The other night in Systematic Theology class the topic of Anne Rice “leaving Christianity” came up and the professor read Rice’s words wherein she declared her decision:
I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or being a part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
Of course I had heard about this but I really didn’t think much about it one way or the other. My faith, after all, is not predicated on what someone else believes and I’m pretty sure God knows what’s up with Anne and doesn’t need my help sorting it out.
My first reaction to her statement was that it expresses immaturity and a real lack of understanding of the Christian gospel as I have experienced it, and I will hold to that. This is the kind of statement you would expect from someone who has gained their knowledge of Christianity from the secular culture; the kinds of things I myself might have said not that long ago.
Interestingly, the professor related to the class, mostly second and third year seminary students, that in his experience when charging Christian leaders to enumerate ten things Christianity was against the response was quick and thorough, but when challenged to enumerate ten things Christians were for the response of the leaders was quite different. Try it yourself. How long does it take to tick off ten things Christians positively promote?
Well, for some probably it will take less time than others and the timing isn’t really important, anyway. What is important is that this is a very real perception held by many both outside and inside the church, and not without reason. Americans tend to identify professing Christians with what they reportedly oppose. In a 2007 survey of young non-Christians, only 16% professed to have a “good impression” of Christianity, and still less “Born Again” (10%) and “Evangelical” (3%) Christians.[i] The following conclusions were reported by the authors of this survey:
In our national surveys we found the three most common perceptions of present-day Christianity are anti-homosexual (an image held by 91 percent of young outsiders), judgmental (87 percent), and hypocritical (85 percent). These “big three” are followed by the following negative perceptions, embraced by a majority of young adults: old-fashioned, too involved in politics, out of touch with reality, insensitive to others, boring, not accepting of other faiths, and confusing.[ii]
We can argue that these perceptions are not fair and represent neither what we believe nor how we act, but the fact remains that this is how we are identified. Clearly American Christians are not doing a very good job of telling our neighbors the “Good News”. And, assuming that Rice as a professing Christian was churched somewhere (if she wasn’t, that would explain a lot), we may not even be doing that well reaching our own members.
The first thing that came to my mind when challenged by the professor to think of ten things Christians are for was that we don’t really need to be for ten things. Jesus did not come with a ten point plan. We only need to make sure that we and everyone we come into contact with know that we are for one thing: amazing grace.
It is true that the Christian church in all of its manifestations is full of the most amazingly judgmental, spiteful, and hypocritical people, just like the world outside the church. It is also true that the sins of those within the church are just as wicked and just as offensive to God as those outside it. But that is no more true today than it was when God himself took on human form and poured himself out. He did that so that “a bunch of quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious” sinners, enemies of God who were completely lost and without hope, could enjoy abundant life. He also did it for no apparent reason (hence the term grace), and that is the Good News we should be shouting, by our deeds and our words, to each other and to everyone around us.
From the very beginning there have been those inside and outside the church who have misrepresented the Gospel. Late in the first century, when Christianity was just getting started but after many of the first Christians had passed from the scene, a lot of people who had not been around to see Jesus started to doubt the things that were said about him; the things he had said about himself. Some of them started teaching these things in the church. John, the disciple who Jesus loved and probably the last living disciple at the time, wrote the letter we now know as 1 John to set the record straight. He wanted to remind everyone before he died that he had been there and seen it all with his own eyes and to make sure everyone knew it was all true.
If you get a chance you should read 1 John. It’s short and contains some of the most amazing teachings in the Bible. In it he refocused the attention of the church to the one thing that matters. It applies to us because it is also the one thing we need to remember we are for, and that we must represent to the world around us if we are truly to be followers of Christ:
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:10-11 ESV)
This is the Christianity I found. Let us pray that Anne finds some of those Christians, and that they might be us.
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