A Magazine of Politics and Culture
Author John Fugelsang explains how American conservatives have twisted Christianity into a tool of hatred and domination.
John Fugelsang is a political commentator and the author of Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism, how it ignores and contradicts the actual message of Jesus, and how believers and non-believers alike can push back against it.
The first thing I want to do is read this little thing you’ve got in the intro here, where you say:
Jesus was a peaceful, radically nonviolent revolutionary who wasn’t American, never spoke English, who hung around lepers, hookers, and crooks, never sought tax cuts for rich Nazarenes, was anti-wealth, anti-death penalty, anti-public prayer too. Never asked lepers for a co-pay, never called poor people lazy, never even slightly anti gay, never mentioned abortion. Supported paying taxes and was a long-haired, community-organizing, authority-questioning, anti-slut shaming, brown-skinned, Palestinian, unarmed, homeless Jew. But only if you believe what’s actually in the Bible.
So John, let me start by asking you, what is the kind of Christianity that you are responding to or critiquing with this book?
This is a book for any believer of any faith, or any atheist or agnostic, who will ever have to deal with, live with, or work with a far-right-wing Christian nationalist or fundamentalist in their family, social media feed, job, school, or government. It’s a response to Christian nationalism and right-wing Christianity and the allegedly Christian politics of Donald Trump’s movement. Even for atheists, for anyone who has to deal with these folks, if you’re arguing or debating the issues of our day with a Christian nationalist, chances are Jesus is on your side, whether you believe him or not, and the right-wing in America is trying to force a very narrow, Jesus-free version of this religion on American society at every level of culture and civic life. And I think it’s going to be more important than ever to take away their camouflage and point out elegantly that these people trying to force the Bible on us don’t actually follow the Jesus parts of the Bible.
Yes, one of the things that’s core to what you’re doing here, as you say, is—it sounds kind of funny to say—really putting Jesus back in Christianity. You emphasize over and over that the people who are the most publicly pious, proclaiming Christians overlook the teachings of Jesus that are the core of his philosophy and also are the most difficult things to live up to, the things that call upon us to look past or get over our uglier instincts to hate and kill one another, to be bigoted, and instead help the poor, care for the sick, turn the other cheek, and be kind to the incarcerated. So tell us a little bit more. I quoted your little intro paragraph about who Jesus really was. Why do you think Christianity needs to return to the figure of Jesus?
If Christianity wants to survive, then they can go back to the teachings of Jesus, because those are popular. Caring for the less fortunate, not hating people, not being into war, not being into violence, looking out for the rights of women, treating women as equals, not discriminating against vulnerable minorities, and fighting for societies to care for the poor and provide healthcare and to be decent to immigrants and prisoners—these are all ideas that are very popular with young people, and they align very well with the actual teachings of Jesus. For churches that want to survive in the 21st century, they can do that. But if churches want to keep on telling you who to hate right now, be it transgender people, be it the Christian refugees at our border that we’ve been coached to call illegals, be it foreigners, Muslims, liberals, or women who may have had abortions—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.
And this is just a response to all the meanness and cruelty masquerading as Christianity. Because everywhere I go, I meet people who were raised religious and now consider themselves spiritual because they’re so turned off to the hypocrisy and cruelty of right-wing Christianity. Look at how the churches are empty. It’s not because people don’t like God or Jesus or Santa Claus. They don’t like the meanness. So I don’t know whether religion will survive or not, but I do know that going forward, the teachings of Jesus are actually not just good for religion; they’re good for society. They’re good for the economy. Putting the last of us first, spending money to make sure that everyone has health coverage, and fighting poverty—well, that’s just smart economics. Forty-five years of trickle-down have shown us putting the rich first doesn’t work unless you’re rich and you can buy politicians to keep that system going for 45 years. What Biden did in the first two years, just pouring money into the middle class and poor people, we had the lowest rate of childhood poverty in history in 2021, which shows we could do that if we wanted. I think COVID proved that a strong economy needs a healthy, living-wage workforce where everyone has health insurance. Taking care of all of us is really good for all of us. So I just happen to think that the Jesus teachings are also smart capitalism.
