What it means to be Christian

I am sitting here in church, basically ignoring the sermon, writing this blog post. Ironic that this post is about what it means to be Christian. I am more and more convinced that being Christian means avoiding church more than it means attending church. What we are taught in the sermon seems more disconnected from reality than it does connected. How can these platitudes and cliches be worth spending 4 hours every Sunday listening to them for the rest of my life?

Understand, there is nothing I am hearing from the pulpit that is doctrinally wrong, opposing the Bible, unhelpful, or impossible to understand. I think the pastor knows who he is preaching to and I think he sincerely wants to help people in their lives. I am not someone who believes I know everything there is to know about God, and I am certainly not arrogant enough to think that I have the authority, inspiration or responsibility to judge how my church is organized or what my pastor’s vision and practice for the church God has given him to lead is. God has not, to date, and will not (that I know of), ever tell me I can stand up and tell my pastor that he is wrong or that what he is doing is wrong – that is entirely between God and my pastor.

I am responsible for myself, and somewhat responsible for my family’s spiritual well being – at least, I am responsible for making sure my family has a deep relationship and dialog with God and I am responsible to share with them whatever wisdom I have gleaned over my years as a Christian to ensure they can take responsibility for their spiritual growth. That is the basis I am using to ask the questions I am asking of myself and to measure my church and my pastor. Are my children and my wife growing in their relationship with Jesus Christ? Do they center their lives around his will? Do they exhibit the fruits of the spirit? More to the point of this blog, is my church helping with my family reaching the goals expressed in the questions I am asking?

As a side note, I want to put to rest what I can hear some who may read this are thinking: ‘If you are interested in spiritual growth, why focus on Christianity at all? There are many ways to grow spiritually, and Christianity is just one of many choices.’

First, I have been around the block many times, and have not been Christian my whole life – there is no ‘religious philosophy’ that can match a direct relationship with Jesus Christ. Buddhism, Taoism, Hare Krishna, Grecian philosophies and any theories of spirituality that divorce a god power from the spiritual equation at the root make the individual into a god. We are not gods and regardless of how much we think positively, neutrally, or negatively (whatever your godless philosophy dictates) our time on this earth is finite, our vision is limited and our power is miniscule to effect true macro or micro change without a ton of help. All of the heroes of the philosophical faiths have done nothing without a huge group of followers to buy into and drive that change. Gods don’t need that kind of help to get done what they want done.

The religions that attribute authority over spiritual matters to a god or gods vary wildly, but at their root they have common features; works based salvation, possibility for their followers to attain godhood, or a concept of truth that compels the rejection of things we know to be true without spiritual ‘inspiration’ – things we know from the wisdom we have gleaned over our time on earth. Religions that reject truths that in our natural operation we know to be true mean we have to divorce our faith from our brain, and operate like fanatics – doing instead of thinking, believing without question.

One thing that is generally accepted as true by all people, something we know instinctively in the root of our being when we are thinking without the influence of skewed philosophies, is that all life matters. Every society throughout history has laws against murder or assault – we recoil physically from murder and death, we fight for our own survival and the survival of the ones we love without apology. True, some societies have applied the laws they have made against murder selectively at times, but generally, people faced with the raw reality of another human being’s destruction naturally go to that person’s defense if they are not clouded by some form of pseudo spirituality or twisted philosophy that denies the sanctity of life. 

Religions or philosophies that reject this reality can’t be taken seriously – although people often times do take them very seriously. Islam is a good example. At the center of the religious sentiment that drives Muslims is the belief that Mohammed is infallible and Allah is the only one worthy of worship – not dissimilar to Christian belief in the role of Jesus and God – however, both Mohammed and Allah calls their people to jihad; killing, destroying utterly, or subjugating whole people groups that are not Muslim (or not Muslim enough) as a requirement for entry into the faith. Believing that this idea is not a core tenet of fundamental Islam, and is part of radical Islam only, is reckless and naïve. Let’s quote Muslim thought leaders themselves on this – don’t take my word for it; research the writings and speeches of the Muslim believers themselves. A great place to start is here.

Second, two core pieces of ‘worldly wisdom’ that are fundamental to the heart and core of human endeavor and accomplishment is liberty and the pursuit of  happiness. While these principles are most famously codified in the Declaration of Independence of the United States, they didn’t come from a vacuum. People the world over fight for liberty and happiness from oppression and subjugation in the mundane day to day arc of their individual lives as well as throughout history under political banners for almost any reason – the pursuit of liberty and happiness is reason enough in itself. Religions that remove liberty through excessive and insurmountable rules and works, or that diminish happiness through guilt or ostracizing their adherents we instinctively despise.

If you follow me on the assertion that at the core of our spiritual selves is the sanctity of life, the greatest degree of liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – and that these things are an accurate measure of the efficacy or ‘truth’ of a religious philosophy or practice, continue reading. If you reject that idea, I can’t help you any longer but to ask – when you live in a world with a thousand competing spiritual philosophies, many of which directly oppose each other and claim that their opponents are false – what measure do you use to determine wrong from right? Make no mistake, the proponents of those philosophies have an absolute measure, no matter how much they insist they don’t – otherwise, why does it matter what philosophy you choose if they are right or wrong based on sentiment alone?

For those that follow me on my assertions, let me take them a step further, and accentuate my point. I would like to add that fundamentally, we all believe in absolutes. We operate in a largely binary environment. We choose daily between options presented to us and weigh those options based on binary measures – one option is good (right, roughly) and one option is bad (wrong, roughly). When we have multiple options, we make multiple binary decisions to winnow down our choice to a final two – ultimately binary. Our final choice is based on absolutes we often can’t express clearly but we instinctually understand. Easy targets we hit daily are issues surrounding lying, stealing, cheating, murdering – targets less easy are things like how we spend our money, where we live, what we say to friends and family in our daily conversations – these have circumstantial facts that color our decisions, but truly those circumstances are coloring our ultimate decision alone, not the absolute that drives that decision.

The summation of the points I am making above is that we operate with absolutes – and central to those absolute principles are the concepts of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. My assertion is that regardless of philosophy each of the absolutes are written into our souls and are fundamental to our being. One thing that I haven’t done, and that needs more space than I want to take with this blog, is define what those concepts mean. I will cut the definition conversation short by saying that the only religion, philosophy, belief or whatever you want to call it that upholds those fundamentals from stem to stern is Christianity.

Now, I know what you are thinking – life sure, but happiness and liberty codified in the Christian philosophy definitively? REALLY? Yes, and that is my point – it is the only religion that aligns with what we are created to believe – what is knit into our DNA. The reason the United States immortalized the statement ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ is because the US was founded on Biblical principles. Honestly check the history – and check it in its entirety. You can find isolated statements from almost all of our founders that seems to disparage or diminish Christian belief, but you can’t take the entire body of works of any individual founder and definitively show that any of them were nothing less that driven by Judeo/Christian principles, contained in the Bible. The beauty of this is that they found that those truths were self evident – not realized by convolutions of thought or unintelligible philosophy that have been filtered through history.

What it means to be Christian is that you base your life on those fundamentals, and fight for them in your words and actions. Being Christian has nothing to do with your church attendance – being a christian does. Notice the small ‘c’. Christianity is real, operates in the realms of fact, and the truths it purports are self evident and are not hampered by works constraints, belief that we as humans are something we are not, and are not constrained by a god that needs irrational convolutions of philosophy that have no basis in history and fact. An honest evaluation of history shows that Jesus was who he said he was and all that is needed to be Christian is to follow that powerful figure that changed the world.