Several years ago, I had the opportunity to teach Sunday school to a group of teenagers. I was delighted to do so because my heart was with those disillusioned with the Christian culture, and the Millennials were one of the groups that were most likely to exit Christianity after being raised in Christian homes. Additionally, several of my kids were teenagers at the time.

This church, like most, was making the fatal mistake of trying to force the teenagers to adapt to the whole Christian culture to be Christian. For example, a few months later, the church discussed making the belief in a 6,000-year-old Earth a requirement of their faith. When I opposed that idea, I too was declared to be “not a real Christian,” forcing me to leave that church.

In the first class, I listed about twenty “Christian things.”  I asked the class to categorize them into one of two categories: “Christian Culture” and “Biblical Mandate.” They seemed confused. But in the end, they listed every single item as “A Biblical mandate.”

The items I mentioned included, banning abortion, stopping gay marriage, meeting on Sunday mornings for worship, Sunday worship must consist of Sunday school at 10, worship service at 11, building churches, church membership, praying before eating, deporting illegal immigrants, singing Christian hymns, not saying “cuss words,” not drinking alcohol, stopping the teaching of evolution, believing that God ordained every single word of our present Bible and is perfect, voting Republican, seeing science as from the devil, never doubting God’s existence, believe everything Christian by faith-not by evidence, loving everyone, and denying your interests for the sake of others. In my view, only the last two were essential to the Christian experience or Biblical mandates. But I didn’t share my personal opinions as I knew that would be a bridge too far at that stage. However, I would soon learn that just the exercise was a bridge too far, as the pastor quickly fired me as a Sunday school teacher. He said it was because their parents were complaining about me.

The objective of this exercise was to differentiate between Christian cultural practices and fundamental Biblical mandates.  When these kids leave Christianity, and I only know of one that did not eventually leave, I knew that they would be leaving because of the Christian cultural items, not the fundamental essentials of following the historical Jesus of Galilee.

For humans, it is tough to recognize our culture as just culture. People will fight you to the death to conserve their culture. Religion is worse because it always represents its culture as a mandate from the creator of the cosmos. Every time I violate that culture, like saying I don’t like religion or that I love philosophy, or that the Biblical church are the people called out but the human church (not a bad thing, yet extraneous) is the organized church, a Christian wants to knock my teeth out or at least inform me that “You are not a real Christian.” It is a miracle, almost literally, that I have not left Christianity for good myself.

I was fortunate that when I experienced my crisis of faith in 1990, I was living in a radically different culture from the American Christian one. I had almost no contact at the time with Christians or Americans. While I had always been interested in human behavior, having studied psychology and sociology in college, the role of culture became very real to me for the first time.

During my first few years of recovery, I found the study of history profoundly helpful. I was able to make sense of why American Christians think the way they do, the vast majority having nothing to do with the Bible. The other problem is that religious people see their history as designed and controlled by God. So, even if they knew that a person, such as a Pope, declared that human life begins at conception, they would still believe that God did that. It is hard to imagine that fallible humans could have created the Christian culture.

It would be so much easier to have this discussion if we could step back and see our culture as just culture, not a divine mandate. Then, the historical Jesus of Galilee would have the chance to stand out, with his revolutionary teachings that would make this world a better place. If so, I believe people would flock to follow the simple Jesus in unprecedented numbers.

Respectfully,

Mike