Jesus Is on Your Side By Susie Moore for Red State
I’ve never been terribly into Stephen King as an author. No knock against him — he has an amazing body of work and has had an inarguable impact on the culture over the past 45+ years. I just never got drawn into his works, perhaps because, to the extent I got into horror fiction, it was Dean Koontz who captured my interest — and he has a fairly prolific bibliography, as well. (“Watchers” is still one of the best reads ever. Highly recommend it.)
I don’t follow King’s social media, though was vaguely aware that he had a presence because I’d occasionally see something he said retweeted into my timeline — usually something that was irksome and confirmed to me that he and I reside on different, political planets. Frankly, I don’t care all that much about that — it certainly wouldn’t keep me from reading his work or enjoying movies when/if time permitted, and I were so inclined. (If a piece of work is good and piques my interest, its author’s politics rarely scare me off. I can generally separate the two, and I don’t subscribe to the notion of viewing every person and every action through the lens of politics.)
Yesterday morning, as I was still wiping the sleep out of my eyes, this tweet from him rolled past:
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
Jesus was not on your side.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 19, 2021
Hmm. That seemed harsh (as I’m sure it was intended.) I took a couple of minutes to breeze through some of the replies. They weren’t encouraging, either consisting of verbal high-fives or apoplexy. (Such is Twitter, right?)
My instinctive reaction was indignance. But then it dawned on me how sad a statement King’s actually was — and how widely he missed the point (and his mark.) So this was my reply:
