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

by Brian D. McLaren

Our religion can “hell-ify” us by inspiring in us an impenetrable sense of rightness or even superiority. That sense of rightness can inoculate us against humility, infusing in us an excessive confidence or addiction to certainty that keeps us from seeing our mistakes until after the harm has been done—to others (including our children) and to ourselves. Our religion is right, we believe, which makes us right. As a result, the more devoted we are, the more stubborn and unteachable we become. And everyone can see it but us, because we’re blinded by our sincerity and zeal.

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 earliest atrocity of my religion began just decades after Jesus lived and died. He taught and modeled love and radical forgiveness, but the religion that sprang up around his name very quickly showed a hateful face, and the first victim of its hostility was its own mother: Judaism.

The Christian community still remains largely ignorant of or in denial about its detestable history of anti-Semitism. It remains equally oblivious to how its contemporary “philosemitism” fetishizes, objectifies, appropriates, and exploits Jews in anti-Semitic ways. Until these dangerous underlying conditions are fully and effectively addressed, they remain like loaded guns hidden in the glove compartment, even among Christians sporting pro-Israel bumper stickers on their minivans.

Until the Christian faith unites more passionately and decisively in acknowledging its ugly anti-Semitic history (which is ongoing and, in some places, experiencing a resurgence), I must be sympathetic to those who say they can’t stay Christian for this reason alone.

Echoing its founder’s nonviolence, the Christian faith initially grew as a nonviolent spiritual movement of counter-imperial values. It promoted love, not war. Its primal creed elevated solidarity, not oppression and exclusion: “For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26–28). The early Christians elevated the equality of friendship rather than the supremacy of hierarchy (John 15:15; 3 John 14, 15). Because of their counter-imperial posture, including their refusal to be soldiers in the Roman army or to participate in the imperial cult that proclaimed the divinity of the emperor, they were often mocked, distrusted as unpatriotic, and persecuted.

Since Constantine, Christianity has repeatedly claimed a legitimate right to do violence to its members to protect its interests and conserve its supremacy. It has sought far-reaching and sometimes almost limitless control over the behavior and minds of its subjects. At times, it has behaved like a totalitarian power, suppressing dissent and claiming divine and absolute authority, capable of absolute corruption. At times, it has behaved like a terrorist organization, intimidating the many by graphic public violence to a relative few. At times (as we will see in the next chapter), it has behaved like a regime of genocide, with a death toll in the millions. Both Catholic and Protestant Christians have covered up pedophilia scandals and mass killings of children in Christian orphanages and boarding schools, protected perpetrators, and silenced victims, showing haunting similarities to a crime network. The tragic irony, once again, makes me grimace: 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.

To state the obvious: Jesus never tortured or killed or ruined the life of anyone, but the same cannot be said for the religion that claims to follow him.

Many white Christians would be appalled to think of themselves as white supremacists, but they would be proud to think of themselves as Christian supremacists. As a result, their whiteness is concealed in their Christianity, hidden to both others and themselves.

Many churches around the world defied commonsense rules of social distancing and quarantine because the common good of public health conflicted with their personal and institutional ability to conduct business as usual, including the collection of in-person offerings. Misplaced, constrained, or absolutized loyalty, we now see, can be lethal. That fact is obvious in death cults like Jonestown, when the poisoned Kool-Aid is literal. It is less obvious but no less lethal when followers drink metaphorical Kool-Aid by defying public health guidelines or refusing to get vaccinations, or by denying climate science because trusted religious company men told them to do so.

Our imaginations are so imprisoned by our economic systems that we find the idea of hating money to be … almost blasphemous! But at this moment, I don’t feel Jesus was exaggerating at all. At thirty, he saw with great clarity what I saw only dimly well into my fifties. Money is useful, even necessary, in our current culture. But it is also dangerous. Locate an evil, and you’ll find the love of money at or near the root of it.

As the ancient foundations and glass ceilings of patriarchy crack, we are finally taking seriously the suffering inflicted by white Christian patriarchal social systems. That cost begins when women and children are required to subordinate themselves to the heads of their families. Although a woman in a patriarchal system may think of herself as under her man’s protection from the violence of other men, she has little if any protection from his violence.

A white Christian patriarchal universe is not a safe place for women, children, racial and religious minorities, and nonconformists, and neither is it a safe place for the earth and its nonhuman creatures. After all, in white Christian patriarchal minds, the earth and all its creatures exist for the “use and profit” of white Christians (to recall a toxic phrase from the Doctrine of Discovery).

Authoritarian followers favor centralizing power in a single individual, party, religion, and ideology. They use fear of a real or concocted enemy so that their strongman can present himself as their protector. They divide society based on a loyalty test to the strongman and his regime. They distort or distract from the truth to build and maintain unquestioning support for the strongman. And they suppress dissent by any means necessary. Any personal values that authoritarian followers previously held are sacrificed, one by one, for the supreme value of all authoritarians: winning, by concentrating power in the hands of their group and its supreme leader. Winning becomes the singular end that justifies any means.

