
·S1 E39
#39 With John Fugelsang, actor, podcast and radio host, comedian and bestselling author of "Separation of Church and Hate": “Why should I listen to Trump and Stephen Miller and reject the words of Jesus?”
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.
I'm John, Father John Deere, and today I'm speaking with my friend John Fuglesang.
This is a project of BeatitudesCenter .org, where you can find many other podcasts and regular Zoom programs on the nonviolence of Jesus and practicing nonviolence and working for a more just, more nonviolent world.
So let's begin, as I always like to, with a little prayer.
So I invite everyone listening, wherever you are.
just to take a deep breath and just relax.
Notice how you're feeling and recenter yourself again.
And then together, let's all just enter into the presence of the God of peace who loves you infinitely and personally and everyone everywhere.
And we welcome the nonviolent Jesus here with us.
And just take a moment to ask for whatever grace we need to follow the nonviolent Jesus more faithfully and to do God's will.
God of peace, thank you for all the blessings of life, love, and peace that you give us.
Be with us now as we reflect together with John on your call to follow the nonviolent Jesus and work for a more just, more nonviolent world.
Bless us, heal us, inspire us, disarm us, strengthen us, and send us out to do your will and to do our part to end poverty, racism, greed, injustice, war.
especially nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, that we might be your beatitude people, your holy peacemakers, and welcome your reign of universal love and peace on earth.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, it's a great pleasure to welcome my friend John Fuglesang, one of our great broadcasters, comedians, and speakers.
He has acted on CSI, hosted many TV shows and podcasts.
Memorably, I first caught you, John, when you hosted that, I think it was a V8 show with Paul McCartney in the mid -90s.
Yes, sir.
And the famous last public appearance of our hero George Harrison as well.
which I hope everyone watches on YouTube, because you got him talking about God and spirituality.
John has debated, oh gosh, John, I don't know how you did this.
He's debated Jerry Falwell and David Duke.
He's been picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church.
That's showing off, John.
Yeah, I'm proud of that.
That's like a daytime Emmy for me, sir.
and hosted the—it's going to be hard for me to keep a straight face talking to you— and hosted the radio series Tell Me Everything on SiriusXM, where he even dared to interview me.
He has had many appearances on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, and his PBS road trip film on The American Dream called Dream On was named Best Documentary at the New York Independent Film Festival.
He currently hosts the John Fuglesang Podcast.
I met John, I think it was seven or eight years ago.
ago in Los Angeles at this big gala event to celebrate all the great folks in California who work to abolish the death penalty.
And John was our emcee and the speakers were Sister Helen Prejean and Bernie Sanders and Joan Baez.
What a great night.
John has just published his first book, Congratulations, Separation of Church and Hate, A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalist, Fascist, and Flock -Fleecing Frauds, from Simon & Schuster.
John Fugel saying, welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.
Thank you.
It's such a pleasure to be here with you and with your audience.
I really appreciate it.
What a title, man.
I love it.
I think, you know, my new book coming out is called Universal Love.
So I presume we're in agreement.
So tell me about your book.
Why did you write it?
What are you hoping to convey?
What's your basic message?
And I hope everybody will get it and read it.
Well, I bought this book for everybody who was raised Christian in America and, like me, thought that Christianity was about the stuff Christ talked about, about helping the less fortunate and forgiving our enemies, about...
acting on the teachings and commandments of Jesus, whether it was for individuals and nations to care for the poor and care for the sick and welcome the stranger and be kind to prisoners, as Jesus commands in Matthew 25, whether it's Jesus, you know, commanding us to turn the other cheek and stop executing people.
And when he said that only sinless people can execute and stopped in execution, the love, the empathy, the.
focus on the marginalized, the focus on the least of us, and that addressing the needs of the least of us who are suffering the most is the path.
Well, I grew up thinking that was what the religion was about.
And then like so many, I grew up in the 80s and 90s and saw this parade of blow -dried televangelists and refried segregationists on TV, the Falwells, the Pat Robertsons, the Swaggards, who didn't talk about helping the poor.
They didn't talk about welcoming the stranger.
