Chapter 1

Two Christianities

I am not a pastor. I am not a theologian. I do not have letters after my name and I do not stand behind a pulpit on Sunday mornings. What I am is a person who can read, and who has, for a long time now, been reading two things side by side.

The first thing I have been reading is the Bible.

The second thing I have been reading is the country I live in.

This book is about what happens when you hold those two texts up next to each other, in good light, and look honestly at the distance between them.

I want to say at the very beginning what this book is not, because the subject is loud enough that people will assume the worst before they have read a paragraph. This is not an attack on Christians. It is not an attack on conservatives. It is not an attack on rural people, or Southerners, or anyone's grandmother who has loved Jesus faithfully for sixty years in a small church at the edge of a small town. It is not a call to trade one political tribe for another, as though the Kingdom of God kept a voter registration card in its wallet. And it is not the work of someone who hates the Bible. It is the work of someone who has read the Bible and cannot un-read it, someone who keeps noticing that the book being waved in public does not seem to be the book being quoted from it.

I am writing as an onlooker. That is the honest word. I have watched, for most of my adult life, a particular version of Christianity grow louder and more confident in American public life. I have watched it plant flags in sanctuaries and sanctuaries in political rallies. I have watched it measure faithfulness by voting patterns and doctrinal purity by cable-news alignment. I have watched it defend leaders whose daily conduct contradicts, line for line, the character described in the New Testament, and then I have watched it call that defense "standing up for Christian values." I have watched, and I have gone back to the text, and I have watched again, and I cannot make the two match.

So I started writing.

The gap

The gap I am talking about is not subtle, and it is not new to notice. Anyone who has ever sat down with a Bible and read it in long, patient stretches (not in the fragments that get printed on coffee mugs and needlepoint pillows, but in the sustained, uncomfortable stretches that make up most of the actual book) has felt some version of what I am describing.

The Bible I have read is a book obsessed with the poor. Not politely concerned about them, not vaguely well-wishing them, but obsessed. It returns to them again and again, in every genre it contains. The Law given to Israel builds in a system where debts get canceled, land gets returned, fields go un-harvested at their edges so that the hungry can come and eat. The prophets, when they speak the fiercest words in the entire canon, do not aim those words at foreign nations or personal misbehavior. They aim them at their own people, and specifically at their own people's leaders, for growing rich while the poor grow hungry. Jesus opens his public ministry by unrolling a scroll and announcing that he has come to bring good news to the poor. His most famous sermon calls the poor blessed and the rich woeful. His most famous parable of judgment sorts humanity by one criterion: how they treated the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, and the stranger.

That is the Bible I have read.

The Christianity I have watched has, for the most part, made peace with the idea that the poor are poor because they deserve to be, that the hungry should get a job, that the sick should have planned better, that the prisoner is beyond concern, and that the stranger at the border is a threat to be repelled rather than a neighbor to be welcomed. It has produced entire theological systems, prosperity gospel on one end and a kind of baptized social Darwinism on the other, to explain why the Bible's obsession with the poor does not really mean what it obviously says.

The Bible I have read is a book that will not stop talking about the stranger. The Hebrew word is ger, and it appears more than ninety times in the Old Testament. Over and over, in every kind of literature (legal, narrative, prophetic, poetic), the message is the same. You were strangers once. You know what it feels like. Do not do to them what was done to you. Love them as yourselves. The two most repeated commands in the Torah are to love God and to love the foreigner. That is not a liberal talking point. That is a word count.

The Christianity I have watched has led, in the country I live in, some of the loudest and most sustained political movements against foreigners in living memory. It has cheered family separation. It has called asylum-seekers an invasion. It has treated the brown-skinned stranger, very often a fellow Christian, fleeing very often the exact kind of violence Scripture repeatedly condemns, as an enemy of a "Christian nation." And it has done all of this while claiming, without apparent embarrassment, to be the party of the Bible.

The Bible I have read is a book that treats lying as an offense against God himself. It is one of the ten things God carves into stone. The book of Proverbs lists seven things the Lord hates, and two of them are about lying. The Gospel of John calls the devil the father of lies. The letters of the New Testament tell the church, over and over, to put away falsehood and speak the truth to one another, because we are members of the same body.

The Christianity I have watched has, in my lifetime, learned to celebrate leaders whose relationship to the truth is not just casual but hostile: leaders who lie about small things and large things, about weather maps and election results, about their opponents and their own biographies, and who have trained an enormous portion of the church to defend, repeat, and applaud those lies as though loyalty to a man were the same thing as loyalty to God. I do not know what to call this except a direct inversion of a commandment.

