Day in and day out, both in the press and in the pulpit, leftists try to use our Christian faith to justify political or economic ideas loved by secular elites, which seem to us wildly unnatural or outrageously impractical. These range from socialism and open borders to “welcoming” gender “transitions” and sniveling pacifism in the face of jihadi aggression. (For specific examples, see: Everything Pope Francis Has Ever Said on Any Subject, and: Whatever Christianity Today has published since Donald Trump threw his hat into the ring.)

When we raise rational objections to such wild claims, we get accused of being “worldly,” “selfish,” or even “racist.” This puts us on the defensive. We don’t want to seem like the stodgy Pharisees or the Prodigal Son’s smug older brother. And we certainly don’t wish to be stigmatized and ostracized, or surveilled as “domestic extremists” by our local FBI. So we might well be tempted to club our reason into submission for the sake of feeling better about ourselves, plus avoiding scorn and spitting.

And that’s how so many Christians ended up spouting fashionable nonsense, as Megan Basham documents in her new book Shepherds for Sale.

My Brain Is a Woodchipper

My friends, I’m here to help. A gift I think I was born with is an excellent nose for gangrene. Like those dogs that can sniff out cancer, I can scent within seconds the poison coated in spiritual candy.

You know the logical stratagem of reductio ad absurdum, where you patiently go through somebody’s argument, step by step, to show that however appealing it seems at first, it inexorably leads to an insane or absurd conclusion? Yeah, my mind does that almost instantly, like some kind of portable woodchipper. Show me your nice little “holiday” tree all strung with pretty lights and shiny ornaments, and I’ll show you … a pile of pine shavings and pulverized glitter.

“But of course, you see why that’s absurd,” I’ll begin winsomely enough, then … rat-a-tat-tat, lay out all the steps that lead from the gleaming heaven on earth some high-minded soul thinks he’s building, down the tracks of the Gadarene swine to a watery grave in the sea.

This may sound too much like just an attack on the woke Vatican and all the Ned Flanders Protestants out there but that’s not my sole intent here. I wish I could simply confer this minor, antisocial superpower on each one of my readers, but that’s not how the world works. Instead let me offer a handy tool that cuts through high-minded nonsense like an electric knife through butter. It will virus-proof your mind from disingenuous drivel.

The Three-Part Litmus Test for Political Claims About Christian Teaching

You won’t always want to call out your interlocutor on his nonsense in front of friends and colleagues. You might just have to nod, smile, pat the person on the head (figuratively, or better yet, literally) and silently consign him perpetually to the short bus.

But everyone needs for at least his own peace of mind and intellectual integrity to have a functioning nonsense detector. When someone who’s aligned with Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom claims that the Christian Gospel really implies that we align with the world and spurn unfashionable “retrograde” attitudes and traditional moral claims, we need a ready response.

So here’s a reliable mental test you can run any idea through. If someone makes a claim about the “essence” of the “Christian message” or the “authentic Gospel response,” ask yourself a few key questions.

• Historically, is this how the Church as a whole viewed this question? Did the early Church, the missionaries who evangelized Europe, the monks who founded the first universities, the translators of the Bible and preachers of the Gospel to the four corners of the earth, from Francis Xavier to John Wesley, interpret the New Testament to mean what this person says it means? Or is this something that dates back to (at best) 1968?
• Is this claim about “real” Christianity just accidentally, purely by coincidence, precisely in alignment with the views popular at Harvard, Facebook, Google, the CIA, and the richest neighborhoods in the bluest cities, where the wealthiest people are insulated from the real-world effects of disastrous social experiments?

The answers to each of those questions will go a long way toward helping you discern how faithful a position is to historic, orthodox Christianity. But there’s a more fundamental one which isn’t context-dependent. And it should be the litmus test for any religious claim someone tries to foist on you:

• If this were actually Christian teaching, would it make Christianity into a suicide cult? If Jesus had actually taught it, would it prove Him a false messiah?

Verily, I Say Unto You

There are many different strands within the New Testament, and Jesus said many things to different people in varying situations, which if you took them literally and applied them universally would have implications so absurd that they would fail this test.

For example, what if people literally cut off their hands and plucked out their eyes in response to temptation? Or what if they took Jesus’s statement about becoming “eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven” to mean that universal celibacy was the binding rule for Christians? That would solve all social problems, and end all sin, in 70 years or so. But if Jesus had really taught it, we would know that he wasn’t the Messiah, come to “bring life more abundantly.” Instead, he’d be a rebel against the Father who told us to “be fruitful and multiply.” So we reject that reading of the Gospel as obviously false.

The same would happen if somebody made a case for abolishing all private property based on Christ’s advice to the rich young man to sell all he had and give it away. We know that apart from small, voluntary communities like monasteries and the family, attacks on private property rights result in nothing but squalor and starvation — as the early English settlers in the America quickly discovered, and decades of Soviet famines also attest. We know that’s not what God wants for us, so we know that reading is wrong.

Most of the historic heresies stem from people taking Jesus’s statements wildly out of context — especially the context of the Hebrew Bible and all the enduring, permanent truths which the Church still maintains. That’s why the Marcionite heresy, which discards the Old Testament as superceded and obsolete, was the most dangerous and enduring source of error. By cutting off Christ’s words from their actual, binding context — the truthful revelation to the Jews — you can make the Gospel mean … anything. Especially if you practice chronological snobbery, and assume that the Church of the past was ignorant and benighted compared to us. (“If they were so smart, how come they’re dead?”)

Welcome the Jihadi

When someone (such as Pope Francis as well as many woke evangelical leaders) rips a few Bible verses, bleeding, out of context to suggest that the West must welcome unlimited numbers of unskilled, even hostile immigrants and let them vote themselves into power, we know this claim fails all three tests offered above:

1. It’s not what the Jews did or what God told them to do, and it’s not what the Church did for many centuries. St. Augustine preached about the importance of keeping out the Vandals, and Luther praised Christians for fighting to keep out the Turks.
2. The claim is most popular among people who profit from cheap labor and are insulated from the destructive effects of mass, unskilled immigration in their gated neighborhoods and posh urban enclaves.
3. This principle would destroy our societies, and render our descendants the serfs of unbelievers. It would homogenize all the nations around a new Tower of Babel, and leave the Church open to persecution in every corner of the globe, as intolerant Muslim colonists and docile impoverished voters indebted to leftists combined to dominate every country. That’s not what God wants for us.

And after you’ve finished woodchipping your colleague or relative’s worldview, you should thank him for stimulating you to think. Then give him a hearty handshake and close with a pithy phrase from some movie we all know and love. You could try, “It’s not personal, just business,” from The Godfather. But my favorite valedictory snippet is Jack Nicholson’s from As Good As It Gets: “Go sell Crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.