Tomorrow I will lose the use of my left arm for a month or so as I have a reconstruction of my left shoulder in the morning. I have practiced typing using one hand, and it is slow at best. So, I wanted to do a couple of posts on loosely connected topics before I end posting for a while.

Intrinsic Vs Extrinsic Christianity

Have you ever felt that something was out of kilter in the world, and you don’t know what the root cause is? Yet, your curiosity about that cause is in the back of your mind day and night. This is how I feel about Christianity.

There are parts of American cultural Christianity I love and parts I hate. While I’ve tried to put it into boxes of denominations, fundamental beliefs, conservative or liberal, etc., it seems to transcend those labels. You will find a mixture of Christian brands within the same church, the same family, and the same person.

Presently, I’m arriving at a conclusion, and it could be wrong or right, and it is about intrinsic vs extrinsic Christianity. But I will describe what I have observed.

The intrinsic Christianity, the kind I hate, is consumed with the self, “what Christianity, Jesus, or the church can do for me.” I read a Christian book that argued that before you love others, you must learn to love yourself first. While there is a grain of truth in that, if someone is so self-loathing, it is a serious problem. I’ve been there at times in my own life. But naturally, we care more about ourselves than others, and the great work is learning to focus on others. But the intrinsic Christianity focuses too much on the problem of not loving yourself enough. It focuses on your problems so much that it eclipses the problems of the world, the others.

I wrote an article here on this blog several years ago, which I titled “When Narcissus Became a Christian.” Christianity, which enslaved people, conquered people, waged war against people, tortured people, hates people, and the list goes on, is an example of the extreme of this type of Christianity.

Another symptom of intrinsic Christianity is a focus on who has done us, or me, wrong. They read about, follow, and overstate the persecution of Christians, while ignoring the suffering of non-Christians. They talk about how society infringes on their rights (which is an illusion) while they completely ignore the suffering in Gaza (not acknowledging that 1% of those being bombed and killed in Gaza identify as Christian), ignoring what’s going on in Sudan, Iran, or Ukraine… or the person down the street.

The intrinsic Christian champions personal spirituality, personal godliness, and personal dogma fidelity, at the expense of having friends who don’t fit their ideals. I think of the monks of early Christianity, who focused on solitude, from living in a cave to living at the top of a pole, being totally consumed with their own purity. But Jesus was torn apart, literally, by the masses.

I suspect that these intrinsic Christians find the narcissist Donald Trump attractive, because he is a champion of the self. Rid the country of immigrants so that we can have more. Attack the country and take its spoils. Attack people who are different from us.

The battle in Minneapolis was a great example of a flashpoint between these two types of Christianity. Many Christians supported the brutal take-down of immigrants under the notion, as one of those Christians told me, because those immigrants, bringing disease, taking our jobs, and money. “God is on our side,” he said, “because God hates the thief.” But who’s the real thief?

It is this brand of Christianity that I hate. My 38 years of evangelism had a small part about service to others, but were built mostly upon myself. When I was forced into total solitude after my stem cell transplant, I was placed on strict home quarantine due to COVID. In that place, while my relationship with God was breathtaking, it was, however, pushing me in a narcissistic direction. My own thoughts and feelings consumed me. I longed for the happiness I felt when I was consumed by the others, working in a refugee camp, helping patients, and such.

The intrinsic Christianity fights for dogmatic purity at the expense of love. They don’t make friends because they care about that friend, but so they can use that friend as leverage to boost their own feelings of goodness. I used to attack people I thought were spiritually inferior. I’ve been attacked many times by those who think I’m inferior.

The Extrinsic Christian doesn’t ask the question, “Am I warm?” “Am I fed?” “Am I safe?” “Am I loved,” and so on, but ask, “Are they warm?” “Are they safe?” and so on. When you meet an extrinsic Christian, they ask you, “How are you?” and wait to hear your response. The intrinsic ones make it about how they are superior to you, “I can’t believe you said that, or believe that, or live that way.”

As I have studied the life of Christ, I have never seen the place where he fought for the rights of Christians, but told them that the rights of others matter. He never said, as some gurus say, “Love yourself,” as he assumes you already do. He never told them to think of themselves as the best, but as the servants of the world.

That is one thing I love about my church: the number of people there who live extrinsically.

Curiosity

There is another thing, under the sun, that perplexes me. It’s hard to put into words, except for the willing lack of knowledge about things. While some think I am talking about intelligence, it’s more complicated than that. Intelligence is about rationality and memory. If it is based on just memory, I am a dunce. But I think it is based on curiosity.

It is hard for me to understand the incurious Christian, who never wonders “How?” or “Why.” Those people become fixed in their original notions as in concrete. I respect those who read, who study, who go to places that make them very uncomfortable.

The downside to fidelity is becoming incurious. I must keep my mind tethered to what I was told to believe, or I may wander away from it.

I grew up curious, very curious, but then when Christianity first took hold of me, it snuffed the flame of my curiosity like a candle snuffer. I remember reading a book in the dorm, and for a moment, I thought the author was saying something against what we were told we had to believe to be a good person.

I threw that book into the garbage can. The next day, I fished it out and began to read again. When the author said something again that seemed to challenge my group-given dogma, I threw it back in the garbage can.

When I had a crisis of faith, while serving as a missionary in Egypt, I told my boss (whose lifestyle was causing me to doubt that Christianity was true) that I was going back to America to study, because I had doubts. He warned me, “You’d better not. I had a friend who studied, and he became an atheist.”

If a teenager told me he was having doubts about his Christian faith, I would encourage him to study all the great atheists. Listen to their lectures and debates. Do it until your mind is flooded with doubts… but don’t stop there. Study more. Study until the doubts run dry, and the sunrises on the notion that even the best atheists, like some of the great religionists, come up short in the end.

These thoughts may not be clear, but I’m out of time. I need to finish my taxes, put away my laptop, and hopefully pick it up again in a few weeks, when I can type again.

God bless you. May your courtesy expand and your vision rise up to see others more than yourself.

Mike

As we would say in Tennessee, Luv you all!