Do I Stay Christian? Quotes

“All too often, the Christian industrial project reminds me less of a religion and more of the tobacco, fossil fuel, and weapons industries: willing to harm millions to keep their business going.3”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“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.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“stay Christian while rejecting supremacy and embracing solidarity instead.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“I felt sick to death of the armed platoon of harm that hides in the Trojan horse of many forms of Christianity.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“I think Jesus would be pretty embarrassed about what we’ve made of the movement he started,” he said. “Sometimes I think he wouldn’t want to be a part of it either.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society, recounted how as the bubonic plague spread from body to body in the fourteenth century, a social plague of violence spread from mind to mind, with symptoms of “divisiveness, xenophobia, witch-hunting, blaming, finding a guilty party—the great ‘other’ that we can attack.”6 The Jews became the other of choice upon whom European Christians repeatedly projected their pent-up anxiety and violence.7 Over two hundred pogroms—or organized massacres—erupted during that plague outbreak alone, with an especially horrific massacre occurring in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349. Snowden writes, The citizens of Strasbourg rounded up the community of [2,000] Jews, brought them to the Jewish cemetery, and said that it was their religion that was leading them”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“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”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“I’m often asked if I have hope for Christianity. These days, I say, “My hope for Christianity depends on my hope for humanity, and we humans are not trending well.” And in that realization, I find a compelling reason to stay Christian.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“A growing proportion of smart and honest Christians of each new generation will abandon the sinking ship, just as they have been doing for centuries in Europe and decades in the United States. 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.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“An unexamined, status-quo Christianity is not worth perpetuating. I cannot and will not stay Christian if it means perpetuating Christianity’s past history and current trajectory. The only way I can stay Christian is to do so as part of a creative movement forging a new kind of Christianity,”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“If you have the inner fire to stay in the struggle, may you know that you are walking a path that reformers, prophets, mystics, and sages have walked before you, including a fellow who grew up in Nazareth of Galilee and died just outside Jerusalem. APPENDIX V ADDITIONAL RESOURCES 1.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Howard Thurman, one of America’s greatest theologians said, “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“we compressed the universe’s whole existence into one year, our planet doesn’t even form until September 11.3 The first forms of life don’t emerge on Earth until around September 30, but no multi-cellular organisms evolve until December 14. The dinosaurs rule the earth from December 27 to 30, and the first humans don’t appear until December 31 at 11:39 p.m. Jesus comes on the scene at 11:59:56, which means that all of Christianity has existed for a mere four seconds. Four seconds!”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, decoupling politics from reality has a long history: “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“[The] church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards humanity.… A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to humankind.… The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.… Many of its most eloquent Divines … have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system.… For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!… These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs.… [A] religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides humankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the person in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of humankind.10”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“We saw how Christian Zionism perpetuates a simple but terribly dangerous theological idea, an idea that Christian missiologist Lesslie Newbigin called “the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism,” the idea that God chooses some people for exclusive privilege, leaving everyone else in a disfavored (or we might say “dis-graced”) status.14 They are the other. They don’t belong here. They are in the way. Their rights don’t count.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“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”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Support every positive change in every micro-movement and institution.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“meaningless”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“trust in the process is another way of saying to trust in an intelligence wiser than current human intelligence,”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“seven practices”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“As Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, decoupling politics from reality has a long history: “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“If God dominates the world and everything in it with an iron fist (or rod, as in Psalm 2:9 and Revelation 2:27), we may find ourselves more amenable to authoritarians who do the same, especially if they hold up Bibles in front of churches.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“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.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“By joining the anti-abortion movement, the once guilty are propelled from deep moral unease to a secure position of moral innocence and superiority, with the added social bonding that comes from uniting against a shared enemy whom they depict as murderous and vile. That’s quite a set of perks for a very low price of membership (namely, agreeing to vote Republican in the United States—or its counterparts elsewhere).”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“if you and I do not stay Christian, if we give up whatever little voice and influence we have inside the larger Christian community, won’t we be an answer to the misguided prayers of the religious company men and their followers, who want the rest of us gone?”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Having strained out qualified experts, journalists, and scientists, gullible Christians swallowed any number of frauds and fools, rendering themselves susceptible to the actual shallow ideologies and “empty deceit” I was warned about in Colossians 2:8 as a boy.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“An unexamined, status-quo Christianity is not worth perpetuating. I cannot and will not stay Christian if it means perpetuating Christianity’s past history and current trajectory.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Christianity promised that it had some special divine guidance and protection that would lift it above these human problems to some degree at least, but it’s becoming apparent that this promise was on par with those made by Christian leaders claiming to “pray away the gay” or pray in the fast cash.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“(War is one of the hallmarks of the old humanity.)”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned