Let's start with your own religious background. Give me the backstory. How did you become so intimately familiar with the Bible?
I come from a rather abnormally Christian background. My mother was a nun from the South. She entered the convent right out of high school. The convent put her through nursing school and sent her to work as a nurse with lepers in Malawi, Africa. My dad was a Franciscan brother who taught history to Catholic boys in Brooklyn and wore the Jedi robes and the rope belt. He fell madly in love with this nun. He was not allowed to have such feelings, and he carried a torch for her for 10 years. Finally, he got her to quit the convent and try going on a date. It worked.
They raised us on Long Island to be progressive, free-thinking, sexually uptight Catholics. My dad's whole parenting model was that he wanted us to be too liberal for the Christians and too Christian for the liberals. Most of my therapists have said his plan worked perfectly.
What religious instruction did you receive, because it seems you really know the Bible?
My parents were very into scripture. My father was a social justice Catholic, a Matthew 25 Christian. That’s where Jesus says, the night he's arrested, what's going to happen at the end of the world. He says, very bluntly, that all individuals and nations will be gathered and split into two groups, the sheep and the goats, and the sheep will go to heaven. “Because,” he says, “I was hungry, and you fed me. I was poor, and you cared for me. I was sick, and you took care of me. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. I was in prison, and you visited me.” And they say, “Well, Lord, when? When did we do all this stuff? When were you sick and poor?” And he says, “As you did it for the least of my people, you did it for me.”
Then he turns to the goats—and this is like Jesus's memo to the Heritage Foundation—and he says, “Who's going to hell? I'll tell you who's going to hell. You people. The ones who claim to be religious, but you did not care for the sick. You did not care for the poor. You did not welcome the stranger. You were not kind to those in jail.” You could end the whole Bible right there. Jesus spells it out. That's what makes a Christian nation. That's what gets you to heaven—helping the poor, the sick, the immigrant, the prisoner, not how much you yell at women outside abortion clinics. That’s the Jesus of the Bible, according to his own words.
Does your extensive knowledge of the Bible come from the training and education you got from your parents? Or was it more formal?
I got a lot from my parents and then regular Catholic training. I stayed a good Catholic all through college at NYU. Then once I stopped kissing the ring, I approached it as a theologian, not so much reading the Bible, but reading books about the Bible and getting deep into people like Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a liberal theologian who called for rethinking Christianity. I debated Jerry Falwell and David Duke in my 20s on Bill Maher’s show. Over the years on my SiriusXM show and elsewhere, I've debated many right-wing fundamentalist Christians. To me, it's always about what’s actually in this Bible that they wave above their heads like a prop. And what teachings of Jesus do these people follow? If you read the Bible, you realize the Republicans and the loudest Jesus fans are not fans of what he said and did.
An important dividing point is between people who see the Bible as the divine word of God and the only truth and those who view it as a pretty good book, a living document that was always being changed and modified by scribes and writers whose names we no longer know. How does this affect how we approach and talk about the Bible?
The media needs to be more Bible-literate if they're going to talk to people who claim that Jesus chased the gay wedding cakes out of the temple. We have this mentality: It's in the Bible, so that's good enough, right? The anything-but-Jesus Christians, if they can't find Jesus saying what they want him to say or hating who they want him to hate, they’ll find somebody else in the Bible who hates them the way they want. And the most common way to do this is by going to Saint Paul and point to what he, not Jesus, says. Many of the right’s favorite passages on abortion, gay rights, and other present-day controversies are not quotes from Jesus but statements made by Paul. Big difference. He is a godsend for people who want to find a way around Jesus's inconveniently liberal teachings.
My point is whether we see the Bible as divinely delivered or as an account of stories and fables that have religious meaning. When you talk about the Bible, you have to first think about what is the Bible.
It's a collection of letters from a bunch of guys who didn't meet each other and had very different ideas of what God and spirituality were. Several hundred years after they were all dead, a bunch of other guys stapled them together, when an empire took over the tiny sect of this homeless Jewish faith healer and Christianity went from being an oppressed little cult to being a giant imperial religion that could oppress other smaller groups. The Bible was a great game of telephone tag. These stories existed in the oral tradition. They were told around campfires for thousands of years, finally written down in Hebrew or Aramaic or Latin or Greek, and then hundreds of years later into English. And we're meant to believe this is the absolute, undiluted, 100-proof word of God.
