Sin-free and Superior!

The true ChatGPT message of Christianity

Some of you may remember how, prior to my rebirth in February 2024, I stopped going to my liberal Scottish church. In my sinful ignorance, I found it inappropriate to have badges with the Queer Liberation fist available to children and for the priest to respond to October 7^th by posting on Facebook that he’d turned down an opportunity to go on Big Brother, LOL.

My thought-reform has since then allowed me to see how faithfully this man is doing the Lord’s work. He limits his pastoral outreach to two Pride events per year and hosting political debates for antizionists in the sanctuary. He finds preaching on Creation Sunday difficult because humans are just a bunch of CO₂ emitters. And he curses Mother’s Day because it’s unfair to people who had bad moms. I would add that even the less bad ones are forever wielding their birth-parent privilege over the rest of us but he's inclusive so I know he would welcome my diverse opinion.

Given the blow the UK Supreme Court dealt to my 2S+ identity this week by saying the law only recognizes male and female, I finally decided to press pause on my cancellation of Christianity and return to this noble house of God in one of my city’s most exclusive postcodes. The three-hour service of devotions they held for Good Friday did not disappoint. I felt safe feeling as if most of the homiletical content had been generated by typing the following into ChatGPT: “Compose six sermons on the crucifixion using the Labour Party’s top issues in the tone of Channel 4 News.” Not all the sermons. Not the one linking Psalm 22 to an ode on a Welsh farmer. And not the one by a Nigerian Anglican about a terrorist who bit his mother’s ear off and blamed her for making him that way. Had the rest of the clergy vetted this one beforehand they might have encouraged him to reframe the terrorist as Christ Himself.

The remaining four sermons teemed with everything we humble parishioners wanted to hear. Some of it was tough of course. It turns out the January 6^th QAnon shaman was not, I repeat not the messiah. Only a brave dissident could declare this before a nave full of Guardian subscribers. I also found it harrowing to listen to the tale the feminine reverend shared to help us understand what it was like for Jesus to be abandoned by the ones he loved: this one time, she was hiking with some friends when she wandered onto the wrong path; realizing she was lost, she retraced her steps and waited on a rock where her friends found her a few minutes later. Which illustrates the Via Dolorosa perfectly. No one said faith is easy.

Other things you need to know: we are living in a world full of unjust immigration officials; the media holds all the cards over trans people; and Hamas has literally no power. They only have 24 live hostages left, and the billions of pounds they poured into building tunnels and dismantling colonialist water pipes to build rockets have dried up. Someone said something about trumped up charges but I was scribbling so fast I failed to write what the charges were and who was responsible for the trumping. I just know it wasn’t me.

The great message of Christ’s death was hammered home again and again: nothing bad that ever happens is ever my fault. When we are asked to identify with the crowds in the Passion story, remember it’s only the racist, xenophobic, transphobic tyrant-lovers who ever shouted “Crucify!” Never us. We allies, we multi-degreed defenders of the 10%, must unfortunately bear the Cross of always being on the wrong side of those who hold authority.

Jesus died to assure us that no one is guilty if they belong to a special class. The second of the two criminals who was crucified alongside him is quoted as saying, “We have indeed been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds” (Luke 23.41). “Really?” queried the emeritus professor and eldest of the preachers yesterday. “He could have been a runaway slave or wrongly accused.” I mean why would Jesus have told him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” if the man had actually done something wrong? This person might in fact have been a misgendered rapist who just had so many rights taken away you could fill five notebooks listing them. The mockery of Jesus is after all identical to what they did to Isla Bryson, just for being who she is. I would love to know how she is feeling this week, but the media again is holding all the cards.

There is no such thing as a guilty criminal—unless you are a working-class white boy, portrayed by Netflix as better off than that, from a two-parent home. I was waiting for it the whole service and therefore let out a huge sigh of relief to hear the final sermon refer to the stunning documentary Adolescence. I would have appreciated if the provost demanded we sign a petition for deleting all of the racist crime data and every online mention of grooming gangs, but at least he promised us he knows the difference between news and propaganda. Likewise he assured us that his role is political: “As a good liberal, I want to understand… It’s who I am and who I will continue to be.”

I can’t get over the humility, or the perspicacity with which he approaches the complex issues of our age. He epitomized this in the very Facebook post that led me back to his redeeming ministry. From Thursday, in response to the greatest tragedy since the wrongful conviction of the criminals who were crucified next to Jesus: “I think that there’s more to being a man than biological characteristics. And that there’s more to being a woman than biological characteristics. And I think that seeing the world entirely through harshly defined gender-binary spectacles may not be good for any of us in the long run.”

Right and precise as always. Other things that make someone a man or a woman include whether they played with trucks or dolls growing up, whether they have a kink that can be celebrated as marginalized, and whether they come back from the bathroom with a twinkle in their eye due to the solidarity of sisterhood they encountered therein. The darkness that came over the land before Jesus breathed his last was an allegory for the gender-binary spectacles that block so many from seeing the light. May the eyes of the heathen be opened, so that the trans women who had to assault cis women because of society may be set free. They never did anything wrong. And neither, good liberal Christian, have you.