Let's get right to it: I’ve invented The Rattlesnake Test, basically the most significant innovation in Christianity since, I don’t know, let’s say the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary. I’m very proud of it, so far it’s working very well for me. It’s named as an homage to Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote in 2005’s A Man Without a Country (his final published work during his lifetime) that “If Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.”
Here’s how The Rattlesnake Test works: if you make a decision or do something, and if you cite your Christian faith as the reason that you did made that decision or did what you did, an outside observer should be able to look at your decision and rationale and say “ah, okay, I see, this person’s Christian faith led them to decide something differently than they would have decided if they had just been acting on animal instinct.” An outside observer shouldn’t look at you and say “okay, that just kind of seems like the thing he was going to do anyways. Actually, it doesn’t even seem like that, it seems like the same thing he would have done even if he wasn’t a rational human being but rather a rattlesnake or similar animal incapable of higher-level thinking.” Because if they can say that, then what the hell was the point of even being Christian in the first place?
Let’s start with an easy example, one that we're all familiar with and for which you’ve already seen plenty of valid critiques. JD Vance goes on Fox News on January 30th of this year, and in the context of defending a mass deportation policy, he says “I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Like I said, there are a lot of critiques of that statement. For instance, I don’t think he’s being sincere at all that he actually believes this is his duty as a Christian, and you probably don’t either. The patristic “ordo amoris” that he cites doesn’t actually say what he claims it says. The theology proposed is so incorrect that Pope Francis himself wrote a letter to the USCCB after the interview saying, in essence, “this is the wrongest thing I’ve ever heard”; this made the breathless defense of Vance that ran on Word On Fire on the same day the Pope put his letter out orders of magnitude more embarrassing than the normal extremely embarrassing content Word On Fire publishes every day. My critique at the time, which remains the best one, was that Vance sounded a lot like the villain of a cult stop-motion television show from 2005. Look, Vance did a bad job, he’s bad at talking about Catholicism.
But let’s look at this with a slightly different lens, let’s just assume Vance is absolutely sincere about everything and look at the words at the surface level. Vance says, essentially, “I am Christian, and because I am Christian, I am guided by the idea that first and foremost, I have to take care of my family and people close to me. I have to prioritize them above all else. It is okay to pursue a policy of mass deportation, and in fact the teachings of my faith condone it, because it results in a benefit to the people closest to me: my family, my community, my nation.” IF Christian, THEN prioritize people based on proximity, THEN yes support mass deportation. Vance is a well-educated guy who converted to Catholicism as an adult and presents himself as someone who is knowledgeable in the faith, who has read and engaged with Catholic theology at some level above the average Catholic layperson. He converted, made this big life change as an adult, and if we assume he is sincere about his faith, he did it because he felt that something in his life needed to change in order for him to live his life authentically. And he does all of that, he goes through OCIA class, he ingests the theology, and the conclusion he lands on earlier this year is “yeah, I think I’m going to have to take care of my family first and foremost and fuck everyone else.” I suppose he’s allowed to have that point of view, but the critique, if you put aside the cruelty and idiocy, is that there’s no need for Christianity in any of that equation. You don’t need rigorous study to arrive at “ah, I see, perhaps I should take care of my family at the expense of everyone else.” You already have that in the reptilian part of your brain! You know how I know that? Because reptiles can do it! A rattlesnake takes care of her baby rattlesnakes1 and chases away predators, and she keeps herself alive, and she doesn't care about anything else or exist for any other purpose, at least to her own consciousness. So I don't know, folks, if you are not only human with fully formed neural pathways, but the kind of human that professes to follow Jesus Christ, who made a decision to live his life differently because of the teachings of his church, shouldn't we expect you to care about at least one more thing than the stuff I can get a rattlesnake to care about?
Sojourners editor Tyler Huckabee wrote a great piece in his newsletter earlier this year about “Wario Jesus”, the Jesus people use to justify rattlesnake-level thinking. This passage is long but worth it:
[The Daily Wire’s Meg Basham] recently posted this novel interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and you couldn’t ask for a better example of how Wario Jesus operates: “What you seem to be missing is that the love shown by the Good Samaritan is so extravagant that every single person on this planet fails to meet that standard. Only one has ever shown that kind of love. And that was the point of the parable. To show us how far we are from God’s standard so that we realize that only by taking on the righteousness of Christ, could we ever meet it. It’s not actually a story just telling you to be nice to people. It’s a story pointing you to your need for a perfect Savior.”
