Opening Statement

I will start with a bold statement: I am convinced that most Christians care more about their traditions and culture than they do about God or Jesus as the messiah. In the following articles, I will lay out the evidence for this claim and offer a way forward in this age, when the relevance of the Christian church is dwindling.

 I am pivoting from my last post. When I go back and read my posts, sometimes they don’t seem to communicate what I am trying to say. As I read the segue for this post, it sounded too much like it was about me. I face this dilemma: I must draw from personal experiences, yet it can sound like a personal gripe rather than a much larger concern about the state of Christianity in the twenty-first century.

While it is true that I have no good friendships with Christians anymore, I don’t write that out of some type of self-pity, or that my feelings are hurt. Yes, I regret that is the case, but I didn’t leave my Christian friendships because my feelings were hurt; I left because they made it impossible after they deemed me inferior in their spirituality, which they did when I didn’t comply with their culture and traditional ways of thinking.

Not having close Christian friends anymore is liberating. Before, I had to restrain what I typed here because of how my words had already alienated my previous close Christian friends, and I did not want to alienate more. However, I no longer have Christian friends to alienate and can speak truth into a world that would prefer not to hear it. To be clear, as always, I do this for the huge numbers of people, especially younger people, who have given up on traditional Christian thinking. It is for them; I lose sleep. Even my own children are estranged from a positive view of God and the historical Jesus, not because we didn’t raise them in church… but because we did.

Also, to be clearer, my grief is not based on my fear that this movement away from Christianity will end in eternal torture, but rationally, when you give up on a personal origin of our creation, you must give up on absolute meaning and morals; nihilism is the only remaining logical conclusion, and that is the rub.

Example 1.

About twenty years ago, I took over the teaching of a young adult (teen) Sunday school class. I was delighted to do so, because I had watched many teens graduate and leave Christianity for good. I knew that a lot was at stake.

Having reviewed the polls carefully, not just the numbers of those leaving the church, but the reasons they were leaving, almost none left because of the teachings of Jesus of Galilee or the belief in a creator, but because of cultural issues. There are some who lost their belief in a creator, and that wasn’t because of being “brainwashed” by higher education, but because they realized that their church experience had never given them sound reasons to believe in the first place, only traditions to follow.

I wanted to separate out those cultural issues they didn’t like from the simple essence of true Christianity. I wrote two headings on the whiteboard: Christian Essentials and Christian Culture.

Then I gave them a list of about thirty items, such as God exists, Jesus is the Messiah, Sunday school, church building, Jesus’ resurrection, worship service, sitting in pews, singing hymns karaoke-style, not saying a list of taboo words, loving others, believing the Earth was created six thousand years ago, smiling, never showing anger, rejecting science, and so on.

To my dismay, the group unanimously put all items under the Christian Essentials category.  I will add that, of the fifteen or so kids in that class, I know of only one who is still involved with the church.

To make this experiment even worse, when the pastor found out what I had done (and some of the kids were his), he immediately fired me as Sunday school teacher. A year later, when the congregation was considering forcing the teens to believe in a six-thousand-year-old earth in order to be Christians, I voiced my opposition. In response, the head elder and the pastor’s right-hand man declared me not to be a “real Christian” in front of the whole congregation. Afterward, the pastor hunted me down, sending me angry e-mails, until he appeared at my house and chewed me out for thirty minutes in front of my kids, declaring me a horrible human being. Profoundly traumatic for me. But this isn’t about my feelings being hurt; it’s about the impossibility of daring to question traditional ways of thinking in any church. Just a couple of generations ago, I would have been burned at the stake.

Speaking of Stake, What’s at Stake

I have many more examples, but I want to clarify what is at stake. No, as I’ve alluded to, I don’t think the resulting problem is damnation for those who leave the church. After years of contemplation, it is impossible for me to imagine a benevolent God who tortures for all eternity those who, through no fault of their own, find the organized Christian church unsavory. The concept of hell is a tool I think the church created to manipulate conformity. The church could (and does) damn you to eternal torture if you don’t believe their hundreds of dogmas and cultural behaviors. I’ve found Biblical interpretations to support the idea of universalism, Christ dying for all. Besides the collapse of the Christian church (meaning the institutional church, not the people), those leaving become unmoored from a monotheistic understanding of creation and meaning. The largest category that those who leave Christianity end up in is the “nones.” They have no beliefs anymore. So, I wished my own children believed in a personal, monotheistic God and in Jesus as the incarnate messenger of that God, for the absolute (extrinsic) meaning and morals it can establish.

Mike