They talked about welfare queens and aids patients and feminists and people i was supposed to hate um they didn't tell me to love my enemy these fundamentalists were telling me who my enemy is which is generally a sign you're not really in a church so i i was raised by two ex -clergy my mother was a nun from the south who worked as a nurse with lepers in malawi africa my father was a franciscan brother from Brooklyn, who taught history to Catholic boys and was a big social justice, Dorothy Day, Catholic worker movement, Gandhi, MLK kind of Christian.
And my father, the brother, met my mother, the sister, fell madly in love with her for like 10 years.
She finally left and they got married.
And, you know, I wrote this book for my parents and I wrote this book because I was tired of watching my parents' religion of love and service be mutated into this Christian nationalism, which is just about power.
They don't really seem to care about the teachings of Jesus.
They care about their club being on top and imposing their narrow right -wing version of Christianity on every level of society.
That is the Seven Mountain Mandate.
Seven Mountain Mandate fights to have right -wing Christianity put at the top, but they don't fight for any of the things Christ actually talked about.
So I wrote this book as a guide for any believer, any atheist, anyone who has to deal with a fundamentalist or a Christian nationalist.
and how to use the bible on the most common right -wing debate points so rather than hate them rather than fight them to let them debate god show them what jesus and god say about these divisive issues and you don't have to argue with them themselves and i find when you do that very often people might appreciate even if they don't agree with you that you took the time to meet them on scripture and meet them in their place and and honestly i really believe john that we get a lot farther showing our right -wing loved ones how Jesus was not an immigrant -hating homophobe than if we just give up and call our right -wing loved ones immigrant -hating homophobes.
So I wrote the book for all the nice Christians out there who are tired of seeing the religion hijacked.
Thank you.
And because also, if I may, because the media is not going to take it back.
The media is never going to ask tough questions.
They'll never ask any of these homophobes, where does Jesus drive the gay wedding cakes out of the temple?
And the Democratic Party is going to be too terrified to ever stand up and say the truth, which is there's no possible way you could follow both Donald Trump and Jesus unless you've neither read either one of their books.
So it's up to us.
And like all social movements of justice, it's going to come from people working together, one heart and one mind at a time.
At the beginning of the book, you have that one page with the classic witty John Fuel saying line.
I've come to view Jesus the way I've come to view Elvis.
I love the guy, but some of the fan clubs terrify me.
Tell me about that, John.
Maybe this is all the same question I'm going to be asking you, just to keep unpacking it.
No, well, I mean, y 'all know, you know, this is this curious kind of American Christianity that believes in worshiping Jesus as a God, because that's a lot easier.
than following his inconveniently liberal and woke teachings.
Jesus' message is not about total right -wing domination of the local school board.
It's about...
picking up a cross and carrying it to follow him.
It's not supposed to be easy.
You're going to be taking the side of unpopular people when you've walked the path of Christ.
You're going to be siding with the least of these and you're going to be judged for it.
That's his message nonstop.
This convenient Christianity where all I've got to do is say, I accept the Lord Jesus as my Lord and Savior and put up a tree in my house once a year.
I don't see anything in the gospels that says that's how it works.
And yet we've had this very cursed history of spiritual narcissism in this country.
Lazy spirituality that doesn't go to Jesus, that finds anything in the Bible that tells us what we want to hear and says, well, it's in the Bible.
That's good enough.
And, you know, going to Leviticus or pass Jesus to Paul to justify your own prejudices is the opposite of Jesus.
Trying to put your group first is the opposite of Jesus.
And a lot of people in this country were raised Christian and they now consider themselves spiritual.
Because they're so turned off to it.
So that's who I'm talking about.
And we've seen so many of us who've talked to our parents and grandparents out of so much homophobia in the last 30 years that I really do believe in so many ways, in spite of what the media and the internet make you think, I do think people are getting better.
And I do think we're getting kinder.
Oh, that's wonderful to hear.
You know, Gandhi, I'm a big student of Gandhi, as you know, and he said the same.
The same thing, only he didn't refer to Elvis.
He said, I love your Christ, but I don't like your Christians because they're so unlike your Christ.
And then in the next page, at the beginning of the book, you also have this one line, which was so important to Gandhi in all the letters that he wrote throughout his life, which I've studied.