The Bible I have read describes vanity as spiritual poison. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes uses one word, hevel ("vapor," "breath," "vanity"), as the drumbeat of an entire book about how everything gaudy and self-important eventually blows away. Isaiah spends a whole section of chapter three mocking the fine clothes and jewelry of the proud. Jesus reserves some of his sharpest words for religious leaders who love the best seats at banquets and the greetings in the marketplace and the long robes and the important titles.

The Christianity I have watched has learned to admire gold. Gold buildings, gold sneakers, gold-edged Bibles printed for profit, mega-church platforms that look like arena rock shows, pastors in five-thousand-dollar jackets, politicians who have turned self-worship into a brand and been rewarded, by Christians, for doing it. I keep waiting for someone in that world to open Isaiah 3 in public and read it aloud, and I keep not seeing it happen.

The Bible I have read says, plainly, that pride goes before destruction, that boasting is evil, that the one who exalts himself will be humbled, that the last days will be marked by people who are "lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, proud." Christ, the letter to the Philippians says, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. That is the shape of divine greatness in the New Testament. Downward. Emptied. Servant.

The Christianity I have watched has learned to cheer men who boast about everything: their wealth, their intelligence, their crowds, their conquests, their capacity to fix what no one else can fix. It has learned to hear "I alone can do this" and, instead of recognizing it as the exact posture Scripture calls satanic, to call it strength. I do not know how to reconcile that. I have tried.

I could keep going. I will, in the chapters to come. Wealth. Violence. Enemies. Nationalism. The flag in the sanctuary. Sexuality and selective literalism. Care for creation. Truth-telling. On issue after issue, the same pattern appears: the Bible says one thing, plainly and repeatedly, and a movement claiming the Bible does the opposite, loudly and proudly, and calls that opposition "Christian values."

That gap is what this book is about.

The trick I want to name

There is a trick that has been played on a lot of people, and I want to name it early, because once you can see it, it is hard to un-see.

The trick is this. A movement, which I will call Conservative American Christianity because that is the most honest name for it, has spent decades convincing the country that its positions are simply what the Bible says. That to be a real Christian is to hold these views, vote this way, fear these enemies, and defend this country in this manner. That any Christianity that looks different is, by definition, a compromised, watered-down, "worldly" Christianity, barely Christianity at all.

That framing is the trick.

It is a trick because it skips a step. It assumes the very thing it needs to prove. It assumes that this movement's positions are the biblical positions, and then treats any disagreement as disagreement with the Bible itself. It turns the movement into the measuring stick, when the measuring stick is supposed to be the text.

I want to un-skip that step. I want to go back to the text, not to score points, not to win an argument, but to do the ordinary work of reading a book and asking what it actually says. And then I want to hold what it says up against what is being done in its name, and let the two speak for themselves.

You do not need me for this. That is the strangest and best part. You do not need my seminary degree, because I do not have one. You do not need my ordination, because I do not have that either. You need a Bible, a quiet hour, and the willingness to read passages longer than the length of a bumper sticker. If I am wrong about what the text says, the text itself will expose me. If I am right, the text will not need me to defend it.

That is the whole method of this book. It is not a trick. It is the opposite of a trick. It is an invitation to read.

Why this is worth a book

Someone will ask, reasonably, why any of this is worth several hundred pages. People have always mixed religion and politics. Every country in history has had some version of a state-flavored faith. Why single out this movement, in this country, at this moment?

Three reasons.

The first is that people are being hurt. When a version of Christianity teaches its followers to see immigrants as invaders, the poor as parasites, the sick as undeserving, the political opponent as demonic, and the leader as beyond criticism, real human beings pay real prices. Families are separated at borders. The hungry are turned away from tables. Laws are written that push the vulnerable further under. The stranger is met with a gun instead of a plate. The Bible is not neutral about religions that produce these fruits. It is, in fact, unusually direct about them. The prophets did not spend their careers rebuking foreign empires. They spent their careers rebuking their own people, in God's name, for exactly this kind of religion.

The second is that a great many people are losing their faith over this, and not the faith the movement wants them to lose. Young people are leaving the church in numbers unmatched in the country's history, and when you ask them why, they very rarely tell you that they stopped believing in God. They tell you they stopped believing the people who claimed to speak for him. That is a spiritual crisis, and it is happening in slow motion, and the movement causing it does not seem to notice or care. If you love the church (and I am not sure a person has to, but many of my readers will) this alone is worth a book.

The third is that the Bible itself is taking damage. When a movement wraps itself in Scripture and behaves in ways Scripture plainly condemns, it teaches a whole generation of watching outsiders that the Bible must be the kind of book that endorses cruelty, dishonesty, vanity, and the worship of strong men, because the people waving it hardest seem to endorse those things. That is a lie about the Bible. It is a lie I have heard from people who have never read a page of it, and it is a lie I have heard from people who have read it their whole lives, and both groups got the same false impression from the same source: the visible behavior of the loudest Christians in the country. That lie is worth answering.

