After Reading Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang

I picked up John Fugelsang's work not really knowing what to expect. I'd heard his name floating around in comedy circles and seen clips of his commentary on social media, but I didn't know much about his perspective on faith and politics. What I discovered was something far more nuanced and challenging than I anticipated—a voice that refuses to let either the religious right or the secular left off the hook, a comedian-philosopher who uses humor to cut through hypocrisy and get to something deeper. The title itself grabbed me: Separation of Church and Hate. It's provocative, sure, but it's also precise. Fugelsang isn't calling for the separation of church and state in some abstract constitutional sense—he's calling for something far more personal and urgent. He's asking us to separate the teachings of Jesus, the historical figure who preached radical love and service to the marginalized, from the hate, judgment, and exclusion that too often gets wrapped in religious language. I'm not writing this as a theologian or a political commentator. I'm writing as someone who grew up with religion in the background, who's watched faith be weaponized in political debates, and who's struggled to reconcile the Jesus I read about in the Gospels with the Jesus invoked on cable news. Fugelsang's perspective gave me language for feelings I'd had but couldn't quite articulate—the sense that something had gone deeply wrong when the same faith tradition that spoke about loving your enemy and caring for the least among us became associated with exclusion, judgment, and political power. Grab a copy of yours now!