Dear Gawker, Jesus Hates It When You Lie About Him

Dear Jennifer Martin at Gawker,

There's an old saying in the blogging world that goes something like this: "You know you've hit the big time when a juvenile, low rent, clickbait gossip website does a hit piece on you." Or maybe I just made that up. I guess it's my attempt at finding the silver lining in your lengthy screed, which Gawker published yesterday, detailing all of the reasons why I'm a terrible person.

The title: "Jesus Would Hate This Christian Blogger Just as Much as You Do."

You run through the familiar progressive script, assigning me the requisite labels of homophobic, transphobic, bigoted, misogynistic and so forth. Unsure of your arguments and unable to engage in a fair discussion, you throw these names around to compensate.

[mattwalsh-social-instory]

As if pulling the whole blustering tirade from a can of processed liberal rhetoric, you even make all of the obligatory references to Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh.

I'm not offended by these remarks -- I struggle to feel terribly injured when someone derisively compares me to the most successful broadcaster in the history of the world  -- but I am bored to death by them.

"You're a conservative? FOXNEWSBILLOREILLYRUSHLIMBAUGHSEANHANNITY! Ohhh take that!" Seriously, it's been that same spiel since, like, 1997. It might be time to update the insult arsenal.

Anyway, I suppose this is just left wing operating procedure and I can't very well hold a website with a "This week in tabloids" feature to a high standard of ingenuity.

For your own sake, though, I hope you eventually come to realize that by standing in your ideological fortress, indiscriminately hurling terms like "racist" at anything outside the walls, you have utterly emptied these words of any meaning at all (except for "transphobic," which never meant anything to begin with).

But it doesn't appear that you were really trying to say anything meaningful, electing to charge out of the gate in the first sentence with some super hip vulgarity:

Have [you] ever thought to yourself, “What the f**k, who actually says that?” while looking at Facebook? Then you’re probably familiar with the blogger Matt Walsh.

I shouldn't be surprised. After all, as another saying goes, "if you bob for apples in a Port-a-John, all you'll end up with is hepatitis and a mouth full of crap." I made that one up too, but it means when I wander into the godforsaken sewer of the internet expecting something mature and intelligent, all I'm going to get is vitriol and fourth grade put-downs, which is mostly what you and your commenters delivered.

I'm not interested in addressing all of them specifically, or defending my honor from a defamatory rag that openly solicits third hand rumors and reprints them as facts. Indeed, a site like yours giving moral lectures is a bit like a strip joint hosting etiquette classes. And I'm equally as uninterested in pointing out every blatant contradiction, although I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight the irony of this line:

But [Walsh's] perspectives aren’t actually based in theological truth, much less Christian love.

That's right. You wrote a whole piece about why Jesus "hates" me, and still found the time to sermonize about "Christian love." This is a common feature of American liberalism. Heap hate and scorn on all who oppose you -- and then chide them for being hateful.

Mother Teresa, you ain't.

[sharequote align="center"]Heap hate and scorn on all who oppose you -- and then chide them for being hateful.[/sharequote]

And, though you've assumed the authority to speak for Him, you ain't Jesus, either. The very fact that you ascribe hatred to the all loving Lord of Creation reveals your severe theological confusion. Unless, perhaps, the title was just meant for shock value, which is a cheap tactic only I would use:

Walsh only offers shock value, not actual value.

Unlike you, I would never deign to add to Holy Scripture, but there's a part of me wondering whether Gawker -- a website that raised money to buy a video of Rob Ford smoking crack -- bemoaning the use of "shock value" is a harbinger of the Apocalypse.

At any rate, cheap shocks would be preferable to outright fabrications, which are peppered generously throughout the diatribe.

In an effort to debunk my assertions that the state of the black family is in disarray, you linked to this study and insisted that such claims are racist.

The enduring racist stereotypes of black fathers are blatantly untrue: 70 percent of black fathers reported bathing, diapering, or dressing their children every single day.

Either you were too lazy to read the report you provided, or you read it and misrepresented it. Either way, the study says, "black fathers who live with their children are just as involved as other dads who live with their kids." The issue, as you know, is not the involvement of black fathers who live with their kids, but the large number of black fathers who don't.

Is this what passes for supporting an argument over at Gawker? Link to an article that undermines it in the first sentence?

