The night before her Conservative Political Action Conference appearance this past Saturday, Marjorie Taylor Greene literally embraced Nick Fuentes at his neo-Nazi friendly competitor to the conservative conference. Fellow Republicans rightly lambasted the Georgia congresswoman for speaking at the conference started by Fuentes, who you may recall is the 23-year-old alt-right activist famous for denying the Holocaust and admiring the way the Taliban treat women. How has Greene responded to opposition to her public appearance with a white nationalist? By branding her conservative critics Pharisees and evidently equating her own relations with racists to the crusade of Jesus Christ.
“Jesus was a friend to sinners. We are called to follow his example,” Greene said Sunday night. “That’s why I will continue to share my message of unity, family, and faith in our great nation to every corner and every group within America. It doesn’t matter if I’m speaking to Democrat union members or 1,200 young conservatives who feel cast aside and marginalized by society. The Pharisees in the Republican Party may attack me for being willing to break barriers and speak to a lost generation of young people who are desperate for love and leadership. But I won’t abandon these young men and women because I believe we need to do better by them.”
I may be no austere religious scholar, but when Christ embraced the sinners rejected by the Pharisees, he specifically aimed to convert them, not simply embrace or condone the sin.
When Jesus famously saved an adulteress from stoning (the sentence followed by the Pharisees), he does not deny the sinfulness of the woman’s actions but encourages mercy by charging “him who is without sin” to cast the first stone. And then, crucially, Christ tells the adulteress to leave her life of sin.
So what’s the parallel that Greene is drawing here? If the GOP consists of metaphorical Pharisees, then is she positioning herself as a Christlike figure with regard to her own relations with sinners? While Christ forgave sinners, he explicitly called upon them to leave behind their sins. Greene instead smiled and spoke after Fuentes led applause for Russia, which spent the weekend bombing the hell out of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, and, based on the available clips of her speech online, refused to call upon Fuentes’s fans to repent for their own wrongdoings. While Greene disavowed “separating anyone in identities,” which is what both right- and left-wing racial essentialists do, she exclusively blamed Democrats for doing “what Marxism is.”
Fuentes’s followers aren’t Canadian truckers protesting for their personal right to not get vaccinated or Virginia parents fighting to defund the teaching of racial essentialism in their children’s classrooms. Fuentes has fans because of, not in spite of, his abhorrent racism and misogyny, and Greene likely didn’t attend his conference with the noble goal of converting his crowd from evil but rather to fan the flames of particularly un-Christlike bigotry.