One of the things that you do in this book, in fact, the core of this book, is a very close textual analysis of scripture, because you want to prove that your interpretation of what it means to be a Christian and take Jesus’s teaching seriously is correct. You had me on your show to talk about my book, Responding to the Right, which kind of had a similar structure, taking right-wing arguments and then going, “Here’s what they say, but here’s what you should actually believe.” And you’re kind of doing something similar here, which suggests that you do believe that despite your harsh language towards the sects of Christianity that you are debunking, you do see the value in argument and dialogue. Tell me why you’re doing that.
You can’t hate these people. You can’t hate these people back. Hate doesn’t work against a hater. It just makes you as stupid and counterproductive as them. And I think social media proves it. Every day we see very smart liberal people who lose their minds with anger on Twitter and get into these flame wars. I’ve been guilty of that before. But when it comes to actual scripture, I find that if you engage your right-wing friends or loved ones or coworkers on what the Bible actually says, they might not agree with you, and they probably won’t, but they may appreciate you took the time to meet them on the pages of the Bible and discuss things on their terms. I have just come to believe that 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. And while you might not win them over, if you can debate what’s in the Bible with kindness, and without getting angry, and just knowing the scripture well enough and not returning their hate, you might not reach them, but you’ll reach their wives, their kids, or everybody else at the cookout. Politicians, Democrats, and the media are not going to do this. They’re terrified of talking about actual religion. They’re not going to talk about how homophobia is an insult to Jesus’s memory. They’re not going to talk about how you can’t support the death penalty and claim you follow Jesus. They’re going to play dumb about it and not ask the harsh question. So it’s going to be up to us to convince the conservatives that hate is not a Christian value.
Because a lot of people on our side of things politically have given up on the idea of engaging with, debating, and convincing people on the right, and you clearly have not given up. On page 61, you have tips for dialogue: “Keep focusing on the actual teachings here: love, compassion, and social justice. Know the text and be ready to challenge misinterpretations. Focus on the principles you agree on, and model.” I feel like you’re one of the last people who believes this can be productive or constructive.
Well, like I said, I’m not saying that you will win them over. I wrote this book for people who feel like they’ve been gaslit and that they’re crazy, who grew up learning that Christianity was this religion of love and peace and empathy and service to the less fortunate, and then you grow up to find out, no, it’s actually this really mean, shitty, right-wing, pretty racist, tax-free clique. And for me, again, I’m not writing this for the conservatives, for the right-wingers. I’m writing this for folks who have to deal with them to say, “No, you’re not crazy.”
It was 45 years ago that the Republican Party gave up on racial segregation. Throughout the ’70s, Jerry Falwell’s big issue was that Jimmy Carter’s IRS was going after universities, taking away their tax-exempt status if they practiced racial segregation. By the early ’80s, they had given up on that, and they went for abortion. And what have we seen in the last 45 years? Abortion saved the right-wing. After segregation and Dr. King and civil rights and Nixon, the right-wing was in the wilderness. Abortion saved them as an issue. It redefined American Christianity for the last 45 years. Two generations of Christians have been raised to prioritize something Jesus never talked about over everything Jesus ever did talk about. Most conservative Christians probably don’t know that the Bible never condemns abortion. There are no penalties for abortion. None of the prophets ever mention abortion, but Jesus is hardcore against the death penalty. I’m just tired of seeing my parents’ religion used as cover for meanness and hypocrisy. I’m not saying the Bible is pro-abortion, but it certainly isn’t against it. Abortions are legal and free in Israel right now because Jesus’s religion—that religion is the star of the book—never banned abortions, and most Americans don’t even know this. Their emotions have been manipulated for 45 years to go for “protecting the unborn,” and then they wind up voting against all the direct commandments of Jesus in favor of guys like Donald Trump.
You mentioned your parents there because you have a very interesting background that you open the book with. Your book is dedicated to Sister Damien and Brother Boniface, and perhaps you could tell us who they are.
My mother was a nun before she married. We should have gotten to this first before I got all preachy. My mother was a nun, and she went into the convent. She grew up in the segregated South and went into the convent right out of high school. They put her through nursing school and sent her off to work with lepers in Malawi, Africa. So my mom went from the segregated South to Africa. My father grew up in Brooklyn, and he was a Franciscan brother, wore the Jedi robes, and taught history to Catholic boys. He met my mom when she was briefly stationed in Brooklyn and fell madly in love. He couldn’t tell her he was madly in love, so they were chaste pen pals for 10 years.
