The Uncivil Rights Era: The Rise of America's 'Woke' Movement For White People

Americans are now reclaiming their constitutional right to be mean, cruel and racist.

(Screenshot CNBC via YouTube)

I remember when Jesus saved me.

In my younger days, I was a huge Bible thumper. I wasn’t a religious zealot who preached fire and damnation or anything. But I did have an extra-large, family-style edition of the King James Bible that my grandmother gave me for my seventh birthday. Aside from paintings of biblical events, sections for taking notes and even a blank family tree, it contained a well-researched concordance, color-coded scriptures and notes from theologians (who I initially assumed were experts on Cliff Huxtable’s oldest son). To me, it was not one of the worst birthday gifts ever; it was a graphic novel, notebook and sketchpad that kept my attention-deficit-disordered brain occupied during extra-long church services. So when my grandmother found my hand-drawn doodles of two men fighting in the margins of this family keepsake, I tried to explain that I had not defiled the Gospel.

“See, if you flip through First Samuel, it turns into an animated version of David versus Goliath!” I told my furious grandmother. “If you turn to the Book of Matthew, you can see my cartoon of Jesus walking on water. Just wait until I finish Jacob wrestling with an angel. What color wrestling leotard do you think angels wear?”

Unfortunately, Grandma seemed to have forgotten the bars David dropped in his 38th hit Psalm; for some reason, she was not ceasing anger or forsaking wrath. Seemingly unaware that she had given me a translation of the Gospel that already had pictures of white people who did not exist, she insisted that God’s words “didn’t need no cartoons.” After she accused me of desecrating a holy book, I calmly noted that my divinely inspired art was written with a blue Bic ink pen. I turned to the eighth chapter of John, the place where I first encountered blue ink.

I’m sure you’ve heard the story: Jesus was volunteering at the Mount of Olives’ Vacation Bible School when a lynch mob of Pharisees showed up at the temple. The devout segregationist Mosaic law scholars whom my grandmother once referred to as “the white people of the Bible” dragged an alleged adulteress and presented her to Jesus. According to their strict textual translation of their founding father’s constitution, the woman and the man were supposed to be put to death (apparently, the man was already granted a pardon). Fortunately, Jesus possessed a rare superpower known as “humanity” and ignored their white nonsense:

But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, “Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?”

She said, “No man, Lord.”

And Jesus said unto her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”

— John 8: 1-11

Unlike most celebrated Huxtableologists, you probably didn’t wonder why it was in italics when you read it. But there is a reason why Mike’s big Bible colored the words blue:

White people made it up.

Known as the Pericope Adulterae, there is a broad consensus among Biblical scholars that the Apostle John didn’t write this story. “We know that this passage probably wasn’t written by John or included in the original version of his Gospel because in the very earliest surviving manuscripts of John, this passage is absent,” writes Zack McCoy. “Furthermore, many scholars think the style of this passage (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, syntax) doesn’t sound quite like John. This is why our print Bibles often have brackets and explanatory notes around this passage.”

Unimpressed with her grandson’s biblical knowledge, my grandmother explained that she never assumed the tale of “let him cast the first stone” actually happened. She had no idea it didn’t appear in the oldest Egyptian texts, which are close to where the apostle Yochanan actually lived (come on, man, you know his name wasn’t “John”). She didn’t care that it magically appeared in European texts when white people started translating the Bible. But my grandmother didn’t mind that the men who wrote the King James version essentially tacked a good story to the Book of White John.

“If it were real, one of those Pharisees would’ve picked up a rock and bussed that ‘jazzy bell’ upside her head,” Grandma said, laughing. “But just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean a story is not true. It’s a parable about forgiveness. But you can ask Jesus yourself … because you gon’ get to meet him in person if I catch you writing in that Birthday Bible.”

My grandmother was teaching me the literal definition of empathy. She was actually doing what Jesus would do. But according to Pharisees and white people, there is another word for my grandmother, Jesus Christ and anyone who shows understanding, awareness or sympathy for the feelings, thoughts and experiences of other people:

Sinners.

In a state that narrowly escaped being ruled by “sharia law,” a new group of devout, segregationist religious zealots is flocking to a tiny town in the Christian nationalist Garden of Eden to live the Pharisees’ whitest dreams.

The Guardian reports:

A Guardian investigation has revealed that a controversial church whose leader has openly expressed the ambition of creating a “theocracy” in America has accumulated significant influence in the city of Moscow, Idaho.

Christ Church has a stated goal to “make Moscow a Christian town” and public records, interviews, and open source materials online show how its leadership has extended its power and activities in the town.

Church figures have browbeaten elected officials over Covid restrictions, built powerful institutions in parallel to secular government, harassed perceived opponents, and accumulated land and businesses in pursuit of a long-term goal of transforming America into a nation ruled according to its own, ultra-conservative moral precepts.

In Moscow, residents don’t need a supersized, color-coded grandma bible, ancient texts or a Ph.D. in Cosbytology. Anyone who wants to understand the Christian nationalists’ ultra-conservative moral precepts can just take a class at the New Saint Andrews College. At this not-so-prestigious historically non-Black college in the 1% town of Moscow, fellow of theology Joe Rigney teaches a class that has sparked a nationwide movement:

Empathy is a sin.