Mick Mooney’s Huffington Post Piece Is Way To “Liberal”

Apparently Mick Mooney’s recent HuffPost piece, WWJD: What Would Jesus Do? Do You Really Want to Know?  has caused a bit of a stir in certain circles.  In the post Mooney has a bit of fun imagining a modern day parable where a mother gives one of those WWJD bracelets to her son.

The boy promptly begins acting like Jesus much to the chagrin of his religious mother who gave him the bracelet in the first place.

she was shocked to see that her son had become friends with prostitutes, was hanging out with ‘sinners’ — even buying people who were already drunk yet another round of beers!

Worse still, he had walked into their church the previous Sunday and tore down the book store, overturned the tables and threw the cash register through the window, he then made a whip and chased the pastor out of the building, declaring he was turning God’s house into a den of thieves.

Most shocking was what happened when his mother went to picket the local abortion clinic. To her embarrassment, her son was also there, but he was standing with the women who just had an abortion, and yelled at the protesters: “You who are without sin, throw the first stone!”

The mother promptly gets the boy a “What Would A Pharisee Do?”  bracelet replacing his “WWJD”  and all is returned to normal as the son begins doing all the traditional things he was expected to do in the first place:

he has become a dedicated tither, a public prayer warrior, an active condemner of ‘sinners,’ a passionate defender of the Old Covenant law, and has a great reputation as a godly young man amongst other religious people.

Understandably Mooney’s parable has it’s critics.  Dr. Joel McDurmon from The American Vision writes in a response piece What Would Jesus Do? Not what this liberal says He would do

So what would Jesus do? Not what this liberal (Mooney) says (dreams) He would do. Jesus would “do” Old Covenant ethics. Anything else is more like what a Pharisee would do.

See, in American politico-Christian culture the worst thing a Christian teacher can accuse another Christian teacher of being is not “erroneous”, “heretical”, or even an “unbeliever”.

No…it’s being called a “liberal”. 

Many Americans have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to respond to someone labeled with the dread moniker with a responding gnashing of teeth. So it’s interesting to note McDurmon’s …um, liberal use of the word liberal throughout the response.

• A great example of this appears in a recent column on HuffPost, by a liberal religious writer Mick Mooney.
• Usually, the liberal intellectual elite are a bit more subtle and sophisticated.
• These and other questions need to be qualified before undertaking such a liberal crusade.
• The overwrought analogies are bad enough, but with the twist of the alleged “Pharisee,” the liberal becomes more transparent than he wishes.
• Jesus in Mooney’s story looks doesn’t look very much like the law and promises; He looks a whole lot like a modern liberal.
• Why it just so happens that this Jesus’ values line up exactly with those we would expect of a liberal writer like Mick Mooney.
• Despite the derisive parable of our subject liberal, Jesus Himself was a passionate defender of Old Covenant law,
• conservatives are often quite Pharisaic in their personal and political ethics. That hardly means liberals, humanists, have the solution.
• So what would Jesus do? Not what this liberal  says (dreams) He would do

If nothing else McDurmon knows his American audience.  Label your opponent as one of “them” liberals and then pile on.

Unfortunately for McDurmon, Mick Mooney isn’t American.  I don’t know Mick personally (although I have friends who do) and I’m pretty sure he’s from Australia. (My apologies if he’s actually Kiwi).  As such, he’s immune from the political – religious chatter that conditions American Christians to respond in predetermined ways.

That’s what has been a relief for me living outside America for so many years.

God just becomes so much bigger and better!

He becomes a God who is no longer invoked in an attempt to get others to join or defend their “side” but a God who is calling all creation to instead come join him on his.

Mick Mooney is declaring who that God is to the world while Dr. McDurmon steadfastly stands guard over a sheep pen whose sheep are increasingly slipping through the cracks.  Slipping through to find fresh water and pasture from their true Shepherd.

Oh, and ironically, in Australia the Liberal Party is the party for the conservatives and the liberals are in the Labor Party.

Just saying…