It’s a long story, but eventually she left. They got married, and they tried to raise us to be progressive, free-thinking Catholics, albeit deeply sexually repressed. And I was raised to think that Christianity was about the stuff Jesus talked about: service and love and forgiving your enemies and looking out for the least of us and looking for the marginalized groups, not total right-wing domination of politics in the school board. So for me, it’s been a lifelong journey, and when I finally began trying to do material about this as a comedian, I had many agents tell me, “Oh, no, don’t do that. No one wants to hear that. Religion’s third rail.” And when I was pitching this book for years, I was told, “Oh, it’s third rail. No one wants to read a book about taking on the Christian right. Wait, atheists and believers working together?” This book was rejected for many, many years and many proposals, and finally, when we finally got it released, almost 15 years after my first proposal I ever sent out for this book, we hit the New York Times bestseller list with no mainstream media appearances because I think there is such an appetite for subject matter like this. There are people who aren’t atheists, but they don’t like right-wing Christianity in America; that’s millions of us.
I think it’s funny that when you’re the son of a nun and a Franciscan brother, you don’t get piano lessons; you get organ lessons.
That’s very painful. And when I was 11, I learned what a vow of celibacy was. So I was like, wow, I’m really not supposed to be here. My parents once promised God I would never happen. You want to talk about existential crises? Let me tell you, in sixth grade, I got mine.
But you still have a great deal of respect for what you see as authentic Christianity.
Sure, I do. Yes, I have respect for people who lead Christ-like existences and look out for the less fortunate. I have huge respect for Jews and Muslims who do the same. I don’t really respect fundamentalists of all the world’s great religions, who use their faith as a cloaking device for cruelty. If you’re using religion to show that you’re better than other people, especially Christianity—if you’re trying to say that you’re better than other groups or other religions because you believe in Jesus—you don’t believe in Jesus, because his movement is all about humility.
It was an interesting moment at Charlie Kirk’s memorial where his widow, Erika Kirk, who apparently takes the teachings of Jesus at least somewhat seriously, said she forgave his killer.
Only one there who did.
She forgave his killer. Everyone else was angry and said, “We’re going to have our vengeance.” And she came out and said, “I forgive the killer.” Which is a very difficult thing to do a couple of weeks after your husband was assassinated in cold blood on video.
A couple of days.
A couple of days, yes. And then Donald Trump came out and said, “Well, that’s very nice, but I don’t love my enemies. I hate my enemies.” And then I saw someone on Twitter say, and I couldn’t believe this, “As a Christian, one thing I love about Trump is how shameless he is about saying, ‘Love my enemies—no way, I hate those guys.’” As a Christian!
“As a Christian, I love the way he hates.” Look, if you’re in a band and you call yourself a Rolling Stones cover band, but you don’t do any songs by the Rolling Stones, you just do Vanilla Ice and Nickelback, then find a new name for your group, man. Again, if you’re admiring Donald Trump as a Christian because of how he hates, you’re not a Christian. You can call yourself what you want. There are Christians, and there are Christ followers. That’s the whole history of the religion. There’s authoritarian Christianity, and they’re always opposed by the people who actually follow Jesus. The Crusades—that’s how it began. We’re waging war and killing pagans, and it’s no longer the movement of the Jewish carpenter. Now we’re an imperial religion, so we’re going to slaughter Jews and Muslims, and the Christ followers like St. Francis quit the war and preached peace. You got the Vatican saying, Doctrine of Discovery: go and steal resources from other lands and dominate Indigenous peoples as long as you force Christianity on them. You had Columbus slaughtering people in Hispaniola, and it was the Catholic priest on his mission, Bartolomé de las Casas, who protested the treatment of the Indigenous. You had slavery propped up by Christianity, but the Jesus followers like Frederick Douglass, the Quakers, and Harriet Tubman pushed back. Christianity propped up segregation, and a Jesus follower, Dr. King, used the Gospels to shame white America. The whole history of the religion is authoritarian Christianity abusing people and the Jesus followers resisting. Those are the two groups, and that battle is playing out right now every day.
