Professor: Religious Right Worships ‘A**hole’ God of ‘White Supremacy’

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) has caused Rutgers Professor Brittney Cooper  to seethe with uncontainable rage and hatred towards conservatives.

Cooper argues that the law “is rooted in politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women” and that conservatives worship their own racist god.

“This white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, gun toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a god of their own making,” Cooper wrote for for the lefty rag Salon, entitled The right’s made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus.  “I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy…This God isn’t the God that I serve…He might be ‘biblical’ but he’s also an asshole ”

The progressive academic also contends that Jesus was most likely gay.

“The Jesus I know, love, talk about and choose to retains was a radical, freedom-loving, justice-seeking, potentially queer (because he was either asexual or a priest married to prostitute), feminist healer, unimpressed by scripture-quoters and religious law-keepers, seduced neither by power nor evil, ” she wrote.

She wants to “reclaim the narrative of Jesus’ life and death from the evangelical right” who have conservatives have “pimped Jesus’ death” to support American imperialism, the subjugation of Black people and the regulation of the sexual lives of women and gay people.

From Cooper’s article:

Any time right-wing conservatives declare that they are trying to restore or reclaim something, we should all be very afraid. Usually, this means the country or, in this case, the state of Indiana is about to be treated to another round of backward time travel, to the supposedly idyllic environs of the 1950’s, wherein women, and gays, and blacks knew their respective places and stayed in them. While the unspoken religious subtext of this law is rooted in conservative anxieties over the legalization of same-sex marriage in Indiana, Black people and women, and all the intersections thereof (for instance Black lesbians) should be very afraid of what this new law portends.

There is nothing about their god that speaks to me as a Black woman of working-class background living in a country where police routinely murder black men and beat the hell out of black women, where the rich get richer while politicians find ever more reasons to extract from the poor, and where the lives the church imagines for women still center around marriage and motherhood, and no sex if you’re single…

Nothing about the cultural and moral regime of the religious right in this country signals any kind of freedom. In fact, this kind of legislation is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women…

…given our current anti-Black racial climate, there is no reason to trust that these laws won’t be eventually used for acts of racially inflected religious discrimination, perhaps against Black Muslims or Muslims of Arab descent, for instance. Surely this kind of law in this political climate sanctions the exercise of Islamophobia…

There is nothing about their god that speaks to me as a Black woman of working-class background living in a country where police routinely murder black men and beat the hell out of black women, where the rich get richer while politicians find ever more reasons to extract from the poor, and where the lives the church imagines for women still center around marriage and motherhood, and no sex if you’re single…

But as I watch the religious right engineer pain and obstacles for queer people in America’s heartland, I find myself wishing that this particularly violent and vicious breed of Christianity would die off…

I cannot stand in a church and worship on Sunday alongside those who on the very next Monday co-sign every kind of legislation that devalues the lives of Black people, women and gay people. I am a firm believer that our theology implicates our politics. If your politics are rooted in the contemporary anti-Black, misogynist, homophobic conservatism, then we are not serving the same God. Period.

Gee, if she feels this way about the “Republican god” what does she think of the Muslim “god” ?