Then, when the book was finally done, I made a few bold choices with trying to market it, including through sponsored ads on Facebook. The end result felt surreal: I ended up with a very positive review from Publishers Weekly, a number of scathing personal attacks from random Christians on social media, and critical reviews from two Christian authors whose work I quoted in the book. Personally, I was having a great time, though some of the comments I received were so harsh that a few of my friends periodically checked in with me to see if I was doing okay (I was).
Since I am currently working on a second edition, and since I've finally been able to restore some old blog posts from 2022 responding to criticisms from a Christian apologist named J. P. Holding, I thought it might be worth writing out my thoughts about why I'm working on a second edition at all and what I'm hoping to accomplish. My reasons basically fall into three categories: (1) personal writing goals; (2) aesthetic preferences; and (3) a desire to streamline the material. Let me talk through each one.
Personal Writing Goals
My goals in writing have shifted somewhat since publishing Politely Rejecting the Bible, but in order to explain what I mean, it will help to go back to what was happening in my life about fifteen or so years ago. Bear with me, since this is kind of a long story.
As a young Christian, I'd always dreamed of eventually becoming a writer in order to communicate my understanding of the things I believed about Jesus. But I was also a minister-in-training who had grown up in the conservative Baptist church but who had, in certain ways, become less confident in its doctrinal framework. I felt very strongly that I should be continuing to pursue a life in ministry, but I had no strong connection to any particular denomination or tradition. By the time I entered seminary, I was mostly working in the Reformed church (RCA), but I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Reformed views of predestination, and increasingly convinced that humans do, in fact, have free will. So I felt that I had a responsibility to figure out where I belonged on the Christian map.
For this reason, I spent a considerable amount of my free time either exploring the seminary library or engaged in intense study at home, taking copious notes on all of the issues that seemed most important to me. At a broad level, I was trying to understand the nature of God, Jesus, the Bible, sin, salvation, and myself. This meant that my mind was constantly thinking about all sorts of questions: What did it mean to be sinful? What does it mean to have faith? Is salvation only obtained through a free choice? How does Jesus's death atone for sin? How does evolutionary theory affect our understanding of sin? What does it mean to say that the Bible has divine authority? Is the Bible inerrant? Are any of the biblical writings forged? And so on.
At the time, I thought that I was simply ironing out the details of my Christian belief system. After all, if I was going to become an ordained minister, I would have to be able to articulate my views on a number of these issues. But actually I was slowly (and quite unwittingly) deconstructing that belief system, bit by bit. I won't go into the details of how it happened, nor will I bother with trying to explain why this wasn't just an academic, intellectual exercise (perhaps I can explore that more in other posts), but by the time I finished seminary, I no longer considered myself to be a Christian, because I no longer believed that it was a good idea to worship Jesus as God.
The last semester at seminary was one of the most stressful, mentally exhausting times in my life. I had only told a couple of people close to me that I wasn't a Christian anymore. But I decided to finish seminary because I was so close to having the master's degree and my tuition was now fully covered through a scholarship due to a strong academic performance. I figured I might as well just see the thing through. But during that last semester (really a spring semester and a summer term) I had to take two preaching classes, a class on the relationship between Christ and culture, a class on spiritual disciplines, and a class for which I would have to write my own eighty-page systematic theology, all while feeling like a huge hypocrite. (For whatever it's worth, I had already cut off any remaining ministry obligations I had prior to that semester, since continuing to work in Christian leadership under those circumstances seemed unethical.)
One of the things I did to help keep myself feeling somewhat grounded and sane was to start an anonymous blog called (wait for it) Politely Rejecting Jesus, where I proceeded to write out a ton of personal thoughts about why I no longer accepted the Christian faith. The title of the blog was mostly just a reminder to myself that I was not trying to attack people who disagreed with me, especially since I had agreed with them for such a long time. I was literally just trying to show that I had good reasons for leaving the church. Admittedly, I did not always stick to my principles. Some of my posts on that blog were quite emotional and, I think, needlessly condescending. In fairness, I was processing a lot of complicated feelings of disillusionment, grief, and anger, without always knowing who or what those feelings should even be directed toward. But some of it was still a little cringey, in my opinion. Still, writing the blog definitely helped me with processing my thoughts and keeping me somewhat grounded.
Cut to about two years later, after my ex-wife and I had left the church and moved to Baltimore to get some distance from our old, smalltown environment. I think I still had the blog up, but by that point I may have already taken it down because, once I shared a post from it on Facebook, it ended up circulating among everyone (students and faculty) at my old seminary and I received a huge outpouring of support from different people there, some who agreed with me and others who didn't but who wanted to extend their kindness. Unfortunately, I was also made aware that it was not going over well with some of the other faculty members (including my old advisor), which I suppose was understandable. In any case, sooner or later I decided to take the blog down. It had served its purpose. But that left me with all of these thoughts, notes, and drafts that I wasn't quite sure what to do with.