He was constantly referring to the last lines of the Sermon on the Mount.
And he was saying, it's really a sad lament of Jesus.
Why do you call me Lord, Lord, but not do what I say?
And I think that's your theme of your book, John, that you're calling out to every Christian in the United States of all walks of life to say, hey, this is not working, you all, and let's try to do what the guy actually wants for a change, all of us.
Tell me a little bit more about that, and in particular about how can we reclaim the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount as the hallmark of our Christianity.
I think by just, you know, if you're going to call yourself a Christ follower, then you fight for the things that Christ talked about, and you talk about the things that Christ talked about.
When debating a right -wing fundamentalist, I'm always fond of asking, can you please cite for me one actual teaching of Christ?
that Donald Trump or the MAGA movement have fought for in the last 10 years.
Can you give me one gospel teaching of Jesus that the Republican Party has fought for in this century?
And when you do this, you'll see pretty quickly how much the person you're talking to knows or does not know about scripture.
You probably know this yourself.
Father John, the first thing I get all the time is abortion.
And I have to explain, where does Jesus speak about abortion?
Christ never mentions it.
We've seen two generations of Christians who have been programmed to vote against everything Jesus demands and everything Jesus talks about, all to criminalize abortion, which Jesus never talks about.
The Holy Scriptures never ban abortion.
Judaism doesn't ban it.
It's legal and free in Israel right now because it's not banned in the Bible.
God never saw fit to have a penalty.
for terminating a pregnancy, never had Moses or Jesus or Elijah or any of the prophets talk about it.
I'm not saying the Bible's pro -abortion rights.
I'm not saying Jesus would volunteer as a clinic escort on the weekends.
I'm saying that we've had two generations who have been groomed and brainwashed to prioritize something Jesus never freaking mentioned.
And abortions existed in Jesus's time, never saw fit to mention it anywhere in the Bible.
And yet, when you actually talk about what Christ commanded.
welcome the stranger they they they call you an open borders globalist and i say you don't need to fight them let them argue with god god commands the israelites to welcome the stranger commands the hebrews to treat the alien as one of your own christ shows up in matthew 25 and says individuals and nations will be judged by how they welcome the stranger i'm not saying we shouldn't have any standards on who enters the country To me, it's all about the criminalization of migrants.
I don't call them illegals.
I call them Christian refugees because it's true and it upsets the right people.
But go ahead and make them argue with God.
Don't get angry with your xenophobic uncle at Thanksgiving.
Just say, well, God says this.
Jesus says this.
Why should I listen to you and Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and reject the words of God and Jesus?
Why are God and Jesus wrong?
Let them argue with the scripture.
It's wonderful.
What was it like for you to, or what lessons might you offer me in my public work from your experience of actually standing up publicly and debating Jerry Falwell and David Duke, the leading racists for decades?
I was terrible debating those men.
I was on Bill Maher's show, and I was very young, and I was going for the laugh.
I was terrible.
I was going for the laugh.
I was going to have the audience applaud.
I was going to take down the bad guy.
And it never occurred to me to actually be calm and relaxed and open hearted and talk about what's in scripture.
Instead, I wanted to have a slam dunk of a racist and a fascist.
And I got it and I got my applause break and I changed zero minds and zero hearts.
So, you know, you're already doing it, sir.
You're already doing it.
Well, thank you for sharing all that.
Bill Maher for years was trying to get me on a show and Bill O 'Reilly, you know, after the New York Times read about me.
And I just said to myself, there's no way I'm going.
I was on Hannity and Holmes.
I don't remember their names once.
And it went really well.
And then they had me back on and brought in Catholic fundamentalists who just yelled at me the whole time saying I wasn't a priest.
And I just had six masses.
three parish councils and two finance committee meetings and three confirmation classes that weekend.
I was a wreck.
So it didn't work.
And I'm always trying to learn.
And everybody says I'm not dealing with the far right.
I'm doing the best I can.
And I was wondering how you did.
So thanks for your honesty there.
Let me ask you then about, gosh, you write in the book that You use this phrase, weaponizing the Bible, and it appears a lot, I think.
And you're saying that's one way to look at what people in the culture under Trump are doing these days.
So what's the opposite of that?
