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Summary
Summary
From the author of the widely acclaimedA Place at the Table, this 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 rather 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 fact of relatively recent origin, are distinctively American in many ways, and are dramatically at odds with the values that Jesus actually 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 become synonymous with Christianity in the minds of many people. Stealing Jesusis 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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Essayist Bawer, whose books include examinations of American poetry (The Middle Generation), the religious aspect of American fiction (The Aspect of Eternity) and the cultural response to homosexuality (A Place at the Table), turns his attention to the relationship between fundamentalist Christianity and American culture. Relying on personal experience, anecdotal evidence and his own study of contemporary religious history in the United States, Bawer contends that fundamentalist Christianity, what he calls the "Church of Law," has been preaching a message of wrath and judgment to modern American culture that Bawer believes is incompatible with Jesus' message of love. In America, Bawer argues, Christianity is taken by the media and by the culture at large to refer to fundamentalist Christianity. Such a mistake is dangerous, he warns, since it changes the very nature of Christianity, at least as Bawer understands it, from a "nonlegalistic religion" marked by love and compassion to a "legalistic religion" with no room for love or compassion. Bawer's sometimes strident tone often results in unsupported generalizations: "Children raised by gay parents have been shown to suffer no ill effects therefrom and to do at least as well in all respects as other children; meanwhile, sociological studies and voluminous anecdotal evidence suggest that children raised in legalistic Christian families tend to suffer to an unusual degree from severe alienation, emotional and sexual abuse, drug problems, and compulsive sexual behavior." On the whole, however, Bawer's graceful prose and lucid insights make this a must-read book for anyone concerned with the relationship of Christianity to contemporary American culture. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Bawer wants to rouse liberal America from its lazy indifference to the rising tide of Christian fundamentalism. A literary and cultural critic, Bawer has written on spirituality in modern fiction (The Aspect of Eternity, 1993) and normality in the lives of gay men and lesbians (A Place at the Table, 1993). Now he turns his critical sights on the history, reigning personalities, and ominous future prospects of Christian fundamentalism in America. Bawer traces fundamentalism back to the 19th-century English theologian John Nelson Darby, who first articulated the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism--a periodization of sacred history that will culminate in a thousand-year reign of Christ--and to C.I. Scofield, who incorporated Darby's ideas as commentary in his Scofield Reference Bible. Bawer goes on to critique Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Hal Lindsey, James Dobson, and Bill McCartney (head of the much- publicized Promise Keepers). He subsumes these men under the larger rubric of a wrathful ``Church of Law,'' which he contrasts with the more truly Christian ``Church of Love,'' best represented by the late Harry Emerson Fosdick, famed liberal preacher at Riverside Church in New York City. That the most distinguished American representative of the Church of Love is dead is just Bawer's point: Nonlegalistic Christians must find their voice again before the legalistic ones steal Jesus away. But with his love/law dichotomy, Bawer succumbs to the very type of black-and-white thinking he decries in fundamentalists. The dichotomy is especially unfortunate in that it both perpetuates an ancient Christian prejudice against law that has often spent itself on Judaism and Hebrew scripture, and distorts religious experience, which some scholars have understood to include both loving and wrathful dimensions. Bawer lightens his critique with stretches of autobiographical narration, but the overriding (and unrepentant) tone of fulmination lends his book the feel of a sermon that has gone on too long.
Booklist Review
Why does an Episcopalian like Bawer respond very warily when a stranger asks, "Are you a Christian?" Because, he argues, in the U.S. Christian has become synonymous with fundamentalist the result of a campaign by several severe sects to transform Christianity from the church of love, grounded in Jesus' great commandment to love God and one another, into the church of law, enforcing rigid strictures on especially sex and family life--no homosexuality, no abortions, no divorce, etc. Bawer traces fundamentalism from the nineteenth-century invention of premillennialism to the theocratic politics of the religious right today. He limns the parallel liberal reaction, too, but notes that, after the notorious Scopes evolution trial in 1925, secularism rather than Christian liberalism became the predominant mindset among intellectuals and opinion molders, particularly in the news and entertainment media. Today, journalists are too ignorant of religion to ask the likes of Pat Robertson hard questions, areligious social scientists pooh-pooh the country's high church attendance, and demoralized religious liberals cower behind secular liberals' skirts and fail to counter the religious right's scapegoating of, most notably, gays. Bawer is first and foremost an excellent critic, and this book is an adventure in American religious thought, every bit as exciting and intelligent as his superb essay on gays in America, A Place at the Table (1993). --Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
Author of A Place at the Table, a groundbreaking book on homosexuality, and of articles on religion, Bawer argues that fundamentalism is a recent development that defies the values of Christianity. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.