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

by Brian D. McLaren

if you and I do not stay Christian, if we give up whatever little voice and influence we have inside the larger Christian community, won’t we be an answer to the misguided prayers of the religious company men and their followers, who want the rest of us gone? Won’t we be leaving them the keys to the bus so they can keep speeding recklessly down the same road we examined in Part I? Won’t we be emboldening them by abandoning our post of creative resistance? What greater damage will the gatekeepers do without prophetic voices “on the edge of the inside” challenging them with an “alternative orthodoxy,” as my friend Richard Rohr says?2 Won’t we be saying to them, “OK. You win. We give up. We quit. The field is yours, beginning with the next generation”? In this light, it feels like either cowardice or laziness to abandon the Seths and surrender to the Christian company men who currently run so much of the Christian enterprise. You may never have thought of yourself as a fighter. But perhaps the decadence of conventional Christianity is bringing out the fighter (albeit nonviolent fighter) in you?

Michael Gungor of The Liturgists podcast has said, for those of us in the West, Christendom is the water we swim in, especially here in the United States, whether we like it or not. It infuses our history, our culture, our politics. It’s on our dollar bills and in our Pledge of Allegiance. Even if we leave Christianity, Christianity doesn’t leave us. So we might as well try to challenge it toward positive change.2

I suddenly see why most of my friends of other religions actually prefer me to stay Christian and work for the common good from within. That is exactly how I feel about them. I don’t want my progressive Jewish friends to abandon Judaism to its most nationalistic, insular, and least-common-good-oriented constituency. I don’t want my progressive Muslim friends to leave Islam to its most theocratic wing. I want them to be faithful Jewish and Muslim examples who are calling their traditions to greater wisdom, love, and big-heartedness. It’s the same with my secular humanist friends. I don’t want them to abandon secularism to its least humane elements.

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.

If we take the future as our starting point for thinking about God, creation, and humanity—then everything we know must … be realigned to an evolving universe, including our theologies, philosophies, economic and political systems, cultural matrices—in short, our planetary life. In this light, Christianity looks very different

if we say that modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, Christianity has been around for 1 percent of our species’ history. Yes, for better and for worse (as we’ve seen), the religion made a big splash in a relatively short time. But imagine two scenarios. First, imagine that human civilization, led by its largest living religion, destroys itself in the next century or two. Wouldn’t you have to be suspicious, at least, that a species that survived for 198,000 years without Christianity could only last 2,000 years with it? That’s not a great reflection on Christianity! But conversely, imagine that somehow,

Sr. Ilia Delio dares us to believe, and I stand with her. She concludes her majestic book Making All Things New by offering us six challenges to seize this opportunity. We must know the earth and our own bodies, because we have become so obsessed with concepts that we have lost touch with our creatureliness. Second, we need to see our world religions as sources of energy that can mature and guide us forward. Third, we need to understand that thought is a physical reality: it exists as an emergent phenomenon in brains and can be replicated in other brains, and like any other evolving expression of life, it can lead us forward. Fourth, we need to fully embrace the idea that something big and beautiful and alive is evolving in the universe, something that includes individual humans but is bigger than the sum of its parts. Fifth, to thrive in this dynamic universe, we need to cultivate a zest for living and a spirit of adventure, to “wildly fling ourselves into the arms of divine Love.” And finally, we need to dare to trust in the process, the process of evolving life, the process of birth and growth of which we are a small part.4 Doing so will help us become “artisans of a new future,” a “new catholicity,” and a “new religion of the world,” grasping this moment as “the kiss of God.”

I would have to say that if Jesus didn’t actually exist, those who invented him as a fictional character were the most brilliant literary and moral minds I’ve ever encountered. I was a literature major in college and graduate school, and to this day I’m an avid reader of literature, so my literary knowledge is probably above average. I have to say that I have encountered no fictional character with even a sliver of the density and moral brilliance that I find coming through in Jesus. So I find it highly likely that Jesus existed and that he was a uniquely extraordinary human being. But that does not mean I take every story about him literally.

“Mere perception—perception without imagination—is the sword thrust between spirit and matter,” or, we might say, between spiritual meaning and the physical reality we experience day to day.

