Jesus Is Nobody’s Panda

Why the choice in front of American Christians isn't the one Peter Wehner thinks it is

The Atlantic is paywalled and I don’t subscribe. What follows is a response to the headline, the dek, the social share, and the first few paragraphs of Peter Wehner’s “American Christians Face a Choice”—not a rebuttal of his full argument, which I haven’t read. That’s a constraint, not an evasion: I’m answering the premise embedded in those fragments, not his specific reporting. The fragments were enough to catalyze something I’ve been circling for a long time.

The Atlantic’s pitch is simple: the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump is a crisis for Christianity, and the way out is to rediscover the virtues of Christian humanism. Robert Jeffress gets cited as Exhibit A—loyal to Trump partly because Trump embodies an ethic Wehner calls cruel, vengeful, mendacious. The cover line: American Christians Face a Choice.

I don’t think it’s a choice. I think it’s a false binary, and I think the binary itself is the tell.

The church is not a museum for saints

Start with Mark 2:17. Jesus didn’t come for the healthy, he came for the sick. Augustine put it more bluntly: the church is not a hotel for saints, it’s a hospital for sinners. Pope Francis called it a field hospital after battle. That’s not a modern rebranding—it’s the oldest self-description Christianity has.

A hospital’s job is to name the disease and treat it. An enabler hands out painkillers so the patient feels fine while the tumor keeps growing. Those are different institutions wearing the same building. The question worth asking about any church—evangelical, Episcopal, Catholic, whatever—isn’t “is it political enough” or “is it kind enough.” It’s: does it still know it’s a hospital?

I’d take it further than the metaphor, honestly. When I’m at Mass, I believe we transcend time and space. I believe we’re not remembering the Last Supper, we’re at it—not by memory, but actually. I believe in transubstantiation, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, a miracle and not a metaphor, and definitely not the cannibalism the early Romans accused Christians of. To me the Eucharist is time and space collapsing down to a table, a meal, wine, shared with Christ the night before he goes to the cross. There is nothing humanist about that. I know exactly how it sounds. I don’t care.

What people actually hated about Charlie Kirk

I want to be honest about something. My first read on Charlie Kirk was built on the same material everyone else’s was—clipped fragments, gotcha excerpts, fifteen seconds with all the context cut away. I thought he was a guy with a weird head doing culture-war theater. Then I looked closer, and I changed my mind. I bought the shirt.

What I found wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone preacher. By every account from people who actually watched him at length, he never yelled. His delivery was clinical, repetitive, almost legalistic—debate-stage cadence applied to sin and salvation. His thesis: modern American Christianity has all the grace and none of the truth. Jesus didn’t come to affirm people in their sin. He came to call them to sin no more. Said flatly. Without theater.

That’s what people couldn’t forgive. Not the volume—the precision. You can write off a screamer as a performer having an episode. You can’t as easily write off someone calmly telling you the diagnosis and just waiting. “You’re not a terrible person, but you’re a sinner, and you need to repent” lands harder with no anger behind it than it would with rage behind it, because there’s no tone to dismiss it by.

I’m not interested in canonizing him. He was a sinner like the rest of us, by his own account. What he was doing, as far as I can tell, was closer to Socrates in the agora than to a prophet claiming special revelation—testimony, cross-examination, the same question asked over and over in hostile rooms until it became unbearable to the people being asked. Socrates wasn’t killed for shouting. He was killed for refusing to stop asking. Both he and Kirk died for the asking, not the volume.

Mascot Christianity

Here’s my actual charge, and it’s not aimed at evangelicals alone. I’d cartoon it this way: a lot of mainline Protestantism—and I say this as someone who spent ten years happily inside it—has become a Jesus drag party. Not in the sense of mockery. In the sense of costume. Humanism with Jesus as the mascot, the same way the World Wildlife Fund uses a panda. Nobody at WWF worships the panda. The panda is the friendly face on a cause that would survive fine without it.

Kirk’s harder evangelicalism has its own mascot risk from the opposite direction: Jesus as the cop, the cross as the threat that backs up a culture-war position. Both moves do the same thing to the same figure—they turn him into an endorsement rather than a demand. Cop-Jesus and panda-Jesus are the same mistake wearing different vestments.

The actual cult—and I mean that in the old, correct sense, a discipline with binding obligations, not a slur—isn’t asking either side’s permission to exist. It’s the priest at the altar facing away from the congregation, pointed at the same thing everyone else is pointed at, refusing to become the show. It’s the thing the golden Buddhas around the world prove people will do anyway, no matter how many times you tell them not to worship the messenger: drift toward the easier, lower form of devotion unless something keeps correcting the posture.

What’s actually changed, and what hasn’t

The welcome has gotten wider almost everywhere. “All are welcome.” Blessings for same-sex couples under a famously gentler pope. Friendlier language across the board. None of that is nothing. But the sacraments haven’t moved an inch under any of it. Marriage in the Catholic Church is still one specific thing. Abortion is still grave matter. You can still be excommunicated over divorce. The innermost structure hasn’t changed; the front door got nicer.

That’s not necessarily dishonest. It might just be necessary. Nobody walks in cold to “you’re full of demons, come be exorcised.” Every single gospel encounter—the tax collector, Mary Magdalene, the leper, the blind man, the demoniac—follows the same shape: come as you are, first, before anything else is said. Only after does “go and sin no more” arrive. The welcome is bait in the oldest and most charitable sense, the only viable front door there’s ever been.

