How to Be a Christian (And Not Turn Evil)
And Introduction to Series #1

“When the Bible and Jesus conflict. Always go with Jesus.”
-Marcus J. Borg

Welcome to the first series from If Not By Faith Zine Publishing: How to Be a Christian (And Not Turn Evil). A set of zines on my complicated journey of being a leftist, reconstructing faith, following the teaching of Jesus, and navigating some of the more difficult sections of the Bible and the church. 

There are a lot of issues we have to come up against when we’re reading the Bible through a modern lens. At times it is easy to just dismiss the teachings of Jesus and the letters of the New Testament all together as misogynistic, homophobic rhetoric that we should just throw out all together. I’m not here to convince anyone otherwise, but I do believe that when you begin peeling back the layers you arrive to a different conclusion. One of radical love, social justice and martyrdom for the oppressed. 

The title was heavily inspired by Peter Enns book, How The Bible Actually Works’ chapter “How to Read the Bible and Not Become Evil”. I want to thank Peter Enns, Marcus J. Borg, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Bart Ehrman, Jon Adams, Filip Holm, Andrew Mark Henry, The Oxford Annotated Bible, The SBL Study Bible, The Book of James, Lao Tzu, Buddha, and of course, Jesus for inspiring me and giving me the strength to reconstruct my faith. 

Any quotes from the Bible are likely from the NSRV or NSRVUE