Being Christian - A Novel

The product of a violent home, John Christian Hillcox overcomes long odds to build a Texas megachurch from where he preaches the gospels of Prosperity and End Times, while also using the power of his voting bloc as a political cudgel. A man of enormous appetites and inadequate self-control, Pastor Hillcox rallies his church and televangelical flock to oppose everything he considers immoral and detrimental to the United States' becoming the godly, Christian nation it is meant to be. Being Christian is a gripping psychological tale of a man who utilizes religion to justify his own sins and lies, heedless of the consequences for his loved ones, his community, and the world at large. The story of this larger-than-life, but all too familiar, character follows him from his crime-ridden early adulthood to the prime of his ministry in post-9/11 America. Not since the twentieth century's Elmer Gantry has a novel so exposed the religious film-flammery and hypocrisy that now threatens to tear apart the American social and political fabric. Being Christian is a quintessentially American story, based on the ideologies and personalities that make the news every day with their challenges to the Constitutional religious/political divide.