Before long I felt strongly that I wanted to collect all of my reasons for rejecting Christianity into a single, streamlined volume, if for nobody else, then at least for me. I've learned that there are two great personal advantages to organizing one's thoughts on topics that matter. One is that it helps you to keep your thoughts more organized in general. The other is that it can help provide sort of a sanity check later on since, as time goes by, you might forget why you formed certain opinions, and revisiting your own thought process can be incredibly cathartic. This is especially true if you (like me) suffer from a mild anxiety disorder and also if you (like me) are coming away from a lifetime of people telling you that your mistakes could result in eternal torment.
But beyond the personal advantages of writing, I also had this strong personal hope that maybe if I communicated my thoughts as carefully and thoughtfully as possible, it would at least help to restore some of the strained or broken relationships with people back in my home community. I didn't expect to win people over to my views (to be honest, the thought of "taking people with me" was a constant source of anxiety toward the end of my time in the church), but I figured it would at least provide a framework for better understanding, particularly with certain of my family members.
In the space of about a year, I finished a complete first draft of the book I envisioned. In the end, it was enormous. I think it came to something like 140,000 words. Not only that, but I had to admit that it was also probably quite boring. I spent some time working on a much shorter, cleaner draft. I can't say it was any less boring, but who knows? I've always been my own biggest critic (on second thought, I think that distinction now belongs to J. P. Holding). In any case, I had a friend who worked in publishing who was helping me with pointers, and I was starting to think about how to get this thing out there.
I won't go into the reasons for why I ended up putting the project on hold. I'll just say that there was suddenly (and unexpectedly) a tremendous amount of pressure on me not to go through with publishing anything. I caved, and I didn't pick the project up again until about five years later, during the quarantine. In hindsight, I think this gave me enough distance from it to eventually come back with a better ability to self-edit and to weed out some weak points. One of the first choices I made was to break the project up into smaller pieces, as opposed to trying to cram every single opinion of mine into a single volume. No wonder the first draft had been so long! I decided to remove two sections completely, with the option of possibly revisiting them at a later date: one on the problems with different Christian apologetic strategies, and another on the problems related to various Christian doctrines. The two remaining sections became my two planned books, one on the Bible, and the other on Jesus. I decided to write about the Bible first.
Now early on in the quarantine, I decided to do a free consultation with Joshua Harris, the guy who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye and became a pastor before having his own crisis of faith and leaving the church. I don't know what he's doing now, but at the time he was working as a brand consultant. I thought it might be interesting to talk to him about my writing project, and it certainly was, but there were two things I took away from that conversation. First, I obviously knew that I didn't really have a platform with which to build an audience for my writing. It's true that I had been doing well in comedy, but only modestly, and with a very small social media following and mostly local appeal. This was not going to translate to an audience for a non-comedic writing project about religion with almost no personal narrative in it. Second, I just had zero interest in trying to build a strong "brand." Harris gave me a lot of good advice about connecting with other authors on social media and sharing their work and other stuff like that. But for me, this sounds like a personal nightmare. I just don't have enough interest in that to devote the amount of time to it that would be needed. For these reasons, I stopped thinking about traditional publishing, and I also became comfortable with the fact that writing was probably never going to be a career for me, much less a stable source of income. It was more like a hobby, and that was perfectly fine with me. For that reason, I stopped worrying about building an audience and started looking into self-publishing.
Of course, I still had an audience in mind for my book, which played a strong role in guiding how carefully I tried to document everything I said. Mainly, I was thinking about people I knew. In fact, my original plan was to send finished copies to specific friends or family members to see if I could open a dialogue with them. Once the book was done, I actually tried to put this plan into action. I started with my parents, and suffice it to say, it did not go over terribly well, in spite of my efforts to make the interaction as warm and friendly as possible. That pretty much killed my enthusiasm for initiating those sorts of conversations with people who had not been very invested in my life in a long time. On the one hand, I thought that maybe it was an obnoxious thing for me to do to people who weren't asking to have that conversation in the first place. On the other hand, I also felt that I probably needed to let go of this naive hope of restoring old relationships with people who obviously had not been very interested in staying connected with me anyway.
That was a hard lesson, although I suppose it played an important role in my personal growth. But once I had that realization, I also realized that I hadn't really written Politely Rejecting the Bible in my own preferred style, but in a style that I thought would offer more to loved ones so that they could see not just my exact thought process, but also just how many resources I had consulted in trying to navigate these issues. That, by the way, is why my first book has a full bibliography and index, and why the second one does not. (Sidenote: writing an index for a self-published book is absurdly complicated and will absolutely drive you to the brink of madness.)
My second book, Politely Rejecting Jesus, was a lot more satisfying personally, and I put almost no effort into marketing it because that didn't really matter as much to me. I was not laboring under the stress of having to prove every single little relevant point. Rather, I was giving as much information as I think would have benefited a younger version of myself, without packing so much in that it would have overloaded my brain or killed my interest.
And that gets me to my present-day goals for writing. Yes, I am interested in making them publicly available in case anyone is interested in that kind of resource. But mostly I am writing just to organize my thoughts, and the main purpose of my books is to keep my main thoughts streamlined and accessible. If anything more comes from that, then great (actually I may be able to get my book into some of the local bookstores, which is exciting). But if not, then that's fine with me too.
