Christians: stop washing people's feet!
Please, for the love of all that is holy
Cautionary preface: this essay was written as a knee-jerk response to the worst Super Bowl commercial of all time: an annoying, toxic corndog which said “Jesus didn’t teach hate: He told us to wash feet," and then went on to show pictures of liberals sucking on minorities’ toes. Something which made a lot of us wonder if the first-century Romans were right.
As such, is the essay holy? No. Is it wise? I would argue only somewhat. Does it accurately describe how most Christians have done foot washing for centuries? Absolutely not. It's about some Christians slandering the other Christians and putting us all on defense in the worst way possible — which is convincing liberals we love people on liberals' terms, and that washing feet is a way to prove it. What I wrote is a ‘torches and pitchforks’ sermon that may not have been polite or Christlike or even intended to make anybody change his mind. It was a sock in the nose. And it was hilarious.
As such I've spent time thinking about whether or not to take it down, and in the end I kept it. Mostly because they deserved it, and if you can't punch an ass you might as well make fun of him.
Yours,
-J
Dear Christians,
Stop washing people’s feet. Thirty years ago John Travolta asked Samuel L Jackson if he’d give another guy a foot massage and Mr Jackson answered fuck you. This is the same answer you should give about foot washing and you know it, because giving foot massages to randos is disgusting.
“But Jesus did it and I want to love people like Jesus.” You know what Jesus didn’t do? Wear socks. Nobody did back then because nobody had invented them yet. That’s why the servants had to wash feet: everybody’s feet were a wreck. Today if your feet are a wreck it’s because you’re a wreck too. Do you want to wipe a junkie's butt? Do you want to brush his teeth and wash behind his ears too, as he actually needs? Then stop it — why don’t you try helping your mom clean up after Christmas dinner? For the (literal) love of God, just check up on your (literal) neighbor*.
Of course being Christlike to your wife and kids on a daily basis is too hard. That’s why when a Christian wants to wash somebody’s feet, he/she/it always books a plane ticket and flies half-way to Timbuktu. Then they find a tranny, or a junkie, or a guy on trial for triple homicide and they start pulling off his shoes on camera. Is it in the privacy of someone’s home? No: it’s in front of a church, or in the middle of the street, or streaming on Instagram. Hey! I wash people’s feet! And look at how weird they are! Grow up.
Washing people’s feet is supposed to do several things, the first of which is to show you have a servant’s heart. Which is immediately nixed because after washing someone’s feet you beat your own. In fact, never in the course of history has any Christian ever washed another’s feet in public and then went home to be their valet. It’s a one-time two-minute affair designed to send a message (“I’m gross!”) so you can get back to your life being the CEO of Chick-Fil-A and start counting all your dividends.
But second, washing feet is designed to showcase equality under God — another failure, since everybody knows washing upwards (or even sideways) is a faux pas. You can’t just wash the President’s feet. Aside from the fact that he’d enjoy it too much, there’s the fact that this would put you in the position of an actual servant. As we already mentioned, this is missing the point. You’re supposed to say, hey, get it? I’m not supposed to be here! So you pick a black single mom with AIDS so everybody can know how Christian you are. Also they can know who you vote for.
It’s worth noting not so much that these things are done along political lines, but that they never seem to actually cross them. It’s hard to even imagine a Christian liberal shaking hands with a trailer-park Nazi — that requires a humility too low, like Christ washing Judas’s feet right before His betrayal. So it’s much better to stick with your constituents, especially when doing it on camera “proves” you have “good will” towards people you can get sued for not hiring.
People will say, of course, that taking Christ literally with the foot washings is the surest way to follow Him. The apostles themselves (who aren't as close to Christ as the liberals**) took a more allegorical view, and when it came time for the church to take off, they distributed most of the grunt work to the deacons. “What are we supposed to do, just wait tables?” they said. This is actually what happened in the Book of Acts, and the reason Pope Francis is out there kissing pinkie toes is probably because he never read it.
