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

by Brian D. McLaren

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...