Or how can we—this is also my life's work—try to, especially in terms of the Gospels, Lift up and focus on the nonviolence of Jesus, which is universal love and truth and compassion.
And, I mean, it can't be used for any violence or any harm toward anyone if you look at just the four Gospels.
So tell me about what your take is on, again, a little bit even more about the use of the Bible and the misuse of it, I should say.
And then if you want to say anything about what has led you to understand what I call the spectacular.
nonviolence of jesus yeah um where to begin right uh it's not possible to use violence in the name of jesus the crusades were blasphemy the spanish inquisition was blasphemy the invasion of iraq saying that god will not be neutral and god told me to invade was blasphemy Slavery was blasphemy.
You cannot claim to be a Christian and do these kinds of things.
And of course, your listeners are much smarter than me.
They all know that already.
I feel like when we talk about Gandhi and nonviolence, that's the problem, right?
I mean, we have to adjust.
If you're going to say you're a Christ follower, you have to embrace Jesus' deeply unglamorous, deeply unsexy, deeply unsatisfying commandments.
about forgiveness 70 times 7, about loving our enemies.
Now, for me, there's nowhere more evident of this than the first issue that radicalized me as a kid, as a teenager, which was the death penalty.
Murdering sinners, governments murdering prisoners and murdering sinners.
Again, we're brainwashed to think it's not murder when the state does it.
You know, the anti -government people don't call it murder when it's, you know.
That big government, they hate so much doing it.
But it is.
And for me, Jesus is so black and white opposed to this.
I mean, saying only the sinless can execute.
And the scripture is right there.
These people are going to try to, you know, wage war, create dominance for themselves on earth.
And they're using Jesus as their camouflage.
So I mainly wrote this book to be.
a guide to camouflage removal, because you don't get to inflict violence to solve problems.
And it's another reason why it was very strange to write this book about how to take down Christian nationalism and racism with nonviolence and humor and scripture.
The same week we see somebody use a bullet to take down one of the most famous Christian nationalists and bigots in our society.
And it just broke my heart, John, because I've dealt with Charlie Kirk.
He came at me.
I'll never claim that he was fighting for the gospel.
His many, many racist statements and cruel statements are out there.
I don't need to recount them all.
Your listeners can Google the very real things this man said and the delight he took and the suffering and violence towards others.
But on the flip side, we had so many friends on the left who were just celebrating this disgusting violence because Nazis deserve it.
And how do I embrace that?
I mean, I don't care how violent he was.
He could have been wearing a swastika.
It's an unarmed man who got murdered by a bullet and people claiming that they're liberals saying that because of his sins, because of the blackness of his heart, that he deserved to be murdered like this in front of their kids.
What I've said to a lot of folks on the left, and again, we're in this really scary time when they're trying to deify this young man on the right and ignore.
his true words folks on the left are pushing back about that and effectively i might add and it's depressing it may or may not be necessary they're not trying to speak ill of the dead they're trying to correct the record and not let this government pass this propaganda off but as a consequence charlie kirk's true unpleasant statements are going to follow him For all eternity.
I mean, his racist statements are going to be known by so many more people now because they've been so widely circulated.
There's people who never heard of Charlie Kirk five days ago, a week ago, and now they know every awful thing he ever said.
And that's sad to me, that his kids are going to grow up and be told their dad was a saint, and eventually they'll get old enough to research for themselves, and they'll see the kind of things their father really fought for.
And I said so many horrible, vulgar things when I was younger, John.
I made so many mistakes.
I said so many things that I thought was righteous and powerful and strong that were actually cruel and stupid.
And I got lucky that I got to grow old and be lame.
Charlie Kirk is never gonna get to grow old.
He's never gonna get to lose debates, have his heart opened.
He's never gonna get to have a black friend or a gay friend or a transgender friend or an immigrant friend.
He's not gonna get to see Trumpism fail and be humbled by losing a lot of debates and losing his funding.
He's gonna be locked in that immature place.
He was so well compensated to normalize white supremacy to college students.
And it's tragic.
That's what he did.
But it's just as tragic to me that he's never going to get a chance now to be the kind of guy who balances that stuff out.
You know, Robert Byrd was in the damn Klan.
