From “Everything Good about God is True: Choosing Faith” by Bruce Reyes-Chow
It is incumbent upon Christians in the United States who believe that our faith has been hijacked to offer something better. It is urgent. Christian nationalists profess a gospel of exclusion that limits the expansive possibility of God’s creativity. It’s a faith built upon a theological absolutism that causes us to know God less, not more.
I am writing this book, which repudiates that version of Christianity by offering a better one, because I believe deeply that these are not simply abstract theological, ideological, or political debates. This warped kind of faith leads to death: death of the body, death of relationships, death of faith. LGBTQIA+ folks are driven to death by suicide and death by violence inflicted by others; immigrants end up dying in the middle of deserts trying to seek bodily safety and economic opportunity; the environment is hemorrhaging; Black and brown people are being killed and incarcerated into chronic invisibility; and the unjust distribution of wealth and resources keeps people in poverty, unhoused, and starving. The list goes on. These examples are hyperbolic, slippery-slope rhetorical examples. They are realities that we know to be true. And they are what drive many of us to fight theologies that are taking society further down this path of hate-filled division and destruction.
All this leads to why I am making an audacious and somewhat arrogant claim: That there is a better version of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That Christianity can actually be a healing balm for a hurt and hurting world. That there is, simply, a better choice of Christian faith.