Overview
This is a book about what Christianity started out as, what it became, and why it’s still worth fighting for.
For millennia, many who call themselves Christians have been suckered into an anti-Christian trap of aligning with power, instead of challenging it.
But conservative power is what Jesus stood up to—not for—time and time again:
-The authoritarians among the religious leaders, drunk on their own eminence.
-The wealthy, worshiping their own stature and possessions while denying the suffering of the poor.
-The capitalists in the temple, greedily exploiting poor believers.
-The imperial government of Rome, whose hunger for power led to its own collapse.
In fact, if there’s one thing the Bible shows us, it’s that authoritarian government, aligned with some extreme conservative religious fundamentalists, literally killed Jesus.
Yet throughout history, Christianity has been used to justify all manner of evils, from slavery to ethnic cleansing to preemptive war. But there’s another side to this. Because for nearly every great injustice perpetrated by authoritarian Christianity, Christian reform movements have dared to fight back, supporting compassion, social justice, and human rights, as Jesus did. St. Francis of Assisi left the Crusades and preached against war. A Catholic priest on Columbus’s ship, Bartolomé de Las Casas, led the first-ever protest by a white person in this hemisphere against slavery and human rights abuses. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist, used the scriptures to shame white America out of the mutually destructive American apartheid of segregation. Along with righteous atheists, agnostics, and many people of other religions, Jesus-following Christians have opposed imperialism, segregation, and science denial; fought for humane conditions for the American worker and for an end to child labor.
Fake Christians is a perspective-shifting history that exposes Christianity’s bad actors from crusaders to colonizers to today’s Christian Nationalists, who want the US to be a Christian nation, but who don’t want to follow the words of Christ. In contrast, the book also highlights the history of Christian resistance that took a stand against violence and oppression—with critical lessons for how to stand up to hatred now.
What do we do when faith is weaponized for earthly power? We strike back. With facts, correct scripture, and irreverent humor. Because the child of a former Franciscan brother and Catholic nun ran with that set-up of a joke and became a comedian.
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