Important books to highlight hypocritical Christianity
In a world of war and wildfires, we need to call out ‘Christians’ who are bombing other countries and destroying the planet. Here are a few good books to start. Also read this brilliant book by John Fugelsang on how to take back the Bible from people who hate.
Bring Back Your People is a book worth reading, by an American Christian who says the price of gas is not the reason to spew politics of hate.
How Western Christianity got it wrong
How Western Christianity Got It Wrong is a book that many of us would like to leave in the library of several politicians and media pundits, though whether they would pick it up and read it, is another matter!
The author (of mixed white and Native American heritage) traces how a brown man from Nazareth (Jesus!) who never lost his connection to the whole community of creation, has been turned into the poster child for building empires and destroying the planet?
Jesus spoke to the wind, to the water and to trees: closely observed the habits of birds, flowers and animals; and called his disciples to model their lives after what they saw in nature. Earth is out of balance, and God’s creation is in peril. Randy Woodley
The Conspiracists (how women are lured to extremism)
The Conspiracists is another American book, which again translates well to England in modern times. The author wanted to work out how women who looked like her (middle-aged white women) ended up storming the White Houses and believing in all kinds of strange things, from racism to New Age.
She meets right-wing populists to those who believe they are ‘starseeds to lead others into the fifth dimension. And traces such movements back to a 19th occulist fraud.
However the message is serious. ‘Normal women’ can get sucked in by misinformation which then leads to extremism. Author Noelle Cook says that people are often doing harm simply due to ‘watching lots and lots of YouTube videos’. And believing bad things are ‘soul lessons’, instead of just accepting the reality that life can sometimes be rubbish and awful.
Recently Green leader Zack Polanski got into trouble for mistakenly sharing a t-shirt that seemed to incite violence to Nigel Farage. Obviously in the wake of the murder of Ann Widdicombe (or even without), it’s a wake-up call that he’s spending too much time on social media, not doing the right checks.
But what irks (noted by radio presenter James O’Brien) is that Nigel Farage seemed to not see the hypocrisy. He raised the case of a woman imprisoned for incendiary remarks about asylum seekers in the US to Trump allies, on ‘free speech concerns’. And even invited her to the US with him, vetoed by government. And hosted her at a Reform UK conference.
