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  STEALING JESUS

  HOW FUNDAMENTALISM BETRAYS CHRISTIANITY

  BRUCE BAWER

  Crown Publishers, Inc. • New York

  * * *

  The publisher has made every effort to trace ownership of all copyrighted materials in this work. If there are any errors or ommissions, corrections will gladly be made in future editions. Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of previously published materials: Excerpts taken from The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey.

  Copyright © 1970, 1977 by Zondervan Publishing House. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. • Excerpts from This Present Darkness by Frank E. Peretti (Crossway Books). Copyright © 1986 by Frank Peretti. • Excerpts from The World's Religions by Huston Smith. Copyright © 1991 by Huston Smith. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  Copyright © 1997 by Bruce Bawer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street,

  New York, New York 10022.

  Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

  http://www.randomhouse.com/

  CROWN and colophon are trademarks of Crown Publishers, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Design by Cynthia Dunne

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bawer, Bruce, 1956-

  Stealing Jesus : how fundamentalism betrays Christianity / Bruce Bawer. — 1st ed.

  1. Fundamentalism—United States—Controversial literature. 2. Christianity—

  Essence, genius, nature. 3. United States—Church history. I. Tide.

  BT82.2.B39 1997

  277.3'0829—dc21 97-20111 CIP

  ISBN 0-517-70682-2

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  * * *

  For Chris

  Love never ends.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  1. "Are You a Christian?

  2. "Who Is My Neighbor?"

  3. Love and Law

  4. Darby's Kingdom

  5. Rauschenbusch's Kingdom

  6. "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

  7. The Legalistic Boom

  8. Takeover

  9. God's Generalissimo

  10. The Choirboy

  11. "No More Gray"

  12. "A Lie Straight from the Devil"

  13. The Doctor and the Coach

  14. "These Secular Times"

  15. Did Lucy Convert?

  16. Abiding Messages, Transient Settings

  Bibliography

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I must begin by thanking the Rev. Canon John Andrew, former rector of Saint Thomas Church in New York, whose sermons taught me how to think about Christianity.

  For their formidable gifts, unwavering integrity, and loyal friendship, I thank my agent, Eric SimonofF, and my editors, Elaine Pfefferblit and Ann Patty, who are, respectively, the mother and stepmother of both this book and its predecessor, A Place at the Table. I am thankful as well to these people at Crown: Patrick Sheehan, Tina Constable, Amy Zevlin, David Tran, Cynthia Dunne, Robin Foster, John Sharp, and Jim Walsh. I give thanks also to Dr. James Dunn, the Rev. Charles Hefling, and the Rev. L. William Countryman for their meticulous reading and invaluable comments; to the Beyond Queer confraternity and my colleagues on the Sexuality Committee of the Diocese of New York for the stimulation of their ideas; to the officers of national Integrity (especially Kim Byham and Louie Crew) for affording me the opportunity to give a talk at their 1996 national convention in which I explored some of the questions dealt with in these pages; and to the Rev. Dan Ade of the Church of Saint Luke's in the Fields and everybody at Integrity/New York (especially Nick Dowen and Sandra Collins) for inviting me to deliver sermons which also anticipated parts of this book. I also thank my dear friends Frederick Morgan and Paula Deitz, editors of the Hudson Review, for encouraging my work in this direction. And I thank the editors of Trinity Church Wall Street's Trinity News for asking me to write an article for them about religion and film; its importance to this book will be readily apparent to them.

  I am deeply grateful to my rector, the Rev. Herbert G. Draesel, and my fellow parishioners at the Church of the Holy Trinity for their fellowship; to my friend the Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton for her inspiring writing and preaching; and to Barbara's flock at St. Clement's Church for welcoming me so warmly into their circle of communion on many Sunday mornings while I was writing this book.

  For their moral support, I thank my parents and my friends Brendan McEntee, Chip Teply, Michael Joseph Gross, Kirk Read, Paul Jero-mack, Stephanie Cowell and Russell Clay, Sally and Mel Whitehead and the whole McGaughey-Whitehead-Kettles clan, David Attoe, Tom DePietro, Judy White, the Rev. Richard T. Nolan, Randall Curb, Michael Smith and David Millspaugh, Michael Lind, Norah Vincent, Joanne Zyontz, Joshua Sherman and Jorge Martin, Terry and Liz Teachout, Robert E. Wright, Harriet Zinnes, Paul Lucre, Leo Carroll, and Rob Morris and Steve Gunderson. I also wish to thank Alex Wiscovitch for being there and for saying to me, at my lowest point, the most important words any human being can say to another: "Dios te ama, y yo tambien." Alongside those words, the next several hundred pages are mere commentary.

  Finally, I wish to mention my grandfather Harry Everett Thomas, Sr., whom I never knew but whose presence I felt strongly while writing this book.

  * * *

  1

  "ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN?"

