Of all the things we pastors tell you that you must “make peace” with — your past, your own struggles and weaknesses, the church — we rarely explain to you that, one day, you’ll have to make peace with the faith itself. You’ll need to make peace with the various ways “Christianity” will fail you. The closest we get is acknowledging the shortcomings of “the Church” in general, but it must be said: the faith itself is a complicated beast, and making our peace with the label “Christian” will be work we will need to do. I suppose we can start now.
To be a Christian is to, unfortunately, find yourself a part of a “body” — a very complicated, disorganized mass of people. This conglomeration of individuals includes percentages that do not represent us often at every level. The work of “I’m not one of those Christians” is only made more exhausting when the internet audience you’re arguing with rarely leaves, always grows, and never forgives. No wonder we resign to despair. The reasons to not be a Christian are many, and, like an unimaginative bean dip, there might be three layers to our discouragement right now in the West: political, cultural, and historical.
Statistics about how “Christians” or “evangelicals” vote can make us feel alienated from people we grew up with or go to church with. That’s politics. A whole mess, but you know what I mean. The…