Interesting take! Let’s table, for now, the idea that the actions of the Good Samaritan — helping someone who’s in trouble — represent some impossible standard of Christian living. Let’s also table the fact that Basham conveniently ignores Jesus’ final line of this parable: “Go and do likewise.” Those are concerns of Jesus, but we’re not talking about Jesus here. We’re talking about Wario Jesus. Wario Jesus occupies a Bizarro Gospel where the words and actions of Jesus are meant to be taken literally but not seriously. For Wario Jesus, everyone in ancient Israel was basically family, so “love your neighbor” was just a command to love people who are like you. For Wario Jesus, the command to love immigrants and strangers was a nice idea back then, but not realistic in today’s far more complicated world. Wario Jesus’ warnings about the rich were actually about how being rich is fine and good, and it’s actually the poor people who are the really greedy ones. And for Wario Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan was not about how to treat those who need help, but just a story illustrating that we not only CAN not help others but SHOULD not help others and in fact should be going out of our way to makes others’ lives as miserable as possible.
I don’t have much to add to Huckabee’s very thorough analysis in the essay - I mean, Jesus does literally say “go and do likewise”, it is very difficult to get around that - but I’m sure you can see how this fits with the Rattlesnake Test. What Basham, and people like her, posit is that they have paid close attention to the teachings of Jesus and concluded that what they need to do is walk past people who are suffering, only be kind or merciful to people they like, and, uh, hoard resources so they can stay rich. All of these, of course, are things that a person can do without any of the teachings of Jesus. If Basham had never heard of Christianity and wanted to figure out the guiding principles for her life, she could have still landed on “look after the people closest to me, defend myself from anything strange or unfamiliar, and hoard as many resources as I can”. She would have easily been able to use these principles to satisfy her instincts to survive and reproduce, which are also instincts that rattlesnakes have. Why even bother with Jesus at this point? If you cite Jesus as a moral teacher, doesn’t that suggest that there was something that you needed to learn from Him at some point?
You can kind of see how Huckabee and I are viewing the same problem from two different angles. Huckabee is looking at the people who say “you think Jesus said this, but He actually meant a complete opposite thing that condones whatever I was going to do anyways”. My point is that “whatever I was going to do anyways” is not only contrary to Jesus’ teachings, but doesn't even require any moral teaching, or higher-level reasoning, or self-awareness of any kind. It’s thinking and behaving like an animal that can’t pass the mirror test.
Maybe you remember earlier this year, when all those idiots piled on that Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde for daring to tell Donald Trump the divisive message of “please be merciful to people who are frightened right now”. One of Budde's critics, Reformed Baptist pastor Ben Garrett, infamously posted in his critique of Budde “do not commit the sin of empathy”, an array of words that I did not think went together at all. When I see another person, particularly one who is suffering, I think about how that person feels and thinks much like I do. I think about how I could have just as easily been that person had the dice of my life landed differently. How could I not? When Pope Francis, for the final time, continued his Holy Thursday tradition of visiting prisoners in Rome, he said “"Every time I enter these doors, I ask myself, 'Why them and not me?'" What else can I possibly think when I see a prisoner? What else am I supposed to think when I see any other person, particularly one who is suffering? That talking moving thing over there is just some sort of annoyance, some NPC, some waste of space, and nothing is real outside of my own consciousness? I guess you’re allowed to think that if you want, but rattlesnakes are capable of thinking that. Aren’t you supposed to be more impressive than a rattlesnake?
Third Space's Paul Fahey wrote an essay earlier this year describing something he felt when he first became a parent, and I knew he was describing something real because I felt the same thing when I first became a parent: you have this tiny person in front of you whom you immediately love down to your very depths, even though they've done nothing to ask for that love and are just, like, a tiny person who doesn't know where they are. And you start to realize, after a long enough time feeling this profound love for someone who doesn't understand it or even really comprehend what love is, that this may be a reflection of how God loves you. And this also, as it turns out, may be a reflection of how God sees every human being He ever created. It’s very difficult to describe, but it’s powerful, and if you’ve been a parent, I assume you know what I’m talking about.
