Rambo Jesus isn’t new; he has long since ousted the Hippie Jesus I grew up with in the Evangelical gestalt, parading on horseback with a fiery sword for the ultra-macho authoritarian fanboys who now line up as the movement’s doughty lieutenants.
We might blame Mel Gibson for that, but the truth is that the seeds of it were planted long before he made that awful movie. Since I was a Sunday Schooled youngster, eagerly clutching my paperback copy of Reach Out!, the Seventies Living Bible paraphrase of the New Testament, I’ve been watching the church turn away from that benevolent, all-inclusive Hippie Jesus, the vision that sold me on the whole premise (despite its incoherence). The Jesus of the Beatitudes. Jesus, the peacemaker; Jesus, the merciful; the Jesus who hungers and thirsts for justice. That Hippie Jesus has, at this point, vanished from Evangelical memory.
No, today it’s Rambo Jesus – that no-nonsense avenger, rallying God’s white suburban chosen against the dark forces of... benevolence and all-inclusiveness; casting a cold and disdainful gaze into the rotten, socialist souls of... the peacemakers; the merciful; those who hunger and thirst for justice. It’s Rambo Jesus, not Hippie Jesus, who stirs the hearts of those young families who populate today's cozy megachurches, jingoing his new doctrines of ideological purity and social dominance into their community-starved souls.
It’s Rambo Jesus who calls them to tribal unity and the piety of social exclusion; Rambo Jesus, who wants their undivided attention; their moral and ethical proxy; and, most especially, their votes.
Hippie Jesus has no place in today’s Evangelical church, which has elbowed and kicked its way to the front of the line in the national scramble for cultural domination. Realizing that five decades of dalliance with the power brokers of America’s political right wing have left them pretty powerful themselves, they’ve gone all in. There’s no place for benevolence or all-inclusiveness. Bye bye, Hippie Jesus!
Russell Moore, once a prominent leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, learned all this the hard way. He watched the decline of Hippie Jesus and the ascendance of Rambo Jesus – who took on the disturbing visage of Donald Trump in 2016, prompting Moore to speak up immediately, denouncing Trump and cautioning his peers about the damage that an alliance between Trump and the Evangelical church could do.
Moore found himself ostracized, as Evangelical pastors and leaders flocked to Trump’s side.
In an interview with NPR, he reflected on all that has happened since. In particular, he expressed alarm that his fellow pastors have reported that their parishioners are now upset by those Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount that enfolds them; they don’t want to hear about forgiveness and mercy anymore, Moore said.
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching - ‘turn the other cheek’ - [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Moore told NPR. “And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’”
Hearing this, Moore says he now believes the Evangelical church is “now in crisis.”
“When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis,” he said.
What has caused Evangelicals to so completely turn away from the very teachings to which they ostensibly pledged their hearts? Moore had some thoughts.
“Almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized," he said. “The roots of the political problem really come down to disconnection, loneliness, sense of alienation. Even in churches that are still healthy and functioning, regular churchgoing is not what it was a generation ago, in which the entire structure of the week was defined by the community.”
That sense of alienation is easily exploited by today’s political right, which started laying the groundwork for the annexation of conservative churchgoers in the Seventies. Today, that annexation is near-absolute: 85% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020.
The following year, Moore resigned his post in the SBC. He is now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. He continues to think about what went wrong in the church he served for decades, and what to do about its appalling embrace of Rambo Jesus white nationalism.
“I think if we’re going to get past the blood and soil sorts of nationalism or all of the other kinds of totalizing cultural identities, it’s going to require rethinking what the church is,” he told NPR. “I don’t think we fix it by fighting a war for the soul of evangelicalism. I really don’t think we can fix it at the movement level. And that’s one of the reasons why, when I’m talking to Christians who are concerned about this, my counsel is always ‘small and local.’ I think we have to do something different and show a different way. And I see in history every time that something renewing and reviving has happened, it’s happened that way. It’s happened at a small level with people simply refusing to go with the stream of the church culture at the time.”
Small and local. That’s how it was in my youth. Small town, small church. Tribal, yes, but not in an all-or-nothing, vanquish-all-who-oppose us way. Benevolent. Inclusive.
In a final irony, Moore noted that as the SBC leadership was fully endorsing Trump in 2017, the convention voted to “denounce and repudiate” the white nationalism it has since embraced.
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