If we distill the original Christian “gospel” to it’s essence, it’s this: Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. Of course, “Caesar” becomes a “fill in the blank”: “Jesus is Lord, not __________.” The core behavior of the Christian faith is to love one another. The central character trait of the Christian is Humility. Lordship, love, and humility are interrelated. The deterioration of any one of these erodes the others.
The Great Reversal
If, we as “Christians”, reverse the gospel message — “Caesar is Lord, not Jesus”, we will also reverse the core behavior of love and the central character trait of humility. We then discard love and justify hatred, violence, and xenophobia. Humility succumbs to the arrogance that “I have the truth” and those holding alternative political views are evil.
The Great Deception
A “great deception” occurs when we say we believe paragraph one, practice paragraph two, while becoming more and more convinced we’re practicing paragraph one.
Note: Obviously, many people who do not claim to be Christians are loving and humble. The problem I’m addressing is casting aside the central elements of our faith, deifying a political leader, and making a political agenda a sacred text – and then placing this all under the umbrella of Christianity.
Jesus Follower, Blogger, Public Speaker. Teresaofavilaturns500.wordpress.com
Teresa of Avila Turns 500 
Succinct and powerful!
Especially after having just read this: https://blog.usejournal.com/the-end-of-white-american-christianity-4a112ce25dc6
Thanks for you kind words Larry. I appreciate the article and enjoyed reading it!
Today is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Going to try fasting. Also, I’m going to have to look into the Milner book you reference a few posts ago. Sounds interesting!
Brian – It’s great to hear from you. Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I hope all is well.