Pitts: Conservative Christians’ vile image of God

“Oh, we have to love these people and take care of these migrants,” she says in a mocking singsong.

“Yes, we’re supposed to love one another, but their definition of what ‘love one another’ means means destroying our laws. … The true meaning of loving one another … means that you also have to uphold the law.”

It’s a bizarre exegesis supported by no Bible.

To the contrary, Greene’s take invalidates generations of Christian activism, thousands of believers — Martin Luther King is only the most prominent — arrested in every cause from racial equality to climate change to nuclear arms to the death penalty.

Further, it ignores that the very founder of the faith was a refugee who was later executed — spoiler alert: it didn’t stick — for supposedly breaking the law.

The congresswoman’s misapplication of the faith she claims to uphold ought not surprise anyone.

The Bible says God created mankind “in his own image.” But many alleged conservatives invert that.

They create the deity in their image, a God who thinks and acts like them, who bears their limitations and biases, their solipsism and illogicality, their mendacity and abiding fear.

And they hold to that false deity with ferocious vigor.

Author Eddy Harris once described a conversation with a white woman in Mississippi whose mother belonged to a whites-only church in the 1960s.

The older woman was asked whether Jesus would have allowed African Americans to worship in his church. “Of course he would have,” she said, “but Jesus would have been wrong.”

In other words, asked to choose between the prime directive of her faith — “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind … love your neighbor as yourself” — and the miserly nature of her own heart, she chose the latter.

As does Greene. As do millions of other putative Christians on a daily basis.

Tarnished view

It’s not hard to understand why they create God in their own image.

If God is just like you, it makes life a lot easier. If God is just like you, you already are everything you need to be. So there’s no cause to work, challenge, stretch or pray yourself into becoming a better, humbler, gentler, kinder, more liberal and generous soul.

You don’t have to care about the plight of the stranger, the hungry, the broken, the unhoused, the immigrant at the border. If God is just like you, you can be self-satisfied and judgmental instead.

Why not?

If God is just like you, you are, by definition, correct in all your biases and fears.

But what if God is not?