Christians Against Christianity: How the Right Wing Has Debased the Faith

by Obery Hendricks

Christians who maintain "conservative" social and political postures are often diametrically opposed to the witness of the Bible. Bible scholar and popular media commentator, Obery Hendricks takes such positions to task using the Bible text itself. He shows that these positions are scripturally wrong because they cite Old and New Testament texts selectively, ignore biblical injunctions that are not consistent with their ideas and misinterpret their context. Hendricks then renders the misconstrued text as they are meant to be read.
Christianity today has become a caricature of itself and is in serious crisis because many have been misled by the theology and rhetoric of the religious right, which claims the Bible as its foundation. Hendricks shows their tenets are not actually biblical. Passages about loving, protecting, and providing for our neighbors in need are jettisoned for verses--taken out of historical context--that counsel punishments, exclusions, intolerance and, in the case of homosexuality, shame and death. Right-wing Christian leaders have all but excised God's overarching qualities of love and justice from their vocabularies. Their often harsh, hateful values are not formed by the tender, compassionate Beatitudes nor prohibitions against violence or Jesus' warnings against greed and gluttony. This misinterpretation--intentional or not--that has led to the heretical evangelical valorization of Donald J. Trump.
A biblical scholar, ordained minister and former president of a theological seminary, Hendricks can no longer stand by as the faith to which he has dedicated his life is perverted from a life-giving force into a hateful, destructive, utterly selfish ideology. With this book he stands in opposition to this religious madness that undoubtedly has Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King turning in their graves.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published September 29, 2020