'American Jesus' Is Not In The Bible

A six year old spent her birthday in federal custody and a man on Substack with a cross as his profile pic told me she deserved it. That pissed me off enough to write this article.

Warning: This article contains scripture that will offend people who applaud when children get locked up.

This morning a man on Substack with a cross in his profile picture told me that a little girl locked in an immigration detention center got exactly what she deserved...

He called her a ‘filthy illegal’ and then he went on with his day feeling like a good Christian.

Federal agents took her and her family into custody about six months ago and sent them to a detention facility.

That girl’s name is Martina. She was 5 years old when this photo was taken before her kindergarten graduation ceremony.

She turned six years old in a federal detention center.

After tens of thousands of complaints from concerned citizens, they finally let her out this week. She is just one of thousands of kids currently locked up in ICE facilities.

Think for a minute about what that birthday looked like for her. She woke up under a fluorescent tube that somebody else switches on and off. Nobody brought a cake into that room and nobody sang to her. She ate what a private contractor served chosen from a list of meals that were determined by an algorithm to be ‘cost-effective’ in order to ‘maximize shareholder revenue metrics’. She went to sleep listening to other people’s children cry through a wall about a quarter inch thick.

The government is careful never to use the word ‘prison’ for these places. Prison is the comparison that flatters them. A man doing twenty years for armed robbery has a release date on a calendar and a law library down the hall and a lawyer the state is required to pay for him.

Martina had access to none of that. She was never charged with anything at all because there is nothing to charge a small child with. She sat in there for six months and that is a tenth of her entire life on this earth.

And a man with a flag and a Bible verse in his profile watched all of it happen and decided the correct Christian response was applause.

So I asked him one simple question. Do you honestly believe that Jesus Christ would cheer while men in body armor walk a five year old through a gate with razor wire on top of it?

He told me it is not his responsibility to take care of other people. Then he quoted First Timothy 5 at me to prove it. ‘If any provide not for his own and specially for those of his own house he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.’

That is the verse he brought to a conversation about a jailed kindergartener…

This guy has never actually ‘read’ scripture. He picked that verse up off a forum or some Rumble video and never once sat with what it means. Somebody handed it to him as the thing you say whenever a person questions ICE putting kids in cages and he parrots it back on command like his masters trained him to.

That verse is about your mother. It is about the widowed grandmother asleep in the back bedroom and the brother with Down syndrome who is never going to live on his own and the father who cannot manage his own stairs anymore.

Paul wrote it to shame grown children who dumped their aging parents on the church and went back to their comfortable lives.

Go read the whole chapter sometime instead of the one line that fits on a graphic. Paul is explaining to Timothy how to run a relief fund for widows who had outlived their husbands and had nobody left to feed them. He tells families to cover their own widows so the money can reach the women with no family at all. The verse is there to get more people fed and not fewer. That man picked up a rebuke aimed at neglect and somehow heard permission to neglect.

The Texas Tribune pulled the government’s own numbers last week. Sixty children held at Dilley for a hundred days or more against a twenty day limit the government agreed to in court. Three thousand kids through that place in a year and over half held past the line.

ABC News got the 911 tapes. Staff calling ambulances for a seventeen month old who could not breathe and a six year old burning up with fever and a twenty two month old losing oxygen.

Then a thirteen year old girl tried to kill herself in there after they withheld her antidepressants and refused to let her see her mother. Her discharge paperwork says suicide attempt by cutting of wrist. DHS told the judge those kids are housed in conditions that are safe and sanitary and appropriate.

Somebody in that courtroom is lying and it isn’t those kids.

That is the country that man was applauding.

Now I know some of you are already itching to scroll down to the comment section and dump some scripture you think justifies the United States government locking kids in cages like animals. So let me save you the trouble and go through what the book actually says.

God settled the stranger question a long time ago. Leviticus 19 says the stranger living in your land shall be unto you as one born among you and you shall love him as yourself. There is no exception written in there for paperwork. Deuteronomy 10 says God Himself loves the stranger and feeds him and clothes him and then orders His people to go do the same thing.