  Spring 1996, New York City. I'm standing on a moderately crowded subway car reading a paperback when I look up to see a man about my age—thirty-nine—who is standing a few feet away and staring at me with disconcerting intensity. For an instant we gaze speechlessly into each other's eyes. I expect him to say (as sometimes happens) that he's read one of my books and recognizes me from my dust-jacket photo. Instead he asks me a question.

  "Are you a Christian?"

  The question takes me aback, though I know why he has asked it. I am reading Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, whose author, the Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, is notorious for his denial of many orthodox Christian doctrines and for his work on behalf of an inclusive church. It occurs to me that my interlocutor, whose question marks him as a born-again Christian, has probably noticed the word Bible, which is in large type, and cannot make out the rest of the title.

  "Yes," I reply.

  "Are you born again?" His eyes meet mine in an unsettlingly intimate gaze.

  I pause for a moment. We have entered difficult territory. Am I born again? Eight years ago, after a decade of feeling that one couldn't be both homosexual and Christian, and after a year or so of listening to sermons that had, for the first time, explained Christianity in a way that made sense to me, I was baptized at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in New York.

  Am I born again? I look into the man's eyes. "I think so."

  "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

  Another pause. "Yes . . ."

  "Then you're born again!" he declares conclusively. "Next time someone asks, answer with confidence that you are!"

  "Well," I reply, falling into a tone that sounds to me rather stiff and academic in comparison with his unrestrained ardor, "if I sounded hesitant, it's because I consider myself 'born again,' but by some people
's definition I'm not."

  I don't explain that part of the problem for many people, himself probably included, would be that I'm gay. In the kinds of churches whose members are in the habit of describing themselves as born again, being gay is considered utterly incompatible with being Christian. Another part of the problem is that I'm an Episcopalian, a member of a church that fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals don't consider a legitimate church at all because of what they see as its theological leniency. Nor do I add that the book I'm reading was written by someone who has helped to change the Episcopal Church in ways that would doubtless horrify my interlocutor.

  "How long have you been a Christian?" the man asks, his eyes fixed on mine.

  "Eight years," I tell him.

  He seems delighted by my answer. Why? Because I've been a Christian that long? Or because I became one as an adult, which presumably suggests that, like him, I'm a "born-again Christian" who went through a "conversion experience," and am thus more serious and committed than many nominal Christians? Or because I remember how many years it's been—which suggests that my conversion continues to be an important event for me?

  "I've been a Christian for nine years," he says. "I was going to commit suicide and then Jesus Christ saved me. I was filled with the power of the Holy Ghost."

  I'm at a loss for words. What can I say in response to this testimony? After all, I'm an Episcopalian. Most of us don't talk that way, especially not to total strangers. "Good for you," I finally say.

  When the man gets off the train a few moments later, we exchange a friendly good-bye. The doors close, and the train moves on. Yet the brief conversation haunts me for hours. I'm at once perturbed and impressed by the man's zealotry. Evangelical Christians, fundamentalist and otherwise, can walk up to strangers on the subway, tell them they're Christians, and testify about how they found Jesus. There's something wonderful about that. Mainline Protestants—members of such long-established, moderate-to-liberal denominations as the American Baptist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Reformed Church of America—don't usually do that sort of thing. And we Episcopalians are probably the worst of all: Some of us are self-conscious about discussing God even in church. A century ago sex was seen as a private matter that simply shouldn't be discussed in public; today our secular society teaches us to view religion in the same way, and most of us unquestioningly oblige.

  "Are you a Christian?" It's not as easy a question as it may sound. What is a Christian? How to decide who is or isn't one—and who does the deciding?

  I probably wasn't more than seven or eight when I first noticed that the word could mean very different things, depending on who was using it. Many of my Protestant relatives in South Carolina routinely distinguished between "Christians"—meaning themselves—and "Catholics." In the middle-class neighborhood where I grew up in Queens, New York, many of my Catholic neighbors made it clear that they regarded themselves and their coreligionists as the only true Christians, and that in their minds everyone else—Protestants, Jews, whatever—blended into a non-Catholic, non-Christian sameness. Among fundamentalist (and many evangelical) Protestants today, such an exclusionary posture toward outsiders is not only alive and well but is a matter of essential doctrine. Fundamentalists, by definition, view only themselves and other fundamentalists as true Christians; conservative evangelicals generally view only themselves, other conservative evangelicals, and fundamentalists as true Christians.

