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Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

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From the writer of the widely acclaimed A Place at the Table, it is a major work, passionately outspoken and cogently reasoned, that exposes the great danger posed to Christianity today by fundamentalism.

The time is past, says Bruce Bawer, when denominational names and other traditional labels provided an accurate reflection of Christian America’s religious beliefs and practices. The meaningful distinction today is not between Protestant and Catholic, or Baptist and Episcopalian, but quite between “legalistic” and “nonlegalistic” religion, between the Church of Law and the Church of Love. On one side is the fundamentalist right, which draws a sharp distinction between “saved” and “unsaved” and worships a God of wrath and judgment; on the other are more mainstream Christians who view all humankind as children of a loving God who calls them to break down barriers of hate, prejudice, and distrust.

Pointing out that the supposedly “traditional” beliefs of American fundamentalism–about which most mainstream Christians, clergy included, know shockingly little–are in truth of fairly recent origin, are distinctively American in many ways, and are dramatically at odds with the values that Jesus in fact spread, Bawer fascinatingly demonstrates the way in which these beliefs have increasingly come to supplant genuinely fundamental Christian tenets in the American church and to turn out to be synonymous with Christianity in the minds of many people.

Stealing Jesus is the ringing testament of a man who is equally disturbed by the notion of an America without Christianity and the notion of an American Christianity without love and compassion.
In 300-unusual pages, Bruce Bawer has opened a floodgate of incisive religious criticism that will reverberate across the American political scene. He has put into eloquent and decisive language what many mainline Christians and non-Christians have quietly suspected but been unable to verbalize–namely that Fundamentalist Christianity is barely Christian at all. A Baptist theologian says he is “not interested in who Jesus was.” Pat Robertson argues the Golden Rule as Jesus’s justification that “individual self-interest is being a very real part of the human makeup, and something not necessarily bad or sinful.” In page after page, Bawer reveals a so-called Fundamentalist movement that readily displays a blatant fail to remember for the most salient message of the Gospels: selfless love and service to all. As for the significance of this revelation in the face of the ballooning presence of Fundamentalist Christians in American politics, readers will have to come to a decision for themselves.

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