Seeing a quote by a clergyman slick enough to jack-knife a semi on a slippery highway, red lights flashed when reading a letter to the PJ 3/22. The quote by Rev. Benjamin Cremer said that “nowhere in the Bible does it say that those who follow Jesus should stop the government from helping the poor and the needy.” He’s right, but Jesus does not order government to impose welfare systems of generational dependency either.

Jesus’ words of helping the poor and needy are imperatives specifically addressed to his disciples, not government. While affirming the words of Jesus to help the poor and needy, the Apostle Paul’s words restrain government by narrowing its functions to punishing evildoers and maintaining order (see Romans 13). The founders of our nation basically viewed it that way too.

Not so with Cremer who uses the Bible and Jesus in ways to make impressionable citizens and gullible Christians mistake taxation for compassion. While, on the one hand, he talks down power as a form of bullying (authoritarianism), but on the other hand, he talks up power to bully you into fake compassion (progressivism).

Cremer’s cunning quote included such statements as “To be anti-poor is to be Anti-Christ… To be anti-sick people getting health care is to be Anti-Christ… To be anti-homeless relief is to be Anti-Christ… To be anti-neighbor is to be Anti-Christ.”

First, his “anti” statements are so generalized that you don’t know if you’re in his category of “anti.” Unlike the local dog owner with TDS, we are to be neighborly as in cleaning up the mess when our dog poops on any lawn: MAGA or LGBTQ, but are we anti-neighbor for opposing being taxed for transgender surgeries in Guatemala?

Second, Cremer ups the ante with “Anti-Christ.” If you’re guilty of being “anti” on his list, you aren’t just “anti,” but a capital “A” offender as in “Anti-Christ.” That’s not how Anti-Christ is revealed scripturally or soundly understood theologically. No wonder some call Cremer a false prophet.

Third, a glaring omission in his list of “anti’s” involves the least protected persons on the planet. Babies in the womb are the most deprived, ignored and dehumanized class of human beings heartlessly regarded as a “legal” option for brutality, dismemberment, and death. Degraded to that degree, Cremer yet couldn’t find space for a line saying, “To be anti-unborn is to be Anti-Christ.” The letter’s appeal to the “Executive Orders of God’s Law to treat others as you wish to be treated” makes me ask, “Aren’t the unborn “others” too?”

Clergyman Cremer is a suave smoother version of Al Sharpton without the baggage, IRS issues and MSNBC gig. Cremer, like Sharpton, leans over backwards for the progressive social gospel, not the gospel. Their progressivism theologically feeds and fuels their progressivism politically. It’s like a school play with able actors working off a script exuding something rotten.

It breeds a bureaucratic administrative state to accomplish objectives and aims in the name of pseudo-compassion, pigeon-holing you as potentially “Anti-Christ,” according to Cremer. As bad as authoritarianism erodes our constitutional republic, it’s the progressive political and theological cocktail facilitating conditions more conducive for the Beast to make its mark.

The Rev. Mel McGinnis is a Frewsburg resident.