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Part 2 moves from Christofascist spectacle to the “mushy middle” of liberal Christianity—why it so often blesses order over justice and falters when fascism rises. Drawing on MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, and lived experience inside white urban churches, he traces how bureaucratic piety, respectability politics, and spiritual bypassing drain the Gospel of conduct and courage—what Bonhoeffer called a “funeral wreath” laid on the culture.

How do institutions become procedurally compassionate yet politically inert? Matthew weaves in memories of global South Christian art, Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montréal, and the everyday service-industry grind of parish life to show how care without solidarity becomes maintenance—while Black Jesus points to co-suffering, mutual aid, and material resistance.

Touching grass means moving from abstraction to accompaniment and from decorum to defense.

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