Take back the Bible (from people who hate)

Separation of Church and Hate is a wonderful book from actor/comedian John Fugelsang. It’s brilliant, funny and an intelligent take-down of people in power who profess to be ‘Christian’. But use their faith to create hatred, division, war and hardship to those less fortunate.

Interestingly, John’s own parents were a nun and Franciscan brother (they fell madly in love and were pen pals for 10 years before marrying). So he knows his religion and Bible, better than some bigoted people who preach it.

A book that is mostly concerned with so-called ‘Christian nationalists’ in the USA, of course now we are having a similar kind of thing happening in England. With far-right MPs and media being taken seriously, by those who profess to be ‘traditional Christians’.

But in both cases, their politics are as far away from what Jesus believed and preached, as could be:

Jesus was a peacefully, radically non-violent revolutionary who wasn’t American, never spoke English, who hung around lepers, hookers and crooks. He never sought tax cuts for rich Nazarenes, was anti-wealth, anti-death penalty, anti-public prayer.

He never called poor people lazy, was never even slightly anti-gay. He was a long-haired, community-organising, authority-questioning, brown-skinned, Palestinian, unarmed homeless Jew. But only if you believe what’s actually in the Bible.

He writes that rather than make ‘disabled and poor people pay’, Jesus Christ (the real one, not the made-up one in right-wing politics) is good for people, planet and even the economy.

If your church is not telling you to love your enemies (but telling you who your enemies are), you’re not really in a church.

He says the reason our churches in the western world hardly have any parishioners, is not because people don’t love God. It’s because they are fed up of the hypocrisy:

• The Vatican hires out buildings for $30,000 a month to McDonalds, and even Pope Leo won’t denounce bullfights (some bulls drown in their own blood) due to donations from Catholic countries like Mexico.
• The Church of England owns over a billion pounds worth of property, yet people are homeless, and King Charles III (head of the church) does not pay corporation or inheritance tax on private estates.
• We have ‘Catholic’ former Conservative ministers, whose policies were so mean, that church leaders actually wrote open letters to them, begging them to change policies.
• The two-child benefit cap has been restored, leading some ‘Christian MPs’ to suggest this is promoting a welfare estate. In fact, 70% of all children in poverty have working parents.
• Then of course we have the issues with immigrants. No-one is denying there is a problem, but to call all immigrants ‘illegal aliens’ (Trump even calls Somalians ‘garbage’, applauded by his Catholic vice-president).

John says ‘You can’t hate these people back. You’ll get a lot farther by convincing your racist uncle that Jesus wasn’t an immigrant-hating homophobe than if you just call your uncle an immigrant-hating homophobe’.

Is this book the truth and the light? I can’t say, but it is certainly the hypocritical modern Christian’s worst nightmare. Nick Offerman

Fugelsang has discovered the Kryptonite to use against Christian fundamentalists – a deep, intelligent knowledge of the Bible. Patton Oswalt

More wisdom from John Fugelsang on religion

Please understand this: the Bible does not tell us to follow the Bible. It tells us to follow Christ.

Only in American can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines – and still call yourself pro-life.

Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.

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.