  When we speak of American Christians, of course, we may divide them into Protestants and Catholics. (Eastern Orthodox Christians account for only 1 percent or so of the total.) But today there is a more meaningful way of dividing American Christians into two categories. The mainstream media often refer to one of these categories as the Religious Right or the Christian Right and call people in this category conservative Christians; people who fall into the other category are frequently dubbed liberal Christians. The terms conservative Christian and liberal Christian can be useful, but I will try to avoid using them here because they suggest political rather than theological orientation. Generally speaking, to be sure, the political implications are accurate: Conservative Christians tend to be politically conservative, and liberal Christians tend to be politically liberal. But there are exceptions; and, in any event, it needs to be underscored that what distinguishes the members of these two groups of Christians is not politics but their essential understanding of the nature of God, the role of the church, and the meaning of human life. It is not an overstatement, indeed, to say that these two groups, despite the fact that they both claim the name of Christianity, have fundamentally divergent conceptions of the universe.

  What, then, to call these two categories? Most Americans employ fundamentalist as a general label for conservative Christians—which is why I've used fundamentalism in this book's subtitle—but in its strict sense the term is too narrow for my purposes. Phrases like traditional Christian and modern Christian are, to an extent, legitimate, for conservative Christians tend to champion tradition and to reject much of the modern science and biblical scholarship that liberal Christians embrace; yet, as shall become clear, it is extremely misleading to suggest that the kind of theology to which conservative Christians subscribe is truly more traditional, in the deepest sense, than that of liberal Christians. Likewise, labels like biblical Christian and Bible-believing Christian, which many conservative Christians attach to themselves, wrongly suggest that there is something unbiblical about the faith of liberal Christians. We might speak of "exclusionists" and "inclusionists," because conservative Christians, unlike liberal Christians, tend to define the word Christian in such a way as to exclude others—including, in most cases, a large number of their fellow conservative Christians.

  But it seems to me that the difference between conservative and liberal Christianity may be most succinctly summed up by the difference between two key scriptural concepts: law and love. Simply stated, conservative Christianity focuses primarily on law, doctrine, and authority; liberal Christianity focuses on love, spiritual experience, and what Baptists call the priesthood of the believer. If conservative Christians emphasize the Great Commission—the resurrected Christ's injunction, at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew, to "go to all nations and make them my disciples"—liberal Christians place more emphasis on the Great Commandment, which in Luke's Gospel reads as follows: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

  Am I suggesting that conservative Christians are without love or that liberal Christians are lawless? No. I merely make this distinction: Conservative Christianity understands a Christian to be someone who subscribes to a specific set of theological propositions about God and the afterlife, and who professes to believe that by subscribing to those propositions, accepting Jesus Christ as savior, and (except in the case of the most extreme separatist fundamentalists) evangelizing, he or she evades God's wrath and wins salvation (for Roman Catholics, good works also count); liberal Christianity, meanwhile, tends to identify Christianity with the experience of God's abundant love and with the commandment to love God and one's neighbor. If, for conservative Christians, outreach generally means zealous proselytizing of the "unsaved," for liberal Christians it tends to mean social programs directed at those in need.

  In these pages, accordingly, I'll refer to these two broad categories of Christianity as legalistic and nonlegalistic. Further, I'll use the terms Church of Law and Church of Love to describe the two different ecclesial ideals toward which the Christians in these respective categories strive—remembering always, of course, that every church and every human soul has within it a degree of legalism and a capacity for love.

  This book will focus primarily on Protestant legalism and non-legalism; some of the things I say will apply as well
to the parallel split within Catholicism, while others do not. Though there are broad sympathies between legalistic Protestants and Catholics, and between non-legalistic Protestants and Catholics, the strongly divergent doctrinal emphases of Protestantism and Catholicism make it difficult to generalize about "legalistic Christianity," say, as opposed to legalistic Protestantism or Catholicism.

  Among the differences between legalistic and nonlegalistic Protestants are these:

  • Legalistic Protestantism sees Jesus' death on the cross as a transaction by means of which Jesus paid for the sins of believers and won them eternal life; nonlegalistic Protestantism sees it as a powerful and mysterious symbol of God's infinite love for suffering mankind, and as the natural culmination of Jesus' ministry of love and selflessness.

  • Legalistic Protestantism believes that Jesus' chief purpose was to carry out that act of atonement; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes Jesus' chief purpose was to teach that God loves all people as parents love their children and that all humankind is one.

  • Legalistic Protestantism understands eternal life to mean a heavenly reward after death for the "true Christians"—the "Elect," the "saved"—who accept Jesus as their savior and subscribe to the correct doctrines; nonlegalistic Protestantism more often understands it to denote a unity with God that exists outside the dimension of time and that can also be experienced in this life.

  • Legalistic Protestantism holds that God loves only the "saved" and that they alone are truly his children; nonlegalistic Protestantism holds that God loves all human beings and that all are his children.

  • Legalistic Protestantism sees Satan as a real creature, a tempter and deceiver from whom true Christians are defended by their faith but by whom atheists, members of other religions, and "false Christians" are deceived, and whose instruments they can become; for non-legalistic Protestantism Satan is a metaphor for the potential for evil that exists in each person, Christian or otherwise, and that must be recognized and resisted.