Two thousand years after Jesus launched a subversive spiritual movement of equality, emancipation, and peace, two thousand years after women were among his inner circle and the first messengers of resurrection, two thousand years after Jesus defended Mary of Bethany’s place in the all-male circle of disciples, the Christian religion still remains subservient to patriarchy and the authoritarian control it engenders.

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.

Our problem is not just the beliefs articulated in our creeds and other doctrinal statements; it’s the pre-critical assumptions—the view of the universe—that underlie many if not most of those beliefs. Think of it like this: our beliefs are like the tips of icebergs. When we affirm them, we unwittingly also affirm a much larger mass of hidden assumptions that uphold them from beneath the surface. Those unacknowledged assumptions often support an archaic view of the universe that further renders Christianity incapable of evolving into something better.

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.

“In light of this new universe—the conceptual universe of process and evolution that more and more of our descendants will be born into—what can Christianity—and we Christians—become?” It would rekindle in us a sense of wonder, which must surely be one of the most essential theological virtues of all. It would let us cut the old anchor line and start sailing again.

Christianity was like McDonald’s, I concluded: the menu was limited and predictable, but its familiarity felt as comforting as a cheeseburger. What it lacked in nourishment it made up for in convenience.

When Christians resist learning about social psychology, they tolerate or even celebrate toxic masculinity and narcissism in congregational and political leaders. When Christians resist learning from doctors and social workers about the processes of dying, they prepare themselves for the afterlife but not for the long dying process that so often precedes it in contemporary culture. When they resist learning about neurobiology and mental illness, Christians engage in harmful or ineffective therapy, counseling, and teaching. When they don’t fearlessly confront the kind of historical whitewashing that we surveyed in previous chapters, Christians allow the racial, ecological, and economic injustices practiced and defended by their forefathers to be repeated by current and future generations.

Failure and success may look like binary opposites. But put them into motion, and they can actually be more like winter and spring, like mass extinction events and post-event evolutionary explosions of diversity. Together they push the process of growth forward. If you want evolution, you have to accept struggle and mass extinction events. If you want birth, you have to go through labor that feels like it’s killing you. If you want a new genesis of diversity and beauty, you have to accept that things must look absolutely hopeless first. You have to commit to do the right thing against all odds. Otherwise, the systems maintain their equilibrium and the status quo spins on.

Perhaps we will be remembered by future generations as heretics. Perhaps we will be remembered as martyrs, heroes, prophets, reformers. Most likely we will not be remembered at all, joining the vast majority of human beings who live good lives but remain unknown to future generations. How one is remembered doesn’t matter when one is focused on integrity.

As things stand right now, about 29 percent of humans identify as Christian. Roughly 24 percent identify as Muslim. About 15 percent identify as Hindu. Another 15 percent or so identify as secular or nonreligious. The remaining 18 percent includes Buddhists (6 percent), members of Chinese traditional religions (5 percent), and all the other religious traditions, including Judaism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Bahaism, and Jainism, each with less than 1 percent of the world’s population.

In the not-too-distant future, Christianity will only exist in those enclaves where authoritarian leaders rule over submissive flocks who enfold their religious lives within the assumptions of the first axial age.

We are not defined exclusively by who we came from in the past. We can also be defined by what we can become in the future.

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 I hold the term Christian for myself and deny it to all those I consider wrong and evil, I am upholding Christianity as the “font of all moral good,” which I know is simply not true.

Meanwhile, 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.

Demagogues who constantly objectify and commodify victims function as vampires, parasites sucking innocence from a steady stream of victims in whose names they rally support and raise lots of money and votes.9 Then they stir up their followers with seemingly righteous indignation against the evil villains, all while deflecting attention from their own wrongdoing, whether they be presidents, pastors, or priests.10 Their fervor for innocence unites their troops into an innocent army.

If you see Christian identity as a pathway to innocence—as many if not most Christians currently see it, then in identifying as Christian, you are seeking to be clean and separated from the unclean. Christianity for you is a temple, a sanctuary, a destination where good and innocent people isolate themselves from the dirty contagion of their unclean neighbors so they can enjoy the sweet fellowship of their own kind. It is like the waiting room at a train station where those ticketed passengers who have been certified as pure wait to board their train to be transported to their ultimate destination, heaven, where they will be eternally separated from all filthy, unforgiven sinners.

Traditional theologians use another word for solidarity: incarnation, the belief that Jesus incarnated or embodied the Spirit of God in human flesh, which means in solidarity with all humanity (see John 1:14). Through Jesus, God joins in solidarity, not just with religious humanity, not just with enlightened humanity, not just with pure, innocent, idealized humanity, but with the fleshy, messy, mucky humanity of unclean slobs like us—who lost our innocence long ago.

