By Robert S. Mcelvaine
http://www.grandtheftjesus.com
A passionate and often hilarious wake-up call to Christians to reject the “Right Reverends” who have stolen Jesus from Christianity and replaced His true message with "ChristianityLite,” an easy, feel-good scheme that promises salvation without sacrifice.
“We’re mad as Heaven, and we’re not going to take it anymore!” declares historian Robert McElvaine in this passionate and often hilarious rallying cry for sincere Jesus Followers. He lets the rest of society know that the extreme right wing won’t be allowed to speak for all Christians any longer. His whip-smart, take-no-prisoners polemic lays bare the Christian Right’s “Easy Jesus” creed, in which people who claim to accept Jesus get a free pass to lie in his name. Grand Theft Jesus exposes the televangelists and the leaders of megachurches as the people Jesus warned us about—the wolves in sheep’s clothing of our day.
The religion that McElvaine calls ChristianityLite resembles schemes that promise "Lose weight without diet or exercise!" Its leaders say, "Be saved without sacrifice or good works!" Run by a crew of politicians, megachurch preachers, televangelists, hypocrites, and snake-oil salesmen, it has hijacked true Christianity and distorted it into something Jesus wouldn’t recognize. Its leaders have taken the generous and loving ideals of Christ and twisted them into a religion that advocates war and intolerance, values money above charity, preaches hatred instead of brotherhood, and promises “true” believers the keys to the gates of the kingdom of God—and to the bank vault.
Excerpt
THE SECOND GOING
OF CHRIST
That’s them in the pulpit
That’s them in the TV spotlight
Losing my religion
That’s how I imagine Jesus would paraphrase Michael Stipe as the Christian Messiah looks at the crew of megachurch preachers, televangelists, hypocrites, impostors, snake-oil salesmen, and just plain snakes who have hijacked the name of Christianity, perpetrated identity theft against Jesus, subverted his teachings, transformed his name into a representation of just the opposite of what he stands for, mocked and damned those who advocate what he actually said, and shouted “Jesus! JESUS! Jeee-SUSS! ” at the top of their lungs to distract attention from their crimes against the one whose name they blaspheme. These people deny Jesus (that is, what he actually said), not three times before the cock crows, but three times three thousand, every day, as they crow like strutting cocks in front of television cameras and congregations the size of rock-concert audiences. They project a totally distorted image of what real Christianity is supposed to be.
These “Christian” impostors often demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public places. The Eighth Commandment (as counted by Jews and most Protestants; the Seventh by Catholic arithmetic) is: “You shall not steal.” This commandment was, according to some theologians, intended to refer to stealing people: “You shall not kidnap.”
Yet these same self-styled “Christians” have committed the ultimate felony, grand larceny on the grandest scale: they have kidnapped Jesus. Their crime should be listed in the indictment against them as Grand Theft Jesus.
Getting to Heaven Without the Hassle: ChristianityLite
In these pages I shall not hesitate to call a spayed Christianity a spayed Christianity. [*]
The “Easy Jesus” creed that passes for Christianity in wide swaths of America (and, increasingly, in other parts of the world as well) today is very much like one of the magical, miracle, no exercise, eat-all-you-want weight-loss programs:
Lose 50 pounds without diet or exercise!
Get to Heaven without sacrifice or good works!
This “religion” can appropriately be given a name that reflects its similarity to effortless, no-sacrifice weight-loss plans: ChristianityLite. Its basic contention is simple: Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and you can do whatever the hell you want.
“Heaven is a place where you can eat all you want and never get heavy,” a grinning Pastor Ted Haggard, of Colorado Springs’s New Life Church (which could justly be renamed the New Lite Church) told Barbara Walters in a December 2005 interview. And the Church of ChristianityLite is a place where you can ignore the teachings of Jesus, sin all you want, and never be held responsible, never accumulate any bad karma. Less than a year after that interview, it became clear that the smiley-face Pastor Ted truly was practicing what he and the other Leading Lites preach in terms of no-responsibility, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do sinning. After a male prostitute said Haggard had paid him for sex, he resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was dismissed as pastor of his megachurch, and issued a statement saying, “I am guilty of sexual immorality.”
