I Used to Be a Born Again Christian Now I Despise Christianity

Chapter ONE

Stealing Jesus
How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

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By BRUCE BAWER
Crown Publishers, Inc.

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"ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN?"

SPRING 1996, NEW YORK CITY. I'm standing on a moderately crowded subway car reading a paperback when I look up to come across a man about my age--thirty-nine--who is standing a few feet away and staring at me with disconcerting intensity. For an instant we gaze speechlessly into each other's optics. I expect him to say (as sometimes happens) that he's read one of my books and recognizes me from my dust jacket photo. Instead he asks me a question.

"Are you a Christian?"

The question takes me ashamed, though I know why he has asked it. I am reading Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, whose author, the Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, is notorious for his denial of many orthodox Christian doctrines and for his work on behalf of an inclusive church. It occurs to me that my interlocutor, whose question marks him as a born-once more Christian, has probably noticed the word Bible, which is in large blazon, and cannot make out the rest of the title.

"Aye," I respond.

"Are you born once more?" His eyes meet mine in an unsettlingly intimate gaze.

I pause for a moment. We have entered difficult territory. Am I born over again? Viii years agone, afterwards a decade of feeling that one couldn't be both homosexual and Christian, and later a yr or so of listening to sermons that had, for the commencement time, explained Christianity in a way that made sense to me, I was baptized at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in New York.

Am I born again? I look into the man's eyes. "I remember so."

"Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

Some other pause. "Yes ..."

"And so y'all're built-in once again!" he declares conclusively. "Next time someone asks, reply with confidence that you are!"

"Well," I reply, falling into a tone that sounds to me rather strong and academic in comparing with his unrestrained ardor, "if I sounded hesitant, information technology's considering I consider myself `born again,' but by some people'southward definition I'thousand not."

I don't explain that function of the problem for many people, himself probably included, would be that I'm gay. In the kinds of churches whose members are in the habit of describing themselves as built-in again, being gay is considered utterly incompatible with being Christian. Another part of the problem is that I'thou an Episcopalian, a member of a church that fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals don't consider a legitimate church at all because of what they see as its theological leniency. Nor do I add that the book I'chiliad reading was written by someone who has helped to alter the Episcopal Church in ways that would doubtless horrify my interlocutor.

"How long have you been a Christian?" the man asks, his optics fixed on mine.

"Eight years," I tell him.

He seems delighted by my reply. Why? Because I've been a Christian that long? Or considering I became one as an adult, which presumably suggests that, like him, I'm a "born-again Christian" who went through a "conversion experience," and am thus more than serious and committed than many nominal Christians? Or considering I remember how many years it'south been--which suggests that my conversion continues to exist an important event for me?

"I've been a Christian for nine years," he says. "I was going to commit suicide and then Jesus Christ saved me. I was filled with the ability of the Holy Ghost."

I'yard at a loss for words. What can I say in response to this testimony? After all, I'm an Episcopalian. Most of united states of america don't talk that mode, especially not to total strangers. "Good for you," I finally say.

When the man gets off the train a few moments later, we exchange a friendly skillful-bye. The doors shut, and the railroad train moves on. Notwithstanding the brief conversation haunts me for hours. I'm at once perturbed and impressed by the man'due south zealotry. Evangelical Christians, fundamentalist and otherwise, tin walk up to strangers on the subway, tell them they're Christians, and testify near how they establish Jesus. There'due south something wonderful about that. Mainline Protestants--members of such long-established, moderate-to-liberal denominations equally the American Baptist Church building, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church building, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church building of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Reformed Church building of America--don't normally do that sort of matter. And we Episcopalians are probably the worst of all: Some of us are self-conscious almost discussing God even in church. A century ago sexual practice was seen as a private affair that simply shouldn't be discussed in public; today our secular guild teaches us to view religion in the same mode, and most of united states unquestioningly oblige.

*

"Are y'all a Christian'" It's non as piece of cake a question as information technology may sound. What is a Christian? How to decide who is or isn't one--and who does the deciding?