The rules I am playing by

Because trust matters, especially from someone who is writing as an onlooker and not as a credentialed insider, let me lay out the rules I am trying to hold myself to.

I will quote the Bible in context. When I cite a verse, I will tell you where it sits, what book it is in, what is happening around it, and what genre it belongs to. I will not use verses as bullets fired out of their setting, because that is precisely the practice I am critiquing in others. If I want the reader to take the text seriously, I have to take it seriously myself.

I will take the whole Bible, not only the convenient parts. There are hard passages. There is violence in the Old Testament. There are texts that have been used, and misused, for terrible ends. I am not going to pretend those passages are not there. I am going to work with them, honestly, and let the shape of the whole book (the arc from creation to exodus to prophet to Jesus to church to the new creation) do what it does.

I will not name individual politicians or pastors by name. That is a deliberate choice, and my publisher-brain and my journalist-brain have argued about it for a long time. The reason I am not naming names is that names date a book and names give readers a lever to dismiss an argument as personal grievance. The pattern I am describing is bigger than any one figure. It will outlast whoever happens to be on the magazine covers when you are reading this. You will recognize the people I mean. That is the point. The recognition is the argument.

I will try to be honest about where I am standing. I am not writing from a mountaintop. I am writing from inside a country I love and a moment I find painful, about a religion I did not invent and cannot ignore. If there is an emotion under this book, it is not rage. It is something quieter and heavier than that. You cannot be this disappointed by something you do not, on some level, still hope for.

And I will hold one more line, which is the hardest to hold, and which I will fail at sometimes. I will try not to become the thing I am describing. It is easy, when writing about a movement that has weaponized certainty, to start writing with the same weaponized certainty aimed the other direction. That would be a betrayal of the whole project. Scripture, read honestly, produces humility, not swagger. If this book ever starts to swagger, put it down and call me on it.

A question I want you to carry

There is one question sitting under all of this, and I would rather admit to it now than have it show up later dressed as a surprise.

When you have to make a call, about a stranger, about an enemy, about a leader, about the family down the street or the family walking north across a desert, what are you actually reading from? The Bible, whole and unedited? Or the version of it a certain American movement has spent a hundred and fifty years quietly reshaping into a shape it finds convenient?

Most people, if you asked them straight, would say the first. Almost no one lives that way. The distance between those two answers is what this book is about. I will not press the question again for a long while. I only want you to notice it is in your pocket as you read.

What is ahead

The rest of this book moves in five parts.

Part I, where we are now, sets the frame. What exactly do I mean by "Conservative American Christianity"? How can a reader tell the difference between a fair use of the Bible and a manipulated one? What are the ground rules for reading a book that was written thousands of years ago, on the other side of the world, and expecting it to speak clearly today?

Part II asks how we got here, because none of this fell out of the sky. There is a long American history behind it: a history of slaveholders who edited the Bible with scissors to keep the enslaved from reading Exodus, of preachers who baptized empire and called it revival, of study-Bible footnotes that quietly taught a whole century of readers to see their own politics as the plain meaning of ancient prophecy. That history is part of what has to be seen for the grip to loosen.

Part III walks slowly through the whole Bible. Torah. Prophets. Gospels. Acts. Epistles. Revelation. Not to summarize it (no book can) but to trace the recurring themes. What does Scripture keep saying, in every genre and every era of its writing, about God, power, wealth, the stranger, the enemy, the poor, the proud, and the truth?

Part IV places specific realities of American life next to that biblical witness. How the country treats immigrants. How the country handles wealth. How Christian voters have come to tolerate, and then to celebrate, leaders whose public lives are marked by lying, vanity, and boasting. How the flag has taken up more and more space in the sanctuary, and the cross less and less. How selective literalism gets used to bind consciences on a small handful of issues while releasing consciences on many larger ones.

Part V is a way forward. It is not a program or a platform. It is a set of old, ordinary Christian practices that have always, in every century, been how the faith has found its way back when it has wandered: reading Scripture in community, disentangling identity from party, mercy toward the poor, peacemaking, honesty, humility. Nothing new. That is the point.

One request before we begin

If, somewhere in the pages ahead, you feel a flash of defensiveness, a tightening in the chest, a strong urge to close the book and be done with it, I ask you to notice it, and to read one more page before you decide.

Defensiveness is not always the enemy's voice. Sometimes it is a signal that something true is knocking on a door you have kept closed for a long time. You do not have to open it today. You only have to not slam it shut.

There is a Christianity you can read about in the Bible.

There is a Christianity you can watch on cable news.

Let us go read the first one, carefully, and see what it actually says.