanted to get inside the building so I could plead the blood of Jesus over it,” he wasn’t defying the teachings of Jesus. He was following the example of the violent Jesus. If Jesus was justified in violently attacking people in the temple, why would Black believe that his Christianity didn’t justify his own violent attack?
Put your Christian cognitive dissonance aside, and you’ll see that the story of Jesus storming the temple is not a metaphor for social justice. It’s not a tale of theological reform. It’s a blueprint for Christian terrorism.
To make this plain, consider this painting of the storming of the temple of Jesus, in which Jesus is beating an old woman for nothing other than engaging in a legal activity that didn’t obey the tyrannical theological demands of Jesus. Christians teach that this beating was a good thing. “His wrath is quickly kindled,” the Christian Bible says of Jesus, with approval.
Thanks to systematic programs of violent radicalization in American Christian churches, terrorists are now able to, without any sense of irony, combine symbols of death and Christianity as they engage acts of mass violence. American Christianity is becoming a death cult, part of a fascist nationalism dedicated to the replacement of democracy with Christian theocracy. Christian nationalism threatens the very foundations of American liberty.
The violent attempted overthrow of the US government by an overwhelmingly Christian mob carrying Christian religious symbols and shouting Christian religious mottos as they beat police officers was not an aberration from the traditions of American Christianity. It was an expression of the tradition of righteous Christian brutality and the long-standing opposition of Christianity to American democracy.