I probably wasn't more than seven or 8 when I first noticed that the word could mean very different things, depending on who was using it. Many of my Protestant relatives in South Carolina routinely distinguished between "Christians"--meaning themselves--and "Catholics." In the middle-class neighborhood where I grew up in Queens, New York, many of my Catholic neighbors made it articulate that they regarded themselves and their coreligionists as the but true Christians, and that in their minds anybody else--Protestants, Jews, whatever--blended into a non-Catholic, non-Christian sameness. Amidst fundamentalist (and many evangelical) Protestants today, such an exclusionary posture toward outsiders is not only alive and well but is a matter of essential doctrine. Fundamentalists, by definition, view only themselves and other fundamentalists as truthful Christians; conservative evangelicals generally view only themselves, other conservative evangelicals, and fundamentalists equally true Christians.

When nosotros speak of American Christians, of course, nosotros may divide them into Protestants and Catholics. (Eastern Orthodox Christians account for only 1 percent or then of the total.) But today there is a more than meaningful way of dividing American Christians into two categories. The mainstream media oft refer to one of these categories equally the Religious Right or the Christian Right and call people in this category conservative Christians; people who autumn into the other category are frequently dubbed liberal Christians. The terms conservative Christian and liberal Christian can be useful, but I will try to avoid using them here because they suggest political rather than theological orientation. Generally speaking, to exist sure, the political implications are accurate: Conservative Christians tend to be politically conservative, and liberal Christians tend to be politically liberal. Just there are exceptions; and, in any event, it needs to be underscored that what distinguishes the members of these two groups of Christians is non politics but their essential understanding of the nature of God, the part of the church, and the pregnant of human life. It is not an overstatement, indeed, to say that these two groups, despite the fact that they both merits the proper name of Christianity, have fundamentally divergent conceptions of the universe.

What, and then, to call these two categories? About Americans utilize fundamentalist equally a general label for conservative Christians--which is why I've used fundamentalism in this book'south subtitle--but in its strict sense the term is too narrow for my purposes. Phrases like traditional Christian and modern Christian are, to an extent, legitimate, for bourgeois Christians tend to champion tradition and to reject much of the modern science and biblical scholarship that liberal Christians embrace; however, as shall become clear, it is extremely misleading to propose that the kind of theology to which conservative Christians subscribe is truly more traditional, in the deepest sense, than that of liberal Christians. Likewise, labels like biblical Christian and Bible-believing Christian, which many conservative Christians attach to themselves, wrongly advise that there is something unbiblical about the faith of liberal Christians. We might speak of "exclusionists" and "inclusionists," considering conservative Christians, unlike liberal Christians, tend to define the word Christian in such a way as to exclude others--including, in most cases, a large number of their fellow conservative Christians.

But it seems to me that the deviation betwixt bourgeois and liberal Christianity may exist nigh succinctly summed up by the deviation between two cardinal scriptural concepts: law and love. Simply stated, conservative Christianity focuses primarily on police, doctrine, and authority; liberal Christianity focuses on dear, spiritual experience, and what Baptists call the priesthood of the believer. If conservative Christians emphasize the Great Commission--the resurrected Christ'due south injunction, at the end of the Gospel co-ordinate to Matthew, to "go to all nations and make them my disciples"--liberal Christians place more emphasis on the Great Commandment, which in Luke's Gospel reads as follows: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

Am I suggesting that conservative Christians are without beloved or that liberal Christians are lawless? No. I merely make this distinction: Conservative Christianity understands a Christian to exist someone who subscribes to a specific set of theological propositions about God and the afterlife, and who professes to believe that by subscribing to those propositions, accepting Jesus Christ equally savior, and (except in the example of the most extreme separatist fundamentalists) evangelizing, he or she evades God's wrath and wins salvation (for Roman Catholics, good works besides count); liberal Christianity, meanwhile, tends to identify Christianity with the feel of God's abundant love and with the commandment to beloved God and ane's neighbour. If, for conservative Christians, outreach generally means zealous proselytizing of the "unsaved," for liberal Christians information technology tends to hateful social programs directed at those in demand.

In these pages, accordingly, I'll refer to these ii broad categories of Christianity as legalistic and nonlegalistic. Further, I'll utilise the terms Church building of Law and Church building of Love to describe the 2 different ecclesial ideals toward which the Christians in these corresponding categories strive--remembering ever, of course, that every church and every human being soul has inside it a degree of legalism and a capacity for love.

This book will focus primarily on Protestant legalism and nonlegalism; some of the things I say will apply likewise to the parallel split within Catholicism, while others do not. Though there are broad sympathies between legalistic Protestants and Catholics, and betwixt nonlegalistic Protestants and Catholics, the strongly divergent doctrinal emphases of Protestantism and Catholicism make information technology difficult to generalize about "legalistic Christianity," say, as opposed to legalistic Protestantism or Catholicism.

