© 2025 Ted Wrong <Rare Trees aht Gee Male Daht Com>

From the depths of the political and spiritual wilderness, I make a confession. Here, my loyalty to Christ stands in stark contrast to the prevailing allegiance to party, nation, or tribe.

There's a litmus test in the Christian community, a divide between Blue and Pink. But it's not about politics. It's about who's a 'True Christian, ' a label often wielded by those full of themselves. They have a built-in meter that judges everyone they meet, giving everyone but themselves an inferior Christianity score.

My journey as a Christian began with my 'Christian' parents. They had their own set of expectations: 'Stop squirming in the Pew… Pay attention to the sermon… Did you say your prayers earnestly? Why are you playing by yourself? This is a church community event.' I always felt like an outsider, struggling to conform to their standards.

I must have a Red Letter 'A' tattooed on my forehead. Everyone intuitively knows I am inferior to their boundless faith.

I pray for the Mind of Christ, for Salvation through his precious blood shed for forgiveness of my unending SIN, for him to send His Holy Spirit (His Comforter) to guide me. Sometimes I pray in tongues, but it is all ego and vanity; try as I might, I'm not a true, die-in-the-wool Republican. My Christian Nationalism merely slumps compared to even backsliders.

I am hopeless as a Christian: I have read the Bible cover to cover twice, read Colin Wilson's Seminal Book of Alienation ("The Outsider") three times. I read Hesse, Hemingway, Clavell, W.E.B. Griffith, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley – over and over—the way I am "supposed to" read the Bible.

My life is not rich with evidence of Jesus – no wad of credit cards, no twin gas guzzler SUVs in the driveway. If you need a Cadillac Escalade with a Platinum and Diamond Crucifix hanging from the mirror to emulate your faith, you have none. No John 3:16 license plate:

• Echoes of Colin Wilson's Outsider—a soul condemned to the margins. Confession in Books: Scripture alongside Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bradbury, Orwell. They read like parallel gospels of despair and defiance.
• Every Church Has an Inner Sanctum of Congregants: They break bread with the Pastors, tithe monstrously large, and shoot me dour looks over their shoulders. I am always outside of this impermeable barrier that professes inclusion and practices clan cliques, judgment, and exclusivity. Tribalism.

Do you have faith and believe, they ask as a parrot would ask. No, I do not have what you have. I look at the leaves of Ferns, at Mandelbrot sets, and I see God. It requires no faith and leaves no room for belief. God is – just look at even one fern leaf, one Ginkgo biloba leaf, and faith and belief be damned. God is. I was born with this sense of awe and wonder at Divine Manifestation. I have struggled with Agnosticism and nearly drowned within the Holy Spirit. The knowledge of God within me now was not put there by my choice; instead, it was put there by God's choice. I am not sure we can choose Him, but the All-Powerful has the power to choose us. This version of God is unintelligible to the televangelist crowd. No, Jimmy Swaggart suits for me.

Rejecting the idols of the mainstream culture — Caesar Wearing a Cross

The Right demanded a king, and it got one. Orange hair, golden throne, Caesar wrapped in a flag and called a savior. Trumpism is the Book of Judges on rerun: Israel clamoring for a monarch, weary of prophets, sick of the quiet Word of God, craving instead a crown they could touch and cheer. The cross shrinks into a MAGA campaign hat. The rally becomes a "salvation" revival. Caesar was mistaken for Christ—even Caesar meme coins.

The golden calf has been resurrected, not as a bull but as a credit card, an SUV lease, and the Hobby Lobby aisles where "faith" comes shrink-wrapped in seasonal décor. Corporatism now plays high priest, enthroning usury where Jubilee once reigned. Israel had debt forgiveness; America has payday loans. Mammon has never hidden itself so poorly.

The altar no longer holds bread and wine but the flag, draped like a holy shroud. Patriotism, at its best, is love—imperfect, earthy, neighborly love. But nationalism is worship, and worship demands blood. Orwell warned us: once the love of country mutates into the worship of the nation, dissenters become heretics, and the inquisition begins. This is my flag, shredded for you; eat and drink me in remembrance of me. 

"Family Values™" is the corporate logo stamped across broken, dysfunctional, sexual, and spousal abuse households. Politicians thunder "family" from podiums while towns rot on opioids, fathers vanish into warehouses, mothers bend under three jobs, and children are fed into the gears of an economy that grinds families into marketing slogans. 

Courtly heirs and gilded scions have replaced Tom Wolf, William Safire, and Hunter S. Thompson.

III. The Left's Blindness — Progress Without a Soul

On the other side, the Left stages its inquisition—an excommunication by intolerance. Faith is tolerated only if declawed, baptized not into Christ but into the rainbow. To dissent is to be expelled. The new orthodoxy preaches inclusion but nails spiritualism to the wall.

