The "If Jesus Came Back..." Award-Winner: Stephen Baldwin!

Reading this article in Salon, I’m inspired to hand out the first “If Jesus Came Back” award.

What’s that about?

It’s the award given in honor of that famous line spoken by Max Von Sydow in Woody Allen’s film Hannah and Her Sisters: “If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.”

The award goes to… yes… Stephen Baldwin!

Here’s a few choice excerpts:

Stephen Baldwin preaches to teens that Bono is in league with Satan. Don’t laugh, the born-again actor is a cultural advisor to Bush and one of the most popular new evangelists in the country.

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Baldwin preaches that free will is a lie of Satan — we must shut off our brains, he says, and be led by what God tells our hearts. Furthermore, he writes, efforts to end global poverty and violence are just the sort of “stupid arrogance” that incur God’s wrath, which we’ll be feeling any day now in the coming apocalypse.

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Baldwin writes that “God has called me to go and make disciples of the youth of America. That is what I am going to try to do, and if you try to stop me I am going to break your face.”

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“The Unusual Suspect” features an open letter to Bono, lambasting him for lobbying for debt relief for developing countries instead of preaching the gospel on MTV. Bono must be in league with Satan, whom Baldwin spends a lot of time thinking about. “I am smart enough to know that Satan is alive and well today,” he writes. “Satan has all kinds of power, and he is able to control the minds of anyone whose mind isn’t controlled by God.” Baldwin’s theology — and criticism of secularists and Christian poseurs like Bono — is written with remarkable confidence for someone who can only recite six of the Ten Commandments and four of the Twelve Apostles.

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Ryan Dobson receives a shout-out in Baldwin’s book as a messenger for “Homey,” as Baldwin calls God. In Dobson’s book “Be Intolerant,” he rails against relativism, homosexuals, environmentalists and “inclusive, open-minded Christians,” charging his readers to “get your armor on and take up your cross.” He knows just how to instill pride in the heart of his father. “I bleed conservatism,” Dobson told me when I met him at a Christian publishing convention in Denver last year, crossing his ornately inked arms over a T-shirt that says, “Jesus Loves My Tattoos.”