I was not raised Christian. I was not raised in a family with any faith at all. I have a very passing, limited familiarity with religion.
That’s why you’re so stable and well adjusted, Nathan. Now you have my respect for that.
But what sort of mystifies me, obviously, is when you talk, I nod and go, “Yes, I see what you mean.” I look at the words of Jesus, and I see they seem pretty plain to me. When I see the Beatitudes, I think, “All right, he’s clearly on the side of the poor and the weak and the peaceful against authority.” So the mystery to me, though, is if the people that you’re arguing against don’t see the teachings of Jesus at the core of their faith, what is it that Christianity means? I’m trying to understand what Christianity really means to them.
It means “I’m better than you.” They don’t care about the teachings of Jesus; they don’t care about Satan; they don’t care about religious freedom. They care about conservative Christian domination of culture and government. That’s what they care about. So that’s it. And the politicians are who I’m talking about, not necessarily the people—a lot of the people do—but with abortion, if they cared about reducing the numbers of abortions, these Republicans would fight for expanded access to birth control. They’d fight for better sex ed in schools and lower the abortion rate. They need the issue to get votes. If they cared about illegal aliens crossing the border—I don’t call them “illegals,” I call them Christian refugees, but if they really cared about that issue, then they’d start locking up the employers who do all the hiring and put up the help wanted sign. You say if anyone hires an undocumented worker, it’s one year in a federal pen, border crossings will stop, and it’ll clean up in two weeks. They don’t want to do that. They use the issue to get power.
Issue after issue, they don’t actually care what Jesus says. They care that they are in power. Immigration is the starkest: God commands us to welcome the stranger and treat the alien as our own. Jesus says individuals and nations will be judged, heaven or hell, by how they treat the stranger. So why the hell should I listen to you and Donald Trump instead of God and Jesus? Right-wing Christianity has been allowed to frame all of these issues using terms that Jesus himself would have rejected. And that’s what they do. They’re here to worship him and fight for him, but they won’t listen to him. And if you try to fight for the things he said as policy, they will call you a woke, open-borders globalist cuck. So they’re frauds, and I got tired of the meanness. Take away their camouflage. Don’t let him hide behind the Bible.
It mystifies me, because I just did this article on this horrible white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who says he’s waging a holy war and he’s got to Christianize America. And I think, what does it mean? What are you even talking about?
Coercive belief in miracles. How are you going to force people to be Christian? This is what we learned when they were massacring the Indians and bringing over the slaves. They rationalized all the cruelty because we’re going to make them Christian. We’re going to save their souls. And that was some unholy bullshit. Being saved didn’t save them. It just made the oppressor sleep better at night. And that’s the whole thing. I can be as cruel as I want if I’m doing it for Christianity. That was the Crusades: Let’s go murder people in the name of Jesus. That’s when it stopped pretending to follow his teachings.
It’s very bizarre, obviously. But I suppose there’s a lot of emphasis on, “You must accept the truth,” but again, if you drain Christianity of the teachings of Jesus, I’m not even sure what it is.
You want to know what it is? It’s MAGA. Oh look, you got Allie Beth Stuckey’s book. There it is.
Yes, here we go. This book just came in the mail here.
Yes, let’s talk about that one.
This is a book called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. This is basically the antithesis of your book.
“Toxic empathy.” You Christians are way too loving. You’ve gone way too far to the Jesus side. You’ve got to come back to Donald Trump. Go ahead, please.
She actually thinks that basically today’s conservative Christians are not committed enough to homophobia and anti-abortion politics.
They don’t follow Jesus. They worship power. They fight for conservative Christian power, not for anything Christ said, and that’s how Trump got them on his side.
But let me give you an example. Because one of the things you do in your book is look at how they argue, and you respond and show how to deal with it. So I want to give an example of the way that she makes this case. Essentially, what she does is say there’s this natural instinct to be empathetic, and that’s all good, but we must follow the rules that are set out for us in the Bible. And so, for example, she has a whole chapter on homosexuality.
And what rules of Jesus does she follow to get there?
