Stealing Jesus : How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

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Summary: Required Reading
Review: A Review of Stealing Jesus by Neil Wilkinson

If the government could mandate reading any one book, Bruce Bawer's Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity would be a suitable candidate. It is a must read for any American who takes seriously such basic Constitutional tenets as freedom of speech, expression, and religion. The Right Reverend John Shelby Spong writes: "Bawer emerges as one of this nation's premier religious commentators. One by one he parades the leaders of America's Religious Right--Falwell, Robertson, Reed, Dobson--before our eyes, and without rancor or hostility makes his readers listen to their own words... Bawer's background as a practicing Christian gives this volume a disarming brilliance." What does Bawer mean by "stealing Jesus?" "In recent years, legalistic Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity they think only of the legalistic variety. The mainstream media, in covering the so- called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to choose from: the God-of- wrath Christian Right and the godless secular left." It is "a dangerously misguided notion" to take the Christian Right lightly, as simply a holdover from traditional Christianity that will eventually fade away. By distinguishing between nonlegalistic and legalistic Protestantism, that which concerns itself with doctrine, authority, and law, at the expense of love as Christ preached it, Bawer observes, "Born out of anger, modern legalistic Christianity has, over the long arc of the twentieth century, become steadily angrier in reaction to spreading secularism." Tracing fundamentalism from its earliest roots to the present day, Bawer explores the origins of such nonscriptural precepts as "the rapture" that emanated from a book known as the "Scofield Reference Bible," a 1909 document written by Texas preacher C. I. Scofield and ! upon which much of modern fundamentalism relies. An overriding theme in Stealing Jesus is the question of love. It is Bawer's assertion that fundamentalism does all it can to convert the spirit of Christianity into vengeance, a mainstay of legalistic fundamentalist thought. The views of Robertson, Reed, Dobson, and others are devoid of love, but heavy on buzz words and arcane inconsistent rules-bound pseudo-theology, one of the major reasons that devout people become defensive when asked the question, "Are you Christian?" The fundamentalist intrusion into the American political process by wealthy, powerful zealots is of particular concern to Bawer. He pays close attention to the "esoteric theology," of "God's Generalissimo," Pat Robertson, It is through flagrant historical, scriptural, and factual distortions to a constituency upon whom such alterations of reality are lost, that fundamentalists have parlayed themselves into a position of incredible political power. They have infiltrated the Republican Party to such an extent that many traditional Republicans find the party unrecognizable, much the same as Christianity is becoming unrecognizable to many of its followers. Crisply written, succinct, and well-organized, Stealing Jesus is a unique and provocative work that leaves behind partisan or, special interest politics in favor of a clear, concise, and even- handed social commentary. Stealing Jesus, published by Crown Publishers, Inc., is three hundred and twenty-eight pages, with an exhaustive bibliography and index. It is available in hard cover only.

Neil Wilkinson lives in Cobb County, GA, in the absolute heart of Gingrich territory (he was here before Newt). He practices law (one day he might get it right) and he is in the Master's of Professional Writing Program Kennesaw State University. He has published poetry, short fiction, essays, book reviews, and features.

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Summary: Stealing G-d: How Fundamentalism Betrays Religion
Review: As a Jewish girl raised in the southern Bible Belt, my religious experience began early and struck hard. Both my parents worked and the only day care they could afford was the local Christian daycare center, where I received my first introduction into the world of proselytization and religious betrayal. As a child, my only memories of Christians were hearty women towering over me, telling me I wasn't allowed lunch or snacks unless I prayed to Jesus in thanks. This left a legacy in my mind that caused me to feel a pervasive resentment and distrust of fundamentalist Christianity -- and indeed Christianity in general. As I grew older I questioned my prejudice . . . and Bawer's book was what I found.

This book completely changed my perspective on not only Christianity, but all the major world religions. To think that this book is merely a criticism of Christianity is superficial and undeserved, for the actual message carried by this book is so much deeper. In a world torn by the violence of religious extremism, the psychological, economic, emotional, and social pressures that endorse the trend toward fundamentalism in Christianity can easily be expanded to give us a greater understand of fundamentalism in ANY religion.

Victor Hugo's adage that the faults we see in others are those we see in ourselves comes to mind when I consider this criticism of Christianity from the inside out. As a predominantly Christian nation, we so easily criticize Muslim extremism, and yet extremism exists among our own ranks. If we can see faults in the rest of the world (religion-wise or otherwise), then we can easily find those same faults within our own ranks. Bawer exposes this hypocrisy with solid arguments and examples whose reality is striking. Props to Bawer for an open-minded book endorsing tolerance and self-reflection!