The actual danger isn’t the welcome. It’s an institution that forgets the welcome was ever supposed to be followed by anything. A blessing offered in place of a sacrament, forever, with nobody ever following up—that’s not kindness to the people receiving it. It’s letting everyone leave the room feeling good without anyone having said anything true. I don’t think that does the gay community, or anybody else standing at that door, any favors. Pretending isn’t a kindness. It’s just a more comfortable kind of dishonesty.

The cult always had a place—just not either of the ones on offer now

The disciples loved each other with an intensity neither modern camp seems to have a category for. We don’t know who the beloved disciple was. We don’t know his gender. What we do know is that whatever that love was, nobody in the room treated it as a banner or a scandal. The early church had real space for the same-sex attracted—not erasure, not celebration as identity, but vocation: the unmarried son who becomes the priest, the nun, the monk, roles built around chastity and devotion rather than either condemnation or a parade. That’s a harder, freer, more dignified answer than either side currently on offer. It asked something real of the person, which is more respect than a mascot can pay anybody.

Not a tranquilizer

None of this is Jesus making you docile. Christianity isn’t a sedative, and it was never meant to neuter anybody into harmlessness. The church is full of generals, tax collectors, people whose careers did real damage, people who vote out of fear for their families, even—Vonnegut’s word, not mine—people who could be Haram in pursuit of something they believed was righteous. That’s not the church failing. That’s the hospital doing exactly what a hospital is for. A hospital with no sick people in it would be the scandal, not the other way around.

Sin in the Greek, hamartia, is an archery term: missing the mark. Not booga-booga eternal hellfire. A missed shot, correctable, expected, the normal condition of someone still aiming. You don’t get thrown out of the ICU for still being sick.

And here’s the part that actually answers Wehner directly, not just Kirk’s caricature of him or his caricature of Kirk: Christianity was never supposed to be empathy-driven in the first place. Empathy is a felt state—your pain becomes mine, we merge, the group absorbs the individual’s suffering as its own. That’s humanism’s actual currency, and it’s a fine currency, but it isn’t this religion’s. The love the gospel commands—agape—is a willed act toward someone’s good whether or not you feel a single thing for them. You can love your enemy with zero empathy whatsoever. That’s not a bug.

And salvation is radically non-collectivist. Nobody enters by proxy. Not your family, not your church, not your nation. The prodigal comes back alone. The lost sheep gets searched for one at a time, not as a flock. The virgin without oil doesn’t get saved by her neighbor’s lamp. Peter dropped his nets and walked out on a family that needed him, and the gospel doesn’t flinch from that, doesn’t soften it, doesn’t pretend it was empathetic. It calls it the cost of the thing. Leaving everything behind isn’t a metaphor with the hard edges filed off. Sometimes holiness requires an act that looks, from the outside, indistinguishable from abandonment.

The Pharisees were the actual collectivists of the gospels—correctness as group membership, righteousness by association with the right lineage and the right observance. Jesus kept doing the opposite: pulling one person at a time out of the crowd. The woman at the well. Zacchaeus up his tree. The bleeding woman who touches his cloak and is healed alone, unnoticed by the crowd around her. The crowd is never the unit of salvation in any of these stories. The person always is.

Eight of ten hills

So when I read Wehner’s premise—evangelicals need to rediscover Christian humanism, the church needs healing—I don’t read a moderate’s plea for unity. I read the frustration of someone who’s already taken eight of ten hills and is irritated that the last two won’t fall. Mainline Protestantism spent forty or fifty years bringing in folk music, then yoga, then therapeutic language, then activism, each accommodation individually reasonable, the sum total close to total. The last holdouts aren’t bigots resisting compassion. They’re just the people still reading the actual book, and the easiest way to take the remaining hills isn’t argument—scripture doesn’t lose arguments easily—it’s making the holdouts radioactive. Call them monsters, racists, Nazis, and the last two hills fall without anyone having to win a debate.

That’s not a both-sides complaint. I think evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics are all vulnerable to the same failure in different costumes, and I think the failure has a name older than any of this week’s politics: you become what you pretend to be—not automatically, not mechanically, but if the people running the institution forget which part was always supposed to be the cover and which part was the mission. Pretense alone isn’t damnation. Forgetting there was a mission underneath it is.

Jesus is nobody’s panda

I have aphantasia. I’ve never had a vision, a felt presence, a sign. I do my own daily office—gospel, exegesis, reflection, examen, rosary—alone, every day, with no guarantee underneath any of it. It doesn’t actually matter to me whether the metaphysics check out. I’d love this gospel if you proved it was hearts-and-minds propaganda. I’d love it if you proved Jesus never existed at all. That’s not indifference to truth. It’s a commitment that doesn’t need the proof first, which might be a harder kind of fidelity than certainty ever was.

What I won’t do is let him be turned into a mascot by either side. Not cop-Jesus, backing a culture war with the threat of hell. Not panda-Jesus, smiling on a cause that would do just fine without him. He’s not a logo. He’s not a vibe. He’s not a brand-safe endorsement for whichever side currently controls the narrative.

The choice on offer—cruelty or decency, evangelical hardness or Christian humanism—isn’t the real choice. The real one is whether you still believe this is a hospital, whether you still think the front door is supposed to lead somewhere, and whether you’re willing to let the actual cost of the thing be the cost, instead of negotiating it down until it fits comfortably inside whatever you already wanted to believe.

Jesus is nobody’s panda. He never asked to be one.