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Just a few miles from George W. Bush's former office at the state Capitol, a panel of religious experts Tuesday weighed a question with relevance to many people of faith: How would Jesus vote?

Such a question is idiotic for a number of reasons, but principally because the WWJD movement is based on an erroneous view of Jesus. Although he was morally blameless, he wasn't the example of "perfect humanity" showing us humans the way to behave--how to vote, what kind of car to drive, whether or not to use air conditioning or aerosol deodorant or one of those deodorant rocks. He claimed to be God incarnate and acted in many situations in ways which would be characteristic of an insane person if what he said wasn't factually true. Because of this, the mental exercise of trying to imagine what "Jesus" would do involves nothing more than people running their own personal Jesus simulacrum through the paces and imagining that the output of what amounts basically to a computer-modeling program is a means of acquiring truth. In reality, it is just a projection of their own moral sentiments into a visual form. They would do better to cut straight to the chase and evaluate those moral sentiments in light of what Jesus actually said with respect to what people's relationship with God, each other, and toward him ought to be (assuming the Gospel accounts to be accurate--and, for reasons it would take too long to go into here, they are).

WWJD is the modern version of pin sticking, a form of divination practiced in earlier centuries in which people would open a Bible and stick a pin to the page at random and read the pin-pointed verse. The assumption was that God would be guiding their hand to show them something he wanted to communicate to them about whatever problem was at hand. At least this had the virtue of limiting outcome to something actually in the Bible--well, to a product of something in the Bible and the imagination of the reader as he tried to shape the import of an isolated verse into a means of communicating something to him about a particular problem or decision he should make.

WWJD skips Biblical content and just goes directly to the imagination part, informed more or less by people's more or less accurate images of Jesus derived from the Bible, Sunday School stories, movies, and other popular sources. The aim of both methods of divination is to shift responsibility for some action to an agent outside of oneself. In the letters of Paul and other apostles, Jesus as an example is referred to, but in very specific ways, not as a plectrum of the imagination to divine the future or to decide what to do.