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Summary: They have the numbers, we the heights
Review: I approached this book with an open mind, really. But I found too often that its author essentially argues against one kind of intolerance and in favor of another kind, supports one subculture against another. The author believes the political atmosphere is right and his lifestyle compatible with a growing "liberal," mainstream all-tolerant church, and to muster the opinion of "right-thinking" people everywhere against a constructed spectral menace. In this book he brings his case to the court of public opinion in the hope of forcing, "legislating" as it were, conformity for the misfit fundamentalist sects whose many sins he enumerates in detail. OK, who doesn't have a bone of contention with one branch or doctrine of the church? More often than not the gripes are personal, vary widely, and cannot be intelligently addressed by "them and us" type critiques such as this one. In his book, Bawer does just that: bands Christians together into "legalistic" and "non-legalistic" categories. "Fundamentalists" for Bawer become the convenient boogey man for crimes such as anti-intellectualism.

Bawer's position is school of resentment. The mainstreaming and normalizing of the church mainly from the perspective/agenda of gay identity politics. His arguments absolutely lack any intellectual, or revolutionary bite. It is a position informed by everything and post everything, one that pretends, just as he accuses his opponent of doing, of having found the treasure of eternal morality.

Bawer's book fails to make me see the cause for alarm he so frequently raises with modern "legalistic" Christianity, with its concommitant (alleged) threats to other faiths and democratic freedoms. If anyone feels threatened, it is he. And inasmuch as our democratic freedoms may appear to be at stake from the fundamentalists, we still have the separation of church and state. Yet to relativists like Bawer, separation of church and state is, if anything, part of the problem. What happened to simply letting each decide for himself or herself and leave it at that? As much as I may differ with various branches of the protestant church, with their many foibles, I nevertheless defend their right to worship in peace and privacy, free from not only government interference, but from societal pressures to conform as well. What Bawer calls fundamentalism has been around a very long time (despite what he conveniently claims) and is itself a definite kind of free expression and protected speech.

Bawer, like so many, takes care to aim at the public manifestations of fundamentalism, particulaly the TV evangelist, already a cliche in our time and hardly representative of all those who take their Bibles seriously. His alarmist rhetoric takes the form of the eleven o'clock news, purportedly speaking for the majority, warning us that these "fundamentalists" are socially and psychologically dangerous, or that "millions of children" as he put it are being taught wrong thinking by their wrong-thinking legalistic Christian parents. It never ceases to amaze me how often we are asked by self-styled intellectuals to look the other way when they engage in irresponsible rant, commit to print outrageous fallacies, or abusive rhetoric; as long as it serves the right cause, it is deemed ok. With that in mind, this book is largely little more than an appeal to "the enemy of my enemy." The problem with this kind of critique is it reduces to propaganda, a mere politcal pamphlet, instead of working out in reasonable prose a personal journey of discovery of some sort and limiting the scope of the dicourse to the personal.

Bawer's "can't we all just get along" tone, it must be noted, necessarily includes the condition that we all agree with his nebulous relativistic guidelines. How can we go wrong as long as all toe the same line of the right-thinking relativism? Here is where he is greatly mistaken in his appeal; just because we do not solve our problems by fighting it out we must all somehow agree to a new list of tenets handed us by self-styled right-thinkers such as the author, even if they were to be credentialled pedagogues of the academic and media institutions. Not as long as they write as poorly as this. The real gospel in Bawer's book is conformity, not diversity.

