Tag Archives: organized Christianity

Growing Up Is Always

Organized Christianity since its inception could rate an A or an F, depending on which bits you examine.

One could point to religious wars killing millions.

On the other hand, where Christians have become a force, slavery generally has been abolished. The status of women has improved. The sick and the poor are more often cared for.

Jesus himself said to judge his followers not by whether they say they are his followers. Rather, have well do they follow his examples? Do they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, take care of strangers, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners?

Bill McKibben in his column in Sojourners (“A Mad and Dangerous Spell,” July 2021) faults those evangelicals who talk of the power of God to keep them from harm from the Covid-19 virus. For this reason, they say, they don’t need to be vaccinated against the disease.

“These sentiments sound pious,” he writes, “but they’re in fact the opposite—individualism masquerading as faith. God gave us a world that works in certain physical ways, and God gave us the brains to understand it.” Science developed the vaccines that have saved countless lives from Covid.

Against the anti-science of some evangelicals and others today, one must point to the books and learning kept alive in Christian communities during the European Middle Ages.

Ignorance is always being pushed back, for Christians as for anyone. Some of the first Christians owned slaves. Women were often placed in inferior positions. Some Christians (or calling themselves Christians) murdered each other and non-Christians in vicious wars and pogroms and crusades.

But change came. And Christians often led the changes, even against co-religionists.

The apostle Peter had to overcome his prejudice against Gentiles becoming Christians. In every generation since, we fight these battles to grow and overcome. We are always children striving to become the adults God wishes us to be.

Wandering Jews and Christians

Polls tell us that fewer and fewer people today, especially young people, identify as religious, including as Christians.

Christianity has lost its majority following before, usually after too many people calling themselves Christians followed gods other than Christ. Nazi Germany is one example.

Wesley Hill is a professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry. He uses Chaim Potok’s books about Jews in America, struggling to keep their faith, as an example for American Christians. (“Chaim Potok’s Wandering Jews, Holding to Faith in a Critical Age,” Plough Quarterly, Autumn 2020.)

Hill writes: “A religiously observant life is less and less accessible or intelligible to modern Westerners, yet many of us remain haunted by its possibility.”

Despite many who leave organized Christianity, others, like Hill, continue in the faith, perhaps in altered form from their childhood.

“Like Potok’s characters,” Hill writes, “I went away to university and experienced something of the wider world beyond the confines of my Baptist, Republican childhood. . . . I am now a member of the Episcopal Church, which, to my childhood eyes, was barely a church at all.”

And so he remains, as do many of us. “. . . “I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want sill, very much to be a Christian.”

But isn’t that the story of the Christian church? Over and over again, dying, then finding rebirth as a more humble but risen faith?