Review from Altar Magazine- I once knew someone who prided himself on being a communist. He would tell his political affiliation to everyone, including (if the opportunity presented itself) the guy delivering pizzas. In fact, my ex-friend really wasn't so much as a communist as a person who liked to stir up trouble. The way that he would tell people over and over again of his communist leanings drove me nuts and stuck in my memory. So when I started reading Davidson Loehr's American Fascism & God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher, and when I noticed he kept identifying himself as a "heretic," I groaned out loud and prepared myself for a long book. I was sure that I was in for a book by a guy who wouldn't actually live up to what he proclaimed to be, like my former friend. To my delight, Loehr quits the heretic rhetoric after his introduction and delivers a book full of various sermons he has given at his Unitarian Universalist church in Austin, Texas. The book offers reprints on sermons focusing on four topics: God, fascism, America, and honest religion.

Perhaps the most powerful sermon, not surprisingly, is the one that was given immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Loehr starts the sermon talking about his initial reaction to the 9/11 attacks as one of "kill the bastards," whoever they are! While much of the rest of the sermon focuses on how to respond to the attack when he later came to see the problem in thinking only of vengeance. This was the first sermon that I read, and the gut-wrenching honestly made me like Loehr instantly. I appreciated his honestly. Among the more interesting sermons are the ones that inform us about the soullessness of corporations (comparing them to the zombies in Invasion of the Body Snatchers), another challenges us to rethink our concept of God, and the final essay cries out for religion to save itself from its followers, to paraphrase the bumper sticker.