To the Least of My Brethren

When I was a small child, I watched a religious documentary on television about the life of Jesus. I have forgotten most of it, but I remember the ending. The narrator quoted Jesus: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do so to me.” The narrator made no further comment. But the film footage that accompanied it showed drug addicts sitting in the gutters of a major city. This was in the mid-1960s, during the height of the hippie era.

I felt really challenged and uncomfortable by the ending of this documentary. If I believed Jesus, which I did, then it was my responsibility to love drug addicts sitting in the gutters. Jesus did not say that the drug addicts first had to reform, and then we could love them. To me—and I was as neat and conservative of a little kid as there could be—this sounded like giving the nod of approval to their sinful life styles. I did not like this.

I still don’t. Jesus’ words are still hard to swallow.

But the most interesting part is this. I’m pretty sure that I remember that the documentary was sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention. I very much doubt that Southern Baptists would produce such a documentary today. The Southern Baptists have pretty much sold out to the conservative, Republican political line that drug addicts are evil and unworthy of any assistance, and that poor people are poor because they are lazy. Conservatives today despise poor people, especially those who are, in fact, responsible for their own poverty. But they did sponsor this documentary fifty years ago. In the last half century, the Southern Baptists and other conservative religious groups have left Christianity behind and become an arm of the Republican Party. It didn’t used to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

I hope conservative churches might emerge out of their Trump-worshiping phase and go back to this particular aspect of what they used to be like. I’m not holding my breath, however.