Followers of Christ Are Not Culture Warriors
We should be showing people a better way to live, not demanding control over God-given free-will
In Embracing Curiosity, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life, exploring my faith and politics with curiosity and nuance.
The truth is, I often struggle to call myself a Christian.
That’s not because I’m not actually a Christian. I am. I believe in the Triune God. I believe that our world doesn’t make sense without a Creator. I believe that I am a sinful human being living in a fallen world and that Jesus, both son of God and God, redeems our fallen world.
But faith is complicated because humans are complicated, and the older I get and the more complex my faith gets, the harder it is for me to call myself a Christian in public.
Because in the United States, the word “Christian” has become weighed down with so much more than just being a follower of Christ.
It didn’t always feel this way.
Being a forty-something who grew up during the rise of the culture wars and during the height of purity culture, I was already having to carefully weed out the extra-Biblical from my faith by the time I was thirty. Then 2016 happened, and my life as a Christian would never be the same, because that was the year I had to put the word “but” after any declaration of faith.
I’m a Christian, but I don’t support a greedy businessman who is a serial liar and womanizer who probably committed multiple sexual assaults, for president.
I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe that unfettered-Capitalism is the way God calls us to live out his mission here on earth.
I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe that the Second Amendment is my God-given right.
I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe in ignoring precautionary measures during a global pandemic.
I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe that members of the LGTBQA+ community are an abomination and going to hell.
I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe America is a Christian nation and I don’t believe it is especially blessed by God.
Instead, I believe that my faith shows me a better way to love and serve my neighbors. I believe that my faith shows me a better way to live, a way that leads to human flourishing when the conditions are right. I believe that we are here because of the work of a loving Creator and that we have a duty to show that love to everyone around us. Does the Law matter? Yes, because it gives us specific instructions for how to live in community. But Jesus summed up the Law with these final commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31
In Rainn Wilson’s new book Soul Boom, he argues for the need for a faith revolution in the United States. A member of the Baha’i faith, he doesn’t encourage readers to select one specific organized religion, but he sees the importance of being a part of an active faith community and finding a purpose for our lives outside of “we live and then we die.” With the number of “Nones” growing every year, particularly in Millennials and Gen Z, maybe it’s time that we start paying closer attention to the impact of loud, moralistic declarations of faith that push people away from God instead of drawing them nearer.
As James Talarico told his Texas colleagues who were trying to force through a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms, “A religion that has to force people to put up a poster to prove its legitimacy is a dead religion.”
And while I believe that God and His purposes for this world are much bigger than the work of a single nation, I also believe that a religion that denies people their free will to practice their faith how they see fit and forces a faith specific moral code onto those who do not practice their faith, is a dying religion. It displays a frightening lack of humility that puts humans in the role of playing God and encourages a stagnant approach to faith development. It removes individual humans from an important covenant relationship with the Almighty.
God wrote the Ten Commandments and gave them to Moses for the purposes of the Israelites. It was a moral code intended for the flourishing of His people. It was not a code for the Babylonians or the Egyptians or the Canaanites. It was a code for the Israelites.
Paul wrote his letters for the sake of the Christian churches throughout the Roman Empire. He was writing to the followers of a religion that was just starting, a faith system with roots in an older Jewish faith, the fulfillment of the Old Testament for Jews and Gentiles alike. Each directive he passed down to the new churches sprouting up all over the Empire were directives for church members and church members only. He was trying to show them a better way to live, a way that set them apart from the polytheistic and often harmful practices of their neighbors.
In her book, Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, L’Engle writes, “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” We should be working to make people curious about God and Christianity, not driving them away because of how we treat others, those who we see as being “outside” of our faith.
And with the behavior of the most vocal and public of Christian voices in America, is it any wonder that more and more people are leaving the Church as they enter adulthood and are not coming back?
Throughout my childhood, I was frequently told about bias against Christians. I was told that I was going to have to defend my faith against my public-school classmates who would mock me for being a Christian, but that never happened. And while I frequently see anti-Christian bias in the media, I usually find it instructive instead of offensive. And even when I am offended (and that does happen), I have to first ask myself why I’m offended and what truth might there be in the bias presented. Rainn Wilson got into hot water on all sides when he criticized the portrayal of the Christian pastor in the HBO show, The Last of Us, but both he and the show had a point: It would be good to see a positive portrayal of a Christian leader and we have seen very few examples of positive, vocal Christian leadership in recent years.
I may be frustrated with the state of Christianity in America today, but I still believe that the world needs Jesus. As Shane Claiborne wrote in his book Rethinking Life,
It’s easy for us to look back with disgust at the Christian colonizers and deem ourselves morally and theologically superior. But let’s resist that temptation and ask some deeper questions: How does the colonizing mindset still affect us today? In what ways might the legacy of colonization still be active in our missions and evangelism? What might it look like to heal the wounds of history by reimagining what it means to ‘go into all the world’ with the good news of Jesus?…The answer to bad religion is not no religion but good religion.1
Later in his book, Claiborne challenges readers to think about a better way moving forward. He says, “The prophets were not fortune tellers but truth tellers. And they were trying not to predict the future but to change the future. They wanted to wake us up to the present and invited us to imagine a different future than the one we’re headed toward.”2 As Christians, we should be presenting to our neighbors a better way through our words and actions, not by forcing them to comply with our vision for the world but by offering to work with them to build a truly pluralistic society that shows a love and care for our neighbors and our earthly home. As Mindy Summers stated in a recent Instagram post: “We are called to love our neighbors, not control our neighbors. I think the beloved people around us are simply waiting to live in harmony with us.”
And many are still hungry for faith and community, as Diana Butler Bass pointed out in a recent newsletter.
I don’t want to have to say, “I am a Christian, but.” I want my faith to be seen as a personal asset, something that makes me a trustworthy friend, colleague, and neighbor. I want my faith to be a point of curiosity, not a target of disgust. I don’t want to keep being disappointed by those who claim to follow Christ yet drive away non-believers with their hate and vitriol.
And I know that I’m not the only one, knowledge that keeps me going even when it feels like I should just give up.
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Claiborne, Shane. Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person. Zondervan, 2023, p. 121.
Claiborne, Shane. Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person. Zondervan, 2023, p. 256
You've written the words of my heart.
Great piece! Fellow 40-something here, and I do not want to re-live culture wars either. You display much wisdom in your words.