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

by Brian D. McLaren

I saw how essential Christian experiences—from being saved or born again to being filled with the Spirit and called to ministry—were often carefully stage-managed and manipulated.

I hope you can see that “Do I stay Christian?” is not a theoretical question for me. It is a matter of the heart, a matter of identity, a matter of ultimate concern. It confronts me each morning when I look in the mirror.

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.

The stories we typically tell ourselves about Christianity keep us living in our comfortable delusion of innocence.

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.

We saw with heartbreaking clarity how Christian Zionism hurts Palestinians, whether they’re Christian or Muslim.

“They’re the cars of Pentecostals. Pentecostals teach that God will bless whoever blesses the Jews. So they sell those bumper stickers at their churches. It’s a way for Christians to buy a blessing from God.

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.

I feel a deep and complex irony: might it sometimes be necessary, to follow Jesus’ example of deep solidarity with the oppressed, to leave the religion associated with Jesus entirely? Might the most truly Christlike choice be to disassociate from Christianity

Might the nonviolent example of Jesus require a true follower or friend of Jesus to defect from any religion with a long track record of doing violent harm in Jesus’ name? No morally serious person can minimize the gravity of these questions.

Might a religion that could make me a worse father also make me a worse neighbor or citizen? Don’t I owe it to my neighbors, especially my Jewish neighbors, to seriously reconsider my involvement in a religion that has been so cruel to them for so long?

When I look back across Christian history, I can’t help but see that there is a fine line between a would-be reformer and a heretic. Successful reformers are revered as heroes and saints by their followers of later generations, but failed or rejected reformers are remembered as heretics by the victorious anti-reformers who write the history.

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.11

If Christianity’s attitude toward Judaism could be compared to a violent child turning upon its mother, and if Christianity’s attitude toward nonconformists could be compared to authoritarian parents browbeating or abusing their children, its relation to Islam could be compared to violent sibling rivalry.

First, yes, we constantly talk about our sins, but have you noticed that nearly all the sins we preach and pray and sing about are personal sins? I spent my entire childhood and young adulthood without hearing a single serious sermon about the social sins of racism and white supremacy, exploitation of the poor, economic injustice, nuclear proliferation, or destruction of the earth, arguably the most serious sins happening during my lifetime on this planet!

I think the radical revealing of the white evangelical church in the 2016 election was when I first started asking the question, “Is the church in America a net gain for compassion in the universe?” …

By reducing its mysteries to beliefs, by codifying those beliefs in systems, and by defining itself by those belief systems, it has rendered itself a paradox: a ship that floats but doesn’t sail.1 For most Christians I encounter today, beliefs are simply what Christianity is. If I point out that in its early years, Christianity was a way of life, not a set of beliefs, they will protest that it was both, and the beliefs had priority. If I point out that the earliest Christians were widely divergent in their beliefs, they are surprised and doubtful; that’s not what they have been taught. If I point out that arguing about beliefs leads to arguments about words, and the New Testament repeatedly and consistently condemns that kind of obsession, they start arguing with me—and if I argue back, there we are, multiplying words, words, and more words, unintentionally proving my point.

And so Christianity faces a very practical dilemma: do we Christians want to continue to enfranchise scoundrels who hold the right beliefs but perpetuate harm? And conversely, do we want to exclude good and genuine people—Christlike people, in fact—who in good conscience cannot affirm our lists of beliefs, even though they are wholeheartedly following the way of Christ?

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.

Why can’t we admit that beliefs are important, but they aren’t the point? Why can’t we admit that focusing on getting our words and beliefs right has not succeeded in helping us be good?

“Which states have the highest church attendance rates?” They would find the following as the top five: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas.4 They might expect that with so many of their citizens deriving so many benefits of Christian faith, these states would be national leaders in measures of well-being like longevity, education, financial prosperity, and happiness.5 But they would be disappointed to find (according to recent studies) the following: Alabama ranks 48th in longevity, 47th in education, 42nd in happiness, 46th in median household income. (It ranks 11th in teen pregnancies.) Mississippi ranks 50th in longevity, 43rd in education, 43rd in happiness, 50th in median household income. (It ranks 2nd in teen pregnancies.) Tennessee ranks 43rd in longevity, 33rd in education, 44th in happiness, and 42nd in median household income. (It ranks 9th in teen pregnancies.) Louisiana ranks 45th in longevity, 48th in education, 46th in happiness, and 47th in household income. (It ranks 6th in teen pregnancies.) Arkansas is tied with Louisiana at 45th in longevity and ranks 41st in education, 49th in happiness, and 49th in median household income. (It ranks first in teen pregnancies.) I share these statistics not to propose a simple cause-effect relationship, nor to shame these beautiful states or their good inhabitants, nor to oversimplify highly complex matters, but simply to illustrate that if we want to argue that Christianity has great power to tran...

If a political party were in power and it kept failing to improve people’s lives decade after decade, we would expect party loyalty to gradually erode until people voted it out. That’s what’s happening in Christianity, in reverse: more and more are voting themselves out the door.

Could those of us who are learning to embody an alternative actually be on the verge of a breakthrough—if we don’t lose heart?

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.

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.

In her warm and insightful book Freeing Jesus, Diana Butler Bass writes, “when quizzed why I am still a Christian, I have always responded, ‘Because of Jesus. I know it sounds corny, but I love Jesus.’”1 I feel the same way.

I must say that Christianity has so much potential for harm that only Jesus can save Christians—and the world—from it. Only Jesus provides a way for Christians to stay Christian, as part of a Christlike resistance to all un-Christlike elements of Christianity and its many mechanisms of domination.

Many of us still call ourselves Christian because, as Diana said, we love Jesus. We “believe in and believe Jesus,” and for us, “that comes pretty near the definition of what it means to be a Christian.” But therein lies our problem. According to prominent Christian gatekeepers across history, having confidence in Jesus and loving Jesus simply aren’t enough.

But I hope you understand that many people, when given the choice between staying Christian and staying honest, feel that honesty requires them to leave literalist Christianity. They simply cannot honestly interpret all biblical stories as accurate accounts.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to me whether there was one demoniac or two. It doesn’t matter which city was the actual setting. It doesn’t matter whether the man was naked before and clothed after, or if the clothing motif is simply a literary way of saying the man became socially acceptable again. It doesn’t matter if the demons were literal. It doesn’t matter if the pigs committed suicide. That’s because if something truly extraordinary happened, I would expect the story to be told widely, and the more widely it was told, the more embellishment there would be. Some differences in details may have arisen accidentally (someone misremembering the name of the village). Other differences may have been intentional embellishments, but even they don’t necessarily falsify the story’s meaning. Each different detail points to something that was deeply meaningful to the earliest hearers and tellers of the story, so meaningful that they exaggerated or embellished it to draw attention to it.

In this telling, the miracle in the story, the magic in the story, wasn’t an exorcism. It was love. Kindness drove out shame and self-hatred. Compassion looked beyond troubled behavior and saw not an evil monster to be chained but a fellow human being to be set free.

(Just as the young English major in a fundamentalist church can’t say, “I think there may be some legendary embellishment and literature of the oppressed at work in the Bible,” because he’ll be quickly excommunicated.)

I wonder if you can see it: the point of the story is not to tell us what factually happened to a man (or two men) in Gerasa (or Gedara) back then. The point of the story is to help something actually happen to us right now, so we too can experience healing, liberation, and reconciliation, so we too can break out of suicidal patterns of trauma and harm.

When I read the gospels literarily, Jesus becomes not less interesting and wonderful but more, not less real and compelling but more, not less transformative and alive but more. The literary embellishments are not facts but neither are they flaws. They are features, part of the way good storytelling works to set people free.

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.

Not only that, but distancing myself from “bad Christians” absolves me of the responsibility to confront them as my brothers and sisters for the harm they do.

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—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 Christianity is to achieve innocence. By distancing myself from a discredited religion, I can feel innocent of its wrongs, weaknesses, and failures. Paradoxically, this confession gives me one of the most compelling reasons yet for staying Christian. Staying Christian is a way of leaving the cult of innocence.

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 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 of climate change, resurgent autocracy, racist nationalism, gross economic inequality, and weapons of mass destruction.

Even though I share with my atheist friends “a disappointment with the narrowness and limitations” of many concepts of God, I do still dare to believe there is a You to address in the universe, a Presence, a Love that loves through all loves, a radiant and holy mystery, the Spirit of life and creativity, the Wisdom woven into the pattern of the universe, the “still, small voice” that beckons creation, including me, toward love and maturity. I can’t help but see that You shining through in the face of Jesus … and through the lives of holy, compassionate, and wise people I meet everywhere. That You that I encounter in life is far better than the He that many of us were taught in church.

the traditionalists issue this ultimatum: Either speak of God using old language and metaphors or don’t speak of God at all. (Quite a fragile God, I’m tempted to say, to be so dependent on one set of metaphors.)

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.

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.

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...

If our understandings of God do not grow, neither will we.

we humans may need periods of religious modesty and silence, maybe even atheism—whether for three days or three years or three decades or three centuries. That way, the dust can settle and the familiar god-talk can fade to silence, and perhaps then we can get a fresh glimpse of what is really there.

I see it again: the worst moments can set the stage for the best moments, if we do not give up and succumb to despair or cynicism … if we keep striving.

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. —FROM RAINER MARIA RILKE’S 1903 LETTER TO FRANZ XAVER KAPPUS

If you’re ready to grow to a new stage but your current form of Christianity keeps you from doing so, you’re going to be frustrated, and rightly so.