Monday open thread: Thank God for Joe Biden

I was going to entitle this piece "What An Asshole". But I knew I was going to use President Joe Biden's Easter tweet as the graphic, and I didn't want any confusion.

So, that's Joe's Easter message to his fellow Americans. It is gracious, it is faithful, it is what you would expect from a practicing Christian. (And yes, I know Pres. Biden is Catholic. Catholics are Christians. One of the things I hate most about certain people is how they differentiate Catholicism from "real" Christianity. I'll put my mother's Catholicism up against Joel Osteen's prosperity fake Gospel any day of the week, all day, twice on Sundays.)

And then, well:

I mean. What can one say? Trump took the holiest day on the Christian calendar and made it about his own hatred and animus. Trump is the kind of man who would have hunted Jews on Good Friday in the Pale of Settlement. The idea that he knows anything about the Jesus message is laughable, and by this statement proven to be false.

And yet this is the man whom millions of so-called Christians uphold as a paragon of Christian virtue. These are the people of whom Matthew speaks: "You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye." They live only to judge, even though the Messiah they purportedly worship as God-made-man said in the same chapter from Matthew, right before calling out the hypocrites: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." If there's any lesson to be learned from the Christian scripture, it's that judgment is God's alone. It's not the Pope's. It's not Joel Osteen's. And it sure as hell isn't a Christian nationalist's.

I'm constantly struck by the meanness and smallness of so many Christians. The Christianity on which I was raised taught me to look beyond myself, to take on the world's pain as my own and work to remedy it. I've mentioned before that teachers at my Catholic high school would organize summer trips to protest at the Nevada nuclear test site. The Christianity which I honor is the faith which seeks to secure God's peace on this earth, to ease pain, to uplift the downtrodden. The Christianity of the people who worship Donald Trump as a golden calf is anathema. It is heathen. It is not centered on the ineffable divinity, but on concerns of power. And yet, when the media talks about "Christian America", it is invariably this perversion of the Gospel message which gets the bulk, if not all, of the attention.

Accept more. Be more open. Judge less. Castigate less. Know what is truly good, and what is truly evil, and look into yourself to know which is which. We would all be surprised. 

This is your open thread.