Whitewashed Tombs: A Three-Part Series on Christ, Nation, and Mendacity
✝️ “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27
Part One
When Christ Becomes a Tool
Resurrection Sunday and the Political Use of Jesus
April is the season when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the time when believers reflect on the truth that Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again on the third day. Because of this, Jesus Christ is recognized as King, and for over two thousand years the world has paused to remember His life, His sacrifice, and His victory over death.
When you consider it fully, it is remarkable that one man could have such transformative power across nations, cultures, and generations. That alone is awe-inspiring, and this season draws people together in recognition of Jesus Christ.
At the same time, something else is unfolding, and it must be named plainly.
Over the past month, there has been an increasing trend of individuals using Jesus Christ not as Savior, but as a tool to support ideological and political positions. This is happening across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, and it has become especially visible in conservative and nationalist circles.
Just this past week, imagery circulated of Donald Trump portrayed in a Christ-like manner. He stood over a man as though healing him, with light surrounding the scene, as if he were the savior of America. The image was astonishing and, quite frankly, blasphemous. It was criticized on both the left and the right and was eventually removed, which was the right decision. The fact that it was created at all points to something deeper.
What we are witnessing extends beyond political division and reaches into spiritual confusion. Everyone claims Christ. That claim now appears across political, cultural, and religious lines, each asserting moral authority while pointing to the same source. They cannot all be right.
Within that confusion, there is a strain of thought, increasingly visible in right-leaning circles, that aligns American identity with whiteness and presents that alignment as both natural and necessary. What is being advanced is not simply a political position, but a redefinition of belonging.
That redefinition carries consequences. It places American Blacks and Native Americans outside the very identity they helped form. It overlooks the presence of Native people who existed on this land before it was named America, and it dismisses the generational labor, sacrifice, and blood of Black Americans who helped build the nation that now claims to define itself without them.
It is presented as order and argued as preservation, defined as truth, when in reality it narrows the definition of belonging to fit a particular image and then uses that image as the standard by which others are measured and excluded.
When Christ is drawn into that framework, the distortion deepens. He is no longer presented as Savior over all, but as a figure used to affirm boundaries that were never His to establish.
“Mendacity: the act of presenting falsehood as truth, not only through direct lies, but through distortion, omission, and the manipulation of reality in a way that persuades others to accept what is untrue as though it were true.”
Mendacity and the Claim to Possess God
What we are witnessing is mendacity. It is not limited to false statements. It takes shape in identity, in authority, and in claim, presenting what is false as truth and reinforcing it until it is accepted.
This pattern appears in both religious and political leadership.
The pope presents himself as a moral authority who claims proximity to divine truth while lacking the spiritual clarity such authority requires. He wears the garment and performs the role, yet what is revealed beneath that appearance reflects what Jesus warned about: a structure that looks righteous outwardly while concealing what is corrupted within.
The same danger appears in political leadership.
Donald Trump presents himself as a force for what is right in matters of war and conflict. I have more respect for Donald Trump than I do for Pope Leo, because Donald Trump recognizes that he is flawed. He knows he is capable of sin and capable of repentance. Pope Leo does not present himself that way. He does not recognize that he is a man. He is not God. He is not the holder of truth. No man is.
No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself.
Political leaders and religious leaders alike remain subject to that truth. The moment either begins to take on the imagery, authority, or symbolism of Christ, the line has already been crossed.
Jesus described such men as whitewashed tombs. Beautiful on the outside, but filled with dead men's bones.
Known by Their Fruit
Jesus said we will know them by their fruit. What a man professes and what a man protects will eventually reveal who he is. The concern here rests with the individual who believes he can define, contain, and speak for Christ as though God operates within the limits he has established.
Scripture has always addressed the question of who can claim proximity to God, and one of the clearest examples appears in the book of 2 Kings.
The account tells of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, a man of authority who suffered from leprosy. The path to his healing did not begin with his position, but with a young Israelite servant in his household, who pointed him toward the prophet Elisha.
