The modern Christian church has given Christianity a bad name.
Last Sunday I steered the family car into the church parking lot and parked in the last available “pull through” spot. Trust me, you don’t want to be reversing in a church parking lot. As we pulled into the vacant spot, all eyes moved to the big, red, raised 4x4, mud covered pick-up truck beside us. This was what we all saw…
For clarity, that’s the church steeple rising above the sticker reading “F*CK JB”.
What would Jesus do, indeed.
This was the experience that moved me to type but I want to be clear that I’m not judging the owner of the truck. Some easy detective work would reveal this was the truck of a high school kid. If they understood the irony of mixing Jesus and politics or just how far removed a sticker like this should be from a religion centered on love, they would probably remove it. And if they simply didn’t know any better, I’m glad they were there and I hope they learn a lot about love. So while this was the moment that inspired me to gather my thoughts, this is definitely not about that kid.
In fact, it’s much more about the steeple in the background. I live in the Bible Belt and when I learned about that title in elementary school, they taught us that in the Bible Belt “there’s a church on every corner”. Sometimes that’s literally true and when you are in a southern town, you can often see a couple of other churches from one church parking lot.
I grew up here in the South and I regularly went to a Southern Baptist church where I was taught that God is love. Oddly, I was also taught, from the pulpit, that I should vote Republican and that supporting certain issues was more important that loving others. While I can’t see any version of my high school self putting a sticker like that on my car, I was definitely taught that some presidents were bad and some were good simply based on what they said about abortion or about gay people having rights. Or worse, based on who was labeled a "conservative" or a "liberal".
Like most kids, I listened to what I was told and accepted it as truth. Until I didn’t.
I do not like to be told what to do. My dad was probably like that or you may have other theories about why I am the way I am, but regardless, it’s a fact about me. If you tell me that I must do something, you’re going to need to provide reasoning for that command. I need to know why it’s dangerous to not listen to you. I need to know why it’s right to obey you. “Because I said so” has never worked on me. When I graduated college, I really began to sort things out for myself. I guess the early 20s are a good time for most people to do this. I’m also a very practical person and I just couldn’t see myself living by a set of rules just because someone said so. I needed to know what I believed, not what someone else believed.
At this point in my life, I asked some questions. Some were very specific and some were more general. I had been told the Bible was the source of all wisdom and that was the first place I looked. When someone is using the Bible as a starting point for a sermon, it’s pretty easy to use it to make any point you want. Want to teach someone that lying is wrong? Easy, just read the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5. “Thou shalt not bear false witness”. Want to teach someone that lying is sometimes ok? Easy, just read the story of Rahab lying to save the Israelites in Joshua 2.* (Seriously, the list goes on...scriptures talk about having slaves and setting slaves free, executing genocide and loving your neighbor, patriarchy and elevating women as leaders, vengance and grace, and on and on and on.)
I started to learn that the Bible was not the “instruction manual for life” as I had been taught. What the Bible is instead, is a compilation of stories that tell us how we should live. The difference between these two statements is greater than you can imagine.
I started to see that many of the Baptist preachers and church leaders I had grown up seeing as wise, were simply lacking the proper understanding of the book they used every week. They saw it as an encyclopedia and they could tell you all the do’s and don’ts contained inside. What they lacked was the ability to “interpret” the Biblical stories, something that Jewish Rabbis had been doing beginning with Moses. I mean, if everything was so cut and dry, why would Moses need to sit so long every day to decide meaningless arguments between grumpy Israelites? And if you’re worth your seminary degree, you’d know that interpretation was exactly what Jesus was bringing to the religion game when he was walking around and pissing off the religious hierarchy in Jerusalem.
Listen, if you’re not into the Bible and you’re not getting these references, just stick around a bit longer. I promise this is going somewhere.
Cutting to the chase, a proper context of scripture was often lost in sermons and in verse quoting. Just think about all the people you know who have Jeremiah 29:11 tattooed on their arm or framed in their house. (“For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”) This quote from God in the Bible was absolutely not written to your friend, your grandmother or anyone else living here in America. It was a very specific message to a very specific group of people undergoing a very specific punishment but it’s too much to go into here. Don’t take my word for it, look it up and read the whole story. (Or, i recommend the podcast "That Won't Preach", specifically the "Does God Plan for us to Suffer" released Jan 1, 2024.)