Early in 2006, a Pennsylvania Lutheran preacher of the Lite anti-Gospel made the “Gospel of Prosperity”—that committing yourself to Jesus will make you monetarily rich—the subject of a series of sermons he delivered for Lent. Lent?? No sacrifice or atonement for Lite Christians. Maybe the pastor thought Lent was a reference to the money-lenders that confused Lite Christians seem to think Jesus welcomed into the temple.
The Lite Christians take the Lord’s name in vain every time they claim to be speaking in the name of the Lord while advocating war, hatred, helping the rich, ignoring the poor, and the rest of their right-wing agenda.
They say, You take the high road, Jesus; we’ll take the low road.
Aborting Jesus: The “Striptures” of
Televangelism and the Megachurches
Let’s not pull punches. One of the major issues on which “Christian conservatives” focus is abortion. Yet it is they who have performed the ultimate abortion:
They have aborted Jesus from the womb of Christianity.
Far from conserving the teachings of Jesus—which, it is plain from a reading of the Gospels, were socially progressive, calling for nonviolence, cooperation, and helping the poor (the meek shall inherit the earth, blessed are the merciful and the peacemakers, turn the other cheek, love enemies as well as neighbors, and give to those who beg)—these self-styled “conservatives” have ripped those sacred teachings apart and thrown them away, replacing them with a radical doctrine that is on almost all counts the opposite of what Jesus said. They like to quote Scripture, but their Scriptures should be called Striptures, because they have stripped the messages of Jesus from their religion.
The “Christian Right,” which in fact is neither remotely Christian nor right in much of anything other than its position on the political spectrum, has stolen both the name of Christianity and that of America, distorting the meaning of both beyond recognition. These dissemblers (and, in George W. Bush’s malapropism that fit both him and his “Christian” supporters, disassemblers, since they have totally disassembled the ideals and values of both Christianity and America) have committed one of the worst crimes in history. They have co-opted Jesus for political and profitmaking purposes.
Enough already. Far too much already! This crime has me breathing fire.
Let’s call a masquerade a masquerade.
People on the religious right have robbed and misrepresented my religion and my country. I, for one, don’t plan to let them get away with it.
It is high time for genuine followers of Jesus to open up our windows and shout, We’re mad as Heaven, and we’re not going to take it anymore!
I am not a theologian. I am not a biblical scholar. I am not a member of the clergy. But I am a professional historian and I do know how to read. And anyone who can read can see in the official Gospels what Jesus is quoted as having said. And it is obvious to those who can read that most of those who most stridently proclaim themselves to be Christians today are not at all practicing what Jesus preached. They aren’t even preaching what he preached.
They have thrown out the Baby born to Mary and kept the bathwater, in which they gleefully wallow.
What makes ChristianityLite so light is that it is Jesusless. Jesus is heavy, but the Lite Christians have shed him and all of his weight. They bear no crosses; they tell their followers that Jesus has taken on all of their burdens and asks nothing of them but that they accept him as their Lord and Savior.
The real spirit of Jesus is reflected in the motto of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” But the Jesusless Lite Christians prefer such aphorisms as “pull your own weight” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” (Try the latter sometime. You’ll find that it’s a physical impossibility.) When it comes to helping others, their likely response is, “He’s heavy, and he ain’t my brother!”
ChristianityLite is Jesusless; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
“I am a deceiver and a liar,” Pastor Ted Haggard declared in a letter following the 2006 revelations about his private life.
A deceiver and a liar. So are they all. Not, presumably, in the specific way Haggard admitted, but in the general way he and so many other popular preachers are deceivers and liars: they deceive their followers and lie about the message of Jesus and what they have done to Christianity.