Amid the differences between legalistic and nonlegalistic Protestants are these:

* Legalistic Protestantism sees Jesus' death on the cross as a transaction past ways of which Jesus paid for the sins of believers and won them eternal life; nonlegalistic Protestantism sees it as a powerful and mysterious symbol of God's infinite dear for suffering mankind, and every bit the natural culmination of Jesus' ministry of love and selflessness.

* Legalistic Protestantism believes that Jesus' master purpose was to conduct out that human action of atonement; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes Jesus' master purpose was to teach that God loves all people as parents love their children and that all humankind is i.

* Legalistic Protestantism understands eternal life to hateful a heavenly reward after death for the "true Christians"--the "Elect," the "saved"--who accept Jesus as their savior and subscribe to the correct doctrines; nonlegalistic Protestantism more than ofttimes understands information technology to denote a unity with God that exists exterior the dimension of fourth dimension and that tin also exist experienced in this life.

* Legalistic Protestantism holds that God loves only the "saved' and that they alone are truly his children; nonlegalistic Protestantism holds that God loves all human beings and that all are his children.

* Legalistic Protestantism sees Satan equally a real brute, a tempter and deceiver from whom true Christians are defended by their organized religion but past whom atheists, members of other religions, and "false Christians" are deceived, and whose instruments they can go; for nonlegalistic Protestantism Satan is a metaphor for the potential for evil that exists in each person, Christian or otherwise, and that must be recognized and resisted.

* Legalistic Protestantism believes that individuals should be wary of trusting their ain minds and emotions, for these can be manipulated by Satan, and that questions and doubts are to be resisted equally the work of the Devil; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes that the listen is a gift of God and that God wants usa to retrieve for ourselves, to follow our consciences, to ask questions, and to heed for his all the same, pocket-size voice.

* Legalistic Protestantism sees "truth" equally something established in the Bible and known for certain by true Christians; nonlegalistic Protestantism sees truth every bit something known wholly only by God toward which the belief statements of religions can just attempt to point the way.

* Legalistic Protestantism reads the Bible literally and considers information technology the ultimate source of truth; nonlegalistic Protestantism insists that the Bible must be read critically, intelligently, and with an agreement of its historical and cultural contexts.

* Legalistic Protestantism encourages a suspicion of artful values and a literalistic mentality that tends to thwart spiritual feel; nonlegalistic Protestantism encourages a recognition of mystery and beauty as attributes of the holy.

Some legalistic Protestants are fundamentalists, whose emphasis is on keeping themselves apart from the evil mainstream civilization and thus pure; others might more accurately be described equally conservative evangelicals, whose emphasis is on bringing the word of Jesus to the "unsaved," or equally charismatics, who seek to model their worship on early Christians' miraculous experiences with healing, prophecy. and "speaking in tongues"; some may consider themselves to be all three at one time. Members of all these groups believe in a wrathful God who rewards "truthful believers" with an eternity in heaven and condemns all others to an eternity in hell.

More legalistic Protestants belong to the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation's largest Protestant group) than to any other denomination; many others belong to such Pentecostal bodies equally the Assemblies of God and the Church of God, which place special emphasis on charismatic manifestations; still others belong to congregations, Baptist or otherwise, that are independent (often fiercely so) of any established denomination and that, in both worship and doctrine, may strike a unique balance among fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic features. Many mainline church members are also legalists, though the percentage varies widely: The United Church of Christ contains far fewer legalists, for instance, than does the United Methodist Church. As noted, so-called traditionalist Catholics, who in before generations would never take been grouped (either past themselves or by others) with Protestant fundamentalists, autumn into the legalistic category; and so do almost Mormons, Seventh-solar day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Though many in this category would not consider many others in it to exist genuine Christians at all, they share a propensity for narrow theological views and reactionary social and cultural values, and consequently they tend to function equally practical allies in the so-called civilisation state of war against "secular humanism."

Fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic Christianity cannot easily be discussed and understood without reference to the distinctive characteristics of American culture. Yes, these forms of legalistic Christianity claim adherents on every continent; but it is in America that they accept taken root most firmly and borne the most fruit. They barely exist in Western Europe; their success elsewhere owes everything to American missionary work amidst the poor and undereducated. In their suspicion of the intellect and their chiselled exclamation that the Bible contains all truth, these kinds of Christianity reflect the American distrust of mind described by Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, indeed, they can exist understood as ways of avoiding the obligation to call back--and, especially, to call back for one-self. As William Ray puts information technology, "fundamentalism demands believers, non thinkers"; Ray's ascertainment that "no evidence, no logic, no personal feel, nothing tin can change the fundamentalist's mind about `revealed truth' "applies equally to conservative evangelicals and charismatics "Questioning `revealed truth' in whatever way, even hypothetically," notes Ray, "challenges the ... conventionalities system at its core.... The more successfully any `revealed truth' is challenged, the more than vehemently the claiming must exist rejected,"

Why did this kind of organized religion develop in America, of all places? Well, first of all, America is the place to which the Puritans came, and their fixation on stark antitheses (God and Satan, saints and sinners), their conviction that y'all're damned unless you believe exactly the right doctrine, and their trend to equate immorality with sex all helped lay the foundations for today'due south legalistic Christianity. So did the pragmatism and materialism of the pioneers, whose respect for "honest piece of work" and suspicion of professors, philosophers, and others who don't produce annihilation "real" spelled success for faiths that involved quantifiable cede, little or no abstract reflection, and a concrete payoff in the class of a tangible heaven. Those pioneers' individualistic sentiments, moreover, made them distrust ecclesiastical elites and accept the right of every person to translate the Bible co-ordinate to his or her ain lights; this emphasis on scripture was also fed by the notion of America as a new Eden, which, every bit the religious historian George M. Marsden has noted,"readily translated into Biblical primitivism," the thought that "the Bible lonely should be ane's guide." Yet given those pioneers' literal-mindedness and aversion to abstruse interpretation, information technology was a short--and disastrous--stride from the thought of the Bible every bit guide to a twisted insistence on biblical literalism.

Nonlegalistic Protestants figure far less frequently in the mainstream media than do legalists. Indeed, they sometimes seem virtually invisible. They worship a God of honey, and they envision the church building, at its best, as a Church of Love. They tend to belong to mainline Protestant churches or to relatively small bodies such as the Quakers and Unitarians. Some are Catholics: some are even Baptists or Seventh-24-hour interval Adventists. If the public face of conservative Christians today is that of Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, liberal Christians as even so have no public face up to speak of. Recently, liberal Christians have formed such national groups as the Interfaith Alliance and Telephone call to Renewal, just so far they accept failed to receive fifty-fifty a fraction of the media attending routinely accorded to the Christian Coalition. Few Americans fifty-fifty know they exist.

Nonlegalistic Christianity has its problems. Those who worship a God of beloved can sometimes announced to reduce the majesty and mystery of the divine to something pat and shallow. While legalists obsess over the presence of evil in the globe, nonlegalists can seem naive, fifty-fifty blinkered, nigh it. How to explain the existence of evil, afterwards all, if God is totally skillful? If God does love all his children unconditionally, and then why do so many people live out their lives fee]ing worthless, lone, and unloved? In a world total of heartless brutality, belief in a God of wrath is hardly inexplicable. Karen Armstrong, the distinguished writer of A History of God and hardly a legalistic Christian, has written that we must "accept evil in the divine" in club to "accept the evil we meet in our ain hearts." This is certainly one solution to the historic period-old problem of evil, and information technology is consequent with much that we read nigh God in the Old Attestation. Simply it is not the faith of Jesus.

In any event, the problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it affirms that God can be evil; it's that it imagines a apparently evil God and calls that evil practiced. In effect, as we shall come across, it worships evil. In America right at present, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of man suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans non as having been "created equal," as the Declaration of Independence would have information technology, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those nearly different from themselves just to regard them equally the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights. This is not only morally offensive, its socially unsafe--and it represents, for obvious reasons, a very real menace to democratic civil society. America'southward founding fathers, as I shall prove, respected religion because they saw it as strengthening people'south best selves and checking their worst selves; too frequently, legalistic Christianity--which has deceitfully portrayed the founding fathers every bit its philosophical allies--does precisely the contrary.

*

Now, what do I hateful past the title Stealing Jesus?

In recent years, legalistic Christians have organized into a political move so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think but of the legalistic variety. The mainstream media, in covering the and so-called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to cull from: the God-of-wrath Christian Right and the godless secular Left. Many Americans scarcely realize that there is any third alternative. And many, unable to take the Christian Right seriously as a cultural forcefulness, view information technology every bit a holdover of traditional Christianity" that has inexplicably lingered into these "secular times" and volition gradually fade away.

