https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iJhLoEnfNFsPx9hhDYU4RgqNwvo0xMmSjAyzUQK4YxU/edit?usp=sharing
The following are writings that will help to clarify who, when and how God became a weapon, Evangelical Theology jettisoned Jesus, how Jesus became white, and why wealth became associated with God’s blessing. These “Christian” beliefs have used God as a bludgeon, causing harm and lasting trauma to individuals, cultures, policies and certainly to the gospels. Included in these writings are poetry, fiction, scholarly works, and non-fiction.
Content Key
- 🔷Indigenous Fiction
- 🔸Theology
- ⭕Memoire and poetry
- 🔹White Supremacy
- 🔶Palestinian Justice
- 🔴Christian Zionism
- 🔵Christian
Abulhawa, Susan. Mornings in Jenine. Nook ebook. New York, New York: Bloomsbury, 210AD. 🔷🔶⭕
Mornings in Jenine brings readers with Palestinians from the Nakba in 1948 through forced displacements, Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) violence, detentions, broken promises and village life. During the Nakba an infant is lost by a fleeing Palestinian mother, picked up by an IOF soldier and given to his wife to raise as her own. One mother grieves the loss and another becomes a mother benefitting from that loss. The complexities of loving the infant enemy show the cruelties of indifference when personal gain is at stake. American Christian Zionism
Laestadius, Ann-Helen. Stolen. Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Ebook. Stockholm, Sweden: Romanus & Selling, 2021. 🔷🔹🔸
This novel takes us to a Sami community in Northern Sweden. The Sami experience racist treatment as reindeer are harassed, hunted and killed by their non-Sami neighbors.
Toha, Mosab Abu. Forest of Noise. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. 🔶⭕
Toha Mosab Abu. Things You Might Find Hidden In My Ear. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2022. 🔶⭕
Poetry by a Palestinian of Gaza.
Mosab Abu Toha won a Pulitzer prize in 2025 for his New Yorker essay, “On the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza.”
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised, Ebook. New York, New York: The News Press, 2010. 🔵🔹
Alexander draws clear connections between the American incarceration system that imprisons far more people of color that data supports to a continued Jim Crow system of injustice.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Touchstone, 1959. 🔸
In this defining work, Bonhoeffer differentiates between cheap grace and costly grace. Using the example of Peter on a stormy Sea of Galilee, Bonhoeffer reminds us that obedience to Christ to get out of the boat is what leads to faith – first step, then believe. Discipleship is a life in lived in response to Christ in service to the neighbor.
Brueggemann, Walter. Ancient Echoes: Refusing the Fear-Filled, Greed-Driven Toxicity of the Far Right. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023. 🔵🔹🔸
Brueggemann lends his ubiquitous voices to the current political and social climate in America by giving faith based, grace filled ways to resist the toxic politics driven by power and proclaim the gospel to those who need to hear it most.
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Kindle ebook. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 🔴🔵🔹🔸
If you want to understand why Christian nationalism is implicitly White Christian nationalism this book makes the connection. Deeply tied to the early and current presence of the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement, morality is in the hands of those who are racist. This is still present in policy making and law enforcement.
Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2012. 🔴🔸
Butler here responds to the violence and injustice of the modern State of Israel and Zionism. She cannot reconcile the faith she loves and its use to justify the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians who lived on the land in 1948 when the State of Israel was created.
Cone, James H.. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Kindle ebook. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. 🔵🔹🔸
In this seminal work, Cone sees the cross of Christ’s crucifixion as a lynching.
DeJonge, Michael P. Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther. First. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 🔸
Exploring whether Bonhoeffer was a true pacifist, DeJonge helps us see that for Bonhoeffer, the creation of peace is to hold a place for the gospel. War and conflict force survival to the top of priorities so peace is a penultimate goal for the benefit of proclamation. Here we also see how Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the Lutheran theology of the Two Kingdoms forms his views of the failure of the German church to refuse the loyalty oath to Hitler. The churches invited the state into their space and became complicit in the atrocities of the Nazis. Bonhoeffer refused to join them.
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Kindle ebook. New York, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020. 🔴🔵🔹🔸
Du Mez follows the evolution of the white, masculine, homophobic, misogynistic flavor of the moral majority. In an attempt to “man-up” Jesus, manly spokesmen were given authority to redefine what it means to be Christian in America. This is the foundation of white Christian nationalism and its hold on American conservative politics today.
Kruse, Kevin M.. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Kindle ebook. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2015. 🔴🔵🔹🔸
Here we find where the power for the Evengelical fundamentalist Christian nationalist agenda is found. It is the purveyor of prosperity theology that makes wealth the sign of God’s favor while creating wealth from those desperate for just enough.
Hargrave, Kiran Millwood. The Mercies. Ebook. New York, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019. 🔹🔸
This novel tells the story which illuminates the consequences of bad Christian theology to decide who is and is not a child of God.
McKinstry, Carolyn Maull. While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement. Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2011. 🔶⭕🔹🔸
The story of a survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. This story, its aftermath and the complete lack of consequence for the murder children shows the results of White Christian Nationalism as policy and culture.
Miqdad, Ahmed. Gaza Narrates Poetry. Gaza, Palestine: Ahmed Miqdad, 2014. 🔶⭕
Poetry from the 2014 bombardment of Gaza from inside.
Niemi, Mikael. How to Cook a Bear. Translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner. Ebook. Stockholm, Sweden: Piratforlaget, 2017. 🔷🔹🔸
This novel of Sweden shows the harms done to people, children in particular, but Christians who view non-Christians as savages and worthy only of service if they do not convert. Even when they convert, they are still a little less than.
Perry, Samuel L. and Whitehead, Andrew L.. “Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 60, no. 1 (2021): 46–63. 🔵🔹🔸
This article explores the connection between white Evangelical Fundamentalism and the American justice system. They conclude the WEF would rather punish the innocent than risk letting a guilty person go free.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. Translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris. Paris, France: Pantheon Books, 2000. 🔷🔶⭕
This graphic novel tells the story of a family in Iran when The Islamic Revolution took place. This story reminds us of the dangers whenever a particular religion or religious practice becomes associated with loyalty and patriotism. When a particular religion is mandated by the state, it becomes weaponized to demand homogeneity and conforming to the ideology of the powerful.
Soelle, Dorothee and Kalin, Everett, Translator. Suffering. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. 🔹🔸
Soelle looks into theologies that make God either a sadist or a masochist. Why do people create these theologies and how they are heretical. She notes that such theologies, while they call them selves Christian, bear not resemblance to Christ or the gospels.
Takei, George, Eisinger, Justin, and Scott, Steven. They Called Us Enemy. Expanded. San Diego, CA: Top Shelf, 2020. 🔷🔵⭕🔹
This graphic novel tells the story of George and his family an internment camp for Americans of Japanese descent. Stories like this show us the consequences of white Christian Nationalism, its distrust of the other, and the power it has to create and implement unjust policy.
Volf, Miroslav. A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2011. 🔵🔹🔸
In this writing of how the common good is to be served by followers of Christ, Volf identifies a faith that functions as it is intended to do by working for justice, through love in public. He also identifies a malfunctioning faith that provides privilege and power for some but stays safely idle when convenient and coercive when wielded as a bludgeon.
Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Revised. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2021. 🔵🔹🔸
In this work we see the power of being able to leave the comfort and be curious about the lives and struggles of others. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s suffering Jesus is found with those who suffer not with those who cause suffering. This empathy causing experience changed Bonhoeffer’s from a white Jesus who looked German (like him) to a Jesus who more closely resembled the inhabitants of Black Harlem.