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Still, I wouldn't be so concerned with all of the lies and contradictions if you hadn't pulled Jesus into this. Attack me all you want. Call me a mean guy and a bad Christian and the super villain of the blogosphere and whatever else.  That's a fine topic, albeit a rather boring one, even for a site that regularly publishes content like "Ed Sheeran's Uncle Jim Sounds Like A F**king Idiot."

However, in your valiant attempt to discredit some insignificant guy on the internet, you defiled the Holy Scripture, ripped 2,000 years of Christian teaching to shreds, and turned Jesus Christ into a glorified Gender Studies professor.

Jesus Christ—the humble, radical, progressive feminist who fought injustice and brought mercy...

The spitballs you shot at me are irrelevant, but your molestation of the Bible needs to be addressed.

Like progressive Christians tend to do, you tore passages and verses out of context and strangled and contorted them with a violent passion, hoping to remold the Word of God into the Word of Marx. In one especially embarrassing moment, you claim that Jesus made a scene in the temple because He wanted to send an economic message:

Jesus, who protested economic injustice by overturning tables in the temple.

This isn't so much "out of context" as it is a ridiculous bald faced lie. Christ was not driving the money changers out of His Father's house because they represented "economic injustice." He did it because they were turning the holy temple into a market place:

"When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” (John 2:13)

Zeal for His house. Not zeal for progressive fiscal policies. He chased them from the temple because they were desecrating the sacredness of God by using Him for their own measly gains, which is precisely what you've done.

In another section, to make the case that Jesus is pro-gay marriage, you point to the most misquoted and misappropriated phrase in human history: "Don't judge."

Matt Walsh Thinks Gay People are Harmful [But] Jesus Told His Followers to Stop Being So Judgmental

Sorry, Jennifer, but Jesus never said "stop being judgmental," neither did He categorically command His followers to refrain from all types of judging. This would have been a nonsensical statement, considering "judge" means "form a conclusion about." I feel quite confident that Christ never intended to prevent anyone from forming conclusions. In fact, He goes to great lengths to instruct us on just how to form them properly:

Judge not according to the appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.(John 7:24)

Judge with righteous judgment. This is a commandment. An instruction. Judge. Use your judgment and judge. God gave us a conscience, a will, a brain, and the Word, and then he told us how to use them. That's what judgment is.

But not satisfied to wield Jesus' admonitions against poor judgment as an instrument to bludgeon His other commands into smithereens, you go on to profess that homosexuality isn't a sin because Jesus never specifically condemned it.

Jesus said absolutely nothing on the topic of homosexuality...

Irrelevant. And also untrue.

Both Corinthians and Romans clearly categorize homosexual sex as sinful:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Cor 6)

For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. 28 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper. (Rom 1:26)

You attempt to drive a wedge between Christ and His Word by ignoring these passages because Paul wrote them. This is another vicious heresy. Christ is the Word made flesh (John 1:14) and all that is contained in Scripture is infallibly true because it was spoken by God through the men who composed it. To reject the Pauline letters and cling only to the Gospels is to suggest that Scripture is not divinely inspired and thus erase any reason to believe the Gospels in the first place.

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Of course, even if we look solely at the Gospels, you're still wrong:

And He answered and said to them, ‘Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning “made them male and female,” and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? (Matthew 19:4)

Conspicuously, He never said "wife or husband." He said "a man shall be joined to his wife." Period. He couldn't have made it any more clear.

Speaking of God creating them male and female, your most impressive feat of Scriptural mutilation came in the section about "transgenders." Taking exception to the fact that I humbly agree with Jesus's opinions about God making us male and female -- as opposed to male and female and shemale -- you contend that Christ never meant to enforce "binary gender systems" at all:

While many fundamentalists take this to mean that God intended all people to be cisgender and heterosexual, that does not mean that there were only binary gender systems in place.

You go on to quote Matthew 19, which says:

Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

Comporting "eunuch" with "transgendered" is an act of distortion so flagrant that I suffered an immediate migraine upon reading it. A eunuch, I can report with certainty, is not a cross dresser. Christ is here referring to men who have been castrated or who were born genitally deformed or sterile. This is both the historic and present definition of the term, and the only one that makes sense.

When Christ mentions those who "live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom," He is clearly discussing those who choose to be celibate. Again, both traditional sexuality and "binary gender systems" are plainly enforced by Scripture. Jesus is giving men two choices: find a woman and get married, or live a celibate life. Never once does He add "become a woman" or "fornicate with men" to the list of acceptable options.