Fahey then goes on to describe how he felt when he saw a photograph of a refugee child who drowned while fleeing from Syria to Europe:
“His name is Aylan Kurdi, and his family were refugees fleeing Syria in a crowded inflatable raft. I remember staring at this picture when it came across my newsfeed. This little boy reminded me so much of my son. I realized at that moment that he was loved by somebody as much as I love my own son. He smiled and laughed and cried and played like my own son. But Aylan drowned in the Aegean Sea, along with his brother and mother, because his dad wasn’t able to hold onto them as during a storm. When I first saw the picture I sat in front of my computer and cried.”
Remember that there were people who, when they saw this famous photograph in the mid-2010s, felt nothing, or worse, felt like this was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs that we could create in order to protect “national identity” or “homeland security” or whatever. There are people right now who are making things like this happen again and again, in the sea, in the desert, in camps around the world, in detention centers on American soil. The people who are making this happen also claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, in fact they claim to be really good followers of Jesus Christ, followers who definitely get what He said better than you ever did. And because they get it so well, they’re going to do everything they can to build a fortress and protect themselves, because, as Jesus taught them, those other people who could drown or starve or die are, first and foremost, threats to resources.
Rattlesnakes see other animals this way. The thinking that Fahey describes is not something that a rattlesnake is capable of, which makes me think Fahey is on to something.
I just finished reading this book by Brianne Bell Jacobs titled Holy Body: Gender and Sexual Difference in Theological Anthropology and Ecclesiology. It’s very good, and traces the development of the Catholic church’s teachings on the gender binary, how the church has historically used those teachings (and others like them) to perpetuate violent power structures - not least among them the clergy sexual abuse crisis which we still, you know, haven’t fixed - and meaningfully damage the church’s ability to evangelize, and what our understanding of gender, sexuality, the church, and the priesthood should be moving forward. The book is thoroughly researched, Jacobs connects all of the dots extremely well, if there’s any justice it will be used as an important piece of research by whoever makes the structural changes that actually fix the Catholic church, the book probably merits a full essay at some point in the future, but I want to focus on something Jacobs writes in her final chapter, about why we have to care about changing things in the church at all:
“[Theologian Johann Baptist] Metz’s most famous quotation, that ‘religion is interruption,’ is often read as saying that religion is not easy, that it is challenging. This is true. But Metz means something more cutting, both deeper and more precise. He means that religion must be our response to the question of whether we choose God and demand God’s justice at the limit-situations where the offer of God’s love to others has been perverted. Do we choose to be affected by others’ suffering, to demand justice of God, and tell the story of history centered on the dignity of those who have suffered, dead and alive, in the hope of that justice? Do we say “Yes” not simply to God in the beauty of the kingfisher or the safety of a mother’s love; do we demand God for the abused, forgotten, and oppressed?”
A rattlesnake does not care about people who look different than she does. A rattlesnake does not feel hurt and furious when others are oppressed but not her. A rattlesnake does not see the suffering around her - suffering that could have just as easily happened to her - and demand a better world for those who desperately need it. A rattlesnake just does her best to get hers, stay fed, protect her young, and never think about anything else. A person can care about these things. Many people do, and many people act on that care, and they feed the hungry, and show mercy to sinners, and care for the sick, and speak up for the voiceless. And then a lot of other people never grow beyond what a rattlesnake can do, and claim that this incredibly basic animal life is the result of lifelong study of and devotion to Jesus Christ, when really, they could have just freed up their Sundays and ended up in exactly the same place. When someone like the Vice President gets on TV and explains to you how Christian that life is, I hope that The Rattlesnake Test provides you with a useful framework for assessing the power of their witness.
The first draft of this essay was “a rattlesnake protects her eggs” but, I looked it up, rattlesnakes are one of the few reptiles that give birth to live young! Wild stuff! I learned this by referencing my daughter’s National Geographic Ultimate Animal-Pedia, which I understand better than JD Vance understands Thomas Aquinas.