Well, I’m going to tell you. She says: “The popular idea is that homosexuality isn’t a sin because Jesus never said it. But this argument is illogical, a misrepresentation of Jesus, and a misunderstanding of scripture. It’s illogical because the absence of condemnation doesn’t equal support. Just because we don’t see Jesus mentioning homosexuality by name doesn’t mean he supported it.”
He really meant to hate them? He meant it. Sorry. Go ahead, Nathan.
Here’s where she gets to her textual justification. “Whatever God says in the Old or New Testament, Jesus says also. Jesus’s words aren’t limited to what we read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The entire biblical canon is his, all authoritative and without error.”
Oh, no errors. All of it is exactly right.
And so then, finally, she says, “So yes, Scripture does clearly and unequivocally condemn homosexuality as sin, despite baseless claims to the contrary. Leviticus, 18:22. 1 Corinthians, 691, Timothy 110, Romans.”
Look at her. She’s going beyond Jesus to Paul and pre-Jesus to Leviticus. She can’t quote Jesus for this, because the only sexual sins Jesus ever condemned are adultery and dumping your wife. That’s it. You can’t do it. She doesn’t follow Jesus. What she’s doing here is a couple of things. Number one, she’s lying because Allie Beth Stuckey does not believe in Leviticus. She does not live by Leviticus. She does not obey, follow, or respect what Leviticus commands. Leviticus is a rule book given to the Jews after they escaped bondage in Egypt and didn’t realize they were about to spend 40 years in the wilderness with no Wi-Fi access, antibiotics, or air conditioning. It’s God giving a lot of rules about how to keep your tribe’s numbers up while still being devout. It’s all about a kosher diet, which I don’t think she does. Is she kosher? Does she actually live by a kosher diet? Does she never eat ham? Because that’s not allowed. You’re also never allowed to tattoo the flesh. Men can never cut their hair at the temples. You’ve got to be an Orthodox Jew here. I didn’t realize Allie Beth Stuckey was Orthodox Jewish.
Leviticus commands you to stone to death anybody who works on Saturdays. Leviticus commands you to stone to death children who are gluttons or drunks. Deuteronomy says that if a man rapes a virgin, he’s got to marry her. Deuteronomy also says if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night, the whole town has to gather together and stone her to death. Is this what Allie Beth Stuckey is believing and fighting for? She wants to use Leviticus to attack the gays, but Leviticus 20:10 commands you to stone adulterers to death. So I don’t think Allie Beth Stuckey has brought many rocks to Mar-a-Lago, but I’m going to call the Secret Service and let them know. Again, they weaponize parts of Bible chapters that they don’t follow. Allie Beth Stuckey is not an Orthodox Jew. She is not kosher. She does not stone people to death for adultery or working on the Sabbath, which is Saturday; they weaponize lines from books they don’t follow to hurt a minority that Christ commands them to love.
Now in Romans, that’s Paul talking about, in the past tense, how there were these Romans who were committing idolatry, praying to animal gods, and God gave them over unto natural affection, so the men burned with lust for one another. Okay, well, that’s what they used to say. The New Testament hates gays, but no, these are straight guys. These are straight men, not gay men, that started hooking up with each other, and God gave them over to it? I think that’s called “forced bi” in the fetish community. But it’s not Paul talking about gay guys, and Paul is not Jesus. Allie Beth Stuckey needs Leviticus to be just as good as Christ. She needs Paul to be just as good as Christ. Because I need an anything-but-Jesus loophole, and that’s what they are, these small “c” Christians—anything-but-Jesus Christians. So if you don’t find the hate you want there, another book is just as good. And if I may, the whole point of Jesus’s movement is that it’s not Orthodox Judaism. The religion lasted because Paul sold it to the Gentiles of the Roman Empire, saying, “No, keep your foreskin and have some bacon, and there’s still eternal forgiveness.” You have to deny that Jesus brought a new covenant. You have to deny that he brought a new covenant and said, “It used to be this; now I say it’s this.” That’s the Sermon on the Mount. “You have heard it said, An eye for an eye, but I say to you, turn the other cheek.” The whole Sermon on the Mount is Jesus saying it used to be this way, and I’m saying it’s this way. This is why the ultra-conservative Pharisees hated Jesus so much: because he was way too liberal and challenged the Orthodox Jewish laws. So Allie can say this to dumb people who don’t read the Bible and have no concept of the history, but there’s no part of the Bible you can use to say that being gay is a sin—none.
