You May Have Been Inoculated Against Real Christianity
Many people falling sick because of exposure to a weakened form of Christianity.
I’d like to make a bold, and perhaps offensive, suggestion.
One of the answers to the question “Why do people lose their faith in Christianity?” is that they were never exposed to Christianity in the first place.
Religion and Vaccines
Exposure to Christianity can work like exposure to a vaccine.
Vaccines are just weakened forms of the virus they are designed to guard against. Our body uses the interaction with the weak virus to build a blueprint for its interaction with that virus in the future. When we are exposed to the stronger form of the virus, we are protected. Our immune systems quickly deploy the same antibodies it used against the weaker form to counter the stronger form.
Many people who think they are deconverting are falling sick because they’ve been exposed to a weakened form of Christianity.
They tried Christianity and found it wanting. It didn’t have answers that suited the modern world. It broke under the pressure of real life. It coerced and distorted their personalities. It was just a part of the narrow, repressive, backward, violent, imperialistic, sexist, tribal, homophobic, patriarchal past. So they deconstructed it, keeping the pieces that lined up with some internal compass they found inside themselves. Or they walked away from it altogether.
When they meet Christianity in its more robust, healthy, and compelling forms, they think: “Been there. Done that. No thanks.” They are immune, but they’ve only been inoculated. It isn’t that they never saw a stronger form of Christianity, it is just that when they saw it, they didn’t recognize it as anything different than what they’d already experienced.
But what would have happened if they’d never been exposed to the weakened form of Christianity in the first place? The result may have been different when they met real Christianity.
Before we get to that question though, we need to think a bit more about what “weak Christianity” really is.
What Is A “Weakened Form” of Christianity?
For the sake of argument, I’m going to define “weak Christianity” as “reduced Christianity.”
When Christian theology goes wrong, it is usually a size issue. The whole counsel of God gets reduced to a few tenets that are most important to a certain group and the rest of the nuanced, robust breadth of Christianity is downplayed or neglected. However, when Christianity is reduced to any of its aspects, it gets distorted. And when it is distorted, any good it does is always mixed in with the bad. It may produce converts but it will also damage them. It may produce disciples, but it will multiply its own distortions inside them. And so the weakened form spreads.
But what does reduced Christianity look like?
Consider the example of moral purity.
God is holy and his moral beauty is attractive, but Christianity can become ugly in the hands of Christian groups who emphasize moral purity at all costs. The group of people who are actually pure gets smaller and smaller as the bar gets higher and higher. The group ratchets up the pressure on the lifestyle of its members in order to make them conform to its standards. If they cannot, they are censored or expelled.
In the gospels, something similar was happening among the Pharisees, for whom Jesus reserved his sharpest criticism. When your standard of moral purity rules out the Son of God, something has gone wrong with the standard. But this is how it works when any group reduces faith in God to one of its aspects—the distortion compounds as it grows.
Or take the example of evangelism.
Some versions of Christianity act as if the mission of the church is solely to recruit more believers, or, as I heard it out once put, to “hand out tickets to heaven.”
So the church is made into an evangelism machine and the kingdom of God becomes a fire sale. “Sharing the gospel” is the application of every sermon, the goal of every mission trip, and the point of every conversation and chance encounter. Evangelism becomes the measuring stick against which normal life and normal relationships are judged and found wanting. Following Christ becomes a matter of mastering the techniques of convert-making. This is usually accomplished by aping the techniques and tools of modernity—and being subverted by them in the process.
Or how about spiritual gifts?
Maybe you grew up in a community that prized the spiritual gifts and had their own hierarchy of what gifts were the really spiritual ones. Maybe your community elevated speaking in tongues, or the giving of prophecies, or teaching, or healing and turned the screws of social pressure on anyone in whom those gifts did not manifest. The result was a hierarchy of human power and acceptance dressed up in church clothes—and, as with every hierarchy gone wrong, the have-nots bore the brunt of the distortions and the bruises. Or they left.
In the old parlance, of course, reductionisms were just called idols. The Bible has a lot to say about how and why we make them. Religious people tend to make them as much as non-religious people do, only the religious kind are perhaps more pernicious because they can masquerade as the King himself and sit themselves on his throne in the minds of believers.
I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he said:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21-23)
Why Do We Reduce Christianity?
We reduce Christianity because we have two problems with our knowing and our practice of the truth: we are finite and we are fallen.
We Are Finite
We find it hard to see past the limits of our own developmental horizon. It takes time to grow, to learn, to see the marred image of God restored in us. Sometimes we settle down inside our current limits and tell ourselves we’ve seen it all, comprehended it all, lived it all in the proper fashion. But the portion of reality that lies inside the circle of our knowledge is always only a fraction of the portion that lies outside it because God is reality and thus reality has an infinite depth.
