Pub Theology 10/6/25 -- Separating church and hate
Peter Trumbore • October 6, 2025
First a disclaimer: Despite appearances to the contrary, this is neither a book review nor an endorsement of the new book by actor, comedian, and political commentator John Fugelsang titled "Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds." From the title you get the general idea of where the author is going with this.
Fugelsang's story is a compelling one. He was raised in a large politically, ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse family as a progressive Roman Catholic by a mother who was a former nun and a father who was a former Franciscan monk. As he puts it in the introduction to his book, "I am here because two people broke a promise to God." What he wrestles with in this book is how to come to terms with, and then fight back against, what he views as the hijacking of Christianity and the abandonment of the faith that Jesus taught by religious and political leaders who have perverted the religion in the pursuit of their own power and selfish interests.
In the introduction, Fugelsang writes: "This is a book about what Christianity started out as, what it became, and why it's still worth fighting for. ... The extreme right uses Jesus' name as camouflage. This is a guide to camouflage removal."
In building our conversation this week around this book, I acknowledge from the start that none of us have (probably) read it. My copy is on its way thanks to The House of Bezos. In the meantime, you can read Fugelsang's introduction by clicking on this link. You can also watch Fugelsang's appearance on The Daily Show by following this link. But I think we can still have a quality discussion around some of what he raises. First, before we talk about the message, let's talk about the messenger. Fugelsang admits that he is no member of the clergy, nor scholar, nor theologian. So what qualifies him to write this book and level the critiques he makes? In short, does the messenger matter? Some quotes from the book will also serve as spurs to our conversation.
- “I generally trust people who are seeking the truth; I tend to be wary of those who claim they’ve found it.”
- “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” (Quoting Susan B. Anthony)
- “In focusing on what cannot be proven, many Christians fall into the trap of a Christianity that’s more about defending the supernatural than embodying the moral teachings of Jesus. It’s not the miracles driving people away from religion, it’s the Christians who don’t live by Jesus’s words about how we’re supposed to treat each other.”
- “[R]emember—if your church isn’t telling you to love your enemies but keeps telling you who your enemies are, you’re not really in a church.”
- “And that’s the point. We’re called to follow Christ, not the Bible. In fact, please understand this: the Bible does not tell us to follow the Bible. The Bible tells us to follow Christ. But Biblical Christians follow the Bible. They do not, in fact, attempt to follow Christ.”
- “Not only are Christians supposed to prioritize following Jesus’s words above the other parts of the Bible, that’s also quite literally why this religion got its name.”
- “These were the fundamentalists, the power-hungry grifters who took advantage of the fact that most people don’t know the Bible all that well. They were charlatans, frauds, hypocrites, and villains. And they made for great TV.”
- “Spiritual people use religion to become better people. Fundamentalists use religion to pretend they’re better than other people.”
- “And I was taught—relentlessly—that Christianity was about the things Jesus prioritized: Service to others. Forgiveness. Caring for the poor, the sick, the stranger, the prisoner. Fighting injustice with nonviolence, like Dr. King and Gandhi. Standing up for the less fortunate, like Dorothy Day and Catholic Charities. Love. Empathy. Compassion.”
Obviously, no collection of cherry-picked quotations can capture the totality of Fugelsang's argument. But it can be our jumping off point for discussion. Join us tomorrow evening, Tuesday Oct. 7, starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
"From ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us!" This very old folk prayer, which has been tied to both Scotland and Cornwall, used to hang on the wall of my childhood home, and it often comes to mind for me at this time of year. A little trivia -- the first known publication of this prayer was in 1926 in a volume titled "The Cornish and West Country Litany," but it is thought to be far older. That it can be traced to regions of the United Kingdom that are quite distant from one another may be a testament to its antiquity. Anyway, we're right up to the climax of what some call "spooky season," the weeks from the end of summer up until Halloween, which this year falls on Saturday. Apparently this idea of "spooky season" is a relatively recent development, becoming popular on the internet as a way to talk about stretching the adult of fun of Halloween from a single day of dress-up shenanigans to something akin to the more well-established holiday season we're now rocketing toward. This is a far cry from what I recall growing up, where more than a few of the local churches in our area very actively sought to discourage observance of Halloween, labeling it a pagan celebration of witchcraft, devilry, and superstition that was incompatible with being a good Christian. Of course that didn't really dissuade anyone. But with the holiday just a few days away, I thought this would be a good opportunity for us to talk about the nature of spooky stuff, ghoulies and ghosties, and other such things. So tell us, what do you love about Halloween? How do you mark it? Does anything give you pause? What do you think about this claim that you can't be a Christian and still participate in or enjoy Halloween? Finally, what do you make of that old Scots and Cornish prayer? What real fears do you think it reflects? And what might a modern version look like? Join us for the conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday Oct. 27 starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