“Christians” of the sort who worshipped at the altar of Haggard the Hypocrite and so many others like him call themselves fundamentalists, but their emphasis is entirely upon the word’s first syllable. They’re all about having fun, spending money, and seeking pleasure, but when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass. Turn the other cheek? Self-sacrifice? Help the poor? Nonviolence? That shit’s too hard! They replace the Gospel accounts of what Jesus said with the Gospel according to John and Paul (Lennon and McCartney, that is): “Give me money / That’s what I want.”
The Lite “Faithful” Are the Fanciful
These fun-damentalists say they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, but they reject him as their Teacher.
The Lites negate the positive Jesus: -(+Jesus). Their prints of his teachings are negatives. They turn Jesus upside down, inside out, and round and round, and every which way but loose.
And they have the audacity to call their opponents Christ-haters? They are the ones who hate what Christ said. Here are a few examples of what, if we are to judge by what they advocate, the faithful of what passes for Christianity today have turned around:
Jesus drove the money-changers into the temple.
Blessed are the cocky, boastful, arrogant and prideful, for they shall inherit the earth (and their inheritance shall not be taxed).
Pride goeth before conquest, and a haughty spirit before a rise.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to get into heaven.
As you do unto the most, the richest, so you do unto me.
The first shall be made more first.
Thou shalt not tax the rich.
When Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he really meant, “Screw your enemy.”
“Turn the other cheek” literally means, “Pull down your pants to present your ‘other cheek,’ so you can say, ‘Kiss my a...!’”
The faith of the Lite Christians is based on fanciful misreadings of what Jesus said. The Jesus Thieves intentionally misread their putative leader in order to mislead readers. Rather than the Faithful, they should be called the Fanciful.
ChristianityLite and the Republican party claim to own religion in America. They are self-righteous, prideful, arrogant, and opposed to almost everything Jesus stands for.
When Jesus hears what the Leading Lites say in his name, I imagine his reaction is to shake his head sadly, sigh, and exclaim, “Oy vey iz mir!”
Christ-Jacking:
The Red Lines Are Their Unread Lines
Is there any way for a Jesus follower to reconcile supporting such policies of a “Christian” President and his “Christian” party as huge tax cuts for the hyper-rich and massive giveaways to oil companies with what Jesus says in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew? A young man has asked Jesus what he needs to do in order to “have eternal life.” Jesus tells him to “keep the commandments.” The young man responds:
“All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.
And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” . . . “But many that are first will be last, and the last first.” [†]
I wonder when the last time was that this passage was quoted in a megachurch by a “biblical literalist” minister who preaches that believing in Jesus will help congregants get rich and that the first will remain first and the last last.
Some Bibles print the words of Jesus in red. Apparently many of the most prominent self-styled Christians today, while they often “see red” over divisive social issues, literally cannot see red. Maybe they have a type of color blindness that prevents them from seeing what is written in red. (Their Lite President, George W. Bush, never seemed to see either the red ink in which his budgets were written or the red words spoken by his “favorite philosopher.”) In any case, they don’t seem to have read the red words. They have stricken through the red lines with a red line, and they don’t think the red lines should be read-lines. The fact that so many people who have taken his name don’t see red must have Jesus seeing red.
These people are the forces of ignorance and evil. They are bamboozling the public by selling them an adulterated product they mislabel “Christianity.” They are something far worse than carjackers; they are Christ-jackers.
The Second Going:
Slouching Towards Colorado Springs
Just how powerful is the religion that has appropriated the name of Jesus, but reverses his teachings on most social issues?
A Gallup survey conducted in 2004 found that one-third of the American people “believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally.” The National Association of Evangelicals represents 45,000 churches and “numbers its membership at 30 million exalted souls, one fourth of the nation’s eligible voters.” Beyond that organization are even more Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals—people who take the Bible as literal truth, believe that a personal relationship with Jesus is the only route to salvation, and feel the need to try to convert others to their beliefs—bringing the grand total by some counts to approximately 70 million American evangelicals. Three and a half million more evangelicals went to the polls in the 2004 election than had voted four years earlier, and they voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush. (This is to say that they voted overwhelmingly against Jesus, because so many of that “Christian” president’s policies and actions were diametrically opposed to what Jesus called for.) Without these additional voters, the younger Bush would not have been reelected.
