My Point of View: What does it look like to practice what Jesus taught… – Albert Lea Tribune

Identifying with a religion is one thing — actually following a religion’s moral principles is another.
Religion is, on one hand, an important means of gaining identity and acceptance. Belonging is a basic human need. The basic need to fit in with a group, though, can be manipulated and can override someone’s ability or motivation to carefully evaluate a situation. Not everyone who follows a religion uses it for moral reasoning. In this way, religion can become more tribal than ethical.
Most slaveowners identified as Christians, no matter what horrors they inflicted on their human property. Most Nazi soldiers identified as Christians, no matter what crimes against humanity they committed in service to Hitler. Most ICE agents probably identify as Christian, even as they rip apart families at scheduled immigration hearings, shoot pastors with projectiles and break the ribs of elderly citizens. 
Judge people by what they do, not by if they flaunt a Christian identity (or some other faith). It is easy for someone to say they are a Christian and that they support “Christian values,” especially in a majority Christian community; it is harder and more costly to follow the teachings of Christ.
I often think of the Bible verse from Matthew 7: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.”
The Trump administration is full of people wearing showy crosses but not acting in alignment with Christian principles. The Trump administration regularly appears to worship greed and reward those who bend their oath to the Constitution to serve Trump. For example, Trump signed into law huge tax cuts to billionaires while cutting health care subsidies to regular people. He has pardoned all the people who beat up police, trashed offices and smeared feces on the walls of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in service to Trump’s 2020 election lies. He pardoned George Santos for fraud, and he pardoned a money-laundering cryptocurrency billionaire, Changpeng Zhao, who was CEO of a company in which Trump’s family has substantial investments.
As Trump covers more surfaces in the Oval Office with gold leaf, he directed his administration to go to court to block SNAP payments from going out to people last week. Purposely trying to make people go hungry is in violation of Christ’s teachings. It is laid out in Matthew 25, including, “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did not do for me.”
Look beyond the label. Let’s go back to the slave owner example. Both people who opposed slavery and the people who supported slavery in the U.S. were largely Christian. If you’re basing your judgment of these two sides on identity, you could make the shallow determination that both were good because they were Christian. Obviously that is not enough.
One must look at the fruits of what people did. As Frederick Douglass observed unsparingly in his autobiography, “I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of ‘stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.’” 
The fruits of abolition was freedom, the fruits of slavery was dirty wealth and tortured bodies. That is the truth and the distinction that matters, despite a shared Christian label, despite slaveholder myths about happy slaves.
I focus on Christianity here for two reasons. First, Christianity is the religion that the largest number of people in this community identify with. Second, the majority of voters in this community also chose Trump.
What does it look like to practice what Jesus taught? It means valuing honesty rather than taking advantage of people, it means taking care of one another’s needs rather than leaving people without services, and it means valuing “enough” rather than admiring people who have acquired obscene amounts of wealth by any means.
We live in a country with freedom of religion. I think our First Amendment rights are the key to defending all our freedoms. I would love it, though, if more people who identify as Christians would more closely evaluate what it means to practice the teachings of Jesus. Maybe then we wouldn’t be on the precipice of losing self-government to an administration that claims to be Christian while conspicuously violating both Christ’s teachings and the U.S. Constitution.
Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.

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