Some weeks inspiration hits and we stumble onto a single topic that has enough going for it that our Tuesday evening conversation revolves around it entirely. Some weeks, like this one, we take a different approach. Tonight, rather than chew on one big idea, we've got a couple of interesting, but generally unrelated questions to animate our discussion. We'll take them on one at a time, in no particular order, and see what develops. Nine years ago New Yorker cartoonist David Sipress drew a cartoon with this caption: "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” Do you experience this tension in your own life, and if so, how do you deal with it? Are you more interested in buying things, or experiencing things? How far will you go to experience something for the first time? What is an example of that? Are you a thrill seeker? An adventure traveler? Something else? Lutheran pastor and writer Nadia Bola-Weber said this: "People don't leave Christianity because they stop believing in the teachings of Jesus. People leave Christianity because they believe in the teachings of Jesus so much, they can't stomach being part of an institution that claims to be about that and clearly isn't." What is your take on this? Do you agree with her? Why or why not? Podcaster Joe Rogan: "Jesus was born out of a virgin mother. What's more virgin than a computer? If Jesus does return, you don't think he could return as Artificial Intelligence? AI could absolutely return as Jesus." OK, is he off his rocker, or do you think he might be on to something? If all else fails, what's on your mind this week? Join us for the conversation this evening, Tuesday Oct. 13 starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
It escaped my notice, so perhaps it escaped yours as well. Back on August 31, the lauded poet, farmer, essayist, and deeply influential thinker Wendell Berry died at the age of 92, in the place he loved best, his farm in Kentucky. Over the years, several of our conversations have been inspired by or touched on Berry's ideas and writings. While Berry has influenced countless Christians through his poetry and fiction, he described himself as a "bad-weather churchgoer." In the preface to his collection of sabbath day poems titled "This Day," Berry explains it this way: "But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams… In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations — other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.." One of the things this quote brings to mind is how important the concept of "place" was in Berry's work and, more importantly, the way he saw the world and how he sought to live in it. Way back in 2017, we talked about the idea of place, with Berry as our guide. "Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are your neighbors in it ..." This is a very small portion of Wendell Berry's "A Poem on Hope". In his poem, "The Want of Peace," reprinted in the illustration above, Berry writes: "I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place." So in our conversation this week we're going to revisit this idea of "place," of finding it, belonging to it, and perhaps losing it. There are many ways we can think about this notion. Where do we find peace? Where do we find God? Where do we find ourselves? Where do we find our people, or our purpose? Join us for the conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday Oct. 6 starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
You're probably aware of this already, but for years now, we've been hearing that Americans in particular are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. Which is different from simply being alone. I think we're all aware that it is perfectly possible crave alone time without feeling lonely, and to feel intense loneliness even when surrounded by people. Sometimes this can be a result of things that are out of our control. But often, it's the choices we make in the name of convenience that lie at the heart of this. Journalist Gabe Bullard's new book, "Against Convenience," argues that our pursuit of ever faster and frictionless experiences comes with invisible costs, and that we unthinkingly accept those as the inevitable price we have to pay to make things easier, Reviewing the book in The Atlantic , writer Julie Beck argues that many of those costs are social. Beck writes: "Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds." Sometimes, she continues, the whole point of an innovation is that it allows you to do something in isolation that once required interaction with others. Think self-checkout at the grocery store, or the "quiet ride" option that Uber introduced. One of the things we regularly talk about in our conversations is the importance of community. It's why some of us come to church, or, for that matter, Pub Theology. But I think we all also recognize that we engage in this tradeoff of convenience over community all the time, and in all kinds of ways. So that's what we're going to talk about in our discussion this week. Thinking about your life, your-day-to-day, how do you experience this convenience vs. community dynamic? Sure, when we're streaming a new movie in our living room, we're trading that for sitting with a bunch of strangers in an actual theater. Or when we get our meals or groceries or other purchases delivered to our door we get to spare ourselves the hassle of interacting with wait staff and cashiers, or dodging around other shoppers blocking the cereal aisle. But what about the impact of convenience on the relationships we really care about? And what is the impact of avoiding interaction, not just on ourselves, but on society?Finally, how much convenience are you willing to give up in order to build, or rebuild, or sustain community? Join us for the discussion tomorrow evening, Tuesday Sept. 29, starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.