Stealing Jesus
This is a huge work that shows the grave danger that fundamentalism poses to Christianity today. It is fiercely opinionated and well-reasoned.
According to Bruce Bawer, the time has passed when denominational names and other conventional identifiers accurately reflected Christian America's religious views and practises. Today's relevant contrast is between "legalistic" and "nonlegalistic" religion, or the Church of Law and the Church of Love, rather than between Protestant and Catholic, Baptist and Episcopalian. On the one hand, there is the fundamentalist right, which creates a clear line between "saved" and "unsaved" and worships a God of wrath and judgement; on the other hand, there are more mainstream Christians, who see all people as children of a loving God who urges them to dismantle hatred, prejudice, and mistrust obstacles.
Bawer fascinatingly demonstrates how these beliefs have increasingly come to supplant genuinely fundamental Christian tenets in the American church by pointing out that the supposedly "traditional" beliefs of American fundamentalism—about which most mainstream Christians, clergy included, know shockingly little—are in fact of relatively recent origin, are distinctively American in many ways, and are dramatically at odds with the values that Jesus actually spread.
Stealing Jesus is a powerful statement from a guy who is troubled by both the idea of an America without Christianity and the idea of an America without love and compassion.
