READING THE BESTSELLERS

The Rebel Christ By Michael Coren Dundurn, 2021. 160 pages. $20 (e-book $10, audio $16)

Raised a secular Englishman Michael Coren once converted to evangelicalism, then to conservative Roman Catholicism, and is now a progressive Anglican. What has stayed the same, as he has opined in various media, is that he is always luminously right and his opponents contemptibly wrong.

Talk media notoriously trades in oversimplification, polarization and combat, and Coren has amassed an impressive list of awards to certify his ability to rile up audiences. But is this the sort of person – whose only religious credentials are ordination in the widely inclusive Anglican Church of Canada (following a divinity degree from its Trinity College in Toronto) – anyone should heed when it comes to the Christian religion? Well, maybe.

Many people will not come within a stone’s throw of Christianity because of their antagonism toward Christian antagonism. Christian ferocity over sexuality, dying with dignity and other sensitive issues has disgusted many of our neighbours. Only someone who quickly sets out progressive credentials has a hope of being heard by such people, and Coren eagerly sets out his.

He offers a Jesus emancipated from flag and fury, a Jesus who contends for justice, generosity, hospitality, forgiveness, forbearance and other good things so quickly lost in the fog of the culture wars.

This is the Jesus, Coren says, of the Gospels – a Jesus who aligns with the best impulses of our culture, not the worst.

Fair enough. But Coren’s book, aside from a good chapter chock-full of Scripture on Jesus and the poor, doesn’t talk much about Jesus. Like the pundit he has always been, he argues at length for his own views, only occasionally genuflecting toward Jesus.

Readers will have to be content that at least Christ is indeed preached here in some way (Philippians 1:18).