No, not how to actually prove that you are an actual true Christian. That involves a strict and rigid adherence to the Golden Rule, and loving thy neighbor as thyself, and all sorts of other things that are impossible if you live in my neighborhood, and. apparently, in any neighborhood. True Christians are beyond being an endangered species. Those actual true Christians are long extinct, as is universally admitted.
No, I’m talking about the problem facing JEB and all the right-thinking Americans for whom he is an oracle. JEB, you see, proposed a while ago (crooksandliars.com/...) that the US admit only Christians among the refugees from Syria. A clever response indeed, because, as you can see from my reasoning above, that would mean we accept no refugees from Syria. But then some liberal media attack dog posed JEB the obviously unfair question of how we distinguish actual Christians from people only claiming to be Christian just to get a visa (crooksandliars.com/...).
The question facing us is, as always, how to help these idiots out of the fine mess they are trying to get all of us into. What kind of testing for “True Christianity” should our side propose that will keep these cholos happy, while not doing irreparable;e harm to the republic for which it stands, etc?
It turns out that testing for True Christianity — as the fundies and the Rs understand what that means -- is much, much easier than testing for actual Christianity. And we can rig the testing so that the refugees will all pass. Okay, all of them except maybe people who actually are true Christians, because those folks might have some trouble with the lies that my suggestion involves. But, hey, what are the chances?
We could give the refugees an IQ test, and that would satisfy the Rs, because their idea of being Christian seems to involve being very stupid. We just get word to the refugees to miss every question, and then the fundies will be sure that they must be particularly good Christians.
This method is amenable to adding on all sorts of other testing to help prove Christian bona fides to the Rs and their fundies.
If the IQ test is thought to be insufficiently rigorous, you could add a general knowledge quiz. As long as the refugees are warned to get every science question wrong, they're golden.
You could throw in a personality test, you know, the sort that asks questions about what you would do if you found a $10 bill on the sidewalk, that looks at traits like empathy and honesty, etc. If we just coach the refugees to answer every question as if they were conscienceless sociopaths, that's the sort of person the fundies respect as a leader among True Christians.
Now, I have to admit that there's one quality of Christianity as the fundies see it that would be very hard to fake. You can fake sociopathy pretty easily, but psychopathy, a true thought disorder, that is not easy to fake. Think of Michelle Bachmann, the Girl With The Far Away Eyes. Hard to fake even the look unless you really are bat-shit crazy.
But beyond just looking crazy, you have to talk crazy, espouse bat-shit crazy ideas, to be what fundies think of as a True Christian. An amateur might imagine that this is easy -- just come up with random nonsense. But that won't work, not at all. The hallucinated nonsense you spout can't be some private madness, its content has to resonate with the content of the hallucinated madness of the other fundies. It takes years of close observation of a particular religious psychopathy to be able to mimic its very peculiar tropes and lurches in and out of coherence of viewpoint. If the fundies insist on a psychopathy test, how will we get these refugees from a foreign culture to successfully pass as psychopaths of the True Faith?
The answer is staring us in the face. These refugees may not have years of experience observing crazed Christian fundies at close range (Hell, if they had, maybe they would think twice about wanting to come to the US.) but they have had plenty of opportunity to observe Islam's fundies up close and personal. It turns out that fundies of all faith traditions tend to converge in the contents of their disordered thinking. I could coach someone fleeing from ISIS in how to talk like a fundie Christian by getting him or her to imagine that they were the most extreme and ruthless ISIS preacher they know of, and then just change a label or two here or there. Take the ISIS political agenda, their idea of how the truly just and otherwise perfect state would be organized, and there, but for a few label changes, you have the US Christian fundie agenda.