Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

by Brian D. McLaren

All too often, the Christian industrial project reminds me less of a religion and more of the tobacco, fossil fuel, and weapons industries: willing to harm millions to keep their business going.

In short, I was taught my religion’s historical upsides and few of its downsides, and I was taught about other religions’ historical downsides and few of their upsides. That’s a perfect recipe for creating ignorant and arrogant religious jerks.

the Christian religion began as a peasant peace movement whose leader said we should all call one another sisters and brothers, but it quickly reduced sisters and brothers to subjects to be dominated, punished, imprisoned, and worse.

Religions, then, are networks of brains under a shared influence. Sometimes the networks may harmonize our brains and lead us to collaborative behavior for the common good. Sometimes the networks may trigger our brains to fear, hate, attack, reject, or kill each other.

In the third category, I’ve observed a large number of what I call Christian company men. (Given the persistence of male domination in most Christian communities, men dominate this category.2) Most are unquestionably sincere, utterly convinced that loyal service to their religious institutions equals service to God. That loyalty becomes their primary qualification. Because of their loyalty, their fellow company men promote them, often to the very highest places of power, even if they must overlook deficits in spirituality, insight, or virtue. Loyalty trumps all else.

Mormon hierarchies are built on company men.

I know that institutions aren’t in themselves the problem; the problem is the institutionalism: the tendency of institutions to abandon the mission for which they were created and instead redefine their mission as absolute loyalty to their own bottom line.

As far as I can tell, as someone who has been around a while, your beliefs—your Christian beliefs—cannot be correlated with your moral quality as a human being, even though they are supremely relevant to your status as a Christian.

I used to think that things were real, and change was something that happened to them over time. Now I think that change is real, and things are events that happen over time. Change is the constant and things come and go, appear and disappear, form and fade away.

Is it a losing battle? I suspect that’s the wrong metaphor. This isn’t a game or a war that is won or lost once and for all. This is an iterative process, a story that unfolds “through many dangers, toils, and snares,” booms and busts, losses and recoveries. It requires heroic persistence. It requires a death to pride, a death to hero narratives, and a commitment to do what’s right even when the odds are stacked strongly against success. Truth be told, it’s a perpetual process of evolution that unfolds in a time span that makes my little lifetime seem like a lightning bug’s flash.

I can stay defiantly, like Sr. Ann and Sr. Jean. I can intentionally, consciously, resolutely refuse to leave … and with equal intention and resolution, I can refuse to comply with the status quo. I can occupy Christianity with a different way of being Christian.”

I have nothing but empathy for Christians who simply cannot bear to remain Christian. But there’s nowhere to go that is free from human beings showing their worst as well as their best.

That’s why the best option I can see (for myself) is to stay Christian while rejecting supremacy and embracing solidarity instead.

The truth is, I too am an atheist—in regard to the slaveholder’s God, the MAGA-church God of the white Christian nationalists, the prosperity gospel get-rich-quick God, the biblical literalist easy-answer God, the Theo-Capitalist God with the big invisible hand, and the right-wing God who is really upset about abortion but doesn’t give a damn about racism, environmental plunder, or authoritarianism. Those are just a few of the many gods I don’t believe in, echoing Frank Schaeffer, who describes himself as an atheist who believes in God.1 Liam is right: that old Big White Guy on a Throne in the Sky has to go.

We don’t let the assumptions of our ancestors about anatomy, psychology, medicine, or physics dominate our thinking and work in these fields today. Why should we be required to let their theological assumptions dominate … especially when some of those assumptions have contributed to the crisis of faith explored in the first ten chapters of this book?

This table (which I recommend you read column by column first, and then row by row) gives you an overview of the four stages as I’ve described them:

Capture this table.

If you can find a community or organization that desires the good of the planet and all its creatures, the good of all people through just and generous societies, and the good of each individual—including you—with a reverence for the sacred love that flows through all these loves, that is a community in which to invest your time, intelligence, money, and energy. That is a community in which to raise your children.

I know there is some truth to the statement, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience,” but there is perhaps more truth in an alternative statement: “We are biological creatures, wild animals, in which spiritual experience happens.”

Instead of a yes, but response to these positive changes, we can offer a yes, and. So we might say, “Yes, it is good to increase efficiency in your internal combustion engines, and it will be even better when we move away from fossil fuel combustion entirely.” Or “Yes, it is good to improve traditional educational systems, and it will be even better when these systems are redesigned to contribute to a new way of life.” Or, “Yes, it is good to reduce the number of weapons in circulation, and it will be even better when we help people feel that violence is unthinkable and nonviolence is as habitual as eating or drinking or breathing.”4 You can cultivate this attitude as an expression of Christian identity or of some other identity.

I’m saying that we need to very lovingly, non-defensively, and non-aggressively be clear about where we are.

better to be rejected for who you are than accepted for who you’re not.

we must be more loyal to reality than to our current beliefs about reality.

Loyalty to reality does not feel like certainty. It feels more like humility. It feels like awe, wonder, curiosity, patient attentiveness. It evokes Jesus’ calls to the perpetual rethinking of repentance, to lifelong childlikeness, to the cultivation of the born-again or beginner’s mind. It renders you less a pundit and more a contemplative. And so we must keep our eyes, ears, and hearts open, tending the fire of desire for truth in our innermost being. For without a sincere loyalty to reality (pregnant as it is with unknowable possibilities), we will be lost, Christian or not. With a humble, teachable loyalty to reality, we can survive and even thrive, inside the Christian religion or out.