Psychologist Slobodzien explores the history of some of the most popular holidays in the Western world.

Several commonly celebrated events in the United States have origins within Christian tradition, including Christmas, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day. However, this book argues, these holidays would have been unrecognizable to first-century Christians. It wasn’t until the fourth century, Slobodzien notes, that Catholicism was institutionalized, and Catholics merged non-Christian holidays with their own faith’s stories and themes. Slobodzien, who was born into a Polish-Italian Roman Catholic family, left that faith in the 1970s and now embraces a version of Christianity centered on home-churches and “The Way” of first-century Christians. The author’s interpretation of his religion embraces a literal view of the Bible, whose verses are found on nearly every page of this book. Fourteen chapters cover a number of major holidays celebrated in the West, from religious celebrations to Thanksgiving, and explore their origins and historical development. A chapter on New Year celebrations, for example, examines the non-Christian origins of several annual festivities, including those in the Babylonian, Roman, Aztec traditions, as well as the Catholic Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. The book’s is encyclopedic in its descriptions of various celebrations, but its polemical style will alienate some readers; from its perspective, many holidays can be traced to “pagan unbiblical Catholic doctrines,” and the author asserts that even well-intentioned Christians may be led astray by participating in them. As the author of several books about addiction and religion, Slobodzien shows a firm command of biblical passages and Christian theology in general. Too often, however, the book lacks nuance, using demonstrative phrases such as “All Bible scholars know…” that overstate scholarly consensus and eschew good-faith counterarguments.

A heavy-handed examination of Christian holidays that some will find problematic.

A Christian book offers eclectic takes on religious doctrine, ethics, and history.

A clinical psychologist, Slobodzien has studied Christian history and theology for decades after a spiritual conversion in the 1970s. He has written over a half-dozen works on Christianity and biblical counseling. In this volume, he challenges the stereotype of Jesus “as a meek, mild, peaceful, loving, hippie type of person” and provides an alternate vision of a “divine Warrior who first came to start an anti-religious revolution.” Indeed, in the work’s reading of the book of Revelation, Jesus will return at the battle of Armageddon as the head of an army that includes “the Royal Priesthood of all believers,” or his true disciples. But not all who call themselves “Christian,” the book claims in one of its central arguments, will be included in this apocalyptic roll call. Raised in an Italian/Polish Catholic family, the author has since determined that Roman Catholicism’s dogmas are not only incorrect, but that “Satan is still being worshipped today” in the religion’s “worship” of the dead (“All Hallows Eve”) and its veneration of the Virgin Mary (a cleverly disguised reinterpretation of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar). Critical of all “organized religion” that bases salvation on codes of conduct and “membership rules,” Slobodzien does not pull any punches regarding Protestant churches either. Entire chapters are devoted to condemning megachurches and high-profile pastors who line their bank accounts via “spiritual financial extortion” and mislead their flocks through promoting Covid-19 conspiracy theories. While following a literalist approach to the Bible similar to evangelicals, the author critiques conservative Christians who use “false religious guilt…to attack God’s People” and presents refreshingly nuanced takes on incendiary culture war issues like abortion and sexuality. And while the book supplies several eccentric theories, such as Satan’s role in mass extinction events in Earth’s history and the conjecture that Neanderthals were the “Nephilim” of biblical lore, Slobodzien’s honest discussions of the “brutal Systemic Racism in our nation” are welcome views from a White Christian author.

An approachable work that delivers reasoned critiques of organized Christianity despite embracing some fringe theories.

A firebrand interpretation of biblical Scripture envisions a unified faith.

Slobodzien (Hidden Bible Taboos Forbidden by Organized Christianity, 2012, etc.) opens his new book, a kind of follow-up to his preceding work, by urging readers to consider “the possibility that it may have been God’s plan from the beginning of time to unite all of his people into One Faith, One Hope, One Family—One Holy Nation!” But he begins his elaboration of this ambitious religious claim in the worst way possible: by misconstruing science, creating a false dichotomy between it and Christianity. His description of the Big Bang—“this speck of LIGHT (existing outside of space and time) appeared from nowhere, and for no reason, only to explode (start expanding) all of a sudden”—and his contention that “the ‘missing link’ (between the cave man and modern humans) is still missing” are some of the familiar fundamentalist misunderstandings he shares. Also in that category are his reference to creationism as a “theory” and preposterous claims like this one regarding the Nepililim mentioned in the Hebrew Bible: “Scientists today confirm the biblical record of these non-human species existing before God created Homo Sapiens (Adam and Eve) and after.” This opening section will likely repel   readers who are non-fundamentalist Christians, resulting in their hesitation to plow through the rest of the book to discover the author’s insights. This is a shame, because once he gets down to the business of exegesis, analyzing the nature of Jesus and the true meaning of the prophesied Kingdom of God, he provides consistently compelling reading about “God’s ultimate plan to gather together all families through the shed blood of Jesus into his One Universal Holy Nation of ALL believers.” Some of these readings are rather odd. He characterizes Jesus as a “Cosmic King” foretold by Old Testament prophets. And the Book of Revelation does not identify the “Roman Catholic Institution” as the anti-Christ. But Slobodzien’s Christian readers should find his assessments intriguing nonetheless.

A strange and ultimately partisan reading of Christianity’s fate.

An unconventional, complicated examination of Christianity.  “What if there was a way to read and really understand the Bible that has been kept hidden for centuries by the professional religious leaders of our mainstream [church]?” Slobodzien asks at the start of the latest edition of his exhaustively researched book. The work began as an essay on the recurrence of the number seven in the Bible (the Seven Deadly Sins, the seven pillars of God’s wisdom, and so on), but it has since grown to its present, extremely detailed state, which incorporates everything from the Apocrypha to the apocalypse to Chinese numerology, Mayan rituals and legends of Atlantis. The author relates it all to 21st-century science and society, spotlighting such varied concepts as quantum physics, dark energy, addiction theory, and the Bible’s stances on alcohol and sex. His main focus on “forms and numbers” leads him into some very complicated research, which he presents with clarity and infectious enthusiasm, but his ultimate goal is simplicity rather than profusion. He frequently mentions the torturous dogma of non-Christian religions (“[T]he Jewish Pharisees believed that they had to obey 613 religious commandments or taboos against specific behaviors to have a right relationship with God”) and stresses that “Jesus came to bring us something new—the New Covenant,” adding: “He did not come to bring us another organized religion called Christianity with temples and a priesthood like Judaism.” Some conclusions he draws may strike readers as bizarre (particularly his contention that the Nazis brought about the Holocaust as revenge against the Jews for their ancient crimes against Aryan culture), and on the whole, his book has little to say to non-Christians or atheists. However, Christian readers will likely find his criticisms of organized religions provocative and his frequent calls to an inner, personal faith, free from the “toxic” perversions of organized religions, reassuring. A spirited revisionist look at Christian doctrine.