Ron Luce, the founder of Teen Mania, a twenty-year-old youth ministry that had by 2006 attracted more than two million teens to the rockconcert-like stadium extravaganzas it had been putting on for fifteen years, boasted to a reporter, “That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in.” Luce then bounded “onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.”The sin of pride is not one about which the Leading Lites worry overmuch.
Megachurches—defined as those with a weekly attendance of 2,000 or more, and often with memberships reaching into the tens of thousands—are flexing their muscles in suburban areas and the nation as a whole. Haggard’s former church in Colorado Springs—the city that has become the Lite Rome and so might better be renamed Colorado Falls—lays claim to 11,000 members, 8,000 of whom can be accommodated at a sitting in the vast chamber they call the “living room.” And Joel Osteen preaches to as many as 35,000 in his Lakewood Church in Houston, telling them that wealth is good and God can make them rich. The proliferation of huge congregation churches is a recent development. In 1960 there were only sixteen churches that large in the entire country. A study published in 2006 found that the number of megachurches had doubled in just five years, to 1,210, with a combined weekly attendance of approximately 4.4 million. Half of all megachurches are in the South and 14 percent are in California.
And megachurches and their leaders exert influence far beyond those who populate their cavernous “sanctuaries.” (Actually, they are sanctuaries from Jesus.) Megachurch pastors top the lists of the most influential American religious leaders. Books written by four megachurch pastors made the New York Times best-seller list in 2005.
God is not dead, but Jesus scarcely has a pulse in most megachurches, which have put him on Lite-support.
The pulses of the megachurches themselves, and that of the televangelists and the “Christian” Right as a whole, on the other hand, are very rapid. Maverick Southern Baptist preacher Will Campbell places the power of this multiheaded empire in perspective when he says, “You can’t curse on our national airwaves because it may harm our children. There are entire governmental agencies to see that it does not happen. Yet we have no qualms broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, an entire channel devoted to televangelist soul molesters.”
These falcons who will not hear their Falconer are full of passionate intensity (and full of a malodorous substance, as well). They say they believe the Second Coming is at hand, but they have given rise to a rough beast that slouches towards Colorado Springs to be born again and loose its blood-dimmed tide on us all.
What they have effected is a Second Going of Jesus—but of course his message has actually gone many more times than that.
Extreme Makeover, Jesus Edition:
Converting Xians into Jesus Followers
Jesus and the God he describes want to put us through an Extreme Makeover, to change radically what we do. Saying we accept Jesus and doing what we please will not cut it. We are called upon to do more than sing the country song “Drop-kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life.”
While we condemn and ridicule the preachers of ChristianityLite—such Right Reverends as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and the late Jerry Falwell—we must be careful to not paint with too broad a brush. Many Christians continue to make serious efforts to follow the teachings of Jesus, and secular liberals too often make the major mistake “of throwing all people of faith into the category of right-wing conservative religion.” As progressive evangelical minister Jim Wallis has pointed out, this approach plays into the hands of the right-wing extremists who have hijacked Christianity. It results in the “religious issues” in an election being “reduced to the Ten Commandments in public courthouses, gay-marriage amendments, prayer in schools, and, of course, abortion.”
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this point. While we justly stress the misconceptions, anti-Jesus positions, and outrages of the Religious Right and ChristianityLite, it is essential that we not lump all people who identify themselves as Christians or evangelicals into these backward and un-Christian categories.