The Bible was written by men, and men are fallible. So the Bible contradicts itself in many ways. If you're going to call yourself a Christian and use that to seek office and power, then it should be pretty simple: You follow Christ. And we should point out that conservative Christian politicians do not follow the words of Christ. They actually campaign and legislate against them. I wrote this book because I was tired of seeing my parents’ faith used as a cover for cruelty and meanness. They try to pretend that there's some spooky, divine, sacred divinity to all of it, when in reality these are letters and accounts that have been rewritten hundreds of times. There’s a lot of truth in the Bible. There's not a lot of facts.
Where are you now on your faith journey? I'll go first because it's only fair. I'm an agnostic on the best days, usually more of a non-believer. You write much about Jesus and his progressive teachings. Do you believe he was the son of God? Do you believe the fundamentals of Christianity?
I've come to believe that I don't care—that literalism doesn't really matter. There are all kinds of truth, and not all of it’s factual. I used to say I was a Christian, and that was how I defined myself growing up. Now I say I aspire to be a Christian. I want to believe in God, because you've got to blame somebody. But I guess I'm an agnostic too, in the sense that I don't pretend to have the answers. I see my believer and atheist friends fighting bitterly over it. I’m like, guys, it's all guesswork on the best of days. I'm just here to call out mean bullshitters. I'm in a place of strong enough faith to say that I don't pretend to have it all figured out. I don't need to have it all be in black and white. It's supposed to be messy. I trust those who are seeking the truth. I don't trust those who claim to have found it. This book is not me telling anybody what the truth is. It's all about what the Bible really says.
Your book is a fun read. It's full of your good humor. You set it up as sort of a how-to manual—how can you argue with a relative or colleague who uses the Bible to justify all sorts of conservative ideas. But, really, how often does that happen these days? How often do you come up against someone who's making these arguments, and you say, “No, no, no, if you turn to John 47…”?
In my line my work, I have to do it all the time. This is a bit more common for me than other people. I wanted to write this book for the person I was at 17, when I didn't really understand how the Jesus I was reading about in the Bible could sanction cruelty to gay people. I wrote this for anybody who has someone they live with or work with or go to school with and has to deal with them. We can't hate these people. I’ve found that you get a lot farther with them by showing that Jesus wasn't an immigrant-hating homophobe than if you call them an immigrant-hating homophobe. Anyone who was raised in a Christianity modeled on love and service and looking out for the less fortunate and who's wondering what happened to that in America—this book is for you. No, you're not crazy. Jesus really isn't a dick, and you're really not allowed to be a dick and claim you're in his fan club.
Your book is full of examples of misappropriations of the Bible by right-wingers. Give us a few of your favorite examples.
Abortion. The religious right has managed to change the entire makeup of our country's politics by convincing followers of Jesus to vote against everything Jesus ever talked about by focusing on abortion, which Jesus never talked about. When Roe v. Wade was first decided, the most controversial thing about it was how uncontroversial it was. Jerry Falwell didn't mention abortion in a sermon until five years after Roe v. Wade. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, they began to realize this could replace segregation, and ex-segregationists like Falwell flocked to this issue. It forever became a litmus test for the Republican Party. The Bible never talks about abortion. Not a single word. So for two generations, completely hoodwinked.
Jesus was against the death penalty. Unambiguously, they never bring that up. These are people who support the death penalty. So they don't consider life to be all that sacred, and they don't mind when Donald Trump assassinates somebody, and they don't really mind too much when an unarmed Black person is murdered by cops. I'm not here to say that the Bible is pro-abortion. What I'm here to say is that two generations of Christians have been suckered into prioritizing something Jesus never mentioned. The great success of right-wing Christianity in the last half-century is that it managed to redefine what the entire faith was about, away from welcoming the stranger, away from everything Jesus demands.
Give me another example. Gay rights?
You can't be a homophobe and follow Jesus. He commands you to treat the lowest of all people the same way you treat him. Right-wing Christian homophobia comes from Leviticus: You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. Leviticus is a list of rules given to Jews fleeing bondage in Egypt, how to keep their numbers up for 40 years wandering the desert. They're not meant to apply to Christians. Jesus offered a new covenant to his followers: “You have heard it said, but I say this, ‘Leviticus doesn't apply.’” Leviticus also commands us to kill adulterers. So if you're saying that being gay is a sin because of Leviticus, you got to start grabbing some rocks for Mr. Trump. I'll let you work that out with the Secret Service.
