'Go Back to the Words of Jesus'

In the sixties, the word 'Christian' in politics usually meant people for justice and civil rights. Now it means Jerry Falwell.

BY: Interview with Dan Wakefield

Dan Wakefield knows his way around a political movement, and he knows his way around spirituality. An award-winning novelist and journalist who has witnessed, lived through, and reported on many seminal moments in the second half of the twentieth century, Wakefield is also a respected voice on spiritual journeys—he writes Beliefnet's "Spiritually Incorrect" column and is the author of several books on personal spirituality.

With "The Hijacking of Jesus," Wakefield's spiritual writing and socially conscious journalism come together. Like other recent offerings by left-leaning Christians, such as Randall Balmer's "Thy Kingdom Come" and Robin Meyer's "Why the Christian Right is Wrong," Wakefield's book sees evangelical Christianity as overly connected to one party (Republican) and one agenda (Christian America). Wakefield spoke with Beliefnet about how the hijacking of Jesus happened, and how he’d like to see Jesus taken back.

You've done a lot of writing on personal spirituality. How is "The Hijacking of Jesus" of a piece with the rest of your life's work?

I think that all the work I’ve done previously that has to do with religion and spirituality, and also the work I’ve done all my life that has to do with politics, have really pointed toward this book. I think it’s the result of a long exploration of these issues, and a long exploration of Christianity in particular. I’ve always written about social concerns. My first book was about Spanish Harlem. And so, finally with this book, the social concerns and the religious-spiritual concerns have come together into the same subject.

Did the results of the 2004 election inspire you to get to work on this project now?

Well, even before the 2004 election, right before it, it just so happened that The Nation magazine asked me to review a biography of William Sloane Coffin. That gave me the initial idea because reading it took me back to that era. I wrote a great deal about the civil rights movement when I was writing for "The Nation" in the ‘60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term “Christian,” it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice. It meant people like William Sloane Coffin or the Catholic priest Dan Berrigan. There was a whole politically progressive, spiritual, religious group very effectively going throughout the whole country.

Now, I see the word “Christian” and it means people like [the Rev. Pat] Robertson and [the Rev. Jerry] Falwell. So, that was really the origin of the book. And then the 2004 election made me think, well, I’d better not wait. I’d better do this right away.

Continued on page 2: How did Jesus become pro-American? »