The man wasn’t the only one healed in the story. The whole village was healed too. A new level of meaning suddenly appears in the story: All of us were sick, not just that one man, they say. We were not behaving well when we banished him and put him in chains. We were all under terrible stress. We were all out of our right minds. We all had been possessed—by the domination of the Romans. We couldn’t trust one another. We couldn’t trust ourselves. We, the dehumanized and oppressed, began dehumanizing and oppressing one another. How could we have become so cruel? Maybe our cruelty has something to do with the fact that the Romans invaded us and now occupy us. They’ve been exploiting us, dominating us, dehumanizing us, and traumatizing us for generations, and asking us to be happy about it. Under their oppression, we have lived with humiliation for so long that we started blaming and shaming one another. Think of it: we raised pigs, which our own religion forbade us to eat, so we could sell them to the pork-loving Romans. We were so compromised by the Roman economy and stressed by the Roman occupation that we scapegoated this poor man, pouring out all our shame and anxiety upon him, as if doing to him what the Romans had done to us would bring us relief. His sickness was related to our sickness, which was related to the Roman mechanism of domination. This powerful truth, however, is politically unspeakable, so the story is embellished (in two of the three versions) with the n...

Jesus was the kind of extraordinary person who inspired people so profoundly that they told stories about him. As they did, they sometimes embellished those stories in ways that deepened, expanded, and intensified the meaning he embodied, not to mislead or deceive, but so that the transforming experience of him could be conveyed. On top of whatever he did in the literal sense, he inspired people to experience something so meaningful that they had to stretch language beyond mere factual reporting to its fullest literary capacities. Their experience felt like liberation. Like love. Like healing and reconciliation. Like good news of great joy for all creation. They wanted us to experience these things too.

If literalism is your bridge to Jesus, if it is the only way you access Jesus, then I promise you: I am not trying to take it away from you. I just hope that you will not feel you have to impose your literalism on people for whom it is a barrier, not a bridge, to Jesus. If you feel that literalism chains you rather than liberates you, if you fear that it is part of the mechanisms of domination that have infected Christianity, that only means you need to leave literalism, not Christianity, and certainly not Jesus.

I read an interview with a Jewish activist and author named Talia Lavin. Her interviewer asked her, “Is it right to say white supremacy is rooted in Christianity?” She replied, “Christianity in the United States has long been entangled with upholding white supremacy.” Then she explained that many Christians “are tempted to put Christian in quotation marks” when they talk about Christian white supremacists, or say that white supremacists aren’t real Christians. But this distancing, she said, is a convenience that is in itself a privileged option: “I don’t get to disavow Jeffrey Epstein as not really a Jew, or Alan Dershowitz, or anyone else I disagree with.”

If we are today’s minimizers or deniers of the racism, religious bigotry, and other evils of our Christian ancestors—not to mention our Christian contemporaries, aren’t we in some way their allies? By excusing ourselves of responsibility because we were not the active perpetrators of evils (racism, environmental plunder, oppression of women and LGBTQ persons, and so on), do we not become tacit perpetuators of those evils—especially if we continue to benefit from them in some way? In the end, how could a person who avoids admitting truths, taking responsibility, righting wrongs, healing wounds, or correcting errors be truly worthy of the term innocent?

Here’s my hypothesis: when white Christians see themselves as valiant defenders of vulnerable unborn lives, they identify with the innocence of the victim so that the innocence or purity of the unborn victim is transfused into them. This idea of transfused innocence has a special appeal to people like me who were raised with an understanding of Jesus as the innocent victim, whose innocence was transfused (imputed was the theological term we used) to us through something called penal substitutionary atonement. With one “sinner’s prayer,” we were “born again” and given a new identity card, so to speak. By a divine transaction we were removed from the list of guilty, hell-bound sinners and shifted to the ledger of innocent, forgiven saints, all through association with an innocent victim. I think it’s important to acknowledge: It is only people who want to be moral (or at least appear moral) who would even desire a shortcut to moral innocence. We might say it is an occupational hazard that morally earnest people uniquely face.4

your quest for instant innocence renders you vulnerable to manipulation by clever religious and political operators who promise booster shots of innocence in exchange for votes or donations. These demagogues exemplify an old saying: the masses see their religion as true; the elites see all religion as false, and the powerful see all religion as useful.

