Book excerpt: Defrocking the Devil/Theology of Fear is a brief history of the last 2,500 years of monotheism using the actual words of the men who claimed to know the devilfigure most intimately. From Peter to Constantine to Martin Luther to our present day theologians, these men and hundreds more included in this book supported the early Church fathers arguments for the inclusion of Satan into Christian polemics. A dualism appeared in the story of Jesus immediately after his crucifixion. Instead of tirelessly promoting the Christian message of love thy neighbor as thyself a new spiritual equation of hate, torture and murder entered the theological landscape. Defrocking the Devil is an attempt to puncture the myths surrounding the words: evil, devil and hell. Two thousand years after the birth of Christianity and fourteen hundred years after the start of Islam, hundreds of millions of people currently living on this planet are in real fear of one day ending up down in the devils lair. How did Christian belief in Jesus become conditional upon the existence of fictional beings and wicked subterranean places? Defrocking the Devil seeks to illuminate the darkness and empower all people of faith to move beyond theologies that advocate violence into the spiritual equation. There have been many books written about this dark side of Western theology, but few historians do much more than recount its bloody genocidal history. Defrocking the Devil actively seeks to tear down such religious dogmas by using the very words of those who extolled such a hurtful, anti- Christian philosophy.