So imagine several volumes of sermons, many of which were built around a simple misunderstanding of the Bible, but still used to push an agenda or to urge church-goers to adopt a specific belief or behavior. I know it sounds nefarious but I don’t believe it was. Honestly. I think these dudes were well intentioned.
But it was still wrong.
What happened, and this is where you can tune back in if you were drifting before, is that generations of people in Christian churches grew up believing things that were just not true. The message of grace, mercy and love that resounds through every single act of violence, aggression and sin narrated by the Bible was lost in the telling. Even when the story of Jesus was told to highlight and emphasize what so many were beginning to miss, modern churches turned that into political agendas, lists of who was eligible to do the work of God and lists of who was NOT going to heaven. Church became a place where you were told who was in and who was out.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that organized religion is evil and self-serving. I will tell you this, though…overhearing someone saying that it costs $7 million for a few seconds of Super Bowl advertising, I couldn’t help but wonder how many hungry people could be fed if all of that money was diverted into one fund for soup kitchens. Then, I immediately thought of the multimillion dollar mega-church buildings being built all over the country and couldn’t help but wonder if it was justifiable to spend $10 million on a building for people to meet and say they love others while hundreds or thousands of people suffer from hunger and homelessness within a 10 mile radius of that building. Right, buildings are more important than people. That’s Christian.
This brings me to the “America First” attitude you’ll find in the modern church, and in the parking space beside me. All those Biblical promises, they weren’t for America. Much to the dismay of a lot of politicians and pastors, America isn’t mentioned in the Bible. Americans are not God’s chosen people and the very idea that America should secure its borders and keep the less fortunate out is quite contrary to the teachings of the Bible (Matthew 25:40). Jesus did not run for office, nor did he attempt to take control of the government. It’s worth noting that it was the religious leaders and the local government who led the push to condemn and execute Jesus. Maybe read that line again slowly.
These generations of misinformed and poorly educated church goers have had quite an impact on their world and not in the way the early church would have hoped. Christianity has not been the “good news” that people in the Mediterranean coastal areas experienced in the early 100s AD. Modern Christianity has been more closely associated with judgment, condemnation, repression and telling people they are going to hell. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? Well, a lot of people as it turns out.
The number of Americans identifying as Christian has fallen increasingly over the last few decades. Christian churches will tell you they are growing and this looks to be true when a single church in one area increases membership and attendance, but the untold story is that those new people are not new converts to Christianity, they’re simply church goers who were tired of their old church. When there’s one on every corner, it’s easy to find another one and they will find another one again when they get bored with the pastor or the activities.
In my job, I interact with students when they leave high school and begin to make their own choices. I see them leaving the faith systems of their childhood and looking for something they believe is actually true. They have zero interest in the oppressive and judgmental culture of the modern church. What they do have interest in is going where they feel loved and oddly, that’s often not anywhere near the local church. Weird, huh?
I know there are church people who would disagree. Their church is different. They love people. They’re generous. But let their actions speak. You don’t know someone loves you because they say it. You know they love you because of how they treat you ("you will know them by their fruit"). If you feel at all defensive about what I’m saying, I ask that you take a good, honest look around. More importantly, I ask that you take a good, honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and New Testament church. Do your actions match the one you say you follow? Does your church look like the churches where all possessions were pooled together for the good of the local community and everyone took what they needed? Or does that idea scare the heck out of you because it sounds like a Bernie Sanders speech?
Since we got here because of a political statement, let’s leave on one. I hear there’s an election this year. Do you plan to vote your religious beliefs? That’s cool. What exactly did Jesus say about the stranger, the alien, the widow and the orphan? What did he teach about who was your neighbor and how you should treat them? Jesus vaporized racism and classism with the story of the Good Samaritan. He put greed in its place with the story of the widow’s mite and the parable of the good steward. He put religion in its place when he called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers”. And not once, not even once, did he teach that you should create laws to force people to do what you believe is right. Faith can’t be legislated. Freedom to choose to do right or wrong has been a part of the God story literally since "the beginning”.
As I see it, the modern Christian Church is at a crossroads. They can turn from the pursuit of financial gain (ridiculous pastoral salary packages, the latest building fund, donations to political agendas) and they can return to the idea that grace is for everyone and that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love your neighbor. The other option is to continue to build social clubs and dream about taking over a political party. The world will be waiting on your decision.