Let’s face it: if we’re adults, we have moved beyond innocence.11 But we still have a chance at goodness and decency. We can be done forever with self-excusing attempts to deny, minimize, or suppress the truth about our Christian ancestors and the unjust systems they created. We can acknowledge how those systems still benefit some of us today, even as they harm others of us. We can stop trumping up nationalistic, racial, and religious myths of superiority. We can stop whitewashing the truth in our children’s history books and our clergy’s sermons. We can stop anesthetizing our guilty consciences with radio and cable news networks that recount history and current events in an unfair, imbalanced, willfully ignorant, and self-aggrandizing way. We can stop erecting and protecting statues to the architects of a slave society and others whose dirty secrets have come out. We can stop trying to drown out the actual facts in order to delude ourselves with “alternative facts.” We can stop playing the victim as a ploy for innocence, and we can stop being parasites on actual innocent victims. We can stop feeling superior because we have bought some inexpensive enemies whose evil we celebrate to make ourselves feel better. We can—we must—seek treatment for and recovery from our addiction to instant, cheap, convenient innocence, so we can deprogram ourselves from the innocence cult. Which brings me, at long last, to a candid confession: one of the prime reasons I sometimes want to leave...

Staying Christian is a way of leaving the cult of innocence. When I ended the previous chapter with those words, you may have felt a bit confused. The sentence is cryptic, and intentionally so.

To be adult is to accept my guilt and not try to project it onto others or a defined group of others

Purity and innocence might sound like good things if you have never read the story of Cornelius and Peter in Acts 10. Peter was raised in a strict purity culture, so he felt it would pollute him to go into the home of an unclean Gentile like Cornelius. But Peter had a powerful dream or vision in which God repeatedly commanded him to break one of the purity commandments and thus violate his own innocence. The vision shattered his preconceptions, and so he consented to enter the home of Cornelius, the unclean, the Gentile, the other. There Peter made this disruptive statement: “God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:28). He wasn’t just changing his definition of what was clean or unclean; he was leaving that binary behind forever. Peter continued to struggle with this insight (the cult of innocence dies hard), and later, Paul confronted him about his inconsistency (see Galatians 2). Paul understood the struggle, because he had a disruptive spiritual experience that was remarkably similar to Peter’s (see Acts 9:1–19). He was what we would call a religious extremist, a violent fundamentalist terrorist going from town to town to arrest, imprison, and kill members of his purity culture who didn’t uphold the high standards of the cult of innocence. He was so convinced of his innocence that he felt justified in committing violence. Through his visionary disruption, Paul realized how he had been blinded by innocence. He went through a deprogrammi...

Paul had his relapses into clean-unclean thinking like the rest of us (see, for example, 2 Corinthians 6:17). But he had the audacity to say that the primary contemporary marker of belonging to the community of innocence—circumcision—“didn’t mean anything” (Galatians 5:6). To another group, he wrote, “From now on, we regard no one from a human point of view” (2 Corinthians 5:16). In other words, from his new and higher vantage point, instead of dividing the world into us and them, clean and unclean, we participate in a “new creation” in which we seek to reconcile all people to God and one another. To another community, he said that he had become “all things to all people” (1 Corinthians 9:22), leaving his supremacist identity behind. And to yet another community, he described his mission as breaking down dividing walls of hostility and preaching peace to everyone, everywhere, no exceptions (Ephesians 2:14, 17). Of course, both Peter and Paul were simply building upon the example set by Jesus himself. He touched lepers, those considered unclean. He protected a woman caught in adultery and challenged her accusers by saying, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” (Which means, if you read between the lines, that if you consider yourself innocent and pure, you just might become a killer.) Perhaps most shockingly, two gospel writers share versions of his encounter with a Gentile mother. The woman begs Jesus to heal her daughter of an “unclean spirit,” but he doesn’t ev...

