When did Jesus start hating immigrants and gays, and loving guns and capitalism?

Many Christians on the political left today no longer recognize the Jesus of the political right in the United States. Despite sharing a text and history, (at least) two dramatically different versions of “Jesus” have emerged in contemporary American Christian discourse, each reflecting a set of moral and political inferences presumably gleaned from the teachings of the historical Jesus, and each set of inferences containing its own problems with respect to verifiability, authenticity, and legitimacy.

This week, we are joined by internationally renowned Catholic scholar Dr. John D. Caputo, author of What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (2007), to re-trace the emergence of these seemingly incompatible iterations of “Jesus,” and try to figure out whose Jesus works for whom.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/ideas/etc.:

• On the problems with Google’s new search engine “AI Overview”
• Cheers (TV series, 1982-1993)
• Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)
• St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Confessions (401 BCE)
• Battlestar Galactica (TV series, 2004-2009)
• Peter Leithart, “Apocalypse and Eschatology” (2015)
• Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son
• The Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar
• Jesus’ parable of the Good Shepherd
• Synoptic gospels
• Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986)
• The Westar Institute, After Jesus, Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the first Two Centuries of Jesus Movements (2021)
• Constantinianism 
• First Council of Nicaea
• Edwin K. Broadhead, “Implicit Christology and the Historical Jesus” (2019)
• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) 
• The meaning of the Passover
• Center for American Progress, “Christian Nationalism is ‘Single Biggest Threat’ to America’s Religious Freedom” (2022)
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s “Philosophy of Revelation”
• Karl Marx, “Schelling, Philosopher in Christ” (1842)
• Sarah Posner, “Overturning ‘Roe’ is the Crowning Achievement of Christian Nationalism” (2022)
• Martin Luther King, Jr., “It’s Hard to be a Christian” (1956)
• Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1896)
• John D. Caputo, On Religion (PDF, 2001)
• pharmakon
•  German idealism
• Mary Steinmetz, “Thoughts on the Experience of God in the Theology of Karl Rahner: Gifts and Implications” (PDF, 2012)
• theopoetics
• The Pennsylvania church behind a ceremony with AR-15s and bullet crowns
• Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed
• Paul Tillich on symbols, in Dynamics of Faith (1956)
• National Catholic Review, “Q&A with philosopher John Caputo about ‘What to Believe?’ and radical theology” (2024)
• The data on the death of religious orders
• Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000)