Richard Quebedeaux

“The beliefs and behavior of the religion of modernity in America indicate a naïve attempt to live in the world as if, from the Christian perspective, there had never been a Fall from what God intended man and woman to be in the first place. But in a fallen world, sin and evil—including aggressive evil—are real, and so are poverty and suffering and tragedy … Failure to acknowledge the reality of sin indicates that self-awareness has not resulted in awareness of one's own true self, one's predilection toward sin and one's reaping of its consequences. Superficiality, then, exists in the modern believer's relationship with God, with others, and with one's own true self. Jesus may not have called anyone a sinner; but he did believe in hell, he did address the Pharisees as those whose father was the devil, and he did know suffering and its divine significance first-hand—in the extreme. In biblical religion, the cross is not a plus sign.”
― Richard Quebedeaux, By What Authority: The Rise of Personality Cults in American Christianity