Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s Sunday Soul Care.
I call it SSC for short in my mind and I’m thinking today of all the other things SSC could stand for: Session of Spiritual Creativity. Sweet Sweet Conundrums. Serene Self-Compassion. Sass, Snark & Cats.
Either way, my hope is that these emails serve as a companion to you as you figure out your own way through spirituality. I’m seriously disinterested in convincing anyone to agree with me or follow my path, and seriously interested in you figuring out the spirituality that works best for you and your soul in your world.
This month I’m putting it all out there and baring my soul about why I don’t consider myself a Christian anymore. Last week I shared the first part of my reasoning: that I no longer wish to associate myself with the cultural and historical institution of Christianity.
A lot of you responded with gratitude and encouragement. Your replies are so meaningful to me, so thanks to anyone who took a moment to do that. A bunch of people also unsubscribed, but that’s okay too—we don't all have the same story and some of us only share a path for a season.
Many of you agreed that the word “Christian” has become so associated with harm that you can’t bear the label either, and that you consider yourselves to be “Jesus-followers” or “Christ-followers” instead.
Well, today I’m sharing why, in addition to not considering myself to be a Christian anymore, I also—and this part hurts to say—don’t consider myself to be a Christ-follower, either.
Let me explain.
THOUGHT
Reason #2: I no longer consider myself a follower of Jesus.
I can’t stress highly enough how glad I am that there are people who feel strongly about reclaiming a more humane version of Christianity. I’m so relieved that people are taking seriously the ethics of Jesus and are building a lifestyle of goodness, delight, compassion and presence in the world.
I’m doubly glad, as I’m more and more aware of how deconstruction is becoming just the latest fad in white-centered spirituality. Esau McCaulley’s book Reading While Blackintroduced me to the concept that when white progressives dismiss swaths of Christian tradition, it also dismisses the rich faith tradition of the Black community who, when they had Christianity forced upon them, managed to find great dignity and hope in the humble path of Jesus. As Candice Benbow quoted in a post this week, “If you away everything Black women believe, what will they have left?” Jasmine Holmes highlighted the difference between the Christianity of the oppressors and the Christianity of the oppressed. To quote my friend Marla in her new book Jaded, “we can’t go from white evangelicalism to deconstruction while ignoring how it’s different for Black folks.”
I’m so grateful that so many of you are rejecting a gross version of Christianity and searching for the purer one, and are embracing a broader umbrella of Christianity beyond evangelicalism to include all people without apology, with more room for disagreement on fundamentals like afterlife, atonement theory, inerrancy, creation and total depravity.
For a long time, I found this broader, progressive version of Christianity to be a perfect fit. Being a progressive Christian lands you in company with good, wise, eloquent people committed to sanctifying the faith. Being a Jesus-follower means you just might find a church community. Being a Christ-follower in any capacity means you can still get book deals with Christian publishers.
I so badly wanted to stay a progressive Christian in this “better version of Christianity” zone.
But.
While I enjoyed this season, eventually I found myself on the boundary of anything remotely resembling Christian orthodoxy. I peeked over the edge and was beckoned by the wisdom and beauty I saw in the horizons beyond. My questions cut to the core of the very foundation of Christianity, and I wasn't satisfied with its answers. The boundaries of my faith began to chafe against my curiosity and the experiences I was having outside of the faith. While I didn't set out to lose my religious identity, it became that as I grew and changed, the label wasn’t accurate anymore. It's as if I was so focused on moving forward that at some point, the label fell off, and I didn't notice until later when I went to look for it.
I still deeply share the values of progressive Christianity, and the humanist ethics it upholds. But I just can’t commit any longer to the particular set of beliefs informing those values.
A caveat: I recognize that it’s hard to say what I think without it seeming like I judge or think less of people who disagree with me. After all, when I look at two options and pick one over the other, that’s an inherent value statement on the beliefs I don’t pick.
But I hope it’s clear that in all these situations where I’m choosing to NOT call myself a Jesus-follower, I’m not doing so out of objective judgment (everyone who disagrees with me is unintelligent!) but out of a subjective self-assessment of what works for me (this belief rubs against some old wounds too much, and doesn't support the calling I feel within my spirit, so for the sake of my well-being, I’m going to release it without fear of retribution.)
When it comes to the core unifying beliefs of Christianity, it’s hard to describe what I mean when I say I don’t believe in them anymore. It’s not that I think all of them are false, or untrue, or definitely didn’t happen. Maybe they did! I don’t know enough to disprove them any more than I know enough to prove them.
It’s more like the things that distinguish Christianity don’t matter to me anymore. The things you have to declare in order to say “I am a Christian” aren’t things I’m willing to declare anymore. I don’t feel the need to make any statements of faith about something for which I can imagine multiple realities. I don’t like the feeling of being presented with a belief about something that happened thousands of years ago, or in spiritual dimensions unknown, and having to definitively say “YES I BELIEVE” or “NO I DO NOT BELIEVE.” After having my mind blown by God so many times even as a Christian, I find it strange that we’re so eager to express God so succinctly in a series of doctrinal statements.
But that’s Christian doctrine, and maybe in a future series I’ll dive into more specifics about why I can’t hang with those core beliefs anymore.
When it comes to Jesus, the literal crux of the entire movement: I don’t call myself a Jesus-follower because I no longer consider my relationship with Jesus to be one of leader and follower. Leader implies that he has the answers and a plan, and that it’s my job to do what he says. But… that sounds like a job. And we’re talking about a life. Even if I could see Jesus as more of a laissez-faire leader, setting basic boundaries and giving permission to freely explore within them, I don’t like limiting my primary source of wisdom and guidance to what I can discern from just a few sources written in and for an utterly foreign context.
If I’m a Jesus-follower, I feel like there’s very little room for me to have autonomy and curiosity to say, “hey what if we look over here at these pagan traditions? Would that be cool?” There’s an authoritarian component to it that seems out of sync with the Jesus I’m coming to know (and even the Christian Jesus I look back on). It makes more sense to me now to think of Jesus as less like a leader, ahead of me and planning each step and leading me where to go, and more as a companion, walking and exploring spirituality with me.
So, there you go: why I no longer consider myself a Christian, and I also don’t even consider myself a Christ-follower anymore, either.
I still really, deeply, love and value a lot of people who consider themselves to be Christ-followers, and I hope that we can continue sharing insight and learning from each other, even if we land in different places. In the end… we’re all just discerning the best we can and making choices. And I believe our diversity paints a much bigger picture of God than any one set of beliefs.
AFFIRMATION
May you follow your soul
To the sources that bring you the most life and peace
Be it to the person of Jesus
Or to an unnamed experience
And an open-ended question.
To those who read down to the end: I’m quietly starting to offer spiritual coaching as part of my work. If you’re stuck in deconstruction, or overwhelmed and needing some peace, or if you’ve ever wished you could sit down with me and pick my brain about something in your soul or spiritual life, I’d be honored to join you and support you as you work through it. I have a limited number of spots available. If you’re interested, send a quick reply to me saying “tell me more…” and we’ll start the conversation from there.
I hope you all have a great Sunday and a wonderful week.
Stay curious,
Joy