Fundamentalism has hijacked and weaponized Christianity to advance a white-supremacist agenda and to seek crass political alliance with other hard-Right reactionaries. In doing so, Christian fundamentalism has flatly betrayed everything Jesus demanded.
None of this is news. In 2010, the Colbert Report argued that we should take Christ out of Christmas because Jesus was a liberal. Lots of us laughed. But the issues at stake here are no joke: the major moral tradition of the West has been twisted to malignant ends. For better for worse, Christian symbolic resources and cultural capital have immense political authority in America. But the Religious Right worships a crazy-violent and vindictive deity proclaimed by the emperor Charlemagne—not by Jesus of Nazareth. They claim that this character will torture most of humanity for all of eternity. That's a belief system designed to legitimate human violence.
The attacks of 9/11 illustrated what can happen when human violence falsely claims divine legitimacy. After that attack, and because as a Christian I recognized instantly the far greater threat posed by American fundamentalists in my own tradition, I spent the next fifteen years researching the relationship between religion and politics in the West. All the way back to pre-classic antiquity, the powerful have sought to drape their exploitation in the robes of religious legitimacy. But they have always been resisted. Moral resistance began more than a thousand years before Jesus. It has continued in various forms, religious and secular alike, for thousands of years after him. Today's progressives, religious and secular alike, can draw on this immense heritage of useful concepts, arguments, and strategies so as to claim the moral high ground in confrontation with contemporary forms of exploitation, abuse, and lies.
Each of my books begins with a sharp account of some threat posed by fundamentalism. Then I explore its history. How did this craziness come up? That history lets me lay out the cultural backstory of classic moral values shared by secular progressives and social-gospel Christians.
Each volume concludes with a brief, entirely secular account of some valuable human insight from one of the lesser-known corners of Christian tradition. One way or another, these insights are all related to a cognitive capacity that by 1800 or so came to be called "moral imagination." Moral imagination is our most direct antidote to the rigidity and literal-mindedness of fundamentalism. One doesn't have to become Christian to value the moral imagination, just as one doesn't need to become Buddhist to recognize and value concepts like "mindfulness" that historically evolved within Buddhist traditions. No matter what tradition we embrace today, we are the cultural descendants of some smart, courageous, and creative people. The wealth and the power of our heritage can help us both to recognize and to resist the malignant political influence of the Religious Right in America.
I hope my books will help you to advocate more effectively and more confidently for values that you cherish. Please be assured that each of my books is written for a secular audience and stands entirely on its own two feet. There is no "best order" in which to read them, and no need to read them all: read what speaks to your own deepest interests and most passionate moral commitments.
Then do what you can. Do whatever you can. As the election of Donald Trump illustrates, rolling our eyes and scoffing at the Religious Right is no longer enough.
