Feudal Heaven

Let’s begin with something obvious that still needs saying, what with it being Good Friday. You don’t vote in heaven. There are no ballot boxes, no manifestos, no hung councils of angels. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus described it, is a monarchy. Not ceremonial either. Absolute. No elections. No appeals. No proportional representation for the meek of spirit.

So no, Jesus wasn’t a social democrat. He wasn’t proposing a Scandinavian model of gentle redistribution with polite taxes and universal childcare. He didn’t believe in progressive budgeting or rail nationalisation. He didn’t even set up a local committee. But he also wasn’t a Thatcherite. Or a libertarian. Or the poster boy for gun-toting, Bible-thumping, punishment-obsessed nationalists who think the Sermon on the Mount was a left-wing smear campaign.

That particular crowd – Christian nationalists in the US – have somehow convinced themselves that Jesus is extremely keen on firearms, hostile to immigrants, interested in controlling women’s bodies, allergic to tax, and fond of executing people to set a good example. All while wrapped in a flag and quoting Leviticus through gritted teeth.

They bang on about small government, but they want to regulate bedrooms. They claim to love Jesus but would have deported him at the border. They campaign on family values while standing behind men who couldn’t define fidelity if it were painted on their front door in six-foot letters.

Jesus, by contrast, healed people. For free. No means testing. No paperwork. No forms. He didn’t invoice anyone. If you limped into his path with a skin condition and no insurance, he didn’t send you away to crowdfund ointment – he healed you. Just like that. If anything, it was dangerously close to undermining private enterprise. He was, by modern standards, a public health hazard to shareholder value.

He fed people without checking if they were skivers. He forgave people without asking for a direct debit. He condemned the rich in language so clear it would make a hedge fund manager rethink his second yacht. If he turned up in Congress, he’d be voted out before lunch for bringing the tone down.

And when it came to capital punishment, he didn’t just oppose it – he stopped it happening in real time. When a woman was about to be stoned for adultery, surrounded by men entirely confident in their righteousness, he didn’t nod along or quote scripture. He just said: “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” Silence. Shuffling. No stones.

He wasn’t interested in punishment as theatre. He wasn’t there to vindicate the crowd. He was there to expose the whole rotten business of judgement without self-awareness. You can imagine today’s crowd, all holding placards and chanting for justice, suddenly realising the target was on their own backs.

But that’s the paradox. Jesus wasn’t a liberal. He wasn’t proposing community-based sentencing or prison arts schemes. His kingdom was deeply hierarchical – but it didn’t follow money or bloodlines. It followed humility. The first shall be last. The last shall be first. The poor are lifted. The rich are warned. There’s still a line. It’s just running in the opposite direction.

Politically, then, he doesn’t fit. The left like his compassion but get uneasy when he starts talking about judgement and sin. The right like the idea of moral order but forget he said to sell everything, give it to the poor, and stop counting coins like a miser in a Dickens novel.

And his lifestyle? He lived like a hippy. No fixed address. Constantly on the move. Surrounded by a loosely organised group of followers. Living off handouts, popping into people’s houses uninvited, offering parables instead of payment. He told people to give away everything. Literally everything. Try running a town council like that. Try maintaining bin collections on that budget.

If he were around today, the right-wing press would call him a sponger. The headlines would write themselves: “Unwashed Preacher Lives Off Handouts – Refuses to Work.” GB News would run a week-long special on Galilean scroungers with suspicious accents and no plan to integrate.

It works beautifully if you’re preparing your soul for the next life. Less so when you’re trying to get your MoT booked.

And yet, in moral terms, he was startlingly clear. Heal the sick. Feed the hungry. Forgive the broken. Dismantle the pride of the powerful. Not a detailed policy platform, no, but a pretty solid set of guiding principles for anyone trying to run a society without devouring its own poor.

If he’d been around in 1948, he’d have been right next to Aneurin Bevan, handing out cod liver oil and asking why it took until after a war to get round to universal care. No consultancy fees. No VIP lanes. Just healing.

And then there’s the question that floats around in every culture war: was Jesus woke?

If by woke you mean alert to injustice, compassionate to outsiders, hostile to cruelty, and determined to lift up the ignored – then yes. He was woke before it was a hashtag. He spoke to women like they were people. He healed foreigners. He made heroes out of Samaritans. He forgave publicly. He overturned tables in temples. That’s not just inclusive. It’s revolutionary.

But if by woke you mean the frothing tabloid version – someone who calls for safe spaces, bans old books, and spends the afternoon renaming cheese – then no. He wouldn’t have lasted long on Twitter. He spoke bluntly, judged harshly, and saw sin as personal, not systemic. He wouldn’t have run a training seminar. He’d have walked out halfway through and gone to heal someone.

So no – Jesus wasn’t a Democrat. But he wasn’t a Republican either. He said to forgive enemies, lift up the poor, and live without hoarding wealth like a dragon in a bank vault. He wouldn’t have privatised the NHS. He’d have healed the Health Secretary and told him to go and sin no more.

Politically? He’s impossible to pin down. He lived like a hippy, preached like a revolutionary, judged like a monarch, and refused to carry a coin. Radically left on wealth. Radically right on personal conduct. And theologically off-grid. A centrist, perhaps – but only in the way a tectonic fault is a midpoint between continents.

And as for those American Christians who shout the loudest about their faith while spitting on the stranger and worshipping the gun – he’d have looked them in the eye and said, with terrifying calm, “I never knew you.”