And then he quit the Klan, renounced violence, devoted himself to civil rights.
And when he died, he was honored by the NAACP.
Charlie Kirk's never going to get a chance to be honored by the NAACP.
He's never going to get a chance to.
balance out the stupid stuff of his youth and and so in that sense it makes me want to be kinder and it makes me want to have more humility and not be so quick to judge other people for for their imperfections yes the racism is a curse but it's a curse that was implanted in this guy and uh it did not make his life better Well, thank you for all that sharing, John.
Is that too much, John?
That might have been a little too much there.
No, no.
Thank you for all that.
And I've been reflecting.
We were recording this just a week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I've been talking about nonviolence every day of my life, John, for 45 years.
And Jesus, I keep saying, don't look at me.
Jesus said this stuff.
And that means pretty much every day of my life.
I've had a Christian say, yeah, but we got to kill sometime.
So I want to ask you about how to talk about that and nonviolent communication and how to talk about Jesus and nonviolence.
You're a famous communicator, and I'm so happy about your book because...
You have come around, and now you're going to be saying publicly, hey, let's really look at what the nonviolent Jesus said.
And he's welcoming everybody and calling for universal nonviolent love.
And I, you know, have tried so hard and get a very small audience, but you can get a big audience if you preach hatred and war.
And meanwhile, we're all called, like Marshall Rosenberg taught in his brilliant, famous book, Nonviolent Communication, that if you want to talk about the nonviolent Jesus, you've got to do it nonviolently.
It's part of the hard part.
So tell me about that, John, your journey in stand -up and acting and podcasts and radio shows and VH1.
And now you've written this very important book, The Separation of Church and Hate.
how we can go forward in this age of Trump.
But, I mean, this is going to help listeners here, and me too, John, how to dialogue, how to talk about these life and death issues and the gospel, but to do it as nonviolently as possible.
Yeah, I mean, but this is the essence of fundamentalism, right?
They like to say that all the problems are caused by the religions, and religion is the source of all the oppression of women and violence and homophobia, yada yada.
And I always have this debate with my atheist loved ones, and I always say, no, man, it's not religion.
It's the extreme fundamentalist wings of all religions.
I would submit to your listeners that extreme conservative fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism and Islam are practically the same religion.
Fundamentalism is what's ruining it.
Always.
Always.
And in Christianity, I mean, from the Crusades.
To these modern gun nuts, the way they portray Jesus is this like battle -ready soldier has always been used to justify violence in the name of power.
We see this in these juvenile ways now that they blend Christ with their own hyper -masculine combat fantasies because that's a studly upgrade from Jesus' yammering about peace and non -retaliation, which isn't that sexy, isn't that glamorous, isn't that fun.
When you see the Secretary of Defense...
This alcoholic sex pest Fox News weekend prompter monkey reeks of Jägermeister through my TV.
Having his childish Deus Volt tattoo, God Wills It, which was what the revoltingly fake Christians used in the Crusades when Christianity went from being an oppressed sect based on love to being an imperial religion that waged war on people smaller than them for power and land.
And Deus vult, God wills it.
Man, this violence has to happen because we're going to impose Christianity on this people.
And that means it's okay that we're violating everything Christ commands of us.
Everything.
Everything.
I mean, as we saw with the slaves in America and with the indigenous people, being saved didn't save them.
And that's the whole history of the religion, right?
So much brutality.
But there's another side to it.
Because every time Christianity has promoted violence to gain power.
there's always been Christ followers who pushed back.
So when we had the Crusades and were slaughtering Muslims and Jews in Jesus's name in violation of his teachings, it was St.
Francis of Assisi who quit the war and preached nonviolence.
When the doctrine of discovery encouraged nations to go and colonize and rape and steal natural resources, but it's all okay because we're going to force Christianity on various indigenous people.
when columbus was slaughtering the taino people in the shadow of the cross it was the catholic priest on his boat Father Bartolomeo de las Casas, who wrote to the queen and protested.
The first act of protest by a white person in this hemisphere was a Catholic priest against what Columbus was doing.
Slavery propped up.
I mean, slavery was propped up by Christianity.
The children of Ham are taking other Old Testament passages out of context.
