Opinion | A Christmas Conversation About Christ – The New York Times

Moore: As the novelist Walker Percy once said of a scandalously roguish television evangelist of his time, “Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn’t mean that God does not exist.”

Kristof: I teased you a moment ago, saying that Jesus seemed center-left. I was joking, but only a little. “Woe to you who are rich,” Jesus says. He advises a rich person to “sell everything you have and give to the poor” and explains that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Sounds kind of lefty, doesn’t it?

Moore: Jesus was frustrating to the people around him — sometimes his own followers — because he wouldn’t “line up” with some political or nationalistic faction or the other. When people wanted to make him king, he withdrew to the mountains. That’s why he counted both tax collectors — collaborators with the Roman Empire — and zealots — those who wanted liberation from the empire — as his followers.

Evangelical Christians around the world can be found on almost every place on the political and ideological spectrum. Most secular people, when they think of evangelicals and politics, tend to think only of white American evangelicals, while ignoring Black and Hispanic and Asian American evangelicals, not to mention the majority of evangelicals who have never set foot in North America.

Jesus sounds “left” in some cases and “right” in others. That’s why when we really pay attention to what he’s saying, all of us will be uncomfortable at some point or another. He just refuses to be a “useful” political mascot for anybody.

Kristof: Two of the main moral issues that evangelicals have been associated with in the last few decades are hostility to abortion and to gay people. Jesus never spoke directly about either, but he was explicit about being against divorce and in favor of giving away all one’s money. So why hijack faith to obsess about abortion and same-sex lovers?

Moore: The premise isn’t really true. Jesus did speak to the issue of marriage — both in terms of its definition and its permanence. I am against abortion for the same reasons I’m against separating migrant children from their mothers at the border. I just don’t think we should estimate a person’s value based on how powerful or “viable” he or she is. When told to “love your neighbor as yourself,” one questioner asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” When we find ourselves asking that question — whether about a pregnant woman, her unborn child, a refugee family, a person suffering with AIDS, or anyone else — we are already in a failure to love. We can, and ought to, love them all.