According to actor and comedian John Fugelsang, there are two kinds of Christians. There are “Christians” who are hypocritical right-wingers who love wars and hate gays and turn back immigrants. Then there are “Christ followers.” Christ followers are peaceful and loving, and believe in every liberal cause that comes from the offices of the Democratic National Committee.
In short, liberals are good and true Christians; conservatives are not.
Fugelsang lays out his catechism in his new book, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds. Fugelsang, the son of a former Carmelite nun and Franciscan priest, knows the Bible. Yet he interprets every citation in a way favorable to the far Left.
“Jesus was: A peaceful, radically nonviolent revolutionary who wasn’t American and never spoke English,” Fugelsang writes, “who hung around lepers, hookers, and crooks, never sought tax cuts for rich Nazarenes, was anti-wealth and anti–death penalty, anti–public prayer, too (Matthew 6:5).”
The Bible doesn’t have an opinion about abortion, God wants you to vote for Democrats, and Ruth 1: 16-17 isn’t about the love between a man and a woman — “I will go where you go” — it’s actually two lesbians.
Separation of Church and Hate is going to cause a lot of endless and tiresome debates of Christians quoting Bible passages at each other. Yet, the better approach to Fugelsang is to offer a course in the natural law. What Fugelsang lacks is not Biblical knowledge, but common sense. As the great Christian thinker and Princeton professor Robert George argues in his new book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, a person doesn’t have to be a Christian to understand that some ideas are just dumb and dangerous.
Take transgenderism. Fugelsang argues that “Christian groups and leaders endorse pseudoscience conversion therapy for transgender individuals,” that “you can’t groom a kid to be transgender,” and that “Christian transphobia is yet another stark rejection of the words of Jesus. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a commandment, not an option. It’s an order that transcends social boundaries, identities, and comfort levels. Jesus goes out of his way to preach compassion for any outsiders that society has decided it’s allowed to hate. Jesus lived when people were often confused by biological phenomena.”
Fugelsang is such a zealot that he can’t see the error of this argument. First, Christians do not hate people who suffer from gender dysphoria. I’ve been Catholic my entire life, and I’ve been hanging around Christian conservatives for decades, and I’ve never heard one of them express hatred toward a gay or transgender person. So that is false.
The larger argument can be easily grasped even by an atheist. Boys and girls are different and not interchangeable. One cannot become the other. It’s a bald fact that anyone of any faith, or no faith, can gasp.
Of course, common sense and the natural law can apply to more liberal causes as well, such as economics. You don’t need to go to Sunday school to know that having someone paint your house for no money is unethical. Your conscience, what Saint Ambrose called “God’s herald and messenger,” tells you that. Or to quote St. Augustine, it’s the “law written on the human heart.”
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Fugelsang has already started popping up in places like CNN, preaching the cult of liberalism. But religious conservatives will fall into a trap if it just becomes a war of quoting different Bible verses. Fugelsang is adept at moving from misinterpreting the Bible to using righteous social movements to make his case.
After all, it’s hard to argue with a passage like this from Separating Church and Hate: “Authentic Christianity puts the well-being of others first; it defends the persecuted, and serves rather than rules. When colonizing Christians began their slaughter, Christ followers like Bartolomé de Las Casas shamed them with a Bible. When Crusader Christians justified violence, Christ followers like St. Francis used nonviolence and scripture to demand peace. When Confederate Christians justified human enslavement, Christ followers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the Quakers called out slavery as a moral abomination and resisted. When authoritarian Christians enforced segregation, Christ followers like MLK, Howard Thurman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and James Lawson took to the streets and took down systemic evil.”