Tag: Anarchist

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#BookReview: Your Jesus Is Too American by Steve Bezner

No Matter Your Thinking About ‘Christianity’, This Will Challenge You. This is one of those excellent books that truly no matter what you think of Christianity or any given Christian-type theology, Bezner is going to find ways to challenge you – in the manner of the classic pastor joke as follows:

Man comes up to the Pastor after the service. “Preacher, you were stepping on my toes in there!”
Pastor replies: “I apologize. I was aiming about 3 feet higher.” (For his heart, in case that is unclear.)

In other words, yes, Bezner is a pastor and yes, this is written in that general style – but it also isn’t a book seeking to destroy everything you hold dear so much as gently goad you in areas where maybe you’re wrong – or maybe Bezner is.

And I’m not joking when I say no matter your thoughts on Christianity here. Bezner goads the conservatives with his talk of their lily white – or coal black – churches and the need for churches to be more multicultural. Bezner goads the liberals with his insistence that sex is only for straight married couples – and goads everyone with his insistence that more needs to be done to support single adults, no matter their sexual choices. He even manages to goad the Anarchists by *actively citing 1 Samuel* – the very passage where YAHWEH decrees that obedience to an earthly king as a rejection of Himself! – and arguing that earthly kings are necessary, but that a “prophet” is needed to stand outside their court and hold them to account.

If you’re looking for a book “taking down” “Christian Nationalism”…. this isn’t your book, and Bezner never intended it to be. If you’re looking for a book that decries *all* politics in the American Church and instead calls for complete separation between the Church and politics… this isn’t your book, and Bezner never intended it to be. It is quite clear that he sought to write exactly the kind of book he did – calling Americans of *all* political persuasions and telling them that according to his own beliefs, they’re wrong. As with anything else, at that point your mileage absolutely varies. I do believe that we can all gain something from reading this book, but I do NOT believe that Bezner is as correct as he clearly thinks he is.

Ultimately two stars were deducted here. One for the prooftexting, even though it only *blatantly* happened as quotes to begin chapters – I don’t really recall seeing it anywhere else. (For those unaware, “prooftexting” is the practice of citing Bible verses out of context in support of some claim or another.) So while not as bad as some others in this space, it is a practice that is an automatic star deduction from me *any* time I see it.

The other star deducted was for the near absolute dearth of any bibliography. While this book was indeed more pastoral in tone, it was still a nonfiction book and should have been cited much more thoroughly than it was – 20-30% bibliography is my general expectation based on my experiences overall, though I’m a bit more willing to come down to 15% as the lower number with more recent (2021 and forward or so) texts seeming to indicate this is a general shift in nonfiction books of this era.

Still, despite the two star deduction here largely on technical matters, this really is a solid book that every American needs to read – perhaps particularly during election seasons.

Very much recommended.

This review of Your Jesus Is Too American by Steve Bezner was originally written on October 15, 2024.

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Featured New Release of the Week: A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

This week we’re looking at a superbly written yet shoddily cited story of how one town’s historic pursuit of freedom potentially led to some creative bears. This week, we’re looking at A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling.

The title of this book is one that grabs you, and it grabbed me more than most because of my own former work as both a Libertarian Party official and a more general libertarian political activist. In those roles, I actually knew a handful of Free Staters myself, though only one that I ever had any direct interaction with is cited in this book – Christopher Cantwell, who I once had to argue against in my proclamation that killing cops outside of active self defense – ie, when they are actively and directly causing an imminent threat of death or severe bodily harm to someon – was wrong. But despite the Free Staters being a bit extreme by their nature, most weren’t quite the level of Cantwell… despite Hongoltz-Hetling’s efforts here to portray them as being at least as bad. (Though to be clear, Cantwell himself is discussed only very briefly late in the book.)

Instead, Hongoltz-Hetling spins some yarns about creative bears with critical thinking skills far beyond any research I’m aware of showing them to possess, with minimal at best documentation of his claims even in this regard. He then combines these bear yarns with stories of the Free Staters of Grafton, NH, which seem to be a splinter group from the main Free State Project types to begin with – at the time of this writing the weekend after Easter 2020, I’ve reached out to my one remaining contact from the FSP from those days but have yet heard back from him. Hongoltz-Hetling then spends the majority of the book focused on Grafton and only mentioning another FSP targeted town, Keene, late in the book and even then only briefly. Indeed, he only gets to Keene at all after having established repeatedly that the Free Town Project of Grafton was the originator of the Free State Project, despite the FSP’s own historians noting that their effort began even before Hongoltz-Hetling is quite clear in his assertions of the beginning of the Grafton effort.

Throughout the text, Hongoltz-Hetling’s disdain for the very people he is writing about, and seeming preference for the bears themselves, becomes quite abundantly clear. Though the bear stories are indeed entertaining, and the prose itself is quite great. The structure of the book into three parts – which this author calls books – seemingly follows that great libertarian magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, which the author references a few times but seems to have never fully understood – if he ever even fully read it. (To be clear, this writer has read it on three separate occasions, one of the only books to have been re-read during my eReader era.)

Overall an entertaining book, if not quite accurate enough for a book claiming to be non-fiction, this would probably be better suited had the author changed the effort into simply creating a novel out of the same material. Still, recommended for entertainment value alone.

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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