I was watching Leslie Stahl’s 60 Minutes interview with the Republican nominees the other night, not too closely since it was a little tiring to watch Trump do his alpha dog act on Mike Pence.  Pence  continually referred to Trump as “this good man.”

Then I heard something that got my attention. Leslie Stahl said that Mike Pence was known to have a deep faith, and it sounded like the question was going to be “how he could be on the ticket with a thrice-divorced, belligerent, self-involved provoker of violence.” However, she didn’t get the question out before Trump butted in.

“I’m religious,” he said. “I’m very religious.”

Far be it from me to judge Donald Trump’s faith (although the words of his mouth—and maybe the meditations of his heart—really don’t immediately make me think of Christian values). But the thing that got me was that I don’t think I have ever heard anyone describe themselves as being “very religious.” I have, at various times in my life worshipped as a Southern Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal Holiness, and Episcopalian. I even went to one Unitarian service. And nobody has ever said to me that they were “religious.”

Maybe it’s because anybody who has spent much time with the New Testament knows what Christ thought of religious people. He didn’t like them. He argued with them. He labeled them “whited sepulchers,” pretty on the outside, rotten on the inside. In the end it was the religious people who tried him and delivered him to the Romans to be executed.

Perhaps it’s because there are a lot of similarities between our age and the First Century that Donald Trump can claim to be “religious.” As in the Twenty-First Century, First Century Judea had a two party system. Since the country was a theocracy, the two parties were both religion based. The Pharisees, the Synagogue Party, held to a strict observance of the laws, all 365 of them. (There’s still a good deal of discussion about where the Pharisees began, but I believe that—at least to a great degree—they were products of the exile; the Law set the Jews apart and allowed them to survive as a people.) The Sadducees, the Temple party, was, because they had accepted Greek influence, a good deal looser. The real rulers of the country, the Romans, had decided years before that they wouldn’t interfere unless they had to.

Another similarity is that these parties had influence far greater than their numbers. Some scholars estimate that at the time of Christ there were about 6,000 Pharisees in Judea and substantially fewer Sadducees out of an estimated population of four or five million people. Most people— “the people of the land”—weren’t part of either party until they could be whipped into a frenzy by one of them.

(There was a third party, created out of disgust for the two existing parties, but the Essenes chose not to engage. They went out to the desert to study, worship, and meditate.)

Jesus’ attitude toward the piety of the Pharisees is shown in Matthew 12. The scene is somewhere on the Judean countryside on a Saturday during the harvest season in about 28 A.D.  There’s a dirt road bordered by cornfields.  Jesus and his disciples leave the road to walk through the field, casually pulling ears of corn from the stalks and eating the kernels.  Nearby is another group, dressed in distinctive Pharisee garb, watching Jesus and his disciples.  Finally, one of the group calls out to Jesus.

Pharisee:  Look, your disciples are doing something that is forbidden on the Sabbath.

Jesus:  (looking at the disciples) They’re hungry.

Pharisee:  But it’s the Sabbath, and it’s forbidden.

Jesus walks to the middle of the road, nearer the Pharisee.

Jesus:  Haven’t you read about David?  He went into the house of God and ate the priests’ bread.  Even in the law — where you’re expert — the Temple priests break the Sabbath and don’t get blamed for it.

Pharisee:  What’s that got to do with anything?

The crowd around the Pharisee murmur and nod their heads.  Jesus stares at them for a moment.  His disciples continue to pull corn from the corn stalks.

Jesus:  I’ll tell you.  Here is something greater than the Temple.  And if you understood your own scriptures, you’d know what the Lord meant when He said “What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.  Then you wouldn’t be so quick to blame the blameless.”

Jesus and his disciples exit, leaving the Pharisees standing there shaking their heads.

Jesus didn’t have much use for those who placed piety over people. He also didn’t have a lot of use for public display over practice. He said that we should not be so proud as to stand on the corner, praying aloud, thankful we’re not like those who are not equally favored, but should retire to our closet and pray for God’s forgiveness.

It’s probable that the religious people of the First Century were not all bad people. I didn’t know any of them personally. But what is certainly true if we believe the Biblical accounts is that they got in the way of Christianity. They were exclusionary, bent on dictating other peoples’ actions, and they dealt severely with people who disagreed with them.

“Look at Him,” they said. “He eats with sinners.”

And we can be very thankful for that.

I’ve known many good people in the churches we’ve been in, and I’ve encountered a few Pharisees, people who put rules, tradition, and their own desires above the stated commandment to “go into all the world.” I found it to be good practice to admire and emulate the former and essentially ignore the latter. It’s worked for me. Until Donald Trump made me consider, once again, the difference between being religious and being Christian.

Maybe the Donald should some lessons from the New Testament, including the stone throwing one.