The Church Is Not a Political Party — And Neither Is Jesus by Jeff Callaway

The Church Is Not a Political Party — And Neither Is Jesus

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"I hate, and have rejected your festivities: and I will not receive the odour of your assemblies." — Amos 5:21 (Douay-Rheims)

You put His name on the yard sign.

You hammered it into the lawn of the church parking lot right next to the collection basket, right next to the stained glass, right next to the cross He bled on, as if He died so your candidate could win a primary.

You carried the Gospel to the rally like a prop. You waved it at the cameras. You held it up like a deed of ownership, like the God of all creation had signed the title of Himself over to your party platform and you were just here to collect.

I have watched this my whole life and I am done staying quiet about it.

There is a man with a flag pin on his lapel standing at a lectern quoting Leviticus while his war contractors cash their checks on Monday. His hands are clean for the Sunday cameras. His hands are soaked in what they bought with your offerings. He has turned the house of prayer into a campaign headquarters and he will shake your hand after the service and smile the way a man smiles when he knows you will not look him in the eye long enough to see what is actually there.

And there is another man who recites the words of Christ about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger — while he signs away the life of the child in the womb with the same pen, on the same desk, in the same week, and calls it compassion.

God sees the pen. God sees the desk. God sees the child.

Both of these men have made a religion. Neither of them made it out of Jesus. They made it out of themselves and spray-painted His Name across the front so the rest of us would stop asking questions.

Lord, I am not writing to You from a place of composure.

I am writing to You from a place of three in the morning when the television is off and the quiet is so loud it sounds like indictment and a man cannot escape what he knows.

I know what this is.

This is not politics gone wrong. This is not a system that drifted. You do not drift into this. You engineer this.

Two cages. One invisible hand. And they keep us inside the cages screaming at each other through the bars while the man holding the key does whatever he wants to this country without a single set of eyes on him because every set of eyes in America is pointed sideways at the enemy they built for us in a laboratory and handed to us through a screen.

This is the oldest trick in the Enemy's playbook. Divide. Name an enemy. Feed the division until it becomes identity. Until a man will let his neighbor starve because the neighbor voted differently. Until a woman will hate the woman on the other street whose crime was trusting a different liar.

And the children of Moloch count their money in rooms we are not allowed to enter and laugh at us the way the powerful always laugh at the people they have successfully turned against each other.

Lord, I am asking You to make them afraid.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. I mean the primal fear that comes when a man realizes the thing watching him is not impressed by his money, not moved by his lawyers, not subject to his jurisdiction, not buyable, not foolable, not capable of being spun.

Let them feel that. Let the midnight come down on them the way it came down on Egypt. Let their schemes develop cracks at the foundation. Let the machinery seize. Let the noise stop.

But Lord, before You bring the thunder —

I am also asking for mercy on the people.

Not the architects. Not the ones who built this cage on purpose. I mean the people who are sitting in it thinking it is freedom.

I mean the man who has been to church every Sunday for forty years and genuinely believes Jesus belongs to his party because no one ever told him otherwise, because the preacher with the television contract and the book deal and the private plane never told him otherwise, because the whole machinery of this deception was specifically designed to make sure no one ever told him otherwise.

He is not stupid. He is deceived. And the Scripture You gave him says that there will come a reckoning for those who did the deceiving.

Wake him up, Father. Not gently. He has been asleep too long for gentle.

Wake her up. The woman who has wrapped her faith in a party flag so tightly she cannot tell anymore which one she is actually holding.

Wake up every American who traded the Magisterium for a cable news channel and calls it discernment.

The Catechism is not a platform. The Beatitudes are not a talking point. The Social Doctrine of the Church is not the property of the left and the right to life is not the property of the right and the moment you let either one of them convince you they own half of Christ you have let them cut your Lord in half like a man dividing what cannot be divided, like a King who would never let that stand.

Tear this down, Father.

Not the people — never the people — but the structure of the lie. The machinery of the division. The whole architecture of the kept-stupid, the kept-fighting, the kept-too-broke-and-too-angry-to-look-up.

And when it falls, build something in the rubble that looks like what Your Son actually said.

Where the man who fought in Your name overseas comes home to a country that remembers his name.

Where the child born into nothing is not condemned to nothing by a system that needed her poor to keep the quarterly numbers clean.

Where the widow is not invisible because she has no lobby, no super PAC, no senator who owes her a phone call.

Where the stranger at the gate is seen with the eyes Your Son commanded us to use — not the eyes the television gave us.

Where the poor are not a campaign slogan dusted off every four years and put back in the drawer.

Where justice runs like water. Where the last are lifted. Where the ledger is kept by Someone who cannot be bribed, cannot be lobbied, cannot be spun, and who will ask every man and every woman one question only at the end of all this noise:

What did you do for the least of these?

Not what party. Not what flag. Not what cable network.

What did you do.

That is the only question that survives the grave. And not one of them in Washington is ready to answer it.

But God — You are coming to ask it anyway.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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