For better or worse, I’ve just started my own political movement, something I would never have considered in any previous iteration of my life.

As a test of this new impulse, I ordered three magnet bumper stickers from Amazon; they say, “Citizens For A Kinder America.”

And here’s the shocker: I’m offering them to any of our Christian friends who will promise to restore and honor the teachings of Jesus Christ and help to staunch the hemorrhaging credibility of faith.

I’m thinking of a way to use the bumper stickers – more are on the way – to honor the Christian faith, the first institution on the earth to invent the idea of conscience.

But I haven’t figured out exactly how to do it yet. I’m working on it.

Religion – especially the Christian faith – has invaded our political system, helped to elect a President, and worked to stuff our courts with religious extremists who have so far shown little regard for people of different values.

The political Christians are key players in the November election.

That invasion has been a disaster for our democracy, politicizing our treasured court system – the envy of much of the world – and damaged the reputation, influence, and integrity of Christianity.

I am not a Christian, but I am a person of faith, and it hurts to hear what every young person I know is saying about Christianity these days, they see it mostly as an extension of a political party, not as a source of guidance or inspiration.

That is a loss for them, for us.

The Evangelical movement has abandoned the Christian ethic of love and humility and decided to ram their values down everybody’s throats rather than persuade or inspire.

Most political scientists believe this wealthy and intensely political Christian movement in America elected Donald Trump, that he could never have won without them.

As someone who has always felt close or closer to Christianity any other religion, this was painful and sometimes frightening to see. I think our country will never be healthy again until we rediscover George Washington and the Founding Fathers’ very strong belief that religion has no place in our political life.

Christianity practically invited the notion of conscience and mercy for the poor and the refugee, to see so many Christians abandon their own faith in this way is a wicked casualty of the hatred movement we call partisanship.

My new political movement seeks a return to the original Christian ethos of empathy and compassion. It is open to absolutely every one of every faith and every color age, or political affiliation – that includes you rascals on the left and the right and the poor bewildered saps in the middle.

As a lifetime admirer of Jesus Christ,  – I’m answering John Lewis’s last call for people to get into good trouble, which Jesus did all of his life –  I’m reaching out.

A political revolution is underway in America, one which perhaps unknowingly embraces many of Christ’s teachings – equality, mercy, love, and kindness.

A  goal of my new political fantasy is to urge true Christians to follow the real teaching of Jesus and maybe get the new politicized and power-mad Christians to think about their erosion of faith. Faith as King Making doesn’t work.

Many so-called religious people seem to have drifted from or forgotten the Christianity that Christ’s life inspired and that the Christian bible demands.

Christ was a political radical who went right after the one percent of his time. He always stood with the oppressed and downtrodden. He would never have set foot in a megachurch.

I think the humble magnet bumper stickers could help. When I hold them, they radiate some sacred energy. There are many good and true Christians left in our world, I think they would love a bumper sticker like mine. They are welcome also.

Jesus preached for gentleness, forgiveness, and tolerance. It seems some of his Christian heirs are fuzzy about those things, they worship a leader who quite openly rejects all of them.

I have some good friends who claim they are devout Christians and who have gotten more political than I ever dreamed of in recent years.

They follow the polls and throw money around like racing junkies reading the tout sheets. They tend to be older and feel persecuted.

The lobbyists and campaign managers and marketers have taught them their trade, a way to make a lot of money and turn faith into raw power.

They elect Presidents and choose Supreme Court justices and build hundred-million-dollar megachurches and flood political campaigns with money.

The Rev. Billy Graham told me when I interviewed him some years ago that Christianity should stay far from politics, it was a poison trap, he called it. The genius of Graham was that he was truly not partisan as a rule, he worked for people, not just Presidents.

In a 1981 interview, the Reverend Graham said people in his position – religious readership – “can’t be closely identified with any particular party or person.” When he was 92, he told Christianity Today that he regrets ever having mixed religion and politics.

He said he recognized that this harmed both religion and politics. Evangelical leaders have mostly rejected this counsel. They have jumped on the money and power train.

The Rev. Graham and I  (odd for a Jewish kid turned Quaker to even say) saw Christ in the same way – he was all about love, compassion, forgiveness, and helping the poor and the vulnerable.

I would hate to generalize, but I am confused by the many Christians who put love, forgiveness, and the poor aside to get the right judges chosen so they can pound their values onto people rather than pray and love or even convert over to their side.

Preaching and proselytizing is different from lobbying and dominating and building lavish churches and pouring millions of dollars into political campaigns to help poison our political system, as the Rev. Graham put it so well.

