Jesus said it:
But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.” For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.
That was then, this is now. How might Jesus transpose all that to our 21st-century generation? Perhaps like this:
Bill Leonard
It is like teens texting on their cell phones. “We sent you a serious text, but you LOLed us; we posted you multiple Instagrams, but you didn’t “heart” any of them! For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has an eating disorder.” The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “He went to the pub with us, but he ordered a Bud Lite, so you know who HIS friends are!”
In this Matthean text, Jesus seems to be letting off a little Gospel steam at his first-century critics, the same kind of folks the 19th-century frontier revivalist Barton W. Stone called “the sticklers of orthodoxy,” religious leaders who consistently monitored the words and actions of Jesus and John, his Baptist colleague.
The religious crowd judged John as far too strident (he had called them a “generation of vipers” after all); and Jesus, by contrast, was a “loose liver,” soft on sinners, with women and assorted Gentiles hanging around him, and in their view, skirting the Mosaic Law every chance he could get.
“For the protectors of orthodoxy, Jesus was a doctrinal danger of the first magnitude.”
For the protectors of orthodoxy, Jesus was a doctrinal danger of the first magnitude — friends with the wrong people, claiming divine authority for casting out demons, acting to heal all sorts of messed up folks and, worse yet, doing such things on the sabbath, thus violating God’s own “order of creation.”
The sticklers of orthodoxy are with us yet, signing doctrinal statements like the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the Nashville Statement on Gender and Sexuality, in addition to assorted confessions of faith. Yet many of those signatories also identify with the politics of the Republican Party and its leader, a decision that seems to have dampened their moralist credentials considerably.
That actuality is not lost on New York Times columnist, Harvard-educated lawyer and outspoken evangelical, David French, whom I cite often in this space, because of his proven Christian convictions and his brutal honesty about the religio-political machinations of our times. In a May 1 opinion piece which I only recently discovered, French wrote, “The Christian Right Is Going Extinct.”
He begins by asserting the Christian right’s original motivation “could be boiled down to a single sentence: Elect people of good personal character who will defend human life and religious liberty.” As evidence, French references a 1998 resolution from the Southern Baptist Convention, declaring: “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
French acknowledges the 47th president “owes his election to white evangelical voters. He welcomes faith leaders into the Oval Office, Trump’s Christian allies hold worship services in the White House, and the Republican Party is stocked top to bottom with elected officials who loudly broadcast their Christian faith.”
“If politics is the religion, then political disagreement is proof of apostasy.”
Yet French confesses he’s only recently recognized this: “It is no coincidence that as the religious right becomes less distinctively Christian, it is also becoming more intolerant of political dissent. If politics is the religion, then political disagreement is proof of apostasy.”
MAGA evangelicals, like children in the marketplace, are saying “we played the flute for you, and you did not dance to our tune!”
These days, French distinguishes between the Christian right, and the Religious Right. He writes:
There are still countless conservative Christians in the United States. Politics is not their faith, and they will break with any party or politician who contradicts the teachings of Christ. But there is another, more powerful faction in the American evangelical church. For its members, Republicanism is the new political religion, and its creed is whatever (President 47) wants it to be.
Thus French’s new thesis: “The Christian right is dead, but the religious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Another way of putting it is that the religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.”
To support his point, French cites the work of politics professor/statistician Ryan Burge who, in a 2019 study compared “the political beliefs of evangelical and nonevangelical Republicans” and concluded, “looked at broadly, we see from this there is essentially no difference between a Republican who is white and born-again and a Republican in general.”
French’s critique of the “religious right” raises larger questions for American Christians and their churches, right, left and center. Is today’s religio-political chaos and division leading all of us to divorce ourselves from “historical Christian theology” while still holding our “partisan beliefs with religious intensity?”
Right now, the gospel bottom line is this: When Congress passes the 2025 “big beautiful bill” that strips the disabled, SNAP recipients and the poor of basic, minimal resources in order to give the wealthy another tax break, will our churches raise the funds to make up the difference? Is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, bringing “good news to the poor” a biblical mandate or a mere political option?
If that’s not a question at the heart of “historical Christian theology,” then nothing is.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.