Again, Jesus came to break the chains, but the Christians didn't care.
They wanted to use his name for power and justify it because we're going to make our slaves grow up to be Christian.
That's how.
it's okay.
We're saving their souls.
These white people lie to themselves in so many ways.
But it was Christ followers like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and the Quakers who pushed back and led the abolitionist movement.
We saw it in the Holocaust.
It was Christians who did it.
They had God is with us belt buckles.
Hitler said Jesus was a fighter.
He saw this, all this macho violent nonsense.
And it was Christians like Bonhoeffer who gave their lives to resist it.
Segregation was prompted by Christianity.
Jerry Falwell opened whites -only schools, and it was a Baptist minister from Atlanta.
who shamed white America using their own scriptures.
We've seen it so many times.
There is an incredible history of the Catholic worker movement when corporate Christianity was propping up exploitation of labor and Dorothy Day and the Catholic worker movement led the fight for an end to child labor.
There's an incredible history in the world of brave, beautiful Christian activism.
And it has almost always manifested itself in resistance to Christian violence and authoritarianism.
Yeah, and you're so right.
Thank you to take us back to Constantine, because that's where the troubles begin.
I've just been talking like you about this all my life.
You know, John, I was reading long ago The City of God by St.
Augustine.
So that goes after Constantine has said, OK, Christianity is legal.
Now you can all kill for the empire.
And we all went, oh, thank God.
And Augustine has a sentence in there that says, you know.
Sometimes the best way you love your enemies is to kill them.
They really want to be killed.
It's in the book.
And he's the greatest, one of the great saints apparently.
Well, anyway.
Yeah.
So.
Well.
You know.
Right.
Yeah.
Why it's almost like things written several thousand years ago might not apply to our century.
You use the phrase, and you've used it several times now in our conversation, which I really like, Christ followers.
And when I read, opened your book, and there you're talking about, I like Elvis, but his fans.
You know, I remember as a kid thinking, because, you know, I'm a Beatles fanatic.
I don't, I'm a fan of the Beatles and Elvis and U2, but I don't want to be a fan of Jesus.
And I think at best these days we're fans of Jesus.
And I really want to do what the poor guy wants.
And I kind of, I've been experimenting with my life.
Yeah.
And I had a question here for you, but I don't even know if I can ask it.
Is it, you know, what is you, so instead of being a fan.
Mouth service or just going to concerts and going, that Jesus, he's a really great guy.
That's what someone said to me in an audience.
I really like this stuff, and I'm a big fan of Jesus, and I love peace.
But sometimes you just got to kill somebody and get on with it.
Yeah, so you're not a fan of Jesus, and you think he's wrong.
Well, you're not a follower.
So you're using the phrase Christ follower.
Tell me about that, what that means.
No, no, no, no, no.
Yeah, yeah, you're not a follower, but you're also not a fan.
Look, here's how I say it, John.
If I'm in a Rolling Stones cover band and I advertise in public that I'm in a Rolling Stones cover band and like I ask people to give money to support my rolling to come see my live gigs with my Rolling Stones cover band.
And that's what I am.
And I identify as that.
Right.
And then we only play songs by Nickelback and Vanilla Ice.
It's not going to go over.
And never actually, nothing the Rolling Stones ever said ever comes out of our mouth.
Things other guys said comes out of our mouth.
Then I need to find a new name for my group.
That's a very clever 21st century way to speak of the gospel.
Thank you.
Okay.
In your book.
For once, I have a Titan compact.
Thank you.
You go through, I won't call them issues, but these different themes.
And I hope everyone, as I said, gets the book because you cover so much.
But at the end, you talk about standing with the poor.
So I wanted to ask you about that.
That's such a hallmark of the four Gospels.
He talks about that almost more than anything.
I think everything he does is...
I always joke, everything he does is nonviolence.
My joke, John, is that Jesus thinks he's Martin Luther King.
He thinks he's Gandhi.
I always say, can I say that?
But you write beautifully about the contrast between liberation theology versus the prosperity gospel, which nobody talks about, but it's really big.
You know, God is blessing you so you can make it and get rich.
You have a personal savior who's going to get you a nice house.
Isn't that cute?
Oh, Jesus wants you to have things.