In my previous book, Faith After Doubt, I described an insight I had when I was nearly finished writing: The greatest loss I experienced through doubt was the loss of supremacy, and that loss was one of my greatest gains. (By greatest, I mean the loss that was deepest, most significant, most subtle, and most wonderful.) The beliefs I held so piously had, for all my life, without my consent or even awareness, contributed to a sense of religious privilege, superiority, and supremacy. Those beliefs deserved to be doubted, and if I had not doubted them, that supremacy would still reign as a covert monarch in my psyche. The process of doubt not only dethroned that sense of religious supremacy; it took away the taste for supremacy of any kind.… I don’t want to be better than anyone. I don’t want to win in any way that makes others lose.… Harmony is, at its heart, a state and a stage that loves solidarity, not supremacy. If it took the agony of doubt to bring me to this place, then thanks be to God, and blessed be doubt.3

If I keep separating from whatever strikes me as flawed, whatever embarrasses me, I will eventually find myself an isolated misanthrope, hating humanity as a failed project. And I’d be ashamed of that too! As Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer often said, “If we demand perfection or nothing, we will have nothing.” So at the end of the day, we all face a similar problem: we can disassociate and re-associate with all kinds of groups and identities, but whatever we disassociate from, still, in the end, we are human. The human problem is still with us, and as professor Kate Bowler aptly puts it, there is “no cure for being human.”5 Any religion that promises otherwise is, recalling the Genesis story (3:5), a serpent in the garden.

Liam explained that his “God problem” wasn’t just about how conventional God concepts had caused him personal harm. Nor was his problem only about the harm his parishioners experienced, even though that harm was, he surmised, significant. He also felt that these God concepts pose a credible threat to human survival going forward. I agree with Liam. If God is entirely separate from the physical world, then the world is just stuff—profane, cheapened, easy to exploit. Besides, if God plans to destroy the world, we humans might as well exploit it all we can while we still have the chance. If God is in control of the world like an engineer controlling a big machine, when we or our neighbors suffer, we can logically conclude that human suffering is God’s will. If God dominates the world and everything in it with an iron fist (or rod, as in Psalm 2:9 and Revelation 2:27), we may find ourselves more amenable to authoritarians who do the same, especially if they hold up Bibles in front of churches. If God chooses some for privilege and abandons others for damnation, God sets an example of us/them thinking that only the worst of us will follow. If God likes to save people from predicaments through magic skyhooks, it becomes more spiritual for humans to pray for a miracle rather than to engage in hard work, diligent study, wise planning, and collaboration. These and other understandings might have been problematic in the best of times, but they’re downright life-threatening in times ...

As Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “Atheism can be like salt for religion. It is negative theology posited in the most absolute way. Most of the time, psychologically speaking, atheism represents a disappointment with the narrowness and limitations of a certain concept of God.”

we are not only free to adapt and experiment in theology, as we are in other fields; we also have a moral obligation to do so … especially in light of the harm we surveyed in the first ten chapters of this book.

When we make this subtle but profound switch from ceiling to floor (or soil), suddenly, before our eyes, the Bible and tradition are transformed into a library of texts that demonstrate the very opposite of what the authority figures told us. These texts and traditions do not reveal one final, ever-unchanging understanding of God. They reveal how notions of God have always been evolving over time, how they constantly grow, relapse, recover, adjust, and grow some more. It’s there in full color. The process begins with hunter-gatherers in a garden, communing with a loving, creative presence in the cool of the day, naked and not ashamed, living a spirituality with no scripture, no temple, no clergy, no creed, no codified beliefs, only an ethical imperative

to live in a care-taking relationship with one’s environment and fellow creatures, modeling the care of the Creator. Early humans decide they don’t want to live within these creaturely limits, and soon they develop various notions of violent gods that sanction and animate their violent societies. Faith in a god who loves all people begins to emerge slowly and fitfully, three steps forward and two steps back. In this ongoing conversation, Jesus appears, and he invites his contemporaries to imagine something bigger than God as currently understood. What could be bigger than God, you ask?7 Jesus called it the kingdom of God, the idea that God and creation are part of one integrated reality that unites all things in one beloved community. In this beloved multi-ethnic, multi-species ecological community, God shares in our experience, in our joys, in our heartbreaks, in the suffering and death of every person, even every sparrow. Finding God with us in our suffering and death robs them of their sting and power to terrorize us. We feel that we are taken up into God’s deathless life. God is no longer simply a singular holy You, as wonderful as that might be. God is a holy and unbounded We, a community or web of life in which we are all included and related, rendered one another, and one. The mystery of the Trinity can be seen as an expression of this three-stage metamorphosis. We begin with the Father, the ancient patriarchal understanding of God who rules from above with almighty...

