The word love appears 551 times in the bible; the 38th most used word (NIV Version). You could easily make a good argument it ranks in the top-ten, by taking out some other “filler” words, places, or titles.
If you take out references to God or Jesus, the most common word is people, appearing 2,214 times. My first memories of learning about Jesus and God focused on the fact that God created us in his image and he loved us so much he sent his son for us when we needed him most. I understand this an elementary understanding but this point was driven home so often that was impossible to ignore or forget. I thought that God loved me no matter who I was.
I want to take a moment before I go further and say that during my time in church was not full of trauma. My time in the church did give me trauma I have had to recover from but it was mostly around shame created by its theology.
I met many great people and felt loved by individuals and I love(d) them. As a straight white male, I never felt unwanted or looked down on by any one person, or if I did, I was able to brush it off easily. I had and have great relationships with people in the church.
However, if I am being honest, I never felt love was in the church.
I remember sitting in church, doing bible studies, going on retreats, etc. where the main message was all about love and caring for others. I am not sure if this was a sugarcoated message to get me to stick with religion into adulthood only to find out that this love now seems to be reserved only for a few or if this message was genuine, yet now warped. I like to think it was the latter but conservative Christians and some alarming historical data seem to make the former seem plausible instead of a crazy conspiracy theory.
As early as eight or nine, I remember sitting in church, mostly always a Catholic church at the time, and having only a few take a ways from the homilies I heard. One, we were all sinners and needed to repent. Two, we must give money to the church for God. Three, we couldn’t escape sin and we needed to fear the Lord because of our sinful ways. This messaging seemed to contradict what I would hear from the children’s message, religious family/friends, what I would read/hear outside of the church pew, or the messages I would hear when I started to attend churches outside of the catholic theology.
The messages at these more evangelical churches seemed to mention love more during the sermons but when I got older, I started to notice troubling language, though at the time I ignored it or didn’t really understand what I was hearing. Again, my white male identity helped me ignore the things I heard in sermons and conversations, because it never felt directed specifically at me, other than maybe some purity culture stuff in my teenage years. While there was more messaging about love there was also a lot of us vs them discussions. The “us” being Christians and the “them” being anything that wasn’t or at least anything that wasn’t our idea of a “real” Christian. I heard more about “going to battle” for Jesus or going out and converting others. Sometimes this felt gross even as I did it.
I grew up around several conservative family members and friends. I am a former conservative Christian, though the self-apologetic side of me likes to say I was young and naive. I drank the Kool-Aid, especially in college. I am just as guilty as using God, Jesus, or the Bible as a way to control others or cause trauma, something I both apologize for and am fully and solely responsible for. I remember myself questioning or trying to clarify what I was hearing in church prior to college. However, when I went to college I eventually gave this up. It was nothing the college did or really, anything anyone did. I began to think I was the lone one out there that just didn’t get it as everyone else around me did. College was also a new experience for me. I was no longer an athlete, something core to identity at a younger age. I think I drifted towards many church work majors and serious believers; an identity I recognized from youth group circles. So, I just, well, to put it in words most of my audience would understand, I chose this mantra, “I'm diving in, I'm going deep, in over my head I want to be, caught in the rush, tossed in the flow, in over my head I want to go”.
For a long time, this felt good and if I am being honest it was easy. I could put all my questions behind me and worry no more. I have a love/hate relationship with this time in my life. This choice brought me many great friends and to a certain aspect my wife, and thus my child. However, I have a love/hate relationship with who I was when I look back. I can almost hear myself saying the very same things that cause me anger when I hear them now. I sometimes come across old posts and can’t remember if I actually believed what I was saying or just felt I had to say it to prove to myself that I should believe it.
It would be easy to put all the blame on the systemic issues in the Christian church but I am also to blame. In reality, my place life allowed me to go through life not thinking about or really questioning the thoughts and beliefs around me. I view that not as an excuse but a condemnation. I walked through life shrugging my shoulders instead of asking why I was shrugging my shoulders in the first place. It would also be easy for me to use the “that wasn’t really me” or “it doesn’t represent who I am”; except that, it was who I was. I have to own that if I am to change and go down a different path.
