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

by Brian D. McLaren

A 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.

Or, to use a metaphor from St. Hildegard of Bingen, surely one of the twelfth century’s most interesting people, we all are born with an inner tent of wisdom. When we’re born, it’s all there, but it is folded so it fits within our infant capacities. As we grow, we unfold the tent and learn to pitch it, so more and more wisdom can make its home within us.

it’s enough to say that if you’re frustrated with Christianity, there’s a good chance that your stage of development is in tension with the stage of development of the form of Christianity practiced by your current faith community.

What if your real desire is not simply a way to stay Christian or put Christianity behind you but a way to be more fully and maturely human?

You’re a human being on a human journey of growth and development—whether you stay Christian or not. You have miles to go before you sleep. And the same is true of everyone else. If you can hold that simple realization with empathy for yourself and for others, you may feel walls dropping away and new possibilities opening in all directions.

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.

For those of us who stay Christian (and perhaps for many others as well), this web of life or tree of life, this universal flow of love, may be one of our best new metaphors for God, recalling our discussion about freeing God in Chapter 19.3 Barbara Brown Taylor, who combines theologian and poet as well as anyone I know, captured this insight twenty years ago. Echoing St. Bonaventure, who described God as a mystery “whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere,” she wrote: 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 re...

Language became so powerful, both interpersonally and intra-personally, that the web of words in our heads often felt more real to us than the web of life outside our heads. Language, we discovered, was a tool we used to describe reality, but it also could become a substitute for reality.

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.

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

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. So Christianity must be recycled, whether you stay part of it or not. Another word for recycled is redeemed, built on the word deem, to give value. And another word for redeemed is re-consecrated, to make holy again what has been desecrated.

In recent years, we’ve called this recycling work deconstruction and reconstruction. I don’t know exactly how we will deconstruct and disarm every dangerous element of the problematic past we surveyed in Part I. Nor do I know exactly what a reconstructed Christian faith will look like after its suitably thorough deconstruction.

We take the Bible seriously, which for us means that we don’t take it literally.

How do we know that we’re aligning with reality or a false narrative constructed by a con artist, demagogue, cult leader, or fool, including ourselves? While there is no surefire trick for avoiding being fooled or being foolish, there is a spiritual practice that can help us: the practice of unknowing. Policy analyst and author Jamie Holmes literally wrote the book on uncertainty. Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing argues that in “an increasingly unpredictable, complex world, it turns out that what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower, or confidence in what we know. It’s how we deal with what we don’t understand.”

When we learn to acknowledge our unknowing, when we learn to sit humbly and in a relaxed way with uncertainty, when we learn to restrain ourselves from jumping from ambiguity to premature closure, we gain some protection from self-deception. 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. Prayer, in my experience, can be an anxious attempt to gain control (with God’s help) over the unknown. But prayer can also be a healthy practice of relaxation, of settling into quiet confidence and “peace that passes understanding,” of learning to acknowledge and hold our unknowing, our un-control, our un-closure. Since I understand prayer as the intentional formation of desire (recalling Chapter 22), and since I desire to remain receptive to reality beyond my current understanding, I have written a prayer that I return to often these days. It is derived from the list of biases we considered in Chapter 9. I use it to help me break down my great wall of bias so I can live more wisely with unknowing, so I can remain part of the reality-loyal community: I do not know everything. I do not even know how much I do not know. Nor do I know how much of what I know is impartial, faulty, or false. So I pray: Source of all truth, help me to hunger for truth, even if it upsets, modifies, or overturns wh...

But knowing what we know now, we have a new responsibility: not simply to carry on the tradition but to challenge and improve it, and our descendants will have the same responsibility when we pass the baton to them. In light of what we now know, to carry on a deeply flawed tradition without improving it feels like a grave infidelity.

Christians like very much to call Jesus the Son of God. Jesus much preferred to call himself the Son of Man (or son of humanity). There are many layers of meaning to the term. But the simplest and most obvious is this: a son of humanity is a human being. If you want to put a finer point on it, son of means the essence of or perhaps a new generation of. 1 Jesus is saying that he represents the essence of humanity, a new generation of humanity, a new kind of human being. In this light, his constant invitation, follow me, means imitate me and join me on my journey toward a new way of being human.

“Home isn’t the name of your tree. Home is the name of your song. Wherever you sing your song, that is your home.” For many of us, Christianity is the name of the tree in which we were raised, or it is the tree in which we sought refuge later in life. But the season has changed. The tree has changed. We have changed. The longer we stay, the more disappointed, disillusioned, frustrated, and even trapped we feel.

What matters most isn’t staying faithful to the tree but staying faithful to the song, our song, the song only we can sing.

Perhaps “Do I stay Christian?” isn’t the kind of question you can answer with a simple yes or no, because perhaps what Jesus was about wasn’t which tree to perch in but how to sing your song in the symphony of creation.

Do I stay Christian? In the end, the answer that really matters is not the one you or I give with our words, but the one we give with our lives.