The eCrozier

“The idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian.” – Wendell Berry

We’re all guilty of the sin of baptizing what we say or do as “Christian” so we can call whatever we say or do as “faithful.” We come by this sin honestly. We’ve been schooled in the celebration of the self all our lives, so it makes sense we’d understand that whatever we do must be what Christians do (or believe). After all, the great American poem is Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, the great American essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, and the great American novel is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, all of which insist on the self as the main source for truth and righteousness. Such selfism stands in clear contrast to Jesus’s plain teaching in the Gospel, so all we have to do is ignore Jesus, do what we want, and call it “Christian.” See how simple that is?

This tendency to baptize our beliefs, prejudices, and actions as “Christian” becomes especially embarrassing since by repeated research (e.g., PPRI’s American Values Atlas, Pew, Gallup, etc.), people who identify themselves as faithful Christians don’t seem to show any different behavior than the population as a whole (“different” = “look and sound a bit more like Jesus”). The traditional markers many have often used to name what they call “immoral” (e.g., premarital sex, adultery, greed, gambling, etc.) show that self-declared “Christians” aren’t any more “moral” than the general population. And when one looks at self-described “Evangelical Christians,” they are in cases like spousal abuse, actually worse than the overall U.S. population (See Ron Sider’s research in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World?).

The above news ought to prompt us to spend less time finding the speck in any other person’s eye (Christian or non-Christian) and spend more time dealing with the beam in our own. PPRI’s American Values Atlas also finds a significant number of white Christians are still holding onto long-ago, debunked racial stereotypes of African-Americans while also denying that the growing white nationalist movement is at all in conflict with their Christian faith. Really? And we continue to wonder why young people in this country aren’t attracted to the Christian Church. White Christian racism is a good place to start our wondering. And then we can also wonder why the denial of climate change science by many Christians creates problems for young people when, at the same time, we assure them that we really do stand for the truth.

In my church growing up, the way we lived our lives was called our “testimony.” Our life, whether we want it to or not, is always an unspoken sermon that’s constantly preaching to others. None of us will ever be free from wanting Jesus to agree with us and for him to see things our way, but humility and honesty demands we admit how our unrepentant selfism continuously hamstrings our witness to the Good News of God in Jesus.

+Scott