OUR VIOLENT WORLD AND THE ETHICS OF JESUS

A debut spiritual book offers a discourse on the iniquities Christians have committed over the centuries.

Willis opens Chapter 1 with some flat declarations: that Christianity is the most homicidal religion in the history of the world, and that Christians have slain no fewer than half a billion men, women, children, and infants. As the author puts it, if all these victims were stacked one on top of the other like cordwood, the “Tower of Death” would rise halfway to the moon. The author insists that Christians who kill or torture on behalf of their government are directly disobeying the commands of Jesus. Rather, these Christians are following an authority-friendly version of Christianity compounded by three men: the Apostle Paul, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and the seminal Christian theologian St. Augustine of Hippo. All of them promulgated a version of Christianity that was willing or even eager to serve secular authority. “This was their respective egos,” Willis writes, “which responded to Jesus of Nazareth as they thought they should, but not as he commanded and expected.” The author fills the pages of his work with text, ample footnotes, many translations, and plenty of bulleted points. The print book’s larger format accommodates the various notes some Christian readers will want to make.

Despite his formidable erudition, Willis often comes across as a tiresome crank. His points are well documented but sometimes hugely elaborated; his footnotes sprawl over 80% of some pages; and his paragraph-long sentences frequently dissolve into mere rants. Even so, his book is an enormously diligent work of scholarship. His recurrent discussions of the nuances of translating the Greek are always illuminating, and his examinations of Christian Scripture are searching and extremely well grounded. And his central contention, that the endless violence and murders by Christians in the last 1,700 years are contradictory to the true teachings of Jesus, is an intriguing argument and conversation starter. The author, who believes in God and loves the biblical Jesus, is engagingly scornful of Christian behavior, calling genocide “the rule of Christian-European American history” and pointing out the “chapters written in blood by the hands of Christians who said they were Christians while they shed blood.” The reach of Willis’ research is consistently impressive and often surprising, ranging from obscure first-century authors to Aleister Crowley, the so-called “Beast of the Apocalypse,” with an enormous number of secondary references thrown in along the way. At the heart of the account is, of course, Jesus, who, Willis insists, “was not some idealistic, dreamy-eyed religious leader uttering shallow words from a deluded mind,” but rather a figure teaching hard-learned moral lessons that ran counter to human nature. Although the author often indulges in overlong explanations (his particular weakness is psychology), his book will captivate Christians and non-Christians alike.

An engrossing, rigorous, and argumentative study of Christian violence.