I am looking closely at this chapter, and I do notice that she does not actually cite anything that Jesus says.
No Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John there. In Corinthians and Timothy, Paul uses a term that he made up that they think was meant to describe Roman temple prostitutes. Because the Romans like to mess around with their boys, we know, but Jesus healed the Roman centurion’s pais, “beloved boy.” It’s called a “slave” in English, but the original Greek word was “beloved boy,” which is probably why the apostles were so disgusted at it. Jesus says essentially gay men are born that way in Matthew 19 when he gives his divorce laws. Jesus overturns many laws of Moses because Jesus’s is a different new covenant. Jesus overturns the death penalty. He overturns the divorce laws, and he says, if you kick your wife out for any reason other than adultery, well then you are an adulterer yourself. But then he says there are three groups of guys this doesn’t belong to and lays out the groups of men who will not be marrying women. He calls them all eunuchs, but it’s essentially people who are castrated, people who become celibate for God, and guys who are born out of the womb just not interested in girls—eunuchs who are born that way. He’s talking about gay men being born that way. Nobody blinks an eye. And Jesus is like, my new divorce laws don’t apply to the men who won’t be marrying. There’s so much evidence in the Bible that Jesus is not anti-gay, namely the Sermon on the Mount. You can’t talk this bullshit that Allie pushes and claim to follow this guy. Toxic empathy—turn away more refugees. Turn away more refugees while boasting of your piety.
Turning to the abortion chapter of the book, I was interested in finding out how she uses the text of the Bible to justify opposition to abortion. And it’s quite thin, this part. I mean, basically she says that God expresses deep detestation for the unjust killing of people; the prohibition of murder is the fifth of the 10 Commandments.
Yes, strong argument.
The Lord hates hands that shed innocent blood. And that’s about it.
So again, I’m not saying the Bible’s pro-abortion or that Jesus would work as a clinic escort on the weekends, but abortions are legal and free in Israel right now. You wouldn’t know this if you watch Fox News, but do you know why abortions are legal and free in Israel right now? Because the one religion that’s in the Bible, that would be Judaism, the religion of Moses—Jesus died being a Jew—never bans abortion. Judaism believes that life begins with the first breath. That’s repeated throughout the Gospels. Now I’m not going to say that it’s pro-abortion, but abortions are legal and free in Israel right now.
They want to believe in a Christianity where God really wants men to force people to be pregnant against their will—where men force rape victims to be pregnant by their attacker against their will—and none of this appears in the Bible. At no point do they say you’ve got to force poor women to have greater poverty. My Christian take is, considering that abortion is less dangerous than pregnancy or childbirth, I don’t have any goddamn right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. I’m on the side of men not telling women what to do with their bodies. That’s the world Jesus grew up in. God, in Exodus 21, asserts that a fetus is property and that a woman’s life has more value in his eyes. In Numbers 5, God gives rather gruesome, detailed abortion tips for pregnant, unfaithful wives. Let’s talk about killing innocents because, oh, you Gentiles heard about Passover? God killed the firstborn of all the Egyptian sons. God kills tons of kids and fetuses in this book; one time, God drowned every pregnant woman and fetus on Earth with a flood because he was in a mood. Jesus never comes out against abortion. God never mentions it. God never has any characters of the Bible say anything against abortion. Jesus is vigorously against the death penalty, but Allie Beth Stuckey thinks that Jesus is wrong on that, and Donald Trump is right. So again, man, you want to go ahead and fight for criminalizing abortion? Go ahead. But don’t tell me you’re doing it because of Jesus.
It’s actually funny in this book, because she mentions abortion defenders sometimes use the plagues to show God himself doesn’t regard life as sacred. Her response to that is, “I won’t pretend to have perfectly packaged answers on every question that exists about the nature of God, but my inability to understand the plans God carries out for his own glory doesn’t obscure his command.”
