Philadelphia Weekly

Brothers and sisters, I write this epistle from the Cornerstone Christian rock festival in deepest, darkest Illinois. More specifically, I'm in the back of the vegetable oil-fuelled tour bus of the righteous Philly band mewithoutYou. Their singer, Aaron Weiss, is something of a legend in these circles. Yesterday I saw him electrify 200 people with a two-hour sermon that started with a warning that he had absolutely nothing of interest to say, climaxed with a verbal demolition of religious fundamentalism, and ended with him asking Jesus to duct tape his head like a Guantanamo detainee if he said anything stupid or harmful.
 
A few hours ago I watched another Philly band, the Psalters--faces smeared with holy smoke and wreathed with beatific smiles; hearts full of prayer--lead a tent full of progressive and/or oddly dressed Christians through an ancient sounding, near-Eastern rythmed version of the Lord's Prayer while a robed woman on the dance floor waved a flaming chalice. The woman next to me, bopping her head furiously, had electric green dreadlocks hanging out of the back of her burka. Sunday school was never like this.
 
Oh, for sure there's more than enough crazy, life-hating, groin-clutching right wing stuff here. There are stalls with smugly subtle homophobic T-shirt, anti-choice propaganda ("Abortion is selfish") and literature that "proves" Noah stuffed the ark with dinosaurs and that science was made up by the devil to confuse us.
 
You'll find them in the same tent as the "progressive" Christian rock magazine, the antiwar stall and the anti-poverty campaigners. Christians who give a shit, I call them (as opposed to Christians obsessed with abortion, homosexuality, the expansion of the American Empire and the literal truth of the Bible--subjects Jesus plainly didn't give a tuppenny damn about).
 
A couple of the chaps from the Psalters are involved in the Jesus for President campaign. A main plank of their manifesto appears to be that patriotism and nationalism are fundamentally un-Christlike.
 
"The Prince of Peace is born as a refugee in the middle of a genocide and is rescued from the trash bin of imperial executions ... What is a Jesus-follower to do when the empire gets baptized?"
 
And I've seen presumably Psalter-related patches featuring a blackened, upside-down U.S. flag with text taken from the Sermon on the Mount:  "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."
 
This is Jesus speaking. He's saying God's an anti-patriotic commie. You gonna argue with him?
 
Turns out Philly is a hotbed of radical anti-imperialist Christian rock 'n' roll. Whoa--hold the front page--just got an email from Margaret Downey, righteous leading Philly atheist, inviting me to a reading of Christianity-bashing Philadelphian founding father Thomas Paine's anti-imperialist classic Common Sense.
 
What a town!
 
To get to the Psalters show I pass another tent where, as July 4 rockets glare red (and a dozen other lovely colors) in the sky above, a stage jam-packed with healthy, white-toothed, pink-skinned young Christians--bursting with health, glowing with testosterone, seething with unspent spunk--sing "Happy Birthday" (dear America) and the national anthem. And then finish off with a rousing chorus of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!"
 
One can only imagine Jesus--that first-century Palestinian proto-Marxist revolutionary and avowed enemy of greed, selfishness, exploitation and the petty nationalism and imperialism that sustains it--rolling his beautiful dark brown eyes.
 
Hey, didn't he say something about coming back next time with a sword? To establish the kingdom of truth and justice here on earth? Well, obviously, like so much of the Bible, this is a metaphor. The kingdom obviously refers to a socialist society based on equality and justice. And the sword is clearly referring not to an actual old-fashioned edged weapon but to some sort of super sophisticated laser device that liquidizes the rich where they stand and then instantly squirts them the eye of a needle, so they can enter reeducation camps in heaven where they'll be encouraged to read the Sermon on the Mount over and over again until they get it into their thick capitalist skulls that Jesus says that stealing wealth and power from your fellow humans (and, as any real Christian will tell you, all property is theft) is wrong, wrong, wrong.
 
Go meek. Beat greedy. Yay.