5 - ‘Never Trust a Hippy’: Finding a Liberal Jesus Where You Might Not Think

Summary

For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish…

(Mk 14:7)

you discover that, for all the new packaging, the Conservatives are the ‘same old Tories’ after all – from the expected 50 Tory MPs in the next parliament to be drawn from the City or the financial services industry all the way to the ‘no entry’ signs on country estates their families have owned for more than 500 years.

– Jonathan Freedland

Image Is Everything: The Quest for the Ephemeral Jesus

One notable aspect of the rapid developments in an international free-market context is the mass spread of a popularized culture, from which Jesus was never going to be immune. According to the veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm,

the global icons come from popular culture. They might not even be strictly part of it, and they might even be inanimate objects. When Andy Warhol, one of the artists of the century most sensitive to the meaning of popular culture, invented the famous set of global icons, he chose Marilyn, Mao, Che Guevara, and a can of Campbell's soup. The simultaneous availability of these images on a planetary scale made this iconography possible.