What passes for Christianity, what people see and mistake for Christianity, that’s what’s wrong with it.
That Christianity — the phenomena, not the faith — has been eclipsed by parody; it’s why so many dismiss it. Because what’s laughable and incredible isn’t genuine Christianity, but rather a counterfeit too often misconstrued for the real thing.
False in two forms. Parodied first by the right, it’s Christianity aligned with the politics of the right. This is false evangelical faith, sometimes false Catholic faith, a Christianity subservient to other masters. This is the Christianity which deigns to underwrite nation, race or regime. It’s false in that it prizes being a certain type of American more than Christian, editing charity along political lines.
A Christianity in many ways theologically and morally orthodox, “biblical,” still, its hollow ecclesiology means its church is America and not the society that Christ founded and not what Jesus called the kingdom, in which is neither Jew nor Greek, Mexican nor American, and which becomes no kingdom on this earth. This false religion sees presidents as chosen instruments of God, sacralizes profane power and believes God loves Americans better than others. It’s tribal faith, not Christianity. The dangerous idolatry is very much part of what’s wrong with Christianity today.
But, of course, that’s not the only mistaken faith. There’s also a Christianity parodied by the left and aligned with the fleeting politics of the left, infected too with the deepening absurdity and thinly veiled nihilism of cultural liberalism. Here are many of your millennial ministers, more like underemployed social workers, hip middle-class youngsters indebted for masters degrees of divinity, hardly worth the paper they’re printed on, bought from dying institutions. These ministers can offer an extended annotated discourse on privilege whilst looking up from their MacBooks in some regentrified coffee shop, but couldn’t offer a coherent account of the Gospel if you begged them, couldn’t tell you what difference Christ really makes.
Seeing in every progressive acronym and every left-leaning hashtag the movement of the Spirit, they’re quick with the shallowest of biblical analogies offered for the latest social cause and even quicker to support any politician who can parrot the latest liberal zeitgeist. These are the protestants who literally anointed Cory Booker after he announced his candidacy for president; these are the Catholics who willfully ignore and twist the clear teachings of their own church. For them, no theology is foundational, no dialectic evil. This too is what’s wrong with Christianity, an ideology equally dangerous.
It’s the devil’s game, that in this cacophonous world what passes for Christianity so often just isn’t. That in this world, I believe, so in need of the gospel, Christian witness resembles more the dark, disorienting clamor of Dante’s hell. That the clear voice of beauty, charity, and the truth is so often drowned by a smug Twitterati, an increasingly shallow clickbait media, and by institutionally inert, socially comfortable churches.
It is what’s wrong with Christianity, that the faith suffers such massive corruption, that the parodies of Christianity, mirroring our broken America, are the only versions of Christianity that people see. A century ago Charles Péguy called it a “mystical disaster.” He said it’s why Christianity and the church are “nothing,” why it “means nothing.” This disaster is still true today, if not more. Because we’ve traded our faith in God and his charity for something less, something bitter.
Bitter like me, undoubtedly, as you can tell: I’m worn down by years of these warring false religions, these faiths I don’t recognize and in which I cannot find him whom I love, that beauty which first enraptured me and still does, and which is discovered only in the silence that today is so hard to find.
Christ is he who must be found, that unideological Jesus, that conservative and liberal Jesus, that rustic Jew, that fully theological Christ, that fully moral incarnate deity, that Christ who’d make you mad. That completely un-American Jesus is who we must find if we’re to again be Christians any good for America, at least for its soul if not its power. The Christ for whom we must destroy our idols, whom we must rediscover if we’re to remain both Americans and Christians at the same time with integrity at all.
Something I’m just not sure is possible anymore, the more I see what America’s done to Christianity.
This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News.