21 INCLUDE AND TRANSCEND “It’s just a stage.” That’s what my mother-in-law would say whenever she offered advice about the struggles of parenting. And she was right. Not sleeping through the night? Just a stage. Saying, “No!” or “Why?” to every request? Just a stage. Throwing tantrums? Just a stage. Obsessed with “cool” hairstyles and clothing? Just a stage. The stages we adults see so easily in children are harder to see in ourselves. The workaholism of our thirties and forties? Just a stage. The obsession with weight or wrinkles of our forties and fifties? Just a stage. Anxieties about empty nesting or retirement savings? Just a stage. Facing death and experiencing denial, anger, depression, or bargaining? Just a stage, and each stage will pass into another. As I explained in Faith After Doubt, about forty years ago I became interested in theories of human development, with their various stage models. Over the decades, I’ve studied well over a dozen models that try to describe general patterns in the way humans grow. I’ve seen with increasing clarity how spiritual development is affected by each new stage of our human development. The reverse is also true: our growth (or lack of growth) in spirituality inhibits or unleashes our cognitive, relational, and emotional growth. Their relationship is reciprocal. How could it be otherwise?

lot of people leave Christianity when really all they needed was to leave a confining form or stage of Christianity. Some people think leaving Christianity will solve their problems, not realizing that their problems are as rooted in their stage of development as in their religion. The reverse is true as well: some atheists, agnostics, or people of other religions become Christians because Christianity aids in their growth. But eventually, even though a certain form of Christianity solved the problem of one stage, it can become a problem at another, creating a stained-glass ceiling that impedes further growth. Of all the models of human development I’ve studied, the simplest is one of the most profound. My friend and colleague Fr. Richard Rohr speaks of “first half of life” and “second half of life.”1 He characterizes the first half of life as developing the basic skills of dualism: dividing the world into opposing categories like good/bad, us/them, safe/dangerous, friend/foe, winner/loser, clean/dirty. This skill of dualism helps us form a container, or moral shape, for our lives, he explains. Then, in the second half of life, we decide how we want to fill that container, and to do so, we develop new skills, especially the skill of non-dual seeing.

Another friend and colleague, the author, podcaster, and performance artist Rob Bell, uses a different three-stage model.2 In the first stage, we are each preoccupied with me; we focus on our individual or personal well-being, in this life and, if we believe in it, the next. We think in terms of my needs, my rights, my freedom, my power, my grievances, my ambitions, my salvation, my perfection, my growth, my future. Then some of us move to we; we become concerned for our group, tribe, race, denomination, religion, or nation. Social values like duty, responsibility, and sacrifice become increasingly important to us in this second stage. Eventually, we may expand our we to include everybody and everything. At this third stage, we begin to see how all humans and all living and non-living things are interrelated and interdependent.

Where, you might ask, does the love of God or Spirit fit in? It doesn’t. Love for the transcendent doesn’t fit in with the others, as one item in the list. Instead, it is inherent in the desire that we experience in the other three desires. Divine love is the nest in which the other desires are nurtured, and it is inherent in all other loves. What I’m suggesting recalls the words in 1 John 4, that “God is love.” When we desire the good of the planet, the good of all people, and our own good, we are participating in a love that is bigger than us. As a Christian, I would say we are joining God in God’s loving desire for the well-being of the beloved. To love the love that loves the parts is to love the whole. To unify our desires in love is, I think, what Jesus must have meant by purity of heart (see Matthew 5:8).

