Wario Jesus (and Some Personal News)
Meet the Double Reverse Uno card for the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount.
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I don’t remember when I first started using the phrase Wario Jesus to describe the MAGA conception of Jesus Christ, but it’s been helpful and instances of Wario Jesus don’t seem to be going anywhere, so I thought I’d pass it along.
Wario Jesus is the Double Reverse Uno card for the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. You know how Jesus said “You have been told [X] but I tell you [Y]” six times in the sermon? Wario Jesus comes through and flips all those constructs back to their most aggressively unseemly originals.
“You have been told to love your enemy,” Wario Jesus sneers. “But I tell you your enemy sucks and is stupid and you should remind them of that as much as you can.” “You have been told turn the other cheek, but I tell you that only sissies do that.” “You have been told ‘do not commit adultery,’ but I tell you, well, nobody’s perfect.”
The most recent sighting of Wario Jesus came courtesy of my old pal Meg Basham, Daily Wire reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller Shepherds for Sale. She recently posted this novel interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and you couldn’t ask for a better example of how Wario Jesus operates.
What you seem to be missing is that the love shown by the Good Samaritan is so extravagant that every single person on this planet fails to meet that standard. Only one has ever shown that kind of love. And that was the point of the parable. To show us how far we are from God’s standard so that we realize that only by taking on the righteousness of Christ, could we ever meet it. It’s not actually a story just telling you to be nice to people. It’s a story pointing you to your need for a perfect Savior.
Interesting take! Let’s table, for now, the idea that the actions of the Good Samaritan — helping someone who’s in trouble — represent some impossible standard of Christian living. Let’s also table the fact that Basham conveniently ignores Jesus’ final line of this parable: “Go and do likewise.” Those are concerns of Jesus, but we’re not talking about Jesus here. We’re talking about Wario Jesus.
Wario Jesus occupies a Bizarro Gospel where the words and actions of Jesus are meant to be taken literally but not seriously. For Wario Jesus, everyone in ancient Israel was basically family, so “love your neighbor” was just a command to love people who are like you. For Wario Jesus, the command to love immigrants and strangers was a nice idea back then, but not realistic in today’s far more complicated world. Wario Jesus’ warnings about the rich were actually about how being rich is fine and good, and it’s actually the poor people who are the really greedy ones. And for Wario Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan was not about how to treat those who need help, but just a story illustrating that we not only CAN not help others but SHOULD not help others and in fact should be going out of our way to makes others’ lives as miserable as possible1. Maranatha, come Wario Jesus, come!
I simply have too much respect for my readers to go through and debunk all these point by point. But to pull back a bit, there are a few frameworks where Wario Jesus asserts himself within teachings of the actual Jesus.
“The poor you will always have with you.”
In Matthew 26, the disciples object to a woman anointing Jesus with expensive perfume, saying the stuff would have been put to better use if it’d been sold and given to the poor. Jesus pushes back, noting that he wouldn’t always be around but “the poor you will always have with you.” The very obvious meaning here is that there was plenty of time to bless the poor but his own time was going short, but Wario Jesus fans treat this as the ultimate Christian Socialism gotcha: “You’re trying to eradicate poverty? Nice try. Actually, the Bible says that poor people will always be around.”
Wario Jesus teaches that since we will always have the poor with us, we should not be moving any levers of government towards lessening their misery or easing their suffering. That would just be a government handout, which would just enable the poor and make them lazier than they already are, as opposed to nonprofit handouts, which are noble and dignifying. And, hey, did you know the “eye of a needle” was the name of a special gate in Jerusalem?
“Do not be surprised if the world hates you.”
I’ve written about this before, but at the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus told the disciples to “not be surprised if the world hates you, because it hated me first.” Jesus said this as a reminder that his teaching ran counter to the prevailing powers of the day and that challenging authority of Rome would come with a price (a price, notably, almost all the disciples paid with their lives).
In Wario Jesus’ framework, this is awesome. “Do not be surprised if the world hates you” is license to be a greasy little stinker: ripping undocumented immigrants from their homes, using slurs and campaigning for rapists, and then dismissing all the pushback with “God said to not be surprised when the world hates me!” Wario Jesus followers can eventually get it so twisted that they’re not only not surprised when the world hates them, but take it as a sign that they’re doing something right and get very skeptical of Christians who aren’t being suitably hated.2
Cleansing the Temple
Scholars are divided on how many times Jesus actually cleared the Temple during his life. Matthew and Luke put the event near the end of his life while John puts it near the beginning of his public ministry. Maybe John was just juggling events a little out of order for thematic effect, or maybe Jesus did this a couple of times. Either way, it was clearly a pretty unique case — a strategic, drastic action.
But for Wario Jesus, this is a carte blanche for being a belligerent asshole who loses his temper, throws his weight around, tells anyone who stands in his way to shut up and get in line, and then justifies it all as clearing the temple.
The end result is that Wario Jesus isn’t just Jesus as Mascot or American cheerleader, but as an anti-Jesus who you can use to justify your worst, sickest impulses. I don’t claim to have any great ideas for how to push back on all this at the systemic level. We are not doing great on that front, to put it mildly. But having a name for something makes me feel a little less insane, and since “White Christian Nationalism” never sat quite right with me as the best description for what’s going on, “Wario Jesus” is helping a lot. It might be the only good thing Wario Jesus is good for.
OK, now for some personal news: I am thrilled to be joining the team at Sojourners as Managing Editor. I’ve been a big fan of Sojourners’ work for my entire adult life, enjoyed my past opportunities to work with them in a freelance capacity, and even been able to make a few friends with their current team. So it is with a lot of excitement and a little bit of nervousness that I hop off the barstool and start making drinks. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you over there!
This probably means I’ll be doing less faith and religion writing here on my Substack, and be devoting most of that energy to my new job and the crackerjack team I’ll be working with there. I will continue publishing here, but it will be a less explicitly faith-related content (though there’s at least a little faith in everything we do, right?) and more of the other stuff I write about like movies and music. If that’s not your bag, the unsubscribe button is free and I won’t take it personally if you use it.
I think it’s very true that Jesus’ teachings about loving neighbors and enemies were intended to be harrowing (which is why the disciples were dismayed at the idea of camels jumping through eyes of needles, crying ‘who then can be saved?”). But the thunderingly obvious take away is that “with man, it is impossible. But through God, all things are possible,” which is why we are commanded to “go and do likewise.” Wario Jesus would have you thinking that we shouldn’t even bother trying to love our neighbors since it’s so hard.
My simple advice to Christians who want to be hated by the world: The fastest, easiest shortcut is the exact same one Jesus taught: loving your enemies, blessing the poor, holding the rich and powerful to account. The “hate” you get for campaigning against trans women in swimming meets or whatever will pale in comparison to what happens when you suggest the rich have already received their reward in full.
This is so good. I haven't seen a better analogy for what they've warped Christ into. Thank you for doing what you do. It's inspiring.
Ironically the whole point of The Good Samaritan is "Loving your neighbor is so easy, a Samaritan could do it". The idea being, followers of the true God should logically be the ones who are doing this stuff all the time, if only they hadn't invented so many convoluted reasons not to. The Samaritan has bad theology but still ends up doing the right thing just because it's so blindingly obvious.