The current path that Christianity is on, especially in America, is downright dangerous and deceitful.
We need to be aware that the vocal and powerful Christians, especially on the radical side, set the narrative for how those on the outside view Christianity today. These extremists are also gaining more and more power. They are no longer on the fringe. They are the power brokers. They are in bed with authority.
We can’t wish that away and we can’t pretend that isn’t the reality, even if we don’t always see it from the inside of our own home church or the people we fellowship with.
Church trauma is real and it happens to real people. While these stories tend be viewed as anecdotal, my own included, they are real lived experiences. This is why it is so important to refrain from saying things like; “that is not how it was for me”, “you just had a bad, abnormal experience” or “but my church isn’t like that”.
Additionally but just as importantly, the point of writing this is not to convince anyone to leave the church or abandon their religion. The house of Christianity has many rooms, and we need to open the doors of all of them. My goal is to point out that the powerful and loud Christian movement is at best ignoring love, and at its worst, causing extreme harm to people. This brand of Christianity, call it conservative evangelical, white evangelical, or something else, isn’t that important as it overshadows what is truly at its core. The church doesn’t seem too concerned with love or even salvation, the focus is on power, individualism, and control. Oh and also martyrdom, but that might be due to sitting in church every week and constantly being told stories of when Christians faced persecution, like 1,800 years ago when it was new and challenging authority. Something that should make Christians keenly aware of the current persecution faced by actual marginalized groups. However, since the focus is on power and control, love for others has taken a backseat.
Additionally, my point is to call on others who claim to care about the church and people to do something. To speak out and help create change.
This isn’t a new thing. James Baldwin, a former young minister himself, told us so nearly 70 years ago. He wrote; “I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant every body. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did…”
Now Baldwin is also talking about race in his letter and not just church in the abstract but his point hits home, talking about systemic issues in the church. Love did often seem to end at the church door. Moreover, when it did leave the front door, that love seemed reserved only for certain people.
Ever since Christianity has come out of the shadows of persecution, about 400 AD or CE, the religion has been a force that has caused extreme harm and pain. If the Christianity wants to redeem itself, it must address these issues with fervor, which includes not only apologizing and admitting its role but changing its ways. We have seen countless examples of this over the years including the response to LQBTQ+ communities, abortion, race, gender, and poverty, just to name a few. We saw and still see how this attitude has taken hold during the pandemic.
Part of me thinks this all begins with the idea of Original Sin, which really emerged as a force in the 3rd century. Earlier I mentioned my first memories of church. Sitting there as a young child hearing about how terrible humanity was and in a way that I was terrible too. How we’re all born sinners and will always be sinners. How we are sinners before we even make our first sound.
The thing is, original sin isn’t in the bible, and it is a manufactured construct. It is a doctrine heavily influenced by Augustine in and around 350 AD or CE, though other thinkers that came before him influenced him. Soon after many Christian communities accepted this as core to their theology. Whatever its intended purpose was, Christian churches/leaders around the world have weaponized this against their members. It is something that we have to reckon with. The doctrine of original sin and Church trauma can go hand and hand. It has resulted in the stunting of emotional growth and well-being of countless numbers of children. We know so much more about the human body and mind than we did when the church adopted the doctrine, to ignore this leads us further down a bad path. It is also important to know that several other theologians and thinkers around the time of Augustine did not agree with his idea of original sin, this is something that needs more room for discussion in the Christian church.
No matter what, the idea of Original Sin caused us not to trust our mind and body. It has put us in a constant battle with the maker. It has taught us to doubt our emotions and feelings but never doubt that we are broken. The idea that our thoughts and actions aren’t to be fully trusted makes it hard for us to grow or to question what is around us. It forces us to conform because the other option presented is eternal fire. We see this often when the church talks about sex, love, and marriage. We ought not to listen to our body because that body doesn’t really belong to us. Too often fear, naivety, selfishness, and the inability for looking inward, stunts the growth of Christian theology. I think this is a result of thinking that the bible is a fixed book, that it was either written in one or two sittings. The belief of biblical inerrancy contributes to this problem. The canonized version of the Bible is still new.
