David Gornoski | On February 27, 2017

The Gospel message of Jesus’s Shalom is for everyone, regardless of background. But I want to exhort my Liberal leaning Christian friends who use Jesus’s nonviolence revelation to really harp on fundamentalist fire and brimstone types. What you are literally doing is beating a dead horse.

All you have to do to see is go to any university or college campus in America. The State is the premier dominant religion of our culture and the world. Religion is not a set of beliefs. When you focus the revelation’s nuclear power on beating up bad belief sets from fundamentalists you are betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion is. It is not primarily belief sets. It is a structure that binds human beings together into common action. It is social aesthetic, ethic, and presupposition of ordering communities. When you bash bad theology ideas all day, you miss the forest for the trees.

The real temple of pagan violence is the college campuses. They are cultural transmitters of the state religion our culture still worships and is bound by like fish are to water. We’re not aware of its total envelopment.

Go to a campus today. You’ll see two poor, scraggly old men with poorly MS Paint made signs screaming about everyone burning in hell and how everyone is a masturbator. No one takes them serious. They’re harmless. But THAT right there is your keyboard crusade’s big dragon. Are you starting to see how ridiculous this is once we get out in real life?

You see the rest of the sprawling hundreds of acres of campus with billion dollar facilities, federal subsidies, and entrenched untouchable priests administering scandal as education, dividing people into neverending hate and envy by outward features, and always programming unwavering faith in their employer and deity, the State? That’s where you need to engage. That’s who you need to teach Jesus to. To all the millions of young people churned up every day in that indulgence selling sacred temple of violence.

Now get to work.

David Gornoski

David Gornoski is your neighbor. For readers’ feedback, aneighborschoice@gmail.com.