Our congregation usually has two "summer reads" each year. I'm never there for the discussions, and won't be this year either, but I decided it wouldn't hurt to have a look at this July's read, Brian McLaren's Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned. The book assembles many reasons why people might want to distance themselves from Christianity (all the folks he mentions are burned-out pastors, mostly Evangelical), then offers some reasons one might choose nevertheless to stay.
The book's final section, coming after the insistence that he respects whatever choice people make, proposes ways of living more humanly either way, beyond the sins of the church. The reasons for leaving were familiar to me, surrounded as I am by religious nones: Anti-Semitism, Christian vs. Christian violence, Crusader colonialism, institutionalism, money, white patriarchy, toxic theology, lack of transformation, constricted intellectualism, demographics.
Those for staying were newer. Here are the names of the chapters:
11 Because Leaving Hurts Allies (and Hurts Their Opponents)
12 Because Leaving Defiantly or Staying Compliantly Are Not My Only Options
13 Because ... Where Else Would I Go?
14 Because It Would Be a Shame to Leave a Religion in Its Infancy
15 Because of Our Legendary Founder
16 Because Innocence Is an Addiction, and Solidarity Is the Cure
17 Because I'm Human
18 Because Chistianity Is Changing (for the Worse and for the Better)
19 To Free God
20 Because of Fermi's Paradox and the Great Filter
I confess I skimmed rather than read these, most of which seem like variations on the same few themes. But a few surprised and intrigued me. 16 built on McLaren's experiences of the curdling sanctimony of the pro-life movement to diagnose a quest for innocence which is really about finding and demonizing others, fancying yourself their innocent victim while relishing the thought that they'll roast in hell. There's nothing innocent about this desire, he says, but this "cult of innocence" is among the main reasons many people become and stay Christian. Hateful hypocrites! McLaren confesses
one of the prime reasons I sometimes want to leave Christianity is to achieve innocence. By distancing myself from a discredited religion, I can feel innocent of its wrongs, weaknesses, and failures.
Paradoxically, this confession gives me one of the most compelling reasons yet for staying Christian: Staying Christian is a way of leaving the cult of innocence. (127)
Instead of disavowing the hateful "Christians" who make more and more young people head for the door, what if one recognized one's kinship with them? Not to justify their limitations but to recognize one's own. And perhaps, in so doing, to help them see - and see beyond - their fear and hatred? The church, a priest friend of mine often said (quoting someone I don't recall), is the cross on which Christ is daily crucified. And yet is there anywhere better than the church for confessing this? McLaren tells, a little glibly, about people he knows who have left the church, only to find the same human weakness wherever else they went. And suggests that his friends in other religions would rather he stayed Christian, hot letting the haters take over, as they do the same in theirs. Elsewhere in the book he reminds us that, while its numbers are falling, white nationalist Christianity has incredible wealth, wealth which will only grow as they sell off unneeded real estate, and which they can use to influence politics (indeed, already do).
Another reason for staying caught me up short. It's chapter 14, which places Christian history in the longer history of our species: the last 2000 of 200,000 years. Wouldn't it be a shame if human history ended, and one saw Christianity as precipitating the end? How much better to imagine another 200,000 years, with Christianity shaping the glorious the second half! Of course that would mean leaving most of what we know behind, and recognizing that "the future is our deepest and truest reality" (words borrowed from Sister
Ilia Delio).
A forward- rather than backward-looking Christianity sounds good to me - and not looking forward to the End Times! But 200,000 more years of human history just seems like pie in the sky. What faith or hope or ignorance it takes to think our days aren't very much more numbered. McLaren's a decade older than me. Didn't he also grow up with the near certainty that we were living the last years of human history before a nuclear holocaust? And hasn't he heard about the Anthropocene? On the other hand, perhaps my time frame is too short, my hopes too dim. Thinking about Christianity (or any other tradition) as something to be saved from its manifold faults so it might serve a perhaps unimaginably different future is intriguing.
Our congregation usually has two "summer reads" each year. I'm never there for the discussions, and won't be this year either, but I decided it wouldn't hurt to have a look at this July's read, Brian McLaren's Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned. The book assembles many reasons why people might want to distance themselves from Christianity (all the folks he mentions are burned-out pastors, mostly Evangelical), then offers some reasons one might choose nevertheless to stay. 