On the Christian Vocation to be a Pest

One thing’s for sure: you’re going to have to get used to being a pest.

You are only going to get through the next four years with your conscience intact, if you get over yourself and are willing to be a pest.

When your country falls to Christian Nationalism, a Christian who realizes that Nationalism is heresy is obliged to be a pest.

When people are acting as though a Caesar, any Caesar, a tsar or an emperor or a Führer und Reichskanzler, is appointed by God and should be honored as a god, it’s the Christian’s duty to irritate them.

I’m very good at being a pest; I think it’s the autism. I am willing to be a pest some more. We all should.

We all need to play the role of the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who created a scandal by insisting that he saw what he saw, even when respectable people around him were pretending to be blind.

Practice being a pest. Practice saying, “You’re not supposed to be cruel to immigrants. That’s a sin.” Practice turning to somebody who just made a nasty racist joke at the Church doughnut social and saying “What do you mean by that? I’ve never heard that word before. What does it mean?”

Stand in front of a mirror and say “You shouldn’t admire Elon Musk because he keeps using the R-word as a slur. It’s not pro-life to make fun of people with intellectual disabilities. Nine in ten people with down’s syndrome are aborted because of the stigma against intellectual disabilities” until you can do it automatically whenever Musk’s name is mentioned favorably for the way he meddled in the election.

Memorize Luke 6:24-26 and practice saying it off book. “But woe to you who are rich,  for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now,  for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.  Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.” Get ready to discharge that verse whenever somebody from church praises a billionaire conservative donor for protecting Christianity.

When somebody praises the virtues of our president for protecting us against the wicked unbelievers and enforcing our lifestyle over everyone else’s, that’s when you deadpan “Put not your trust in princes!” and get ready to duck in case they smack you.

Get ready to walk up to the deacon after Mass and say “Deacon O’Malley, I think you made a mistake. You’re not allowed to endorse a political candidate by name in a homily. You can and should explain Catholic Social Teaching, but you shouldn’t endorse a candidate.”

Get ready to approach your pastor and say “Father Malarkey, I think there was a mistake in the bulletin. I didn’t see that you’re starting a food drive to help support all the poor people in our community who have been thrown off food stamps! The Protestant church down the street has theirs on the second Wednesday of the month, so maybe we should move ours to the fourth Wednesday of the month. We do have a food drive, right?”

And yes, before anyone tells me so, we’d have to do something like this under a different president as well.

The reason I have been supporting Democrats lately is because they remain a political party while the alternative has become a personality cult. They aren’t saviors, they’re just politicians. Some of them are awful. We can have all kinds of lively disagreements on the best way to govern, and we can each disagree, vehemently, while still being Christians. Some Christians are fiscal and social conservatives and they’re not wrong; I respect a lot of them even though I’m a commie pinko liberal.

You can wag your finger at me for being a filthy dirty hippie and say that the churches should be taking over this much of the social services in a community, and I can wag my finger at you for being a stuffy old walnut and say that actually the rich should be taxed in a much higher bracket to expand the safety net. One of may be gravely mistaken, but we’re both having a disagreement on HOW to best support the poor, instead of one of us thinking that the poor shouldn’t be supported at all. We both want good things and are in a fight over how best to accomplish them. That’s the kind of argument we can and ought to be having.

But Christian Nationalism is different from that. Christian Nationalism is a sin right out of the gate.

For the sake of our souls, we have to be pests, and stand up against that sin.

Thankfully, I have plenty of practice at being a pest.