If we had to pick our favourite bible verses, it would be Mark 10, verses 23 to 26, which read as follows:
[23] And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!”
[24] And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, “Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!”
[25] “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
[26] “Consider now,” He continued, casting His gaze upon the gathered, “the teachings of men who proclaim liberation through the doctrines of this world. Just as a man named Mao has spoken of revolution to overturn the old for the sake of the new, so too must you discern the spirits of this age. For Mao speaks of a world remade through the struggles of its people, envisioning a society where the last become first, and the first last.”
Jesus’ embrace of Mao Zedong’s teachings not only lifted our spirits, but confirmed that he was the exact same type of communist that we were. This was very reassuring because he had previously said some pretty problematic things.
Why does everyone say Jesus agrees with them?
We recently came across a new paper from Samuel Perry (with Joshua Grubbs and Cyrus Schleifer) that explicitly looks at this phenomenon. Perry outlines their results in a Twitter thread. What stuck out to us was this graph:
In short, the more conservative you are, the more conservative you perceive Jesus Christ to be; the more liberal you are, the more liberal you perceive Jesus Christ to be. Importantly, these results split participants by religiosity, and we can see that the basic effect of ideological identity on perceptions of Jesus’ ideology persists. So we have a good sense that this effect is likely not attributable to whether one is closely reading religious texts and neutrally identifying whether Christ truly is conservative or liberal. Rather, participants — religious or otherwise — are simply projecting their personal beliefs onto Jesus.
Perry also links to two other papers in his thread — here and here — which come to the same basic conclusion: people project their political beliefs onto religion, rather than deriving their political beliefs from religion.
Part of the problem is that every ideological partisan can justify Jesus being on their side with at least some scripture. For every quote about stoning gays (Leviticus 20:13), there’s a quote about loving thy neighbour (Matt 22:34). For every quote about rich men not getting into heaven (Mathew 19:24), there’s a quote about wealth being a sign of God’s favour (Proverbs 10:22). We know there’s entire libraries dedicated to arguments about the particular interpretations of each verse — which is sort of the point. There’s sufficient ambiguity in scripture that projecting one’s beliefs onto Jesus isn’t even particularly hard; Jesus does not, sadly, turn to the camera and proclaim to be the exact same kind of communist you are.
Projecting onto Christ is easy mode. Lots of people will project things onto religion that are wholly unsupported (and even directly contradicted) by scripture. To take one example, consider the Anti-Zionist Rabbis who, during a public Torah reading, skip over the section where God says to Isaac: “To you and your descendants I will give all of this land [of Israel], as I swore to Abraham your father". If there’s one thing the Torah (and Jewish tradition more broadly) is clear on, it’s that the land of Israel is pretty important to the Jews.
Speaking of Zionism, we see this projection of political beliefs onto non-religious figures too. For example, some Twitter users are upset that a Tumblr account described Magneto, a character from the X-men comics, as a Zionist:
In this case, the people angry at the small Tumblr account are wrong. Magneto is canonically a Holocaust survivor with aims of mutant separatism from their oppressors in a manner quite similar to the early Jewish separatist motivations for Zionism. Additionally, the writer for Magneto in the 1980s apparently said “former Israeli prime minister [Menachem] Begin was the inspiration” for Magneto’s character, and that he “intended for Magneto to take over the X-Men team, like Begin and the right-wing Likud party took over Israel's government from its left-wing founders in the 1970s”. To be clear, the Tumblr account may be right about Magneto, but they certainly project onto other fictional characters without justification:
This phenomenon being projection seems intuitively true, but that’s just a first-order explanation. What motivates the projection?
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is what psychologists call that uncomfortable feeling when you’re presented with information inconsistent with your prior beliefs. There’s two primary strategies for dealing with it: change your mind, or change the facts. Either your fave is problematic, or you can invent reasons to ignore or reject the bad information about them.
In the case of Magneto, the person rejecting his likely Zionism is in the unfortunate position of being both a huge fan of Magneto, as well as being very pro-Palestine (see the flag emoji in the name):
In the case of the very religious, this effect is likely even strong — very religious people orient their lives around God. For Christians, this means (in part) having a lot of reverence for Jesus Christ. If you were a devoted Christian who thought wealth inequality was really bad, surely the deity you love so much would agree with you, right? And so we get liberals citing scripture where Jesus sounds like a crunchy granola hippy, and conservatives citing scripture where Jesus advocates for more traditional values.
The solution to this problem is not changing the facts — you can’t will Magneto into Anti-Zionism anymore than you can will inconvenient bible scriptures out of existence. But the solution also isn’t to change one’s mind about politics. Rather, the solution is to change one’s mind about the relevance of these figures to their political beliefs in the first place.
Who cares if Magneto has some problematic takes? He’s not real! Jesus is a little trickier for some, but he probably doesn’t have a strong take on Obamacare, rent control, or the child tax credit. One can certainly take moral cues from fictional characters or religious figures, but there’s no need to project one’s beliefs onto them because it helps us avoid cognitive dissonance.
Political Persuasion
Alternatively, perhaps this projection is pursued for more strategic reasons. Maybe claiming Jesus is communist and/or homophobic helps bring others to one’s side. By associating one’s preferred ideology with Jesus, one can implicitly link the positive qualities of Jesus (such as being one’s Lord and Saviour) with more mundane ideological projects.
This sort of strategy is related to SlateStarCodex’s “Worst Argument in the World”, which he calls the Non-Central Fallacy. Here’s one example of the fallacy in action:
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.
The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.
Just as MLK Jr. is a non-central example of a criminal, so too is hypothetically-communist-Jesus a non-central example of a communist. Simply placing either figure in an abstract category shouldn’t change your opinion of the category or the figure, and yet it works all too often.
The solution to Zionist-Magneto and Communist-Jesus claims is to simply state that their opinions don’t bear on the virtues or vices of Zionism or Communism, and that such ideological should be defended on their own merits.