This notion is dangerously misguided. To be sure, the kind of legalistic Christianity that flourishes in America today does have a long historical background of which Americans need to be more aware--and which I volition briefly trace in these pages. Legalism has, then, been a part of the Christian picture from the beginning. Even so today's legalistic Protestantism is very much (to borrow a favorite legalistic term) a "new creation." Every bit new species evolve from old because they are specially equipped to suffer a changed environment, so today'south legalism--an brute dissimilar any that had always existed before--emerged as an accommodation to mod secular democratic order. Far from being a vestige of traditional Christian faith, in brusk, it is a distinctively modern phenomenon--i that, while making tradition its rallying weep, has at the deepest level betrayed Christianity's nigh precious traditions. In fact it has, every bit we shall see, carried out a tripartite expose:

* Doctrine. Information technology has replaced the traditional emphases of Christian belief with bizarre doctrinal strictures that have no legitimate footing in scripture, reason, or tradition.

* Authority. Information technology has replaced the foundational Protestant trust in the individual'south "soul competency" with a dictatorial system of clerical absolutism.

* Police force. It has replaced Christ'southward gospel message of love, which drew on the noblest parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the harshest edicts from the Pentateuch. the epistles of Paul, and the Book of Revelation.

Born out of acrimony, modern legalistic Christianity has, over the long arc of the twentieth century, get steadily angrier in reaction to spreading secularism. During that period it has besides spread like a cancer, winning adherents by the meg and posing an increasingly serious threat to other faiths and to autonomous freedoms. Information technology has, in the process, warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism. And, quite oftentimes, it denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who decline its barbarian theology. In essence, then, it has stolen Jesus--yoked his proper noun and his church to ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that would have appalled him.

Yet to an extraordinary extent, the American media--which are widely denounced every bit liberal and which tend to exist controlled and staffed past secularists and by nonlegalistic Christians--have allowed their own way of using the word Christian to be strongly influenced by legalistic Christian activists. This is especially true, unsurprisingly, of the bourgeois press. In 1996, the right-wing policy magazine American Enterprise published a special outcome on religion in which the word Christian was routinely used to mean but legalists. I article referred to the increasing "involvement of Christians in school boards"; another gauged the "Christian influence" on the media and adverted to "Christian media" and `Christian periodicals.' Over and over, in curt, the word Christian was used in a narrow way to include simply legalistic Christians and to exclude pretty much everybody else. Certainly there aren't "more Christians" on schoolhouse boards or on Capitol Colina than at that place used to be; at that place are simply more than legalistic Christians in these places.

Such usage is probably to be expected in a periodical like American Enterprise, whose editors consider legalistic Christians their ideological allies. But it is rather more surprising in the case of the New York Times, which legalistic Christians almost universally despise for what they view as its liberal, anti-Christian slant. Given the fact that legalistic Christians tend to view the Times equally their single greatest enemy in the media establishment, and given the Times's history of extremely careful usage, it was remarkable to find Times religion reporter Gustav Niebuhr, in a 1996 commodity, using the word Christian to mean a legalistic Protestant. Niebuhr refers to "Christian booksellers" whose `Christian bookstores `feature "Christian music videos" by "Christian musicians." That neither Niebuhr nor his editors considered it inappropriate to say "Christian" rather than, say, "bourgeois evangelical" indicates the extent of the Religious Right's success at getting even some of the most responsible and cogitating elements of mainstream America to accept, however unconsciously, the notion that legalists are the but true Christians--or, at the very to the lowest degree, are in some way "more" Christian' or more urgently or authentically or fully Christian, than other Christians.

The increasing tendency to utilize the discussion Christian to mean but legalistic Protestants has given the discussion an unpleasant flavour for many Americans--Christians included. In a 1996 sermon, a friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest recalled that he cringed when, at a social event, he met a homo "who rather quickly identified himself as a Christian." When the man said the discussion Christian, several other words immediately went through my friend's mind: "bigot, arrogant, mindless, intolerant, rigid, hateful-spirited." Though the encounter proved pleasant, my friend was struck by his initial reaction to the human being's seff-identification every bit a Christian, and by the fact that the word had come to stand up for so many bad things that even a devout clergyman could find himself recoiling at the sound of it.