Naaman approached the situation expecting a display that matched his rank. He anticipated a direct encounter, an invocation, an act that aligned with what he believed such authority required. Instead, the instruction came through a servant, directing him to wash in the Jordan. The simplicity of the command conflicted with his expectation, and he turned away from it. Only after setting aside that expectation and submitting to what had been spoken did the healing come.
His response afterward reveals something deeper. Naaman declared that he would worship no god but the God of Israel and asked for soil from the land to take with him. That act reflected allegiance. The God he encountered was not found within the structures he knew, nor in the power he carried, but in the authority of God's word.
Christ later pointed back to this moment, noting that while many in Israel suffered, it was Naaman the Syrian who was cleansed. The significance rests in where God chose to move. Proximity did not determine access. Identity did not determine outcome.
While certain voices speak with certainty about the side on which they believe God stands, they overlook the pattern Scripture reveals. God does not move according to expectation, status, or proximity. He moves according to His own authority.
When Christianity is fused with national identity and treated as something to be held and preserved within a particular image, the result is distortion. What begins as conviction shifts into possession, and what belongs to God is drawn into human structure and defined by human terms. That movement does not produce alignment with truth. It produces conflation.
Truth does not submit to identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.
In Part Two, I will name what these men are actually arguing for, in their own words.
Part Two
The Argument They Are Making
On Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge, and Calvin Robinson
That same mendacity did not remain confined to political or traditional religious spaces. It surfaced this week on the far right in a conversation on NXR Studios, where Joel Webbon, joined by Dale Partridge and Calvin Robinson, framed Christianity and American identity in ways that tie faith to race, lineage, and national structure, raising serious questions about who belongs and who does not. All three men identify as Protestant. Two of them, Webbon and Partridge, are white. Calvin Robinson is of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. That detail matters, and I will return to it. What was presented carried the appearance of order and conviction, yet rested on a narrowing of truth that cannot sustain itself under Scripture.
Come with me as I walk through the major points being made, the arguments used to justify exclusion while denying its name, and the structure that allows it to stand.
Race, as it has functioned in America, is not a fixed biological reality but a social construct shaped by law, history, and power. It was used not only to organize and separate, but to assign belonging to whites and exclusion to Blacks in particular. That structure did not emerge by accident. It was built into the system itself, often enforced through measures as rigid as the one-drop rule, where the presence of any African ancestry placed a person outside of whiteness.
At the same time, the reality remains that all people share a common humanity that cannot be reduced to these categories. The tension between what is constructed and what is real has shaped the American experience from its beginning.
It is within that tension that this conversation must be understood. In their discussion, Webbon, Partridge, and Robinson take the language of race, nation, and identity and move it in a specific direction. They frame American identity and Christianity in ways that align with a particular vision of nationhood, one that narrows belonging and places American Blacks and Jews outside of it, while presenting that framework as consistent with Scripture.
That distinction requires clarity. The Jewish faith, as it is practiced today, does not affirm Jesus Christ as the Messiah or as divine. Christianity rests on the belief that Christ has already come, that He is the Son of God, and that salvation is found through Him alone. Judaism continues to await the Messiah and does not accept that claim.
This difference matters, and it should be stated plainly. Disagreement with Jewish theology does not translate into agreement with the arguments being made here, nor does it justify broad or disparaging claims directed toward Jewish people and American Blacks as a whole.
The same standard must apply across the board. Entire groups cannot be judged collectively while the historical record of others is minimized or ignored. The history of European expansion, conquest, chattel slavery, and the formation of this nation carries its own weight and cannot be set aside when defining who belongs.
Their position unfolds as a layered framework. A nation, in their view, is not simply a political structure but a combination of land, lineage, language, laws, loves, liturgy, and faith, with race and ethnicity treated as essential components rather than incidental features.
From that foundation, they move toward a vision of stability that depends on uniformity. A nation must remain unified in its composition in order to endure. That unity is not limited to culture alone, but extends toward a preference for a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and at times mono-religious society, where difference is treated as a source of disorder rather than strength.
From there, they move to a reading of American history that frames the nation as fundamentally European and Christian in origin. Immigration and demographic change are then positioned as threats to cultural continuity. That concern is not without historical context. The issue arises in how it is applied and who is included within the definition of the nation itself.
