Claiborne starts his letter with an apology followed by a story:

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn’s Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, “God is not a monster.” Maybe next time I will.

Then there is more apology:

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, “I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ.” A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved.

I have run into Claiborne a few times at Christian conferences of one kind and another, but we’ve never had a real conversation.  My guess is that he picked up his radical take on the Christian message from folks like Tony Campolo, a professor at Eastern College who blends sociology, theology, politics and stand up comedy into an entertaining and, for many, infuriating message. 

But Claiborne isn’t just a Junior version of Tony Campolo.  For one thing, Campolo is as bald as the proverbial cue ball and I suspect Claiborne’s mother thinks he has entirely too much hair.  More significantly, Campolo addresses an aging audience still wrestling with the thrills and chills of the 1960s; Claiborne talks to adolescents and young adults who have very different issues. 

The Esquire letter doesn’t touch on the criminal justice system, but it cuts to the heart of the punitive Antichrist religion that drives that regime and the gracious God who calls us to a higher vision.

How strange that a young man who lives on next to nothing and makes his own clothes should catch the ear of Esquire. 

Here’s the tail end of Claiborne’s letter:

The entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay “out there” but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, “Nothing good could come.” It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors… a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, “I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.” If those of us who believe in God do not believe God’s grace is big enough to save the whole world… well, we should at least pray that it is.