Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

by David Zahl

The too-good-to-be-true message of mercy, grounded in history and hemoglobin as opposed to sentiment or theory, speaks directly to criminals and failures, and all those bowed down by life’s crushing load.

grace moves beyond deserving.

grace has no meaning apart from law.

The seculosity of Jesusland takes root when law supplants grace as Christianity’s final word.

One of the chief ways Christianity morphs into seculosity occurs under the heading transformation. As exciting a prospect as transformation may be, when it takes center stage in a person’s spiritual life, it swallows up grace and turns Christianity into a vehicle of anxiety and exhaustion.

And yet, in its emphasis on personal transformation, American Evangelicalism often seems more American than Evangelical.

when faith is tied too tightly to changes in behavior, it is put at odds (and in competition) with other “spiritual products” and the results they yield.

Christianity itself starts to resemble a self-improvement scheme on spiritual steroids, only as reliable as the personal growth it may have produced, which we know—from both experience and Scripture—is not always that reliable.

this kind of theology creates an environment of suspicion and blame, where otherwise kind people start monitoring one another’s devotion, keeping score at every opportunity, usually for the sake of propping up their own.

a gospel based on personal sanctification is no gospel at all. It produces refugees.

While beautiful in theory, however, the church in these cases is left with little to say to the perpetrators themselves, the sinners in the equation. Forgiveness, if offered to such villains at all, only comes after protracted displays of self-flagellation. It has to be earned.

Instead of loving your neighbor, you start to hate her for not evincing compassion, or not evincing enough compassion. Yourself too.

It’s hard to teach a person something when you’re mad at them for not already knowing it

Feigning personal improvement for the sake of approval is a skill we learn over time.

no plant can grow if it’s being dug up every five minutes to monitor its growth.

What makes Christianity a religion of grace, ultimately, is its essential revelation: of a God who meets us in both our individual and collective sin with a love that knows no bounds, the kind of love that lays down its life for its enemies.

It is not a roadmap to engineering spiritual enoughness but the glorious proclamation that on account of Christ, you and I are enough—right now, right here, before we do or say anything.

good behavior does not bring Roger into contact with Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, and it won’t bring us there either. Only bad behavior does the trick.

the only life raft capable of reaching a world drowning in seculosity will not be inflated with anything we do or don’t do, but what God himself has done and is doing.