GRAND THEFT JESUS
The Hijacking of Religion in
Robert
S. McElvaine
(Crown,
2008)
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Excerpt ✝ ✝ ✝ Genesis 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 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 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 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 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 ass!’” 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
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 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 Just how
powerful is the religion that has appropriated the name of Jesus, but reverses
his teachings on most social issues? A 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 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 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 “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 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 . . . + + + Reprinted from GRAND THEFT JESUS: The Hijacking of Religion
in 
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