He went further than that and commanded sanctuary. Israel was ordered to build cities of refuge for people running for their lives. Deuteronomy 23 says you do not hand an escaped servant back to his master and that he lives wherever in your land he chooses. That is God legislating on this exact question and He came down on the opposite side from you.

Then comes Matthew 25 and the part that should be keeping people awake. Jesus divides everybody the way a shepherd divides sheep from goats. The first group inherits the kingdom off one list. I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you took me in. The second group goes into everlasting fire off that same list read backward. I was a stranger and you took me not in. Whatever you failed to do for the least of these you failed to do for Him. A six year old in a detention center is the least of these.

So go ahead and cite Acts 17 about God setting the bounds of nations. Read the sentence before it where Paul says God made every nation of one blood, said out loud to knock the superiority out of people exactly like you. Bring up Nehemiah and his wall. That wall went around a city where foreigners lived under the protection of the law. Tell me heaven has a gate. Revelation 21 says the gates of that city are never shut.

And before you type any of it, remember that Jesus was a refugee child carried over a border at night while a king murdered every little boy he could reach. Egypt took Him in.

Somebody is already typing at me about Romans 13 and how we are supposed to obey the governing authorities. Paul wrote that letter and Paul spent years in Roman jails for refusing to shut his mouth and that same government put him to death in the end. Peter stood in front of the authorities in Acts 5 and told them we ought to obey God rather than men. The midwives in Exodus lied straight to Pharaoh’s face to save babies and scripture says God dealt well with them for it. When the state orders you to do something God forbids you obey God.

Which brings me back around to the man with the cross in his profile picture. That man does not worship God. He worships ‘American Jesus’.

He worships a paper god that comes in denominations of one and five and ten and twenty and fifty and a hundred. He worships military force and the comfort that comes from knowing the boot is pointed at somebody else this time. He worships corporations that would fire him tomorrow to save a nickel. He worships politicians with perfect fake teeth who tell him convenient little lies and then raise money off the fear they just sold him.

Jesus said you cannot serve God AND Mammon.

None of these people got any of this out of scripture. They got it from ten straight years of propaganda television news owned by billionaires and from memes built by intelligence agency assets who do not care whether they live or die. They absorbed a mood and started calling it a faith.

I am not a Democrat and I am not a liberal. I am a Christian and that means I help people who need help. It does not matter where they came from or what their paperwork says or whether helping them polls well in my county. Faith is not a political position and it does not shift with the news cycle. God said what He said and none of it is up for negotiation.

Jesus had almost nothing gentle to say about people who harm children. He said that whoever offends one of these little ones would be better off with a millstone hung around his neck and dropped into the depths of the sea.

He chose that image on purpose.

So when you get online and cheer because a six year old spent half a year in federal custody you are not defending the faith. You are telling the whole world which side of that judgment you belong on. Christian nationalism built a Jesus who checks immigration status at the door and the real one would weep at the sight of it.

Go read Matthew 25 tonight before you post another thing. Then go find somebody in your own town who needs a meal or a ride or a phone call and be the person Christ described in it. That is the entire assignment and it always has been.

If you made it through an article where I quoted six books of the Bible at you and never once tried to sell you a prayer cloth or a commemorative coin then consider a paid subscription.

The Wise Wolf is not a media empire. It is one guy who walked away from a steady paycheck to write things that get him yelled at by strangers with crosses in their profile pictures. Lily finished her journalism degree this year and is working at a summer camp because that is what the job market does to a talented young reporter. She would like a master’s without a mountain of student loans on top of it. I would like a news van so I can cover stories from where they happen instead of from a room with questionable carpet. Neither of those runs on exposure and good vibes.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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I am closing this one out with a song. Bad Religion released American Jesus in 1993 and I wore that record out as a teenager in the early 2000s. The whole thing is about a manufactured Christ who blesses the bombs and the border and the balance sheet. It is a Jesus built to make a country feel righteous about the exact things the real one stood against two thousand years ago. They were singing about all of this over thirty years ago and almost nobody listened. Consider this a fair warning before you click on it. This is fast nineties punk rock with loud guitars and a singer who does not slow down for anybody. If that is not your kind of noise then skip the listen and take the point with you anyway.