And this is why I'd like to revisit the first book. Among other things, I'd like to reshape it to be more aligned with my current writing goals, and to make more sense as a companion to Politely Rejecting Jesus. (Incidentally, my first attempt to create something more condensed and readable based on the material in the first book was called The Case Against the Bible in a Nutshell. It was an experiment in several ways, one of which was that I wanted to try out a feature that Amazon was offering for self-publishing authors, which is why the book was only available there. I've since removed the book from Amazon, and I don't really have any interest in promoting it.)
Aesthetic Preferences
Since Politely Rejecting the Bible was self-published, all the work of editing and designing the book fell on me. Thankfully I had a couple friends who helped with reading the manuscript and providing feedback. I think it came out looking alright, but I never really liked the cover I made, and I had some issues with formatting the text. Of course, I ran into an entirely different set of formatting issues when working on the second book, but no need to get into that here.
Formatting issues aside, there are also some stylistic choices that I made in the second book that I think would benefit the first book. One of these was to use a less academic writing style. More significantly, I decided (with only a couple of understandable exceptions) not to engage with any specific authors by name, focusing more on arguments and ideas. This made the second book flow a lot more easily, I think, and I think it would help to tighten the first book's focus.
In any case, my brain will probably not rest until the style of the first book matches the style of the second book. I am also dying to remove the book's subtitle.
Streamlining the Material
The last reason I have been working on a second edition for Politely Rejecting the Bible is that I'd like to streamline the central argument and make the whole thing a bit easier to follow. This involves rearranging the material significantly and removing some sections that now seem unnecessary. I’ve also done a fair amount of rewriting, mostly in the interest of condensing certain discussions that felt unnecessarily detailed, although I’ve added some new material as well.
The most significant area of revision will be expanding the book's focus from the doctrine of inerrancy (which holds that everything the Bible affirms is true) to the doctrine of inspiration (which holds that the Bible is a divine revelation). In the first edition I focused on inerrancy because my basic point was just to demonstrate that the Bible contains undeniable falsehoods, regardless of whether that fact can be accommodated into a Christian framework or not. In the concluding chapter, I offered some brief thoughts about why my rejection of inerrancy also led me to reject the doctrine of inspiration, but I did not intend it to be a fully worked out argument. Again, my thinking was that this would allow me to explain to certain people in my life why my views of the Bible changed while I was still a devout Christian.
Since writing the book, I have come to a couple of important realizations. First, the version of inerrancy that I grew up with was, in fact, much stricter than the version that is endorsed by thoughtful, conservative Christian philosophers. The most shocking part of this for me is the realization that the doctrine of inerrancy can be coherently formulated (I think) in a way that allows for the Bible to make false statements, just as long as those statements do not compromise the teaching of scripture. This simple realization drastically reduces the value of identifying historical falsehoods in the Bible, since some of them (including at least a couple of the cases I explored in my book) need not be treated as carrying any pedagogical weight.
Of course, since there are lots of Christians who affirm the stricter version of inerrancy (I know because I grew up surrounded by them), it's not as if the historical falsehoods have no significance. But it has always been my belief that, when criticizing an opponent's viewpoint, the best method is to attack the most plausible version of that viewpoint. This doesn't mean that the most plausible version of inerrancy can allow for just any historical falsehoods in the Bible. But there is definitely an opportunity to streamline my argument here.
Furthermore, while I acknowledged the connection between the Bible's moral and theological teachings and its divine authority in the book's conclusion, I think even I failed to appreciate just how significant this really is, in light of the Bible's undeniable moral and theological falsehoods. In fact, it's fair to say that I lost my confidence in using the Bible as an authoritative source of divine truth once I realized its teachings could not always be trusted. The only reason I tried to hang on to the doctrine of inspiration for some time after that is that I had not yet decisively ruled out certain liberal or revisionist approaches that, I think, merit important criticism of their own.
This means that there is one claim in the book that calls for serious correction. I claimed that nobody in the church prior to the nineteenth century ever insisted on always affirming the literal meaning of the biblical writings. In hindsight, I believe that this claim is false. However, it's not too damaging to my argument, since the more fundamental point that I was trying to make was that nobody in the early church insisted on always affirming the Bible's literal meaning, and to the best of my understanding, this still seems to be correct. The earliest Christian writer I am aware of who speaks (as far as I know) of fully affirming the literal meaning of the Bible is Thomas Aquinas. So my central argument is not much affected. Nevertheless, I see a good opportunity here to strengthen my discussion about the relationship between Christian theology and the Bible's moral and theological teachings.
Incidentally, since I mentioned J. P. Holding earlier, I might as well also mention that in my book I misattributed an article from his website to Holding himself rather than to the correct author, who was acting as a guest writer. I've always wanted to get that fixed. Apparently Holding now has a pretty sizable paragraph on his website ruthlessly insulting me for what I think is a fairly normal and harmless error. I've enjoyed showing the paragraph to a few of my friends, since it's truly one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen.
In any case, my hope is to get the second edition of Politely Rejecting the Bible (sans the subtitle!) out sometime later this year.