I know a lot of people who love Donald Trump, and I mostly respect that, or at least I did until recently, but when I see him talk and speak and tweet, I have trouble finding my understanding and love for Jesus Christ in his Twitter Feed or behavior.

Just how much do people of genuine faith have to look away from to rationalize their spiritual cowardice. Whatever he is, Donald Graham is not a modern Jesus, he does not warrant being worshipped.

Rev. Graham was a lifelong and passionate opponent of racism and discrimination. Donald Trump’s injection of bald racism into a Presidential election would have horrified him.

What About Lying?

Jesus ‘s dad is quoted in the Bible as saying, “the LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy..” (Proverbs 12:22). “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another. (Leviticus 19:11).

I didn’t see anywhere in the Bible where people who tolerate lying or who lie get a free pass into Heaven. I rather get the opposition impression about Jesus Christ and his view of hypocrites and enablers.

What About Cruelty?

Our President is often described to me as a man who has been picked on my far left Communists and conspirators and civil servants. He has been quite openly brutal and cruel to people.

He makes fun of the disabled, of women, of dead war heroes, of dead senators. He ignores laws he dislikes and invents laws he wants to see.  He pays no mind to the people suffering from his neglect and ignorance.

The Bible says that is wrong: Proverbs 1:17: ” A man who is kind benefits himself, but a cruel man hurts himself. Or Proverbs 12:10: Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.”

I didn’t see anywhere in Proverbs where Christians can be cruel to people so that they can fire gay and transgender people.

What About Adultery?

The Bible says Christians “shall not commit adultery,” which is sexual relations in which at least one participant us married to someone else.

I can’t find any passage where Jesus or the Bible says it’s okay to stick your tongue down the throats of beautiful women or “grab their pussies” because you are rich and famous, or cheat on your wife and brag about it.

I don’t believe Jesus would go along with that.

What About Helping The Poor And The Refugee?

Helping the poor and the homeless was Jesus’s thing. In 2 Corinthians 9:6-8, he preached: “Each of you should give what you have decided to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God can bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

Proverbs 19:17: “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done.

I don’t believe a government that cuts benefits, fights to take away health care, separates the poorest of women from their children and puts them in cages and refuses to offer refuge to the most miserable and frightened and threatened of the world is honoring or obeying Jesus or his father, or their Bible.

What About Going To Church?

The Bible suggested that coming together in faith created unity in faith, a vital part of the early Christian movement. It wanted Christians to go to church.

Hebrews: 10:24-25: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting altogether, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

And Colossians: 3:16: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs fro the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.”

I wonder if anyone who cares to love Jesus or cares about the poor believes Jesus would have accepted and followed a leader who exploits the Bible to hold it up in front of a church as a political prop minutes after ordering the clubbing and gassing innocent people so that a politician to construct a photo opportunity.

I want to understand how so many Christians can follow a very broken man who never goes to church, and by all accounts, has never read the Bible either?

How, exactly, does he practice his faith? Where, precisely, is his faith? The only thing I’ve seen him worship is himself.

So I struggle to fathom how a notorious liar and admitted adulterer and enemy of the poor and the vulnerable all over the world and a known non-believer who does not worship or attend church services is the new Messiah, come to save Christians from people like me.

I guess it’s a fair trade – judges and the right to dictate the morals of others and discriminate – in exchange for some souls.

So many Christians are eager to trade. Power does seem to corrupt, in politics, in religion.

Our President was, in part, elected by millions of Christians and anointed by them as a savior come to save them from a secular country founded on the principle that religion should be kept separate from the civic and that people ought to be free to love whomever they wish.

Wasn’t that the whole idea of America?

These political Christians claim to love our country, but only if we change it to follow their faith. Or if judges protect them from our laws.

Instead, they are working hard to make it crueler and angrier.

What About The Hypocrite?

In all of my life, the two students of morality I most admired were Jesus Christ Christ, who sacrificed his life for the poor and the needy, and Hannah Arendt, the brilliant moral philosopher.

Here is what she said about the good Christians who would trade the proud Christian legacy for money and political power and poison our civic life, just as Billy Graham told me they would.

“Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core,” wrote Arendt. “Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it, nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.”

Donald Trump had no right to hold that Bible up as a campaign tool It was the very essence of hypocrisy.

And here is what Jesus and the bible say about hypocrisy:

Matthew 7:5, “you hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

And Matthew 15:7-9: “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: “This person honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

I thought Arendt was referring to the horrors of the 20th century. But it could apply to our new kind Christians just as easily. All irony aside, I fear for their souls.

And I fear for faith. They ought to be more careful about what they wish for. When you pick one side, you earn the dread and distrust of the other.