In less than a minute, Matthew Dowd — a former Republican political strategist turned commentator turned Democratic candidate for Texas lieutenant governor turned commentator again — got virtually nothing right about Jesus.
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Deadline White House,” Dowd claimed the message of Easter is to “love one another” before going on to say: “If Jesus Christ was alive today, he would be called a groomer. He would be called woke. And he would be called a socialist, if he was alive today.”
“If he was speaking the message he spoke in the Gospels today about treating everybody with dignity — Jesus Christ hung around with prostitutes and tax collectors,” he continued. “He was nailed to a cross because he spoke on behalf of the most marginalized people in the Middle East.”
“And the idea that a certain segment of the population has tried to capture the faith and corrupt a message that I [may have been] a follower of since I was baptized and was confirmed and served on the altar in the course of this, is something I think all of us — it’s not just people of faith, but whether Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or don’t have a faith, the message of ‘love conquers hate’ is a message we should be pushing, but especially Christians in the country that can’t stand what happened to our faith,” Dowd added.
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The MSNBC commentator’s remarks were seemingly prompted by conservatives and Christians — and apparently some Democrats — who support Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits public-school educators from teaching children in pre-K through third-grade classrooms about sexual orientation and gender identity.
In the wake of that law’s passage — mischaracterized by the media as the “Don’t Say Gay bill” — many have raised concerns about teachers across the U.S. purportedly using their positions to advance leftist and pro-LGBT talking points to their young students. Some conservatives have called such tactics “grooming.”
Of course, Dowd’s comments about Jesus being called “a groomer” are profane. It’s also troublesome whenever anyone tries to pigeonhole Jesus by placing Him inside a political box, especially a socialist one.
The father of modern socialism, Karl Marx, operated from a very faulty — and poorly informed — premise. He believed capitalism was the catalyst for human beings’ egoism and socialism would reorient people’s hearts, rendering them truly selfless. As Dan Sanchez, editor-in-chief of FEE.org, explained in 2017: “Some go so far as to demand the abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism in order to fully restore benevolence and the intentional promotion of the public interest in the hearts of humankind.”
As Christians, though, we know that capitalism is certainly not the root of our brokenness and self-interest. Rather, it is a result of our sinful nature — a deadly spiritual sickness curable only by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, which is available to us solely because of Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice on the cross, where He paid the price for our sinfulness once and for all. That, by the way, is the real message of Easter.
There are other problems with socialism, too. As GotQuestions.org explains, socialist theory flies in the face of the biblical principles of identity, personal responsibility and dignity, self-sacrifice, and respect for others’ possessions.
And of course, contrary to Dowd’s comments, Jesus is very much alive today.
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