In Sunday school, I learned to think of God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne, who stood above creation and occasionally stirred it with a stick. When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread. As I look, I can see light moving through it as a pulse moves through veins. What I see “out there” is no different from what I feel inside. There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars.… Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. At this point in my thinking, it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. This is the God who is not somewhere but everywhere, the God who may be prayed to in all directions at once. This is also the God beyond all directions, who will still be here (wherever “here” means) when the universe either dissipates into dust or swallows itself up again.4

Christianity evolved as, among other things, a language, a set of words pointing to a set of ideas. This language was necessary to liberate people from another language, the language of empire and domination. This liberating language evolved and shaped the inner architecture of generations of Christians, furnishing them with foundational terms like sin, grace, and salvation. These terms were woven together in stories, and the stories were woven together in a framing story—another phenomenon of language. But like everything, language evolves. Meanings modify. What once was liberating can become a cage in which we pace, dreaming of freedom. Many people today are pacing the cage. Old Christian words have been emptied of their substance, or their meanings have mutated. The old framing story doesn’t fit the reality we experience and feels instead like a conspiracy theory or manic fantasy. We can’t help but feel that the language of Christianity creates a make-believe world, a rabbit hole, an alternate reality, where angels and demons are real but climate change and evolution aren’t. The gap between actual reality and the Christian linguistic reality stretches our credulity to a breaking point. That’s why many can no longer stay Christian, and that’s why many of us who choose to stay Christian must deconstruct the Christianity we inherited—and shake off much of its language. But we can’t underestimate the staying power of conventional Christianity. Even if millions of us renounc...

St. Augustine (Sermon 126.6) put it like this: Some people, in order to find God, will read a book. But there is a great book, the book of created nature. Look carefully at it top and bottom, observe it, read it. God did not make letters of ink for you to recognize God in; God set before your eyes all these things God has made. Why look for a louder voice?2 Meister Eckhart, who was about fourteen when Aquinas died in 1274, put it no less strongly: “A person who knew nothing but creatures would never need to attend to any sermons, for every creature is full of God and is a book.”

If our human words have taken on a life of their own, and if that life is out of sync with the primal logos, pattern, or wisdom of creation, then we need nature to become our teacher. And not just nature but nature as unmodified by human interference as possible. Our name for unmodified nature is the wild or wilderness.

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.” Our bodies are our wildness, a wildness which we are oppressing and driving to extinction as we do with every other wildness. And it is our human social constructions—our ideas, conventions, assumptions, belief systems, cultures, civilizations, religions, and all their words upon words—that drive us to do so.

What if part of the restlessness many Christians feel about their faith is disappointment with this accommodation to the powers of the old humanity? What if widespread Christian nominalism isn’t only a symptom of the half-heartedness of individual Christians but also of their sense that Christianity in its current forms is not really that big a deal and is unworthy of wholehearted commitment? Would those of us who left Christianity as a religion of the old humanity actually be leaving Christianity? Or would we be setting out to rediscover it as a religion leaning into a new humanity?

Whether or not you stay Christian, I hope you can see what I see: with or without the Christian logo, we must invest in the new spiritual meta-movement that is already emerging within and among us. If it is to liberate us from the dominant meta-movement that has proven itself genocidal, eco-cidal, and therefore suicidal, the new meta-movement we need must go beyond mere sustainability. It must be fully regenerative, restoring old balances that have been disrupted and diminished by our current civilizational project and, where that is impossible, finding new balances that make new vitalities possible.

Every micro-movement and institution will be flawed and limited, even as it accomplishes much good.

The more we trust any single one to be the magical, long-term solution, and the more we demand it to be perfect, the more likely we will be to sabotage it or hasten its failure.

Support every positive change in every micro-movement and institution. In light of the radical change we need, we will be tempted to belittle or even despise incremental positive changes that are achieved in this transition time. But we need to learn that even when the candle is small and flickering, it flickers in defiance of the night.

Prepare yourself for turbulence. The existing meta-movement has thousands of years of momentum behind it. It has amassed wealth, weapons, and the unfathomable power of human assumptions, especially the assumption that there is no alternative. The emerging meta-movement has no chance to challenge it—until, that is, the existing meta-movement reaches necessary levels of destabilization and disequilibrium, often through the self-sabotage of overreach. Bible readers will recall Jesus’ words about things getting worse and worse, “but this is still not the end.” I suggest that Jesus wasn’t speaking as a fortune-teller here; rather, he was speaking as a wise man who understood how systems work. He knew that systems are desperate to maintain equilibrium (a.k.a. the status quo), and they often look most successful just before they fall down the steps, so to speak, in phase after phase of decline. In this way, “the end of the world” is not the end of the world, but the end of the current world system, when the current meta-movement runs its course.

