“If you die tonight, do you know where you will go?” This question and its brothers and sisters have echoed through toxic Christianity for centuries as preachers have literally scared the hell out of people. “Do you know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of your life?” “Have you prayed the prayer to accept Jesus into your heart?”
It is almost unbearable. In any major city — and even some small towns — you will inevitably encounter someone on a street corner pitching their version of Christianity. It’s manipulative. It’s angry. And it plays to our fears. It seems that the louder they are, the scarier their version of Christianity is. The loudest have megaphones and great, big signs with scary (even hateful) messages on them.
Does it seem to you that Christianity is a religion based on fear?
Fear of what, you might ask. Fear of hell. Fear of meaningless living. Fear of God’s wrath. Fear of death. Fear of the truth. The list could go on and on.
Several religious scholars have named anxiety as the human condition, and when you think about it, it makes sense. We are creatures that live with great fear. John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop says, “Many forms of religion are little more than cultural manifestations of the fear of nothingness.” (Jesus for the Non Religious).
We fear and so we twist the liberating, welcoming message of Jesus to a fear-based, angry, manipulative message all about sin, repentance and eternal life. In Did God Kill Jesus, Tony Jones says, “Now here we sit, two millennia later, and survey after survey tells us that Christians are known not for our love, but for our fear: fear of gays, fear of change, fear of the ‘end-times,’ fear of science, fear of the Other—in whatever form the Other takes. How did we get here? How did the act of following Jesus go from something that was a response to God’s love in the first century to a bloody, fear-based, avoidance of hell decision in the twenty-first?”
Has Christianity been made into a fear management system? We have to say yes.
One could look at the aspects of Christianity that many emphasize: human sin (original sin, for many), Jesus’ death for sin, hell, retribution, forgiveness of sin. Many of the major themes of Christianity revolve around getting over the sin problem. With the emphasis of sin, forgiveness, and eternal life, we have twisted this life-giving message of the Kin(g)dom of God into something it was never intended to be.
So now you must be wondering how we can get back to the affirming, hospitable, joyous message of Jesus.
1. Love
Gandhi famously shared with Christian minister E. Stanley Jones several ways that Christians can be better world citizens. All of his recommendations revolved around love. Christians have misinterpreted God as a being to be feared. God is not loving in many of these systems that we should be afraid of mentioned above. But Gandhi reminds us to get back to love being the center of our faith because love animates God. At God’s core, God is loving, not vengeful, not wrathful, not seeking a blood sacrifice. God is love. And Jesus is our best image of that love in the way that he treated people, welcomed them, and prepared the way for communities to carry on hospitality and real welcome. Christians must become better at love if we want our faith to survive in the 21st century.
2. Kin(g)dom of God is here and now.
Jesus came to announce the good news that the Kin(g)dom of God was among the people. You see, they had been expecting something to happen. They expected God to send a mighty warrior to establish a new kingdom that would be ruled by the law of God. But instead of a mighty warrior they got a wandering teacher. This wandering teacher, Jesus, preached that the Kin(g)dom they expected was going to be much different than they expected. It would be one based on loving enemies and forgiveness. It would be based on care for others in the community and inclusion. This realm of God that Jesus came to awaken us to is not a ticket out of fiery existence after our death. It is a realm that we can live into now by embodying the love within Jesus’ teachings. We can live into this realm by taking on the subversive practices of inclusion, forgiveness of others, non-violence, servanthood, and so much more.
Christianity doesn’t have be scary. Christians have made Christianity scary. What are you going to do to make it different?