Celebrate the Holidays like Jesus Did

“No matter what God’s power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.”

-Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

I have plenty of reasons to be pissed off at Jesus this Christmas. Not that I didn’t have plenty of reasons to be pissed at Jesus last Christmas but over the years I just seem to collect more and more wounds inflicted on me in the name of Christ. As if spending decades in the closet of a backwoods Catholic church weren’t enough, I seem to just keep vomiting up repressed memories of the lewd things the priests did to my body in that blackhole between their lessons on all the reasons my gender identity was going to send me straight to hell.

In order to survive this level of trauma at such a young age, I had to segregate my consciousness into five distinct dissociative identities to keep the secrets I couldn’t tell even to myself. Thus, most of my alters are still children and always will be, so when another powerful sexual predator like Donald Trump declares “gender ideology” to be a symptom of terrorism and commands the fine people who torched the children at Waco to stomp it out, I get to experience this resurrection of Christian nationalism from the perspective of a freshly raped five-year-old trans girl.

So yes, dearest motherfuckers, I do indeed have many reasons to be pissed off, and I am not above lashing out. I use Norwegian Black Metal songs like lullabies to put my youngest alters to bed and I cannot drive past a church of any denomination without holding one finger high above my head. But I’m not pissed at Jesus, I’m pissed at Christians, and something tells me that Jesus would be too.

Christ is an ancient figure steeped in mythology and lore. There are thousands of interpretations of the motherfucker and what he represented. I can’t pretend that my interpretations are any more or less legit than the next bitch with an ax to grind but I can tell you that I spent 11 years being indoctrinated in a parochial school and I spent another twenty studying scripture and the often-esoteric history that informs and frequently censors it in an attempt to unlearn that abuse.

I have studied the Gospels, including the Gnostic ones, and I have poured over what ancient Islamic and Judaic texts have to say about Christ as well, not to mention the debates of a host of secular historians, linguists and philosophers on the matter.

So, the following is my own mythology, constructed from many sources over many years, and I stand by it as absolute chaos magick. Make of that what you will.

Jesus Christ was a shaggy-haired anarchist troubadour, a traveling mystical heretic delivering muckraking rants against the rich and the pious. Far from what the revisionists in Rome would have you believe, Jesus was a disgruntled Jew who despised the Old Testament and the gangsters who spewed it. Christ was hostile to pretty much all authority; banks, kings, empires… But he despised no seat of power more than “Moses’ seat” in the temples of ancient Roman Judea.

He went from town to town, passing right by these so-called houses of God and the pompous bigots who frequented them and then headed straight for the local red-light districts to rally whores, lepers and eunuchs against them. Christ taught these people that God was a divine spark within them and that they didn’t require holy men to access enlightenment.

Jesus also spent plenty of time trashing those holy men. Referring to them variously as snakes, hypocrites, blind guides and play-actors. Accusing them of slamming the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces and devouring widow’s houses while they sat on Moses’ seat counting their gold. The only time Christ even stepped foot in a church, he flipped the fuck out, turning over tables and chasing moneychangers into the streets as he condemned their temple as a den of robbers.

It’s hard to imagine the fury that the stadium churches of today’s millionaire Zionist Evangelicals would inspire in this mystic wildcard, but I imagine it would likely put the teenage church burning Satanists of the Norwegian Black Metal scene to shame. This is the Jesus I know and, in this light, even the wholesome fable of the first Christmas takes on a far more rambunctious flicker.

After getting knocked up by an angel, Mary and her terrestrial side-piece Joseph fled Galilee on the orders of a census that was set to increase their taxes to the Roman imperial rump state of Judea. When King Harrod, the quisling in charge of this glorified colony, learned that holy men were traveling to Bethlehem to visit a newborn who might someday challenge his monopoly on power, he sent his own Waco death squad out to kill every male under two in the metropolitan area. Luckily, the Family Christ managed to dodge the pigs and go underground in Egypt until Harrod finally kicked and the heat died down. Then Young Jesus started kicking kings for kicks and the shit got real again…

Is any of this shit true? Who fucking knows. What I do know is that the Gospels served as an inspiration for heretics, peasants and revolutionaries long before they were hijacked by the same tyrants who likely had Jesus killed with a little help from the Pharisees that he spent his short life flipping off. Believe it or not, as a battered, raped and tormented closet case, it was actually Christian revolutionaries that gave me the strength to defend myself against the church and they continue to inform my radical contrarian ideology to this day.

I owe everything to proud Christian heretics like Jaques Ellul, Dorothy Day, Ivan Illich, Peter Maurin and Nikolai Berdyaev, and in the darkest days of my life, I have increasingly turned to the more Gnostic side of Christian mysticism, finding the strength to be the woman the Christians continue to conspire against me becoming through the divine feminine spirit of Sophia and the holy women defined by it; Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Saint Brigitte and most of all, the Virgin Mary.

Faith isn’t about what you can prove or what you can preach, it is about inner knowledge, gnosis, a personal kinship with the divine and how that inspires you to live or in my case survive. The church has declared war on me through another empire that uses a bad interpretation of the Bible to justify its conspiracy for global dominance and I have never felt closer to Christ in despising these cunts. In fact, I would argue that this current union of church and state is an excellent candidate for the Beast described in the Book of Revelations.

After all…. “The first beast comes up from the sea… it is given authority and power over every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation.” Or as Jaques Ellul put it, “All who dwell on earth worship it.”

How is this not the Christian nationalist church of Pax Americana during the age of artificial intelligence and Donald Trump? Wasn’t it the American Empire that first came from the sea with its battleships and gunboat diplomacy? Isn’t it the state-bastardized version of Christianity that first sought global hegemony over every pagan tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation? Can you honestly think of a better candidate for Antichrist than JD Vance, a Silicon Valley technofascist masquerading as a homespun Christian populist bumpkin?

It all fits like a noose around my neck but I’m not afraid to go down swinging. After all, the power of Jesus Christ Heretic compels me.

So, during this holiday season, with Judea in ashes and the poor man’s pedophile Constantine languishing in the White House, I invite you to celebrate the birth of Christ the way he lived his life, by flipping off every church you pass and spitting in the eye of the powerful.

Mery fucking Christmas, dearest motherfuckers, and a happy intifada.

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