Throughout the Bible, Jesus is unambiguous about kindness to the people who are despised. The right-wing Christians point to Matthew 19, to say Jesus is against gay marriage because he said God made male and female to marry and be “united in flesh.” But this was in the context of Jesus overturning Moses's divorce laws because they were too anti-woman. Moses would allow a man to divorce his wife whenever he felt like it and kick her to the curb. Jesus, woke feminist that he was, was opposed to those laws. He says, if you dump your wife for any reason other than she cheated on you and if you marry another, you're committing adultery. He’s not speaking against gay marriage. It was an admonition against straight divorce.
What fascinates me is that the Bible yields such diametrically opposed ideas of Jesus. Is he the hippie who preached love and humility, prioritizing compassion, especially to the least fortunate? Or is he the gun-toting savior who blesses rich folks who want to remove health care from millions and end humanitarian assistance to people suffering the ravages and of disease and war overseas? How did we end up with such different depictions of Jesus?
The Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire coopted the faith, gone was the simple message of love from the homeless Jewish faith healer, and up sprung doctrines and dogmas and church hierarchies and bishops and violence. And suddenly pagans were being persecuted and forced to convert, and Christianity got strong enough that it was no longer being pushed around. It could push other people around. With the Crusades, they decided Jesus is a warrior. Now we're so much on Jesus's side that we're fighting for him, and it doesn't matter if we're violating every rule he gave us.
Telling people what they want to hear is the most effective way of getting a religious movement to grow. It’s always worked. A big thing in my book was about how the whole history of the faith has been the true Jesus followers versus the self-professed Christians. The Bible's a mirror. You will see what you want to see at it. But if you want to go by what's actually in it, you're a lot closer to the hippie-love Jesus than the alpha, gun-toting, ass-kicking Christ. He commands you to turn the other cheek, take the punch, and forgive your enemies.
How many times in the Bible are people commanded to help the poor?
Depending how you can count, it can be over 2,000. You are never once commanded to repel the stranger or keep the immigrant out or be shitty to the trans kid. But there are thousands unambiguous commandments to care for the poor and marginalized.
You write, “Biblical literalism feeds authoritarian tendencies by emphasizing obedience to rulers over critical thinking and individual freedoms.” Does this explain MAGA support for authoritarian policies?
Critical thinking is death for authoritarianism. With fundamentalism, that's how you get people to be obedient. You do not question anything in the scripture. You obey it, and if you do ask inconvenient questions, God's mad at you. This is how you use fear to control people.
Do you think that we are destined to forever have this ongoing fight over the Bible and the true essence of Christianity? Is Jesus going to be a political football until the Second Coming?
Correct. That's why I want to have this dialogue. Because it's cool how the Jews do it. The Jews are always debating scripture all the time, nonstop. That’s healthy, for a faith to evolve, breathe, expand, and grow. If you had told me in the ’90s that we'd have a Black president and decriminalized weed and gay marriage, I wouldn't believe it. For all the shittiness that's out there, I believe we're getting better too.
Religion is always going to tie us down, but spirituality is always going to move us forward. Spiritual people use religion to try to be better people, and fundamentalists use religion to pretend they're better people. We're always going to have hate. Hate didn't invent religion, but hate found voice in religion. Haters are always going to hide behind scripture. I wanted to write a book for the other side to show that you can't call yourself a follower of this guy, whether he was real or not, and be hateful to Jews or to Muslims or to gay people or to women who had abortions, foreigners or atheists or anybody.
You say this is a book about what Christianity started out as, what it became, and why it's still worth fighting for. I know there are people reading this newsletter who believe that at least as an institution, it's probably not worth fighting for and that it’s a net loss for human society. Why is it still worth fighting for?
When I talk about the teachings of Jesus, I'm not talking about organized religion. I’m referring to the revolutionary ethic behind turning the other cheek and “blessed are the meek.” Those things could still save us in the place we're in now. I'll be the first to agree that religion is responsible for so much suffering and oppression throughout history. There’s a flip side: We don't know how many murders, rapes, and crimes were not committed because somebody was afraid of hell. It’s always the fundamentalists and the douchebags who get all the ink.