Thankfully, there is a growing body of research and literature focused on the practices we need for surviving the end of the world as we have known it.5 The communities that learn and teach these essential practices of spiritual resilience will become vital resources for everyone.

To trust in the process is another way of saying to trust in an intelligence wiser than current human intelligence, to trust in a love deeper than current expressions of human love, to trust in a desire stronger and wiser than current expressions of human desire. Christians refer to this wisdom, love, and desire as God or the Divine or the Creative Spirit, and others can find their own ways of naming it. But whatever name we use, the next step in this process will only become clear when we’re pushing through the current step, often at the last possible minute. To use familiar biblical language, we will need to walk by faith through the valley of the shadow of death, always holding anticipative space for something beautiful to be born, especially during the most painful contractions.

“There is no away,” environmental activist Annie Leonard says. “When you throw something away, it goes somewhere.” Once this simple insight hits you, you realize what a myth our culture has built itself upon. The meta-movement of domination and exploitation has told us that if we don’t like something, we can simply kill it, banish it, incarcerate it, incinerate it, ignore it, bury it, or otherwise throw it away … and it will be gone for good. But as James Baldwin realized, what is true of things in space is also true of time itself: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.”1

The only way to get rid of our enemies is to turn them into friends, as Dr. King said: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity.”2

Before humans in the meta-movement of domination, exploitation, and extraction, there was no trash. It didn’t exist. Every leaf, every bone, every scrap of food was a gift to something else. That realization provides a sobering reminder to all who decide not to stay Christian. You can leave Christianity, but Christianity won’t leave you. No matter how toxic some of its elements, they will still be there in the environment, living on like plastic trash in the minds and hearts and bodies of your neighbors, and through them, Christianity will still influence you.

In other cases, we may repurpose old elements, like reusing disposable plastic containers as flower planters or old tires as building materials. This is what some of us are doing with the ideas of heaven and hell. We see how this binary was used to devalue the work of social justice here on earth, so we are repurposing heaven: it is not an escape clause from a doomed and unsalvageable earth but encouragement that even if we suffer for justice in this life and don’t see the full results of our labors, our labor will not be in vain, longer term. Similarly, we are repurposing hell: it is not a threat of divine retribution in the afterlife but a dire warning about the inevitable negative consequences of harmful behaviors in this life—like war, ecological overshoot, or gross economic inequality.

As I wrote the book, I was coming to realize that the very idea of being clean carried in it the rendering of the other as dirty, which is the seed of ethnic cleansing. So I dug more deeply into baptism in the New Testament, centering the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10. I saw (as we noted in Chapter 17) that baptism could actually be understood as a rejection of clean/unclean narratives; it could be understood as an immersion into the current of the Spirit running through our world, bringing us into solidarity with all people. I similarly looked at how common understandings of the eucharist (evoking blood sacrifice), election (being chosen for salvation and leaving others for damnation), foreign missions (which have tended to collude consciously or unconsciously with colonialism in recent centuries), and other elements of inherited Christianity could be radically reimagined and repurposed … not just thrown away, but recycled.5 So we are recycling salvation as liberation, evoking its original biblical meaning in Exodus. We are recycling the final judgment as the realization that only time will reveal the full goodness or evil (or mix of both) that flows from any action. As we considered in Chapter 15, we are recycling demons and the devil as an early theory or model of mental illness and systemic evil. We are reframing the doctrine of the Trinity from a math problem to a profound insight into the dynamic, creative relationality of God and the universe, helping us r...

A church leadership team that wanted to make these changes could create a checklist of desired steps and then schedule each item: ___ Review the prayers that we use in public worship. Diversify the ways we refer to the divine. Specify the desires we want to strengthen. Replace religious verbiage that sounds familiar but says little with meaningful and needed language. ___ Look at the length and structure of our services. Determine the desired outcomes for each element, identify missing elements, and experiment with redesigning our service plan. ___ Determine which song and hymn lyrics are problematic. Where possible, rewrite the lyrics. Where that’s not possible, replace that song with a more appropriate one. ___ Assess benefits and liabilities of staying with the lectionary (or current system of sermon planning) or using an alternative plan. Make changes where needed.