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Summary: A challenging and urgently important book.
Review: If you are a Christian, what do you believe? There are as many different answers to this as there are Christians. Personally, I've long felt that, to call yourself a Christian, all you really need to subscribe to are the Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments, and even certain points within those are open to debate. (Even such a straightforward commandment as, "Thou shalt not kill"; does that include soldiers during wartime? Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Amish think so, but most other denominations disagree.) But as Bruce Bawer warns us, there are always those who would try to dictate what all Christians should believe, and in America today such people--as represented by what Bawer calls "legalistic" Christians, of the ilk of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and James Dobson--are in the ascendant. In "Stealing Jesus," a bracing and compulsively readable book, Bawer demonstrates that fundamentalist doctrines--which its adherents claim are traditional Christianity in its purest form--in fact were not formulated until the early 19th century, or codified until publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. The Scofield Reference Bible, for those unfamiliar with it, emphasizes and annotates those portions of Scripture that fundamentalists interpret as setting forth the coming of the End Times, the Rapture and specific prescriptions for personal salvation. Those passages stressing Christ's message of love, community and selfless service to others are pointedly ignored. As Bawer sees it, the spiritual war in America is one between the Church of Law, which stresses salvation for the few true believers and damnation for everyone else, and the Church of Love, which stresses the need to follow Christ's teachings and emulate His example. Bawer shows in convincing detail that through vicious political inflghting, the Church of Law has gained such ascendancy in the U.S. today that when the mass media refer to Christianity, they always mean fundamentalism. Even worse, the agenda of the fundamentalists often has little or nothing to do with faith, and often is shockingly racist, misogynistic and homophobic. "Stealing Jesus" sounds an important warning to those Christians who don't want the world to think Pat Robertson speaks for them. Even more, it challenges lukewarm and devout Christians alike to think about their faiths, clarify their own beliefs and stand up for them; it may also serve to show some secular humanists that it's possible to give your heart to Jesus without sacrificing your mind.
As much as I admire this book, I disagree with Bawer on certain points. For example, he is comfortable with the suggestion that Jesus may not literally have been divine; here I have to agree with the fundamentalists that without the divinity of Christ, Christianity is nonsense. (This may explain why Bawer, an Episcopalian, never quotes in "Stealing Jesus" from C.S. Lewis, the most renowned Anglican writer of the 20th century; Lewis himself insisted that Jesus could only be either the Son of God or a liar and madman. Lewis, however, also didn't live to see the ascendancy of Robertson and Falwell, and would have been appalled at their flat denial of the worth of human logic, intellect, and imagination.) There are also times when Bawer lets his cultural prejudices show, as when he describes the congregation of an Atlanta fundamentalist church as "people brought up on TV and country music." (I happen to have three close friends who by night are country musicians; by day they are a computer systems designer, a librarian at the Environmental Protection Agency, and a producer at CBS News. They are all extremely well-read, and if anything would think that Bruce Bawer is soft on Pat Robertson.) Nevertheless, Bawer's main point is undeniable for anyone for whom the spirit of Christianity is more important than its letter. It is put best in Bawer's quote from Harry Emerson Fosdick, the great liberal theologian of the 1920s: Speaking about fundamentalists, Fosdick said, "They call God a person, and to hear them do it one would think that our psychological processes could naively be attributed to the Eternal. It is another matter altogether, understanding symbolic language, to call God personal when one means that up the roadway of goodness, truth and beauty, which outside personal experience have no significance, one must travel toward the truth about the Ultimate--"beyond the comprehension of the human mind." Of course, that is vague; no idea of the Eternal which is not vague can possibly approximate the Truth."

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Summary: A Personal Analyses of the Dangers of Fundamentalism
Review: Stealing Jesus is an odd book. Not exactly a work of intense research, both an analyses and a testimony, it is best thought of as one man's confrontation and analyses of Christian Fundamentalism on a historical, personal, and spiritual level.

Bawer's thesis is simple - Christian Fundamentalism in America is a comparatively recent phenomena that largely ignores the actual words of Jesus, is obsessed with control, is often shallow, and is socially and psychologically dangerous.

Bawer examines this from the rather interesting perspective of a committed gay Christian who is obviously very, very serious about his religion. There's a passion here to his work that gives it, despite some flaws, an honesty of spirit. Bawer really, really means what he says and is honestly concerned with people.

Bawer treats us to a history of religion and Fundamentalism in America that's extremely eye-opening, especially concerning modern day assumptions about what Christianity is and has been and how religion has functioned in America. Revealingly, America has proved to be far more religiously diverse and dynamic than many suspect - and that today's idea that Christian means a vaguely right-wing personl obsessed with hell and judgement is an unfair picture of American Christianity and Christians in general.

Bawer then analyzes modern occurances in highly revealing ways - information we've seen before, but again given his passion, his testimony, he helps put things in perspective. He addresses sexism, racism, and homophobia of course, but spends a great deal of time on greed, materialism, selfishness, and less-discussed aspects of pathology in Fundamentalism.

However, don't expect modern secular/liberal/pop culture to get off easy. Bawer blasts the spiritual and cultural emptiness and ignorance of our culture with equal passion. He makes the case that our culture's shallowness and ignorance is dangerous, and is a place where Fundamentalism can take root. He also notes that, essentially, many of us belong to subcultures who were blatantly ignorant of cultural and social changes and lack-of-changes.

Is it a perfect book? No. It could have been longer and had more research, especially on psychodynamics. But did it reach it's goal? Yes. It's a heartfelt, passionate work on one man's research and experiences.

Will some be offended? Doubtlessly. But I think they'll be offended because Bawer is speaking honeslty and from the heart about issues people don't want to address. Simply, he argues Fundamentalism has hijacked Christianity at the betrayal of its principles, leaving a wake of pathology and intolerance, and spilling into politics and modern life. Certainly as we've witnessed time and again, people convinced God (or the equivalent, such as Evolution or History) is on their side will do the most terrible things. In an age of incredible weapons and a connected world, we can no longer afford to assume we're perfect.

This book somehow gives me the image of Jesus going after the moneychangers in the temple - this is a man honestly, egolessly offended at something horrible. Indeed I found myself, a non-Christian, finding myself actually feel close to Christianity for the first time in over a decade.

Should it be read by non-Christians. Probably. Should it be read by Christians? Definitely.