Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

National Review, March 9, 1998 by George W. Rutler

Father Rutler, formerly an Episcopal priest, is now a priest of the (Roman Catholic) Archdiocese of New York. His latest book is A Crisis of Saints (Ignatius Press).

THE author of this book attacking conservative Christianity, himself a prominent ex-conservative, was taught by his mother: "It doesn't matter to God what religion you are. What matters is whether you're a good person." He challenges a "Church of Law" with a non-doctrinaire "Church of Love," the former including "legalists" like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and, by antecedent implication, Moses. They have stolen the authentic Jesus of the Church of Love whose sentinels include Thomas Jefferson, Walter Rauschenbush, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. As for the Pope, "The replies given by Jesus and John Paul II to their questioners could hardly be more different."

Catholicism is only an undertow in Bawer's critique of fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and charismatics. The argument here is that they are all mostly illegitimate inheritors of the Christian tradition. Who can claim legitimacy in Bawer's view? St. Francis of Assisi comes off well, but if you believe Bawer's account of the saint's allegedly upbeat attitude toward the Saracens, you may also believe that Mary Baker Eddy was a gastroenterologist. There are insightful comments on religion in film and "mall churches," but theological analysis rarely rises above saying that Catholics think good works "win us divine brownie points." Although the author abjures "prefeminist concepts about the family and sex roles," he sometimes slips: "During the nineteenth century, members of the educated classes, and men of all classes, ceased attending services in droves, leaving behind a church composed mostly of women and the uneducated. To appease those members' sentimental superstitions, the Vatican added new doctrines about the Virgin Mary."

The thesis of Stealing Jesus is an antinomian heresy rooted in gnostic dualism about the flesh and spirit. The Nicolaitans carried it to the extreme reading we find here, but they, like their principal echo, Johann Agricola in the sixteenth century, put it better than this Smile Button iconography cobbled together with remnants of nineteenth-century liberal Christology. Bawer tries to warm up the antinomian leftovers in an unplugged microwave.

While doctrines are only "metaphorical statements" (a statement caricaturing the complex business of what is called analogia entis), certain theologians are reliable: principally John Shelby Spong, who calls Bawer "one of this nation's premier religious commentators," and Hans Kung ("perhaps the most distinguished theologian of our time"). On the down side, St. Augustine and other early Fathers gave us at least 1,046 doctrines, of which "only nine concern love." It is also outrageous, I suppose, that not a single clause of the U.S. Constitution concerns oxygen. Praise of the sixteenth-century Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, is well aimed, but for the wrong reason; Bawer seems under the impression that the champion of natural law denied it.

There is a charming naivete about the author's free treatment of subjects beyond his grasp, but that can be dangerous: like gentrifying Chernobyl. The image does not limp: for all the importance he places on rationality, Bawer was baptized eight years ago in the Episcopal Church, which has lately made meltdown a sacrament. It "views the mind not as a potential instrument of the Devil but as a gift of God," as though it were not both. ". . . of all the major institutional approaches to doctrine that grew out of the Protestant revolt, the Anglican theological method most surely commends itself to those who seek an intellectually solid, broadly inclusive formation for a true Church of Love." Mother Teresa! Why couldn't you have been more like Diana?

Since Bawer expresses indebtedness to "the Beyond Queer confraternity and my colleagues on the Sexuality Committee of the (Episcopal) Diocese of New York," he is not likely to be too keen on a literal interpretation of God's views. His own virtual-reality church has "a positive attitude toward God." One gets the impression that John of Salisbury's Policraticus is not on Bawer's short list, for it calls law "a barrier against vices and the destroyer thereof." As a higher critic, Bawer makes Norman Mailer sound like St. Jerome: "It was Paul himself who laid the groundwork for the Church of Law." Like Cartesianism according to Voltaire, the Church of Love resembles a novel in that it is delightful and not true.

In the Church of Love patience has its limits: legalistic Christianity "imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good . . . it worships evil." Andrew Jackson "exterminated Indians on Saturday and taught the gospel on Sunday." Pat Buchanan, Cal Thomas, and their sort are "among the most mean-spirited political bullies of our time." Pat Robertson's use of the word "Blitz" as in "Blitzkrieg" is darkly portentous. Bawer seems unaware that Nazi mythology actually has roots in the Jesus-Lite neologism of Harnack and Bosc.