A “Che Guevara Jesus” for Evangelicals?

By Mark Tooley @markdtooley

Recently the new co-head of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) hailed a “Che Guevara Jesus” for heralding a new “revolutionary” way. The comparison is odd, since Che was a brutal Marxist-Leninist commander who was an enthusiastic torturer and prison keeper for Fidel Castro’s new Cuban communist dictatorship. He also was instrumental in bringing Soviet nuclear weapons to Cuba.

ESA has long been outspokenly pacifist, anti-nuke, and has condemned U.S. enhanced interrogation techniques during the War on Terror as “torture.” So in this embrace of Che, is ESA now backing armed combat, nukes and torture?! Probably not. But the comments from Paul Alexander, who teaches at Palmer Theological Seminary outside Philadelphia and is ordained in the Assemblies of God, don’t bode well for ESA’s future. Ron Sider, ESA’s founder and retiring long-time chief, was politically liberal and pacifist while still keeping ESA theologically orthodox and fairly reasonable. Although his rhetoric may have been more leftward in his earlier days, Sider likely didn’t hail a “Che Guevara Jesus.”

IRD’s Kristin Rudolph attended ESA’s installation of its new leadership in July and reported:

Although historically justice has been understood differently, from “sevenfold retribution … where if someone hits you on the cheek you slit their throat … [resulting in] spiraling violence,” to “one for one kind of retribution,” Alexander stated Jesus brought a new “revolutionary” way as the “Che Guevara Jesus, the nonviolent revolutionary Jesus.” This Jesus, as opposed to the “Colonial Settler Jesus” Alexander joked he asked into his heart at a young age, advocated “turning the cheek of equality, turning the cheek of respect, staying engaged in the conflict and in the problem and working toward hopefully transformation and a solution.”

Interesting that Alexander equates his “Che Guevara Jesus” with a “nonviolent, revolutionary Jesus.” Guevara was no pacifist. He was a commander in Castro’s armed insurrection against Cuba’s Batista regime, in which capacity Che executed colleagues deemed traitorous or malingerers. After Castro seized power, Che ran the notorious Cabana prison in Havana, where he tortured regime opponents, likely executing hundreds, possibly several thousand over his career.

Here’s a typically zealous quote from Che:

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!

It doesn’t sound very Jesus-like or non-violent, does it?

Maybe Alexander, even though he’s a professor, doesn’t know much about the real Che Guevara, though surely he at least knows that Che was a soldier in armed Marxist revolution. Che did not believe in God, of course, but in Communist dogma, which included persecution of Christians and of all others who doubted Communism. He believed that establishing a Marxist police state merited the flow of rivers of blood. Che even criticized the Soviets for not launching nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crisis. He later was killed in Bolivia, where he was unsuccessfully trying to ignite armed Marxist revolution. It’s also notable that before leaving Cuba, Che headed Cuba’s national bank under Castro, helping to institute the disastrously collective economic policies that would transform Cuba from one the hemisphere’s wealthiest nations to one of the poorest. Cuban Communism has specialized in keeping poor people poor.

So how does Che Guevara resemble Jesus? Why would his name even be uttered in the same paragraph with Jesus? Only Paul Alexander can answer that question. Thirty two years ago IRD was founded because many church elites were equating the Gospel with Marxist revolution, even supporting violent Marxist insurgencies and Marxist regimes that tortured and murdered their opponents, including Christians. Thankfully, those dark days are mostly over, and most of “Liberation Theology” that justified these outrages is discredited or forgotten. Let’s hope there’s no attempt to resurrect it at ESA under Paul Alexander.