But people change as they get older, and who knows? Maybe I’ll give it a try someday. Maybe like baptism and sacrament it’s a symbol that imparts a spiritual condition. But Paul also commanded us to greet people at church with a holy kiss — and I haven’t tried it yet, but when I do, I’m tightening up my face for a slap. As it should be whenever a holy man shows up and tries to take off your shoes for a TikTok.
Yours,
-J
P.S. This essay was rejected by my editor (God bless him) on the grounds that some people are really taking the "go and do likewise" literally — and that doing it honestly and humbly is okay. I agree with him here, and if there's anyone out there who washes his fellow parishioners' feet, you have my blessing. I mean no insult to the honest follower of Christ here. Just the pompous ass who's doing it for show.
There's another objection to be made here. I implied in the first paragraph that one man asking another man to wash his feet is disgusting. This is still true on several levels to me personally, but a question could still be asked. Is me touching another man's already-clean feet gross because the act is gross? Or is it gross because I am?
As with daddy-daughter dates and men holding hands in public, the objectionable may lie more in the objector than the objected — but still the big question remains. With the utility gone, why wash feet? Americans aren't used to touching each others' feet. They don’t even do it when they're knocking boots. They also aren't used to touching one another's faces. If I wash my neighbor's feet without them being dirty it's considered an act of innocence. But if my neighbor's wife's hair is out of place and I brush it across her face and tuck it behind her ear, how do you think he'd take it?
These questions are all cultural, and can change from region to region, so there's no objective answer here. But if I ask for some cultural leeway as an objection to following Christ's example, I also grant some — especially to Christ, who lived when people washed other people’s dirty feet regularly. I just ask that foot washing gets done in humility to actual neighbors: not to show what a great liberal you are on camera.
*It’s impressive how much the term “neighbor” gets convoluted into almost anything but actual neighbors. Illegal aliens from failed nations? Neighbors. Prisoners in nursing homes? Neighbors. Prisoners in prison? Neighbors. Gay people in general, black people entirely, any nation you’re currently at war with? Neighbors. Your neighbor? Treated like a fuckin’ foreigner.
"Neighbor" means an obligation to seek the welfare of every single person you have zero connections with; and the person who comprises your daily neighborhood experience, whom you see weekly and don't know whether they're killing it or on the verge of killing themselves, is a nonentity. To liberal Christians especially, you have more obligations to whoever's protesting against your whole race, right or wrong, than you do to your own extended family. How's that for a neighbor?
That's why I mentioned helping mom at Christmas dinner. To a religious doofus, you can rack up serious points washing a tranny's foot for two minutes. But on Christ's birthday or Thanksgiving, you can eat all somebody's food, disrespect them at dinner about what they consider a neighbor, and then leave them with a huge mess to clean up. Honor your father and mother gets a holiday, and the mother being neighborly gets a workload.
**P.J. O’Rourke, probably the greatest Republican humorist during the Boomer years, put the term “liberal” thusly,
“Liberal” is, of course, one of those fine English words, like lady, gay and welfare, which has been spoiled by special pleading. When I say liberals I certainly don’t mean openhanded individuals or tolerant persons or even Big Government Democrats. I mean people who are excited that one percent of the profits of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream goes to promote world peace.
The principal feature of contemporary American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things—war and hunger and date rape—liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. People who care a lot are naturally superior to we who don’t care any more than we have to. By virtue of this superiority the caring have a moral right to lead the nation. It’s a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don’t have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
He picks this up further in the preface to Give War a Chance, showing that the liberal idea of “liberty” is about as silly as the liberal idea of “caring.”
[L]iberals aren’t very interested in […] real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent—not to say toddlerlike—idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums.
That liberals aren’t enamored of real freedom may have some-thing to do with responsibility—that cumbersome backpack which all free men have to lug on life’s aerobic nature hike. The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors—psychology, sociology, women’s studies—to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal point of view.
—A psychological portrait that lines up perfectly with the average Instagram foot-washer.