I know this sounds complicated. It is. I understand why some of my friends want to be done with any talk of God for good, under whatever names or metaphors. And I understand why others of my friends want to cling to conventional notions, using the Bible and Christian tradition as the eternal ceiling for any and all conversation about God. God is perfectly defined there, they say, in black and white, so there’s no need for new approaches. Just read and repeat, again and again. Stay safely under that ceiling, they warn, or you will lose God, the Bible, the tradition, everything. But if we dare take a third option—of finding language appropriate to our context to describe the insistent holy mystery that is inherent to our experience of life—we have the opportunity to rediscover the You in ways that are as inspiring and liberating in our world as the old metaphors were for our ancestors in their world. We will indeed lose the Bible and the tradition as our ceiling, as we were warned. But we will get them back as our floor, the ancient foundation to build upon, the soil in which we plant new seeds, the launchpad from which we boldly go where no one has gone before.

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.

Is McLaren speaking of om’ism or the “one drop in a big ocean” type theology? Or is there personal identity? I’m a little confused.

When we argue about God, we aren’t simply arguing about an abstract concept. We are also (perhaps even primarily) arguing about what kind of life, culture, and world we want to create, which explains why our theological arguments are often so heated. What seems like esoteric debate about highly speculative matters is actually a practical, down-to-earth contest about how we and our descendants will live. Will we conserve the Christian supremacies of the past—male, white, Christian, and human—that helped create the harm we surveyed in Part I? Or will we create new metaphors, language, and formulations that are more humane, more ecological, more generous, just, and regenerative? Every statement about God, every argument, every fine distinction is, in this light, doubly poetic: both highly metaphorical and highly creative. When you see it this way, you see that theology, religion, and spirituality aren’t just preoccupied with God and mystical esoterica. They are vitally engaged with the creation of the future. They are evolutionary endeavors. By seeking to understand what is essential and ultimate, what is right and good and beautiful, what is wise, what beckons us forward morally, what is, in traditional terms, God’s will, we are setting the course for our evolution. If our understandings of God do not grow, neither will we. We may not even survive.

Our problems, once again, are not just religious problems. Nor are they merely political, economic, or scientific problems. Our problems are human problems, expressed in all these different fields of human endeavor.

No, I don’t need an evacuation-plan gospel that tells me this world is hopelessly sinking, so I should give up on it and jump into the lifeboat bound for heaven. Instead, I need a transformation-plan gospel, the kind that inspired our ancestors stuck in their own existential threats to seek a way when no way was visible.

Life in a wheelchair some days can feel like I’m stuck, locked in a helpless rut of immovability. It’s not always easy but, in those moments I try looking for, praying, and seeking hope in transformation not through escapism of this life, but in transformational change in my life. When the world gets smaller, go deeper.

If religion has a positive role in our future, it will surely involve specializing in desire formation. In fact, for better or worse, religion is desire formation.

But it’s worth remembering that even if you leave your religion to escape its influence on your desires, unless you are intentional about shaping your desires, others will do so for you. In other words, religion isn’t the only industry in the desire-formation business.

Going forward, we will learn to take as good care of ourselves as we would want our neighbors to be taken care of. Our well-being won’t be above or below theirs but inseparably linked with theirs. This nested approach to self-friendship and self-compassion puts us in a collaborative win/win relationship—rather than a competitive win/lose relationship—with ourselves, our neighbors, and the earth.

Jesus’ great commandment to love God, neighbor, and self makes sense as a survival strategy, not just a spiritual aspiration: when we love God, we love neighbor, self, and the creation on which neighbor and self depend. These loves are inseparable. They are, in fact, one love.

If we desire a thriving world for all as our deepest and most all-encompassing desire, not only will we have everything we need: we will become the kinds of people who help create that kind of world. Healed human desire will re-consecrate what distorted human desire has desecrated.

We each have a tiny outpost of the wild that we carry with us wherever we go, namely, our bodies. Like the wild outside us, we constantly try to control and modify our wild bodies. We clothe, tattoo, and sculpt them. We overfeed them; then we starve them. We restrain them from the healthy stress of exercise, or we punish them with the excessive stress of anxiety. We’re proud and ashamed of them. We flaunt and hide them. We love them and hate them. And we do all this because of the linguistic architectures and the social constructions in which our bodies live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). You might say that our linguistic constructions about our bodies are more real to us than our bodies themselves.

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.

It’s not that religion is holy and the secular is profane. It’s that both religion and the secular can be holy, and both can be desecrated, recalling again Wendell Berry’s wise words.7 Ultimately, the religious and the secular are not two things, but one: life.

Our work is to stop the desecration of life in both its religious and secular dimensions. Our work is to restore both the religious and secular to a creative dynamism that deserves and inspires appropriate reverence.

If we are willing to sit with unknowing long enough to examine evidence, consult wise counselors, think critically, and keep our hearts and minds non-anxious and open, we will increase the likelihood that we are moving forward in sync with 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.