Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

In 300-odd pages, Bruce Bawer has opened a floodgate of incisive religious criticism that will reverberate across the American political scene. He has put into eloquent and decisive language what many mainline Christians and non-Christians have quietly suspected but been unable to verbalize–namely that Fundamentalist Christianity is barely Christian at all. A Baptist theologian says he is “not interested in who Jesus was.” Pat Robertson argues the Golden Rule as Jesus’s justification that “individual self-interest is being a very real part of the human makeup, and something not necessarily bad or sinful.” In page after page, Bawer reveals a so-called Fundamentalist movement that readily displays a blatant disregard for the most salient message of the Gospels: selfless love and service to all. As for the significance of this revelation in the face of the ballooning presence of Fundamentalist Christians in American politics, readers will have to decide for themselves.