Jesus wants you to have so many things.
I don't remember him saying that.
I remember him saying, give away your money.
And I did that.
And it's been downhill ever since.
But go ahead.
Yeah, they also think Jesus said, if you don't work, you don't eat.
No, Jesus didn't say that.
Paul said something like that, that you're taken out of context to justify ignoring Jesus's favorite issue.
In every one of Jesus's live appearances, I like to say, at every one of his live gigs, talking about Jesus.
about poverty was like his Layla.
OK, that was Layla in his set list.
His opening line was blessed are the poor.
That was his opening.
He didn't talk about drag queens, not about the capital gains tax, not about a talking snake, not about how loud you can scream at women outside clinics.
Right.
I mean, I mean, he came to.
Let the oppressed go free.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
That seems quaint now, but when you realize he said it with a bunch of armed imperial Roman centurions around him, he was being incredibly subversive in ways that we can't understand as kids when they teach us this stuff.
The prosperity gospel, look, here's what I'll say about that, okay?
Joel Osteen is not a racist, okay?
His whole movement, they're not bigots.
They're not Christian nationalists.
They're not out there demonizing the immigrants.
The book's not about them.
I didn't write about them.
But it's still junk theology.
You know, it's no different than Jerry Falwell coming out in the 70s talking about all these welfare bums.
Where the hell does Jesus ever talk like that, these welfare bums?
Like, you know, it's literally the issue he cares about the most.
The Bible.
talks about helping the poor over 2 ,000 times, and I guess that's why conservatives can't stop talking about it, huh?
How many conservative Christians do you have who talk about it?
It's just God, too.
I mean, God forbids us for charging interest to people on loans.
I mean, God says if anyone becomes poor and can't support themselves, we have to support them.
This is not some new liberal idea.
This is God and Jesus saying that you have a responsibility to prioritize care for the poor.
We have to ask these conservative Christians, why are God and Jesus wrong?
The prosperity gospel, this whole notion of if you're really, really good and you live by the Lord, God will like you so much that, by gosh, he's just going to reward you with tons of earthly riches.
It's so cute, but it's the same junk theology of essentially saying if you're struggling and things aren't going your way economically, that's probably because you're not right with God.
And God doesn't want you.
I mean, they never think about the fact that you're saying that wealth is a sign that God's a fan of you.
And they never quote Christ for this.
They quote Deuteronomy and Proverbs, right?
I mean, nowhere does Jesus promise wealth for any reason.
Jesus taught self -denial and service to others.
And he warned about materialism.
Don't store up treasures on earth.
Store up treasures for yourself in heaven.
The movement, Jesus keeps saying, is about what you do, not what you get.
And yes, according to the Bible, God can give you material blessings.
Yes, but Jesus' whole gig is about sacrifice.
Pick up the cross daily and follow me.
So this whole God wants you to be rich, call now?
I mean, it's not about hate, but it's dangerous, victim -blaming junk theology that has nothing to do with Christ's teachings.
Thank you.
We're near the end of our time, so maybe two more questions.
And of course, they're infinitely big.
It'd take a year to go through them.
And so I guess I'll put it this way.
I'd love you to talk specifically about Blessed are the Peacemakers and Love Your Enemies in the time of war, Third World War, peace meal, Pope Francis said, or permanent warfare, or nuclear weapons, or God bless the troops.
And in particular, John, what I love so much, what I got from Martin Luther King was, you know, when I was a kid, I go, okay, Jesus, I love my enemies.
I'll do it.
And by the way, for me, that's nation state language.
You love the people.
Your country is designated for death.
So that means Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Palestinians.
So I'm like, why?
Jesus, and it's right there.
So I want your comment on this.
The most political sentence in the entire Bible is sort of like, not only the love your enemies, it's not only the end of war, it's the end of the nation state system.
Oh, it's more than that.
It's Jesus breaking every cycle of violence.
It's Jesus saying, I don't care who started it, and I don't care who gets the last punch in.
I am here with my covenant to say this ends now.
And any Christian individual or any group that advocates violence or justifies violence or engages in it— are directly rejecting Jesus' direct teachings and commandments of non -retaliation.
Jesus blessed the peacemakers.
He taught reconciliation.