American identity is not reserved for European descendants. It is inseparable from American Blacks, descendants of those who built this nation through forced labor, and from Native Americans, whose presence on this land predates its naming.
Within their framework, stability requires sameness. Diversity becomes fragmentation, and change becomes decline. Immigration is then framed as a moral violation, at times described as theft, shifting the language from governance to judgment.
At the same time, Christianity is positioned as the force that should shape national identity, binding faith to governance, culture, and law. The church is called upon to develop a theology of nationhood that aligns belief with race and lineage.
The conclusion becomes clear. A nation defined in this way cannot remain multi-ethnic without losing what they believe it was meant to be. What is presented as preservation becomes a narrowing of identity.
The Slavery Problem They Will Not Solve
There is a tension at the center of this argument that remains unresolved. Immigration is described as theft, yet slavery is not addressed with the same clarity.
If crossing a border unlawfully is framed as taking what does not belong to you, then the forced removal of human beings, the stripping of identity, the separation of families, and the exploitation of generations must be understood for what it was.
It was theft in its most complete form. It was theft of body, of name, of language, of land, of lineage, of faith, and of future. The very elements they use to define a nation were taken from my ancestors.
That reality does not sit comfortably within their framework, and it is often avoided. The argument begins to resemble a desire to return to an earlier order while denying the full truth of how that order was established. The claim that the nation belongs to those who built it cannot stand without acknowledging who labored, who was forced, and who paid the cost.
An argument that treats immigration as a moral violation while softening the reality of slavery does not hold. It applies judgment selectively. It names one form of taking while minimizing another that was far more expansive and far more destructive.
That is not a theology of nationhood grounded in truth. It is a framework built on selective memory.
A Man Arguing Against His Own Existence
There is one more thing worth saying before moving to the answer. Calvin Robinson, sitting at that table, is himself of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. By the standard the three men are arguing for, he would not be considered fully English under their own framework. Race is biology, they said. Blood and lineage define a nation, they said. A man of partial Caribbean descent does not fit that picture cleanly. The fact that Robinson sits comfortably defending an argument that, taken to its logical end, would exclude him, is one of the strangest features of the whole conversation. It is also a reminder that ideology has a way of asking people to argue against their own existence.
In Part Three, I will answer them. Not with abstraction, but with my own lineage, and with the witness of Scripture itself.
Part Three
Land, Lineage, and the God Who Will Not Be Owned
An American Black Answer to Mendacity
There is a point where argument must give way to clarity.
The framework these men advanced attempts to define belonging through lineage, to anchor identity in ancestry, and to align nationhood with a particular vision of race and faith. It presents order as something that must be preserved through sameness and suggests that deviation from that sameness leads to decline.
That framework does not account for my existence.
I am an American Black woman. My lineage is not a matter of abstraction. It is tied to this land through generations of labor, displacement, survival, and faith. My ancestors did not arrive here by choice, yet their hands helped build what is now called America. Their presence is not incidental to this nation. It is foundational.
Land
My great-great-great grandfather married a Cherokee woman. That woman was not an immigrant. She was not a settler. She was born of the soil this nation now occupies. Her people walked this land before there was an America to call it America. That ancestry ties me to this place in a way no European descent can match. The Cherokee were here. They are part of who I am.
The men who argue that America belongs to them by lineage came here from somewhere else. England. Scotland. Ireland. Germany. The Netherlands. They came across an ocean to a land already inhabited, already named, already known by the people who had walked it for generations. By their own logic, the original claim belongs to those who were already here. By blood, I am also one of those people.
Lineage
My African ancestors did not come to this country. They were brought here. The first documented Africans arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1619. That is more than one hundred years before most European immigrant families set foot in America. Our roots and our ties were cut, just as the white man's roots and ties were cut when he left Europe. We became loyal to this land because this land became the only land we had. Africa was severed from us. America became us.
