A party girl with a broken heart, pissed off at a culture that made her an easy victim of a love gone wrong, takes an irreverent look at the way centrists and liberals let the right hijack Jesus-and gives moderates and progressives of all faiths and of no faith a recipe for taking back God, flag and country.And she'll make you laugh in the process-like where Paul says, in Aramaic, shit happens. Corinthians 6; 1-13.. (Rice is pretty sure that most Bible literalists don't realize that the Bible was written in Aramaic, Hebrew and ancient Greek. Meaning it's impossible to interpret the Bible literally). Kate Rice is a party girl and battle-scarred veteran of three different religions and countless church suppers, Easter luncheons and bar and bat mitzvahs. She explains our nation's ongoing wrestling match with religion, politics, and sex through the prism of her own struggles with God, faith, and society. She explains her teenaged self's religious justification of blow jobs and believes that sex can't be bad because God made it so fun. She introduces us to the tatted up minister who preaches the joy of sex, church-going progressives standing strong in a rural America that is not as red as you think, and people of all faiths and no faith at all working together. These Americans who know the America our founders created: a nation that promised not just freedom of religion but freedom from religion. And, most importantly, freedom and equal rights for all.

The complete guide to debunking right-wing misinterpretations of the Bible—from economics and immigration to gender and sexuality. Jesus loves borders, guns, unborn babies, and economic prosperity and hates homosexuality, taxes, welfare, and universal healthcare—or so say many Republican politicians, pundits, and preachers. Through outrageous misreadings of the New Testament gospels that started almost a century ago, conservative influencers have conjured a version of Jesus that speaks to their fears, desires, and resentments. In Republican Jesus, Tony Keddie explains not only where this right-wing Christ came from and what he stands for but also why this version of Jesus is a fraud. By restoring Republicans’ cherry-picked gospel texts to their original literary and historical contexts, Keddie dismantles the biblical basis for Republican positions on hot-button issues like Big Government, taxation, abortion, immigration, and climate change. At the same time, he introduces readers to an ancient Jesus whose life experiences and ethics were totally unlike those of modern Americans, conservatives and liberals alike.

New York Times bestseller God's Politics struck a chord with Americans disenchanted with how the Right had co-opted all talk about integrating religious values into our politics, and with the Left, who were mute on the subject. Jim Wallis argues that America's separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values from the public square. God's Politics offers a vision for how to convert spiritual values into real social change and has started a grassroots movement to hold our political leaders accountable by incorporating our deepest convictions about war, poverty, racism, abortion, capital punishment, and other moral issues into our nation's public life. Who can change the political wind? Only we can.

Terry Heaton, who worked alongside Robertson at The 700 Club and became its executive producer, provides the inside story of how evangelical Christianity forced itself on a needy Republican Party in order to gain political influence on a global level. Using deliberate and strategic social engineering, The 700 Club moved Christians steadily into the Republican Party–and moved the party itself to the right.

A new breed of evangelicals, with a fiery passion for economic justice, racial reconciliation and a care for the environment, has abandoned the religious right. Harper, a rising star in this movement, describes the roots of this political shift, the agents of change driving it and the extent of the evangelical rejection of the right-wing political agenda. Here, Harper offers a powerful indictment of the religious right demonstrating how it has abandoned the gospel in its racist and sexist core beliefs.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, conservatives have sought to impose an ideology upon the American people that has not intentionally, but inherently oppressed the middle class. As Newton proposed For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, while conservative political initiatives have uplifted the so called job creators, they have naturally stepped on the middle class in order to do so. Jesus Was a Democrat illustrates how American businesses have outsourced manufacturing jobs to third-world countries, and how the destruction of privatesector collective bargaining has forced middle-class workers to accept lower wages and loss of benefi ts, creating a buyers market for todays employers. Jesus Was a Democrat shows how Republicans ignorance of the past has led to economic, military and political failure today. Dan DeFreest has crafted a book that examines how Republicans have failed to understand their own moral dichotomies and connects the dots between their oppressive ideology and todays income and wealth disparity. Using a historical perspective, he shows how conservatives have stolen the future from our middle class and brought this country to the brink of political revolution.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

In recent years the American media have portrayed the evangelical movement as a conservative force in society equating it with fundamentalism. Many people equate evangelical Christianity with conservatism in religion, politics, theology and social attitudes. But is this the whole story of evangelicalism? Roger Olson's new book sets forth evidence that the link between evangelicalism and conservatism has not always been as strong as it is today in the popular mind. Olson shows how contemporary