And even under Paul, called his followers to live in peace with everyone.
Love your enemies and care for those who are different from them.
My God, look what they can do.
It's fantastic.
Look what they can do, these zealots in a country with over 100 guns for every person.
So, John, but...
Then Martin Luther King says, here in this political commandments, the heart of the whole thing.
And I'm asking why.
Dr.
King said, because didn't we just agree in the Beatitudes?
Then you're really the sons and daughters of the God who lets the sun rise on the good and the bad and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
In other words, I think it's the clearest description of the nature of God in the entire Bible there in the most political sentence that God is a God of universal love and nonviolence.
And that's the issue is our image of God.
Tell me about the image of God as.
I mean, I think Jesus is saying God is infinite nonviolence, universal love, universal compassion, universal peace.
And we're the children of that God.
So we don't kill.
If you follow Jesus, if you follow Jesus.
But if you follow the Bible, oh, there's lots of violence.
There's lots of God having lots of slaughter.
There's lots of God telling you you are all clear to commit genocide.
i mean bible doesn't forbid genocide it forbids uh uh eating bacon doesn't forbid genocide so it depends if you're following the bible you'll find plenty of reasons to kill lots of people and a god that cheers you on if you follow christ you don't get to ever do that And that's the difference.
Christians follow Christ.
They don't follow the Bible.
The Bible tells us to follow Christ.
The Bible doesn't tell us to follow the Bible.
The Bible is 400 dead guys with their version of what God is, all competing in one narrative with too many rewriters.
And I think that what you're trying to do in the book is to help us unpack what Jesus actually said, and therefore to find the living true God.
It's shocking and scandalous and goes against all politics and all sides, this God of universal love and total nonviolence.
And then the question becomes, do we want that God?
Do we want a God of universal love and nonviolence?
We're so scared of that because we only know violence.
What do you think?
I think you're right.
I mean, it all comes down to people recreating God in their own image.
The Bible's a mirror, and whatever you want to see, you'll see.
If you want to see love and grace and forgiveness and fellowship, you'll see it.
But if you want to see condemnation and misogyny and women as second -class citizens and homophobia, if you want to see violence being okay and I'm better than other people, you'll see that too.
Bible's a mirror.
Your book ends with the last sentence, love is the only religion that works.
That's so beautiful.
And I've been thinking that once you enter in the boundaries of gospel nonviolence, I refuse to kill or retaliate or support war.
Then we begin to...
breathe and can become people of universal love.
Tell me about the religion of love and this vision and where the hope for you is living in and spreading and proclaiming this universal love and the practicalities of that, because universal hate is not working.
No, and nor is universal indifference.
I mean, look, I think spiritual people use religion to become better people.
Fundamentalists use religion to pretend they're better than other people.
And I do believe that love is the only thing that will save this country.
Love for America and love from America.
Authentic Christianity is not looking to dominate anything.
If you're trying to have your religion on top.
You're not following Jesus.
Jesus is constantly telling us to go beyond our religion's rules into a deeper kind of love.
And I say it in the book.
It's not just a form of affection, this love.
It's not some passive, permissive state.
This is an action verb love with all of its challenges and discipline and healing.
And it's not always going to be rewarding.
And it's not always going to feel good.
And the people we are called to love are not always going to look like the Dickens characters we think they're supposed to be.
And they're not always going to be grateful.
And that's why it's picking up a cross and carrying this guy because we need people willing to take a punch in the name of love.
So that's why I'm here.
That's why I respect the work you do.
And that's, you know, all I can do is just say, this is what Jesus says.
Either you believe it or you don't.
But if you don't believe it, don't pretend you're on his side.
Is there anything else you'd like to say before we end?
I'm just so grateful to you, John.
You are just such an inspiration and you consistently remind us, consistently remind us to just focus on the love.
And in that sense, you know, you prove that the only way to be a true conservative Christian is to be a flaming pro -love liberal.
So thank you for what you do.
Well, thank you, John Fuglesang, for being with me today.
And I hope everyone gets this great new book, Separation of Church and Hate.
And thank you, friends, for listening to the Nonviolent Jesus podcast.
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Keep on following the non -binary Jesus one day at a time.
See you next time.