The following is the Gospel according to Nicky Reid, a ranting, genderfuck, lesbian, Christopagan anarchist from the 21st Century. Like all religious propaganda, it is loosely based on a hot mess of new age folklore, revisionist history, pharmacological hallucinations and psychotic episodes. Take it with a grain of any spice you like, but please remember that it is no less fantastic or plausible than your own preferred Christmas fairytales. Let’s face it, we’re all swinging in the dark here folks….
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there lived a teenage hermaphrodite by the name of Mary whom God chose to be the virgin mother of the greatest revolutionary who would ever live due to the beauty of her unique chromosomal make-up. Upon making herself pregnant to save mankind from its own bullshit, Mary and her husband, a super chill carpenter with rumored connections to old money named Joseph, left their hick town of Nazareth and traveled to Joseph’s familial home of Bethlehem in the suburbs of Jerusalem for tax dodge reasons. Unable to snag a cheap motel room, the two ended up giving birth to Jesus Christ, king of Queers, in a barn surrounded by animals and migrant farmworkers. King Herod, the local Roman puppet caudillo, caught wind from a few traveling groupies of the birth of a child who would one day threaten his fragile grip on power and did what petty tyrants do best, he flipped the fuck out and started killing babies. After being tipped off about Herod’s homicidal hissy fit, Mary, Joseph and the wee baby Jesus chose to go underground in Egypt.
A few decades later, Jesus Christ reemerged on the spiritual scene in ancient Palestine and immediately started shaking shit up. He traveled from town to town, skipping the local temples and country clubs in favor of the seediest dives he could find where he hung down with the freaks and ghouls, your prostitutes, your lepers, your hustlers, your Queers and your eunuchs, not so he could speak down to them and tell them to change their wicked ways, but to embrace them with open arms and inform them that they were the true chosen people of God. Society had fucked up and these outlaws weren’t a part of it. Jesus railed against the beautiful people, condemning the colonialist Roman Empire and the temples that did it’s bidding and preached that man required no church or state to be in harmony with God.
Unlike most rabbis of his era, Jesus rejected traditional marriage and chose instead to embrace a polyamorous relationship with a dozen or so of his closest followers who he called Disciples, mostly hunky dudes who he picked up at the docks, but also an ex-hooker and noted foot fetishist named Mary Magdelene who would become his most devoted confidante. When they weren’t raising hell in the local villages and vandalizing the temples, Jesus’ crew would hang out in the surrounding deserts where they would trip on shrooms and watch their messiah perform crazy magic tricks. Naturally, as Jesus built up a devoted cult following, the temples and imperial Roman overlords whom he condemned for being the fraudulent tyrants they were, caught wind of the freaky young renegade and conspired with one of his disgruntled groupies to have him killed. After a brief show trial, Jesus was given the death penalty for being a dangerous heretic and crucified on the cross.
That should have been the end of it, but a diehard crew of Jesus’ closest followers kept his message alive in stateless underground communes where everything was shared and nudism, psychedelic rituals and free love was practiced openly. Slowly their numbers grew. At first, the Romans persecuted these spiritual outlaws violently, having them stoned to death and fed to the lions. But as the Roman Empire’s own imperial cult began to lose popularity with their jaded citizenry and Gnostic mystery religions from the Orient became all the rage, Emperor Constantine committed the worst atrocity the world would ever know and hijacked Christianity’s cult of peace, love and understanding and perverted it to save the very empire that murdered its founder and namesake.
With help from the self-proclaimed Church Fathers, the Roman Empire buried Jesus’ revolutionary gospels in a leather-bound hunk of violent, bigoted bullshit called the Bible and the good name of Christ was used in vain to promote everything he despised. First, it was used to slaughter Europe’s rural heathens who were guilty of the same crimes as Christ, practicing a communal lifestyle that didn’t rely on the state for its relationship with a higher power. Eventually, Christianity became a tool for international imperialism used to justify everything from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the genocidal colonization of Africa and the New World. Even after Rome fell, this mutated creed was passed on from one brutal empire to the next until it finally reached the empire that would span the entirety of the globe and become the Antichrist known as America.
But the Queer word of Christ did not die with the birth of the Church. True Christian outlaws fought on valiantly throughout the ages. Righteous temple shaking motherfuckers like Francis of Assisi, the genderqueer Joan of Arc, Oscar Wilde, William Blake, Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Jacques Ellul, Ammon Hennacy, Ivan Illich and the Berrigan Brothers. They would lead peasant revolts, expose the thieves who run the Church and sabotage the empire’s wars. A pair of revolutionary theologians, in the 16th and 17th Century respectively, named Thomas Muntzer and Gerrard Winstanely of the Diggers would give birth to what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would later call anarchism, a rejection of all earthly hierarchy as blasphemy against mankind and a call to live as Christ did, in Queer harmony with the universe sometimes referred to as God.
We here Christians living in the belly of the Antichrist in America, find ourselves this Christmas in the year of our lord Twenty-Twenty-One at a great crossroads. We live in the Ebenezer Scrooge era of the American Empire, confronted by three ghosts. The Ghost of Christmas Past, which confronts us with the heinous deeds that our empire has done in the name of Christ, from Manifest Destiny to the War on Terror. The Ghost of Christmas Present, which confronts us with a great fearsome mirror showing us the reflection of a greedy, fallen people, praying to false idols in-stadium churches and voting booths, and ethnically cleansing Christ’s ancestral home of Palestine on the orders of Evangelical Zionists. And finally, the Ghost of Christmas Future, which confronts us with the inevitable results of our imperial deviation from Christ’s true path; climate change, famine, nuclear holocaust, the annihilation of all that God has bestowed upon us to cherish and keep holy.
But it’s not too late, dearest motherfuckers. These visions are but the shadows of things that may be, not the shadows of things that will be. It is Christmas morn and that means that it’s not too late. There is still time. If America truly is a Christian nation, then America truly is a Queer anarchist nation and where better to begin a revolution to take back our spiritual destiny and crush the Evil Empire which murdered the wild faggot who set us free from our own bullshit, not with guns and bombs and violence, well, maybe a little bit of that, but mostly with peace and love and secession and agorism. We, the freaks and ghouls, the chosen people, can defeat the Antichrist by doing little more than rejecting his poison fruit of statism and growing a new stateless kingdom of God in the shell of the old.
Be merry, Queer Christian soldiers, for it is Christmas and we have a whole world to win!