Book Review: Stealing Jesus

Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity
by Bruce Bower

Admittedly, it has much to do with my close encounter with a Fundamentalist Christian family last summer, but from start to finish I could barely put this book down. Though the contents are a bit stilted (the author is a homosexual liberal Episcopal), it is an incredibly well-researched volume, cohesively detailing the history of the Protestant movement in America from the Puritans and Founding Fathers to the megachurches and televangelists of the late 20th century. (It was published in 1997.)

Bower clearly contrasts the Church of Law (orthodox) and the Church of Love (liberal), outlining their fundamentally different beliefs and divergent views on Jesus Christ. He draws from the work of Harry Emerson Fosdick, a 1920s Baptist minister and staunch modernist. Among many of Fosdick's fabulous quotes, here are two of my favorites:

"Jesus did not think first of usages, institutions or traditions; primarily he though about people who were missing an abundant life."

"What is a religious doctrine, after all, but a set of metaphorical statements? What does it mean to say that Jesus is the Son of God, a part of the Trinity...? What does it meant to say that these are three Persons but one God? Certainly Jesus was not the son of God in any biological sense; and when we speak of God as three persons we do not mean homo sapiens. ... The idea is to find some way of imagining the unimaginable by characterizing it in human terms."

Chapter three, "Darby's Kingdom," unveils the bizarre apocalyptic theology popularized by John Nelson Darby and others who lived in the early 1800s. Taken from the enigmatic Book of Revelation, the curious theory of "dispensational premillennialism," holds that Jesus will personally return to Earth and reign from Jerusalem for 1,000 years. Then, during the Rapture, he will lift all the "saved" disciples up in heaven and send the rest of the human race to eternal damnation. These archaic beliefs are still held by many sects of orthodox Christianity, including Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists. Now, we liberals tend to disagree with this theory due to some time-tested scientific concepts like biology and physics. (But I guess if they are right, we are in big time trouble.)

Chapter nine, "God's Generalissimo," contains Bawer’s facsinating analysis of Pat Robertson and his formation of the Christian Coalition. He rips to shreds any notion that the Coalition is good-natured by showing how it hypocritically relates to its members, though, among other things, propaganda-filled voter pamphlets distributed the Sunday before election day -- versus how it relates to the public, via CNN and other news media.

In chapter eleven, "No More Gray," Bower attends a service at a conservative church in Georgia. It's a humorous yet chilling anecdote of a minister who speaks to his congregation like kindergardeners and even equates Jesus to a rich relative who has left them a huge financial inheritance. Bower notes, "A successful church service gives worshippers the feeling of having come closer to God, to one another, and to all Creation; of having shed at least some degree of self-concern and anxiety about death; and of having been filled, at least to some extent, with gratitude, love for all humankind and a desire to serve." He illustrates how black-and-white legalistic churches tend to do just the opposite and explains why they are growing at such an alarming rate.

Chapter twelve, "A Lie Straight from the Devil," relays the story from a pamphlet designed to drop in children's candy bags on Halloween which the author discovered at a Christian bookstore. It contains a comic strip with two boys trick-or-treating. One gets hit by a car, dies and is pictured in Hell with Satan. When the other boy asserts that his friend really is in heaven because he was a good kid, the Sunday school teacher tells him, "That's a lie straight from the devil," because the dead boy had not been saved. Further, we are all sinners and can only get to heaven because of Jesus's sacrifice on the cross.

Clearly, conservative Christians will hate this book (but they'll never read it anyway), and liberal Christians will probably ignore it in apathy. On the contrary! Stealing Jesus is required reading for any breathing being who believes that "the real Jesus was not about asserting power, judging or destroying; he was about love."

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