In the preface of his book “Christians Against Christianity”, religious scholar and professor, Obery Hendricks, references something a professor said during a lecture while he was a student at Princeton, “reading scripture without context is pretext”. We need to do a better job of looking at the historical timing of each story or book. I think it could be equally important to talk about what was left out of the bible and why. A lot of times, this was not even intentional, it was just that people reading Paul’s letters or even the Gospels 1,500 years ago would have understood some of the cultural references without needing a history lesson, something current Christians can’t because we are so far removed from this time period.
History needs a bigger place at the table when we talk about theology and the influence it should have on our behaviors and thoughts today. Theology can’t sit by itself, isolated in biblical studies departments and/or in the hands of, mostly white, and almost exclusively male, preachers/priests. If Christianity is relegated to these spaces, it can’t survive or even thrive. Science, history and other academic research belong at the table. If God or Christianity is for all, its home can’t be an echo chamber.
In recent years, a lot of religious historians that produced great books looking at how we got to this point. In addition, many Christians have started to deconstruct, privately and publicly, it is important to understand that deconstruction doesn’t mean losing your faith. These two things could help alter the future of Christianity in America and around the world. The hope is that it could move Christianity back to where it started; focusing on Jesus, his teachings, and the treatment of others. The focus needs to be on the oppressed instead of being the oppressors.
I have thought long and hard about why so many Christians, especially conservatives, are roadblocks when it comes to making real loving changes in our country. It is easy to look at these issues and blame selfishness, and while I strongly believe that to be a factor; I think there may be a religious psychological reason as well. I am sure there is an academic view on this and maybe even a more official diagnosis, but I’ll call it “the Jesus paradox”. A quick google search showed a reflection titled “The Jesus Paradox” but it differs from how I see the paradox. Earlier I briefly talked about how often I heard about Jesus' and God’s love as an adolescent Christian. This message sounded simple, all we need is their love and our worries were gone as long as we believed in them. I think this message stifled Christianity so much when it comes to our response to our society. How I see this play out is this; so many Christians think that by Jesus dying on the cross that all our problems are a) solved or minor, b) all we have to do is trust & pray that problems will be solved, and c) we just need to get to heaven and all will be okay. The main problem with this paradox is that by following it, people feel absolved of taking any action or responsibility.
Lots of Christians love to quote Corinthians and I acknowledge that quoting scripture, any one-off scripture verse to try to prove one's theological belief can lead to a lot of whataboutism, but with that said, 1 Corinthians 13:13 should be something we at least take notice of. It goes as follows; “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
When love is more important than faith, is our calling not to love first? We can’t truly show love if our focus is on shutting others out.
If Christianity is at its base, and most importantly, is about love, why do so many act in defiance? Why do so many support leaders that use Christianity as a grift in order to hold power? Why do we use the bible to keep people out or ignore the plight of fellow humans? Why do we see social progress as front to Christianity? Why do we lament change and action by claiming religious martyrdom so we can discount what we see?
As Beth Allison Barr, asks in her book, why, if we, as Christians are called to be not of this world, do we continue to do what the world was doing before Jesus came to earth?
If the future of Christianity in America or anywhere else continues to be about exclusion rather than inclusion or about power and authority rather than salvation and love, why do I want to invest any time or effort into the church?
The church should be about liberation. “The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive,” wrote James H. Cone in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Christians influence how the power of the cross by their behavior.
Maybe the church never really felt like love because the church never seemed to be about love.
I don’t know where my faith walk will lead me. I don’t know if I will deconstruct into a life without a religion. I don’t know if will lead to a reconstruction, whatever that means. To be honest, I don’t care about the final result, because if I focus on that now, I surely will never reach it.
It would also be easy or catchy to say something like, “I didn’t leave the church, the church left me”, but that downplays the hundreds of years of harm the church has done. In reality, the church has done a marvelous job covering up their abuse and harm and until recently, I shielded myself from the truth, like many other followers. The church can and in opinion needs to change, but until that occurs, I will refuse to participate in it. I know there are great churches out there and maybe I will end up in one in the future but right now my focus can’t be there. There is work I need to do for myself, and, there is work the church needs to do to prove it is a worthy investment.
In the meantime, I will strive to live out this WH Auden verse, “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me”.
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