God wants to midwife us into reality, but, like birth, it is a slow and painful process.
What else did Jesus mean when he told the disciples, “I have so much more to say to you, but you can’t bear it yet. But when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will lead you into all truth.” (John 16:12-14) Surely Jesus, the infinitely wise, infinitely creative teacher could have found a way to tell them what they needed to know so that they would understand. Right? It seems that even God couldn’t make the apostles grow up instantly. Like us, they were finite. It would take time to cure them of their reductions.
We Are Fallen
Our fallenness produces “reality-interference.” We don’t know as we should, will as we should, or love as we should.
That isn’t to say that our intuitions and ideas are totally off—God made us such beings as are able to exercise their rationality to understand him and his well-ordered universe. But it is to say that we often stumble in our journey into God’s reality. We are prone to settling down and building our own unreal kingdoms.
Our fallen reductions render God more easily categorizable and controllable—something the part of us that is in rebellion against him is always interested in. Reductions help us carry out our campaign against God’s truth in order to gain power, to play games with our creator, to enfranchise ourselves over others, to dodge pain, and to shift blame.
Because of these double limitations, God’s essence and his truth aren’t things we can fully grasp, but nevertheless, he has revealed himself to humanity in the form of creation, scripture, in Christ, and in countless other ways. We cannot understand God fully, but because he has spoken, we can understand him truly. Our finitude and fallenness impose limitations on us, but they haven’t totally robbed us of our ability to know and practice the truth. Because of this our knowledge and our embrace of God’s revelation is never exhaustive, but it can be nevertheless reliable.
Christians who think their reductions can draw a box around God are mistaken. They’ve forgotten that we can’t know God exhaustively. On the other hand, those who throw their hands up and despair of knowing him truly are mistaken too. They’ve forgotten that God has spoken in myriad ways that we can understand.
With the Spirit’s help, we try to make sense of those revelations. Christianity is the result of our sensemaking efforts, but we shouldn’t confuse “Christianity” with reality. That way lies tribalism in Christian vestments. We use the word “Christianity” because we need something to say in order to talk about the ideas of the group of humans that are trying to orient their lives, thinking, and communities toward God’s revelation.
But not all Christianities are created equal. All are reductions of reality to a certain degree, but some are closer to it than others.
The False Exodus
Reduced Christianity rightly strikes people as being off somehow. When this happens, people get wise to it eventually—even if that knowledge is then suppressed. Something feels wrong about it. It is too judgmental, too controlling, too angry, too mean, too simple, too far from the Jesus they read about in the Bible and to whom they still feel strangely, powerfully drawn.
A pressure begins to build within them. They hear sermons about a Jesus who healed the injured, comforted the brokenhearted, and challenged the engines of religious coercion of his day, and then they look at how short his church falls and the whole thing smacks of hypocrisy.
The church begins to bleed disillusioned people who have become disillusioned not because of Christianity itself, but because of what it has been reduced to. And they get out with a bunch of bruises and their share of horror stories. The bruises and the stories form a shell around them that can become more difficult to penetrate as time goes on.
Then, one day, they meet someone who embodies a different kind of Christianity, one that looks a lot more like the way of Jesus. But instead of being attractive, it only serves to hit them in their bruises and trigger their horror stories. Their immunity kicks in and they stop listening. The “stronger form” of Christianity doesn’t take hold.
But what if the en-masse departures from Christain faith happening right now are really a false exodus?
The tragedy of the Great Un-Awakening the West is experiencing is that so much of it might be just reaping what we’ve sewed; we sewed lesser seeds and have grown distorted fruit. We should be grieved, but not surprised when the fruit falls to the ground.
If the world looks at the church and sees only a mirror, whose fault is it? If the church becomes just another unreal kingdom, who is to blame? Not God, certainly.
And, if you are in the midst of a season of deconstruction, you should ask yourself the question of what you think you are actually deconstructing. What if the problem wasn’t Christianity, but reduced Christianity? What if the solution wasn’t less Christianity at all, but more Christianity?
Perhaps you are justified in rejecting the paltry reflections of the religion Jesus meant to make, but what if the real way of Jesus is still out there, yet to be found?
What Is Real Christianity?
So what is “real Christianity”?
By “real Christianity,” I don’t mean a certain denomination, congregation, or, you know, my Christianity. My form of Christianity (and that of any denomination) falls short of God’s reality in all sorts of ways.