It is not my intention to castigate the people who have bought the popular consumer product ChristianityLite that has been so effectively mass marketed to them. (And let me make clear that many people—and more than a few of their clergy—in churches that have been infected with ChristianityLite don’t follow it to its extremes. Many of them are concerned about such issues as poverty and environmental stewardship.) My criticism is of the product, not its consumers, who have been misled, bamboozled—hooked may be the more appropriate term, since this corrupted,
adulterated “religion” is, like other harmful or useless consumer items sold to people by the pushers of the advertising industry, like a narcotic drug: something that provides the user with an artificial sense of well-being. The evildoers are not the followers, the consumers; they are the pushers: the Jesus Thieves, the Great Deceivers, including Robertson, Falwell, Dobson, Haggard, Osteen, et al.—the hijackers of Christianity, the kidnappers and aborters of Jesus. The ChristianityLite preacher-salesmen are pied pipers who mislead their followers in much the same way that advertisers or the liars of Fox News do:
We decide (what you should think); you regurgitate (what we tell you).
People of faith must be shown an alternative to the dominant ways, a genuinely Christian approach that properly exposes the lies of the impostor faith that has robbed the name of Christianity. This alternative faith embraces what so many fundamentalists ignore: the peaceful, compassionate, tolerant Jesus who demanded social justice.
Here’s the message about Jesus that we need to bring to those who have been misled by the deceivers of Lite Christianity: “Not a cheap Jesus, not a counterfeit Jesus,” says Ross Olivier, former general secretary of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. “Not a Jesus full of panaceas and superficiality and cosmetic religion, but a real Jesus, who calls us to the deepest levels of love and sacrifice and generosity and kindness and compassion. Not a Jesus who excludes some; not a Jesus who condemns people because they don’t look like us, but a Jesus who dies for the sake of love.”
“It is my hope,” Olivier continues, “that we will be profoundly Christian as we say ‘yes’ to Christ. . . . A church that can make a difference. A church that can be a transforming power in society. A church that brings real conversion, real healing, real loving. . . . That church can only come into being when its people recognize the Christ.”
Jimmy Carter puts the proper Christian perspective directly and simply: “In the religious realm, I shall depend on the Holy Scriptures, as interpreted by the words and actions of Jesus Christ.” It is those words and actions that the most vocal “Christians” today have crucified and interred. They must be resurrected.
Some of what I have to say on such topics as Creation, women, and sex is likely to curl the hair of many of those who have fallen prey to the praydators of ChristianityLite. I ask, though, that they hear me out and compare both what I say and what the Lite Reverends say with what Jesus said in the Gospels before they condemn me.
It’s too bad Jesus didn’t think to trademark his name and that of Christianity. Then these quacks who are prescribing and selling a Christianity that bears far less resemblance to the real thing than a fifty-dollar Rolex knock-off does to a real Rolex could be sued for trademark infringement. A copyright, rather than a trademark, on Jesus would be of no use, since the Lite Christians are doing the opposite of copying him. They are, though, plainly guilty of slander when they cite Jesus in support of war, tax cuts for the rich, opposition to social programs, and a host of their other Jesusless policies. But Jesus qualifies as too much of a public figure for a successful slander suit to be brought on his behalf.
Grand Theft Jesus is intended, in lieu of an actual legal action, to be a literary suit against those who have taken Christ out of what they call Christianity. Laughably, most of them call for putting Christ back into Christmas and deplore the use of “Xmas.” What this book calls for is putting Christ back into Christianity by reversing the anti-Jesus policies of the Lite Christians who have X-ed out Jesus and can accurately be labeled “Xians.”
Combining the fact that the Jesus Thieves have X-ed out Christ with the name ChristianityLite produces a convenient shorthand for the Jesusless religion of ChristianityLite: XL, which I’ll employ from time to time in the pages that follow.
The goal is to convert these misled Xians into genuine Christians: Jesus Followers.
I have no illusion that this objective will be easily achieved. I bear in mind the words of Thomas Jefferson on such an undertaking: “Of publishing a book on religion, my dear Sir, I never had an idea. I should as soon think of writing for the reformation of Bedlam, as of the world of religious sects. Of these there must be, at least, ten thousand, every individual of every one of which believes all wrong but his own. To undertake to bring them all right, would be like undertaking, single-handed, to fell the forests of America.”
He may not have qualified as an angel, but only a fool would rush in where Thomas Jefferson feared to tread. I am not the first such fool, though, so let me rush on in . . .
