3 minute read
In 2016 into 2017 I had a profound crisis of faith.
It was not a crisis of faith in the person of Jesus, the truth of Jesus, or even the way of Jesus. Instead it was a crisis of faith in the followers of Jesus. I felt like I’d been lied to my whole life.1 Literally the exact same clergy and laity who railed against Slick Willy Clinton in the late-’90s as having no business being president because of moral deficiencies in his character–particularly his sexual immorality–were now vehemently defending a hedonistic narcissist who’d appeared on the cover of Playboy, is known to have affairs with porn stars, and brags about sexually assaulting women. Suddenly they were preaching a different tune: “We’re electing a commander-in-chief, not a pastor-in-chief!” Even while my own outlook had become more moderate and nuanced, all these years I’d continued operating in good faith by giving ’em the benefit of the doubt about their ideological partisanship. Alas, it was proven to be a sham and I an utter fool for that charitable interpretation. That was spiritually and socially devastating.
Four years later, it’s happening again with COVID-19.
Despite all the other differences, at the very least I thought I could count on conservative evangelicals and Catholics to highly value human life during a pandemic. Surely they would believe in the need to band together to protect the most vulnerable among us because of the profound value of all human life as made in God’s image and dearly beloved by their Creator. That much I thought I could count on. Instead their foremost priority seems to be this consumerist “right” to be able to eat at Chili’s without the “tyranny” of wearing a mask.2 It’s all about this neo-Gnostic secret knowledge called a “personal relationship with God” set against the backdrop of a uniformly red cultural script of libertarian freedom, capitalistic happiness, conservative political populism, faux-intellectual rigor via conspiracy theories, and moralistic therapeutic deism. At this point, I believe their conception of the Gospel has about as much to do with The Way of Jesus as Ted Bundy’s serial killing has to do with pacifism. As Gandhi put it, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
It’s just a surreal state of affairs.
The good news is that since leaving evangelicalism my own Christian faith has become deeper, stronger, more nuanced, and less constricted than it’s ever been. A huge part of that journey has been the difficult process of carefully parsing between the redemptive metanarrative of Scripture and the cultural script of American Christianity. I’m rather fond of the cultural-historical Jesus of Nazareth recorded in Scripture, but the way in which the story of King Jesus and His Kingdom have been culturally packaged in the American consciousness is utterly horrific. It’s a bit like dropping a beautiful diamond ring down into the bowels of a porta-potty after a long weekend at Mardi Gras. Who wants to dig around in there to save the ring? More than ever, I understand why so many people have left the institutional church to become “spiritual but not religious” or have lost their faith entirely. I literally cannot fathom how I’d remain a Christian if I still thought all this crap is what it meant to follow Jesus. I’ve lost all trust in that whole paradigm.