In order to liberate our images of Christianity from the reductions we have experienced, we need to do some work to stretch our imaginations into a bigger, fuller, more beautiful form of faith.
Real Christianity Is Jesus
If you want to know what real Christianity looks like when it is loose in the world, look at what happened around Jesus.
Everywhere Jesus went, the effects of the Fall were pushed back. He healed people, restoring the ravages of the fallen condition on their bodies. He challenged their mistaken notions and gently (or sharply) taught them the truth, the way of life in a realer world. He confronted the oppressive power structures, both religious and civic. He honored those whom society shamed. He told those whom society honored to take the lowest place.
He invited those who puffed themselves up with religiosity to step into the true spirituality of self-forgetfulness. He forgave sin and was a friend of sinners. He kept company with prostitutes, priests, civil officials, and terrorists. He calmed the chaotic forces of the natural world. He held people back from their self-destruction. He reversed death. He set people free. It is as though there was a circle around Jesus inside of which everything sad came untrue.
There has never been anyone like Jesus.
But that isn’t quite true, is it? After all, if Jesus was telling the truth, becoming more like him is the treatment you sign up for when you join yourself to him.
The people of God are meant to mirror Christ’s effect on the world, to be a community that makes the fractures of sin begin to become whole again.
Maybe that is what Jesus meant when he said, “Whoever believes in me will do greater things than I have done.” (John 14:12) That is a mission much larger than sin management, disciple multiplication, theological crusading, or any of the other micro-redemption projects that Christianity can be reduced to.
So when people get near you, your community, your church, your home they are supposed to find themselves coming alive. They are supposed to find that they can drink the words that come out of your mouth, and the water tastes like life. They are meant to come inside the spaces you make and the welcome you give and feel respite from the inner exile all humanity suffers under. Like manna in the wilderness, they are meant to feed on your commitments, your loves, and the covenants by which you bind yourself to others. The fidelities you keep are supposed to keep people alive. They are supposed to set people free. The life of Jesus inside you can, ever-partially, ever-imperfectly, ever so slowly make the sad things come untrue.
When Jesus sent his nascent disciples into the world, it wasn’t to hunker down inside their tribal boundaries. And it wasn’t to deploy the mechanisms of spiritual coercion to conform people to their own image by main force. Jesus meant that his disciples should form communities and live lives that were intoxicatingly attractive to those being saved from the unreal kingdoms of the world.
The church is supposed to be an enactment of a different way of living, a lived parable of the kingdom of God. If the people of God are meant to be salt, it is a smelling salt. The whiff of the kingdom of God is supposed to wake you up. Christianity is supposed to make you gasp. It is supposed to make you say, “I want that.” The kingdom of God is a treasure in a field that you sell everything you have to gain because God is visible in its midst. It embodies and demonstrates the reality and worth of the king.
Jesus knew that we would fail at such a colossal mission. He knew we’d settle down in reductions of reality for all sorts of reasons, and that those reductions would do damage of their own, inoculating people against the real thing.
So with such an immense calling and such a great shortfall, how can the immunity be undone? Can people be un-inoculated against Christianity?
You Aren’t Real Christians
I remember sitting around after dinner with some dear friends who were not Christians when the conversation turned to Christianity. We were all ex-pats teaching English in South Korea. We were all lonely until we found one another. We had spent the year watching and discussing movies, going to the beach on weekends, and cooking dinners together after our classes were done. At one of these dinners near the end of our time together, one friend, Sean, started to make jokes at the expense of Christianity and I reminded him, “Hey man, you know we’re Christians, right?”
His response was “Yeah, but you aren’t real Christians.”
He didn’t mean it as an insult but as a compliment. He meant was “You aren’t like my reduced idea of what a Christian is.”
And my answer was “Yes, we are real Christians.”
His categories had been so powerfully shaped by his previous negative exposure to a weaker strain of Christianity that my wife and I were excluded mostly by the merit of the fact that he liked us.
This isn’t to say that my wife and my faith is all that spectacular. How did we accomplish this overthrow of his expectations? It was pretty normal, actually. We did our best to love him, to become his friend, to enjoy who he was. As we shared meals and shared life together that year an impression was made. And a dent was made in his assumptions.
Can people be un-inoculated against Christianity? No. They can’t. The experiences that inoculated them will never un-happen. They will always be part of their story.
But there is hope if they can be made to see that the thing they thought was Christianity was only a reduction. The realization may send them looking for the real thing and may make them ready when they find it. Perhaps the experience of a richer, realer Christianity will slowly efface their immunity, heal their bruises, and give a new ending to their Christian stories.
Who knows? It is in God’s hands. As T. S. Eliot said, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)