A friend of mine who teaches theology at a Catholic university noted in a 1996 personal letter that at a recent meeting of his academic department, "one of my colleagues pointed out that the administration has constitute it unwise to use the word `Christian' in its official statements.... Why unwise? Because in the public perception `Christian' is hitched to `Coalition.'" Indeed, as the Reverend Canon John L. Peterson, the secretary-general of the Anglican Consultative Council, observed in his opening remarks at an international evangelism coming together in 1995, "in certain parts of the world the word Christian has become an embarrassment considering it has been aligned with movements which are opposite to the Loving Christ that is at the centre of our message. I hold my head in shame to hear Jesus' name being affiliated with political movements that isolate, inhibit and breed hate and discontentment between human beings."

Why haven't nonlegalistic Christians made more of an endeavor to rescue the word Christian from the negative connotations information technology has acquired in the minds of many Americans? Partly, I call back, considering nonlegalistic Christians are used to thinking of religion every bit a private thing; they aren't in the addiction of talking about what they believe, let lone organizing politically to practice so. Partly because they feel cowed into silence by the ambitious, unapologetic way in which legalists depict boundaries between "true Christians" (themselves) and false ones. And partly, perhaps, because they have a quite proper attitude of awe and humility nearly the fact that they are Christians--and an alertness to the danger of seeming smug, strident, and cocky-congratulatory in their profession of organized religion.

Nevertheless 1 unfortunate outcome of this reticence is that the nonlegalistic Christian indicate of view has played an about invisible role in the discussions of religion and "values" bug that have roiled our club in recent years. Instead, those discussions are almost invariably represented in the mainstream media as a clear-cutting contest between "Christians" (that is, legalists), who supposedly uphold responsibility, values, and family, and liberal secular humanists, who support rights, tolerance, and separation of church and state. A major problem with this vision of the conflict is that neither side of it, equally presented past the media, is speaking for Jesus Christ--for what he was and is really about. Indeed, it oftentimes seems that the media, secular liberals, and legalistic Christians akin take for granted that the most prominent legalistic spokespeople--men and women like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Phyllis Schlafly, and James Dobson--practice speak for Christianity. Fifty-fifty every bit many secular media figures privately smirk at legalistic Christians and tilt coverage in favor of secular humanism, they never publicly challenge the legalists' claim to speak on behalf of the Body of Christ--because the Body of Christ is, to them, not something of value.

The time has come for this claiming to be made. For to be a serious nonlegalistic Christian in America today is to recognize that the word Christian--and, more important, the real living Christ--are crying out to be unshackled from the prejudices and precepts to which legalistic Christians have bound them. To be a serious nonlegalistic Christian is to recognize that while legalists present themselves as "true Christians, the narrow doctrines they profess, the authoritarianism they practice, and the laws they uphold represent a damaging distortion and subversion of Jesus' bulletin. And it is to recognize that in recent years, fifty-fifty as serious biblical scholars have answered with increasing clarity the question of who Jesus was and what he was about, legalists have radically redefined Jesus, condemning the principles he really stood for and instead identifying him with their ain ugliest tendencies. Meanwhile, secular Americans have looked on blindly or indifferently, for the near part either not realizing or not caring what was going on. And most nonlegalistic Christians have held their tongues.

Still to examine the near two thousand years of tension between the Church of Law and the Church building of Love--a tension that has mounted at an increasing rate around the world, and in America higher up all, over the course of this century--is to feel that the nowadays millennial moment in America is a moment of truth for Christianity, a moment when there is an urgent need for the Church of Law to be challenged. This challenge will about certainly have to come from within the mainline Protestant churches, and information technology volition accept to exist issued by Christians whose unfamiliarity with the present conflict's historical groundwork I hope to remedy here. I volition seek to do this past showing how discontinuous much of today's Christianity is with the teachings of Jesus; by describing how extreme such Christianity has become in twentieth-century America; by demonstrating how fully it has succeeded in usurping the proper noun of Christianity; by explaining why these developments endanger the stability, democracy, and pluralism not but of the Us just also of the world in which it is now the sole superpower; and past emphasizing how necessary it is--for the health of Christianity, of America, and of the earth (which legalistic Protestants are at nowadays aggressively evangelizing)--to reverse these developments at present.

(C) 1997 Bruce Bawer All Rights Reserved ISBN: 0-517-70682-2

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