Those are Christ's actual commands, which are quite at odds with Christ's commands as told by Gawker Media, Inc.

Crucially, the central theme of your various apostasies, and indeed the centerpiece of all of Progressive faux-Christendom, can be found in this section of the article:

Matt Walsh Thinks Transgender People Are Ill [But] Jesus Said They Should Live the Way They Want

...I would argue that Jesus himself was not only aware of people who did not identify their gender by their biological sex, but that he actually encouraged those individuals to live in the way they felt most comfortable...

Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? Here we arrive at the dividing line between what you call "fundamentalist Christianity" and this new progressive abomination you and many others have concocted. This is why you despise true Christianity with such a passion. This is why you've eagerly skimmed through Scripture, selected random phrases here and there, divorced them from the whole, and attempted to build a new faith from the dismembered parts.

Jesus rebuilt the temple in three days through the miracle of His resurrection (John 2:19), but we have neither the power to resurrect ourselves nor the authority to write a new Gospel and instill in it the fullness of Truth. The gospel we write is dead, and it can bring only death to those who follow it.

Your gospel -- the Gospel according to 21st century American liberalism -- boils down to what you say right here: Live the way you want. Do what makes you comfortable.

This may be a great mantra for a gay pride bumper sticker or a t-shirt at a rock festival, but it doesn't even vaguely resemble anything Jesus ever said. Instead, Our Lord told us to abandon sin (John 8:11); to reject materialism (Matthew 19:21); to stay loyal to our spouses and to not even think lustful thoughts about another (Matthew 5:27); to give up everything, even our lives (Matthew  16:25). From the Garden of Eden to the Sermon on the Mount, from the Ten Commandments to Christ's exhortations to the apostles before He ascended, from each verse to the next, screaming out of every page and chapter, comes this unmistakable and sometimes terrifying and always challenging message: "Do what makes you holy, no matter how it makes you feel."

[sharequote align="center"] "Do what makes you holy, no matter how it makes you feel."[/sharequote]

Not only did Christ never whisper the faintest suggestion that our lives should be governed by our wants and our comforts, but every command and call to action was, and is, intended to specifically abolish that sinful attitude. What you are advancing isn't just a misinterpretation of Christianity, but the antithesis of it.

Satan rebelled against God because he wanted to serve himself above all. Liberalism, particularly Christian liberalism, continues that rebellion to a degree never before witnessed among mortal beings.

That's why I despise your ideology -- not you, I love you because you are a child of God -- I despise liberalism because it is a lie that convinces people to live according to their desires instead of the Truth. It denies all that stands in the way of its own carnal fulfillment. It takes our eyes away from what is sacred and turns us inside out, where all we can see is the darkness of ourselves severed from the Creator.

The only thing that Jesus hates is sin because sin leads his sheep astray. By using Christ's words to justify immorality and advance untruths, you are a shepherd scattering and destroying His flock (Jeremiah 23:1). Jennifer, that is what Jesus hates. You are lying about him, and He hates it:

There are six things the Lord hates,

seven that are detestable to him:

haughty eyes,

a lying tongue,

hands that shed innocent blood,

a heart that devises wicked schemes,

feet that are quick to rush into evil,

a false witness who pours out lies

and a person who stirs up conflict in the community. (Proverbs 6:16)

Notice that I don't say any of this as a perfect man. I am flawed and weak. I have suffered the devastating pain and confusion of betraying God and going down my own path in spite of Him. Yes, I've never been plagued with same sex attraction, I've never been burdened by the delusion of "transgenderism," I've never had an abortion, etc., but I have sinned in my own ways. Why would I -- how could I, how could anyone -- sit by and let our culture promote sin as the way to happiness when I have known the despair that such separation from the Lord brings?

It's only necessary to harp on some of these issues -- gay marriage, abortion -- because these are the severe evils people like you actively encourage. These sins have their own interest groups, their own marketing teams. That's why they have to be particularly engaged, because they are being particularly pushed.

Am I hateful for pushing back?

No, it is hateful to stay silent. It is hateful to lead the flock further astray for the sake "comfort" or "pleasure" or whatever hollow reward.

It is hateful to tell people to live how they want.

That is hate, Jennifer.

And it's dripping from your every word.

I'll be praying for you.

Sincerely,

Matt

Feature Image: Screenshot

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