I can trace my legacy to a family that came out of slavery and built a community in Nacogdoches, Texas. That community exists today. I do not have to look at a photograph to prove it. I can go and stand on the ground where my people built. They did not migrate here. They were forced here, and then they built. That is American lineage. That is generational presence. That is the very thing these men say defines a nation, and I have it in two directions, by Native ancestry and by African ancestry, both rooted in this soil.
Labor
They want to talk about who built America. We should talk about it. The American Constitution was written by European men. The American economy was built on the backs of African slaves. Both things are true. Cotton became the largest export of the United States in the nineteenth century. That cotton was picked by the hands of slaves. The wealth that funded northern banks, southern plantations, and the broader American economy passed through the labor of people who received nothing for it. Parts of the United States Capitol and the White House were built using slave labor. That is a documented fact, not an opinion.
Black Americans have served in every major American war. The Revolutionary War. The War of 1812. The Civil War. The First World War. The Second World War. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. We have shed blood for a country that has not always been willing to shed its prejudice for us. That is loyalty by any measure these men claim to honor.
The God Who Will Not Be Owned
Christ does not belong to a nation. He does not belong to a race. He does not belong to a structure built by men. He is not preserved through lineage, nor is He confined to a people who claim proximity to Him.
He reveals Himself according to His own authority.
Scripture makes this plain. He spoke to those who were not expected to receive Him. He moved among those who were considered outside. He established a kingdom that did not follow the lines men had drawn.
Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another. He crossed that boundary on purpose. He told her that God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.
"God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."
— John 4:24
Rahab was a prostitute, and she is in the lineage of Christ. Ruth was a Moabite, and she is in the lineage of Christ. The Roman centurion was an outsider, and Jesus said He had not found such great faith in all of Israel. The Ethiopian eunuch was the first recorded African convert in the book of Acts, baptized on a road in the desert by a Spirit-led evangelist. Naaman the Syrian was healed when the lepers of Israel were not. This is not a modern invention. This is the original pattern.
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
— Galatians 3:28
Paul wrote that in the first century. He was not a liberal theologian. He was a former Pharisee writing under inspiration to a young church trying to figure out whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish in order to be Christian. His answer was no. His answer remains no. Ethnicity does not determine standing before God. Status does not determine standing before God. National identity does not determine standing before God. Faith does.
"After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb."
— Revelation 7:9
That is the final vision. Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every language. Not one race elevated above the others. Not one ethnic group designated as the true heirs. The throne room of God is the most diverse gathering in all of Scripture. Anyone who tells you that Christianity requires racial uniformity has not read the last chapter of the book they claim to follow.
The Retraction
The attempt to bind Christ to national identity reverses the pattern Scripture establishes. It takes what is not owned and presents it as possession. It takes what is given and reshapes it into something to be defended. It replaces revelation with structure and substitutes identity for truth.
That movement is not preservation. It is distortion.
What we are witnessing in this country is a retraction. There were ancestors, men and women, who thought they were better. They killed. They robbed. They raped. They stoned. They lied. For centuries, they pretended to be something they were not. Now that some of that has been corrected, even partially, there is a movement to go back. They want to relive a time when they were foul and called it good, because in their minds they hold an image that is a lie. It is a false image. It is mendacity.
Mendacity does not always appear as an obvious falsehood. It often presents itself as conviction, as order, as clarity. It speaks with confidence and appeals to history, to tradition, and to authority. Over time, it becomes familiar enough to be accepted.
But it does not stand when examined.
Truth does not depend on who claims it. It does not shift with identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.
They claim Christ. They cannot have Him on those terms. Christ belongs to Himself, and through His own choosing, He gives Himself to all who come in spirit and in truth. The Samaritan woman knew it. Ruth knew it. Rahab knew it. The Ethiopian on the desert road knew it. My ancestors, who took a faith that was used against them and reshaped it into a faith that set them free, knew it.
I know it too.
No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself. No nation is the inheritor of Jesus Christ except every nation, together, before the throne. No race is the bearer of Jesus Christ except the human race, made in His image, redeemed by His blood.
The whitewashed tomb is beautiful on the outside. Inside, it is full of dead men's bones. We have seen the outside long enough. It is time to call what is inside by its name.
Mendacity.
Jacqueline Session Ausby
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