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

by Brian D. McLaren

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...