Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels Hardcover – October 6, 2020

The strategy of pulling a significant number of "Evangelical Christian Nationalists" into the pathetic position of supporting a corrupt, abusive, ill mannered dim witted alleged billionaire's bid for President of the United States is presented in a historical context of the misuse of Biblical scriptures the truth ofwhich is evident to children in elementary Sunday Schools to achieve antisocial and illegal purposes centered on enriching the wealthy 1% of voters beginning with efforts to support slavery and murder indigenous people and moved on to opposition to FDR and the New Deal - goals which continue for many far right white nationalist bigots. Since no one actually believes Trump could list Christian values let alone act on principles advocated by Jesus or even attend church it is a mystery to many of us who try to live our lives along these lines the question is how these people who claim to be Evangelicals can vote for this loser. The answer seems to be some people are actually impressed by his pathetic chronic liar sociopathic personality (no doubt also enjoy obscene comics in nightclubs after a few drinks) but many others understand he is a pathetic and dangerous dim witted twerp but nevertheless feel he will present national laws consistent with what their pathetic loud mouthed ministers tell them from the pulpit using uninformed antiChristian interpretations of scripture to support their evil political agendas which have nothing to do with doing the right thing for America. Trump's only interest in the disgusting rhetoric of these "ministers" is he understands they will get him votes. No wonder so many of us church goers no longer attend any meetings with the word Evangelical attached to it. Apparently these clowns believe any of us who actually believe in Jesus are stupid enough to believe anything. If you buy into this crap ignore the book. If you were raised in a real Christian tradition it's well worth the money to understand how we got in this mess.

The book shows that many Christians, even the most devout, in fact know little about what the Bible actually says and even less about the times in which the Bible was written. This allows the Bible to be used to support political positions that are in fact not supported by the Bible at all and in many ways contradict it. I am continually amazed at the amount of expert Biblical scholarship, and by the quantity of time and effort that must be expended to acquire the knowledge to understand what those who wrote the Bible actually said and/or meant. Most people have no idea that such scholarship even exists.

"Republican Jesus" tells a familiar tale of how the Christian Right has co-opted the Bible for political purposes, rendering it as the authoritative source for many Republican Party political positions. The author, using Biblical interpretation and the historical and cultural context, shows how often misuse has occurred in this "politicizing" of the Bible. The book's subtitle "How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels" suggests my one major disappointment in the book in that it's far more a discussion of conservative Republican political posturing and maneuvering over recent decades that rely on selected scriptural passages than of a deeper analysis of any political / social / economic content that we can discern in the Gospels. We do get some background analysis of scripture, and his notes are very good in that regard, but I guess I expected more.I'm a member of the (apparently shrinking in the U.S.) Christian Left, and the author is a presumed secular Leftist who attended Divinity School, so we should credit him with not juxtaposing a "liberal" or "socialist" Jesus from the Gospels, which he asserts cannot be clearly derived, against the anti-gay, anti-separation of church and state, etc Jesus of the Christian Right. He recounts, humorously, many "Battle of the Verses" incidents where Right and Left argue using different verses from the Bible. As for a political Jesus, didn't He say: "My kingdom is not of this World?"In my view. religion, institutionally, should not be involved in politics, but religion, individually, is inescapably involved. It pays to remind we adherents of the Left that Christians played a vital part in the Abolitionist movement of the 19th century, and Christians and Jews played a key part in the Civil Rights movement in mid-20th century America. It's also worth noting that socialist and labor parties in the U.S. and Britain, before the secularization of the Left, often used Bible verses on social and economic justice as influential to their policy positions.An interesting part of the book is the author's contrast of Arminianism / Wesleyanism with strict Calvinist predestination, with the former using a mix of grace and free will to obtain salvation while the latter assumes the Elect are foreordained. The author suggests that the content of Arminianism among Evangelical and conservative Catholics religious beliefs underlies their support of untrammeled free markets and a "bootstrap" social philosophy, i.e., if you're "empowered" to seek your own salvation, then you're also "empowered" to seek economic opportunity and escape poverty. "Empowerment," in contrast to a fatalistic attitude, is an individual virtue that we need to cultivate in ourselves and others, but we must also recognize and correct structural impediments to empowerment. And what a paradox......a "liberal" theology is used to explain "conservative" economic policies (although they can also be called neo-liberal). It's worth noting that Weber stressed the Protestant (Calvinist) virtues of asceticism (no buying of luxuries, etc.), thrift, reinvestment, and no idleness as the springboard of capitalism, and not so much from the "free will" Arminianism component of Protestantism.

In this book, the author gives a lot of insight into how interpretation of the Bible has evolved. I would never have imagined the changes that had occurred over centuries in time. His chapter on the end times meant to me that the book of Revelation made sense to me finally. The number 666 (or 616 in some older interpretations) stands for Nero and the book is totally about the Roman empire. Of course, I had heard this before, but now I know why. He covers the idea of the Rapture, which he said is an invention construed from II Thessalonians 2, Revelation 12 and 13, Daniel 7, and 11, and Matthew 24, and that it is a completely inaccurate ideology as believed today. I agree with that and now I know why. Other chapters were on family values and charity, among many more topics in Christianity today. The author believes that Jesus advocated celibacy.Unlike what a detractor of the book said in a negative review, the author did not say that the Bible told him so. This was instead, a reference to Dale Evans song around in the 1950s. The author instead said that the Bible cannot speak for itself in today's world and must be interpreted in the most accurate way possible.I loved this book because of the careful and educated explanations in it. I highly recommend it.

AWESOME

An interesting book with an important topic unfortunately marred by a mediocre writing style consisting of what feels like long lists of citations. As a result, the book is more boring than it needed to be.The author defines a set of issues making up the "Republican Jesus" and then provides the history of how that issue became part of the Republican liturgy and then tries to define more precisely what the Bible actually did and did not say on this issue. To the authors great credit, he provides a fair and balanced treatment of the Republican positions on these issues and how they are treated in the Bible.

I was expecting Keddie to attempt ripping the face off right-wing political interpreters of the Bible, exposing the hypocrisy of self-righteous ethno-nationalism, etc. And he does explain that “Trump and his supporters have reinvented Republican Jesus as a wealth-loving, positive-thinking nationalist.” But actually, Keddie is mainly concerned that many people greatly oversimplify the Bible. To challenge popular oversimplifications, he examines the Bible’s diversity of messages and the contexts of the times and places where they were written. For example, he points out that the book of Revelation denounced “those who say they are Jews, and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan” (2:9 and 3:9). This line seemed to defend “real Jews.” But many later Christians interpreted it as a declaration that all Jews were a synagogue of Satan, and that any Jews who failed to convert from their ancestral religion deserved God’s eternal punishment.Keddie looks at a range of hot-button culture war issues including racism, state-backing for religion, the values of nuclear families, abortion, taxes, and the “God-given” right to bear guns. He does this with more consideration for textual and historical complexity than probably most Bible readers are willing to put up with. But I think he does a decent, rather studious, non-hypocritical job. As he urges near the end of the book,“It is crucial that ancient [scriptures] … be interpreted as products of specific historical circumstances. If they aren’t, they can too easily be used to sanctify hatred toward whoever happens to be the interpreter’s most reviled opponents – toward liberals or conservatives, toward Christians, Jews, or Muslims, or even toward [Harry] Potterheads.”If that’s too complicated, Keddie also quotes Anne Lamont’s simpler observation: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”