Identity politics becomes the opposite of Genesis. Instead of Imago Dei, where each human being bears the unspeakable dignity of the divine, people are filed into categories, reduced to boxes, slogans, and acronyms. Dostoevsky foresaw this: erase the eternal soul, and all that remains is a shifting struggle for power —its pus-filled voice and clenched teeth preaching humanism and pithy euphemisms from a rainbow tabernacle.

The new Utopia is a Tower of Babel praised by PowerPoint. Davos handshakes, WEF manifestos, Silicon Valley sermons about "the future of humanity." It is Brave New World, rebooted with carbon credits and AI moderators. Liberation offered, surveillance delivered. 

The State becomes both Mother and Father, nanny and warden, caretaker and jailer.

IV. The Outsider's Faith — Risk Without Tribe

To be a Christian outsider is to risk everything and gain nothing that counts in the eyes of the tribe. Faith is not a label, not a demographic, not a party platform. It is a trembling wager. Dostoevsky's underground man knows the solitude: every leap of faith is a leap without a net.

Tolstoy whispers: renounce all allegiances when they try to seize lordship. Family, nation, ideology—none can be enthroned above Christ. Allegiance to Christ is a solitary revolution.

The conscience remains the last sanctuary. In an age where collective lies roar louder each day, the lone voice that says "No" becomes the most actual act of worship. Heinlein knew this: the rebel who stands before power alone is more dangerous than any army.

The image is this: a solitary believer walking away from the city lights, a Bradbury figure trudging toward the wilderness fire, carrying nothing but Scripture and a stubborn heart.

V. The Almost-Constitutionalist Rebel

Irony of ironies: the parchment of Enlightenment skeptics has become the shield of the saints. The First Amendment, scribbled by deists and doubters, gave Christianity its freest home, and what they meant as secular guardrails became, in God's economy, a sanctuary—accidental mercy.

The true spirit of rebellion is not empire but locality. Not Big Government or Big Tech, but the stubborn resilience of neighbors who refuse to be managed. It sounds like Orwell's "common decency," and it echoes Catholic distributism and Protestant sphere sovereignty—strange bedfellows, but kin in their suspicion of vast, unaccountable power.

Subsidiarity is survival. When the WTO, WHO, or IMF stretches its hands across continents, humanity shrinks. Clarke warned that systems too vast can become inhuman. The Christian outsider insists that only small, human-scale power honors the image of God.

Freedom is fragile. Heinlein would say: it must be doubted, fought for, and protected daily. Freedom cannot be inherited like a family heirloom. It is won each dawn or it is lost by nightfall.

VI. A Rule of Life for Outsider Christians

If exile is to be survivable, it must be ordered. A Rule of Life, whispered against empire, becomes both shield and staff.

Media Fasting: The Soul Is Not a Precog, by Philip K. Dick. We were not created to ingest outrage futures.

Local love: real politics is the man across the street, the widow down the block, the child in the Pew. Twitter wars are pyrotechnics for the void.

Economic generosity: Jubilee in miniature. Cancel a debt, forgive an IOU, slip an envelope under the door. The empire thrives on usury. The outsider rebels with a gift.

Sabbath from ideology: one day each week, no propaganda—only Bible, silence, nature, and flesh-and-blood community.

Radical honesty: truth spoken without tribal accent. Even if it earns exile, even if it costs belonging. The truth itself is the belonging.

VII. Holy Disillusionment

J. Krishnamurti frequently discussed society, emphasizing that it's a projection of individual consciousness and that true transformation requires inner change. He argued that society, as it currently exists, is often based on flawed principles such as competition and ambition, and that a mind conditioned by these values cannot be truly free or virtuous. He also highlighted that societal structures are often designed to control and conform individuals, rather than fostering freedom. 

Both Right and Left kneel to idols. One bows to Caesar, the other to Utopia. Both mistake penultimate powers for ultimate truth.

The wilderness, feared as exile, becomes sanctuary. Moses found God there, Elijah heard Him whisper there, and John the Baptist thundered there. The voice of God is not lost—the empire's drums drown it out. In the desert, the drums fade.

The ultimate question remains: Who do you worship? Party, tribe, nation, State, market—or Christ Himself?

The final vision is not of triumph, but of freedom: a church in exile, a pilgrim community, outsiders who refuse every idol, disloyal to every empire, free because they bow only to Christ. True Christianity is best described in Acts and Romans, and often ended with dead Christians. These chapters are glossed over or completely unread by most Saccharine "Jesus followers." If the Son of God were asked to die for the cause, what makes today's "Christians" think they deserve a Gold and Mother-of-Pearl life?

True freedom is the internal surrender of allegiance to all earthly idols and the total embrace of Christ, which brings true Salvation in this life and the next.

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." - Albert Camus.

###

I'm Not One of Those 'Types' of Christians

© 2025 Ted Wrong