Positive Liberty

In a previous post, Blue Like Jazz Reflections, I suggested that Organized Religion was bad — a turn-off. Well, this blog post is for everyone who agrees with that sentiment.

I want to share with you a couple of samples of Donald Miller’s writing that don’t sound like Christianity in the modern American/cultural sense. I’m a Christian and these statements really resonated with me (edited for length, with parentheticals added for clarity). I hope you find these sentiments valuable to you as well.

From perhaps the most powerful chapter in the book, Confession, comes this passage…

The human struggle bothered Rick [Miller's pastor], as if something was broken in the world and we [the people in Miller's church] were supposed to hold our palms against the wound. He didn’t really see evangelism, or whatever you want to call it, as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life. He saw evangelism as reaching a felt need. I thought this was beautiful and frightening… frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture, and I absolutely hate bothering people about this stuff.

So much of me believes strongly in letting everybody live their own lives, and when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy trying to build my downline…

In a recent radio interview, I was asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I know longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it.

If you find the book in the bookstore, and you start thumbing through it but you don’t yet if want to buy it, then I encourage you to read the chapter, Confession. It’s worth the effort — worth the price of the book, all by itself.

Then there’s this, from the chapter called, Love.

I began to attend a Unitarian Church… they freely and openly accepted everybody the church didn’t seem to accept. I don’t suppose they accepted fundamentalists, but neither did I at the time. I was comfortable there. Everybody was comfortable there. I did not like their flaky theology though. I did not like the way they changed the words in hymns, and I did not like the fact that they ignored the Bible, but I loved them, and they really liked me. I loved the smiley faces, the hugs, the vulnerable feel to the place…

I began to understand that my pastors and leaders were wrong, that the liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reason Christians are Christians, because they believed their philosophies were right, good, and beneficial for the world. I had been raised to believe there were monsters under the bed, but I had peeked, in a moment of bravery, and found a wonderful world, a good world, better, in fact, than the one I had known.

The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn’t. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people are bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity… Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this… with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong… to many in the church tolerance is profanity… I was tired of the biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy… and discovered they were not the enemy.

This was, at the time, my primary problem with Christian faith. With all its talk about pure love, in the end it shook down to conditional love. Again, this is a provocative statement, but I want you to walk through the emotional process I went through.

And indeed, throughout the entire book, Miller lays his emotional process out there for you to see, no matter how vulnerable or unattractive it might make him. I’ve never read a book like this.

After reading these quotes, can you see the difference between Christianity the Institution and Christian Spirituality? If you want to bash Organized Religion, you’ll find increasing sympathy from practicing Christians. We love Jesus and what he represents. But, increasingly, we’re not so sure we love the institutions that claim to represent him.

Hardball delenda est.

Tags: Blue Like Jazz, Christianity, Organized Religion

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