That’s why I wrote the book, Nathan. Because if you’re saying we have to criminalize abortion because of Jesus, even though Jesus never mentioned abortion, and you support the death penalty, which Jesus actually opposed, then the rest of us aren’t really obliged to take your claims of piety seriously anymore. Some of the best Christians I know are atheists, and you don’t have to believe any of the Bible is literal fact to use it to push back against these people who are trying to use it to take over our country.
Well, that gets to my final question for you, John. For those of us who are nonbelievers, there is value in the exercise that you’re doing here, because you’ve spent a lot of time reading the literal text of the Bible. You’ve got quotes, chapter and verse, on every issue. Some of us may be reminded of the way that hardcore Marxists enter extensive debates about, well, did Marx want this or did Marx want that? And if you’re not a Marxist, you might go, well, I don’t care.
It’s kind of boring after a while, I know.
It’s not really relevant to me. I’m interested in what we ought to do, not what the sacred holy text commands. So make the case to me for the value of giving this level of attention to the text.
Great question, Nathan, and I thank you for it. Okay, a few things. Number one, you’re right. Many atheists have no interest in this, and they should not read it. However, many atheists are atheists because they grew up in toxic Christianity. There are even a lot of atheists and agnostics who do still have spiritual sides or still have religious family that they love and need to get along with, and they might like to have some ammunition the next time their family wants to call them a godless sinner and dupe of Satan. And by the way, I do find that most atheists know the Bible a lot better than most right-wing Christians. And finally, there are atheists out there who have to deal with these people anyway, and their jobs are in government, and it might be informative for you in future debates to know how these people who are using their spooky language to show that they are exalted over you are actually completely full of crap and don’t even believe the lead character of this holy book they pretend to follow. So again, you don’t have to believe it to use it against these people, because this agenda is a threat to every atheist and every believer of every faith.
Yes, your book ends up as a real, inspiring call for us, regardless of our views on his divinity or whether there’s a divine creator, to return to examining the teachings of Jesus—someone who has asked people to freely share everything they had, turn the other cheek, and break all ancient cycles of hate and suffering; who broke social and religious taboos by associating with outcasts and sinners and treated all with compassion, directing his anger instead towards economic injustice and exploitation. This seems like something we need right now.
I know a lot of atheists who align with those exact values, and you don’t have to believe in any of it as literal fact. I say early in the book, I’m not going to ask you to believe any of it. I love the miracles. They’re the best part in all the Jesus movies they make us watch as kids. But coerced belief in 2,000-year-old supernatural events is no way to spread a movement. But the teachings of Jesus still have a revolutionary ethic, and I think there are many nonbelievers who will appreciate that the teachings of this character—whether he’s real or not, divine or not—are as threatening to authoritarian power now as they were 2,000 years ago.
Well, we really appreciate you coming on the program, John, and we congratulate you on this book, which is, as you mentioned there, the conclusion of many years of work. It really shows in the book. This is based on deep research, although you are not a professional theologian.
Professional clown.
Well, I guess you are a bit of a professional theologian now, because you have published this excellent, best-selling book, The Separation of Hate: The Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalist Fascists and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, which I just wanted to say again.
Because I love the way you say it. Some of these hosts are afraid to go for the subtitle. Not you, Nathan. Thank you very much.
You have a lot of zingers in here too. It’s really worth mentioning that this book is fun.
Light and dense, light and dense. And more dick jokes than the average book about the Bible usually has.
Yes, I wanted that to come across to the readers.
Oh, there’s something here to inspire and offend everyone. I promise.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.
Our stunning 56th issue is here. This is a fun one, folks. Ron Purser shows how the cannibalization of universities by ChatGPT goes beyond student cheating—administrations are embracing the very AI tools that are undoing the institution. Our correspondent K. Wilson takes a trip to the Bible Museum in D.C., Emily Topping revisits the bizarre reality show Kid Nation, Alex Skopic introduces us to a creepy red tower that serves as a metaphor for our economic system, Ciara Moloney shows us how underrated Western movies are, Hank Kennedy looks at old anti-communist comic books, and I pay tribute to New Orleans music! That’s before we get to all the wonderful art and loopy “false advertising,” including products like Democratic Inaction Figures and the “Slur Cone.” It’s a jam-packed issue filled with colorful surprises and insightful analysis, plus gorgeous cover art by Sarah VanDermeer. Check it out!
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