Is Christianity All About Being Religious?
Talk to Cambridge University Students October 2009
Is Christianity all about being religious? Of course it isn’t, ladies and gentlemen, and I am going to prove it to you.
But let’s face it, we wouldn’t be answering that question unless lots of people think that Christianity is exactly all about being religious. Beatbox genius and comedy demigod Marcus Brigstocke voices the opinions of a lot of people when he says this about Christians and everyone else he thinks is religious:
When you’ve finished smashing up the world and blowing each other to bits and demanding special privileges while you do it, do you think maybe the rest of us can have our planet back please?
Christians – you and your churches don’t get to be millionaires while other people have nothing at all. The ten commandments are your rules – either stick to them or abandon the faith. And stop persecuting and killing people you judge to be immoral
I wish religious people would just own up that their special book says “fight, fight, kill, maim, fight, smash, destroy, smash, murder, kill. And fight. We love a scrap, we are fighty, scrappy, punchy, killy all the way.” I am so sick of religious people screwing it up for the rest of us. Please don’t kill us, seriously
Religion is the power base for nutters. Religion by its very nature doesn’t tend to concern itself with truth. By the time all the toadying, condemning and hiding from science is done, truth has given up and gone down the pub for a pint.
The abrahamic faiths are like scousers – they all feel picked on harder than everyone else
If we gave up religion we would have time to explore space, look in the sea, maybe find a cure for James Blunt
The relationship between religion and warfare is like the relationship between Ant and Dec. You can have one without the other, but I am not sure anyone would see the point
Here is what I think about Brigstocke’s observations: I agree with all of them. (Especially the bit about James Blunt). If you see people acting like that then don’t have anything to do with it. Using God to justify violence, lack of concern for truth, lack of compassion for people, persecutions and poverty and smashing up the planet. Just run in the opposite direction.
But here is where Brigstocke is wrong. He identifies religion as self-justifying rules to legitimate (usually) bad behaviour. A system of control of followers that creates a power base for manipulation, abuse, moralism and political coercion. And that’s right, that’s what religion does.
The thing is that Christianity isn’t a religion. Not the real deal. Not being a follower of Jesus Christ who said to his disciples “secular rulers lord it over the people but you are to be utterly different. You serve with kindness and compassion because I came to serve and rescue lost people.” He says the same kind of thing in lots of different ways and lots of places. But you can’t hear even just that single example and still believe that it is possible to be religious a la Brigstocke and a proper follower of Jesus. Jesus is antithetical to religion and religiosity.
Now I want to be the first to admit that there have been plenty of people in history who have done terrible things, saying not only that they are Christians but also that they have done it for God. But let’s be honest, there are probably times I am also perfectly capable of seeming like a pious killjoy, detached from reality with a liberal sprinkling of hypocrisy and a real lack of love. If you look close enough at my life you will find a list of all the things that Jesus Christ doesn’t stand for.
Its in the answer to the fact that we are not good that the vital distinction between religion and Christianity kicks in. I look at my life and see the failure, the times when I am selfish, the stuff that goes on in my head that I wouldn’t want my mum to know about, and I want to know what the solution to all that is. I suppose I could just ignore it all, but living in denial is never a good thing if there is a better answer.
Then I get offered the religious answer. The answer of religion is to look at my life and say “here is a list of rules that deal with that and the guilt and feeling of failure that goes with it. If you follow the rules, do the religion, make the right rituals, pray the right prayers, give the right amounts, attend the right meetings, submit to the right leaders, you will make yourself morally good.” In fact the definition of religion is basically “here are a set of rules, structures, lifestyle, gurus and rituals that if you do what they say you will make yourself a good person. And in one subset of religion, you will make yourself good enough for God.
There is a big problem with that. You know what it is – not only the fact that it doesn’t work because you and I never live up to even our own standards (and know that we don’t) - but actually the religion rule book tells us you have to be perfect. There is never a “just good enough” with religion. Religion always, unfailingly puts “must do better” on your end of term report.
Therefore if you confuse Christianity with religion you will think, like Marcus Brigstoke, that Christianity is condemning. Religion is condemning because it holds out the promise that you can be good but fails to deliver. You find that to be good enough you have to be perfect and that just leaves you feeling guilty and that religion didn’t deliver. You do one of two things. Either you dump religion because it didn’t work, or you get into a ceaseless round of trying and failing, trying and failing to live up to the rules.
And the temptation of that is for people caught up in religion to in turn be condemning. Because they have to appear perfect and therefore they demand unobtainable perfection from everyone else. They have to put on a mask and market themselves as morally good. The watching world is justifiably tired of pretence, lack of authenticity and people who claim to be sorted. The religious person implicitly says “I have everything worked out in life and I am good, and you are not. Therefore I am better than you.” It may be that your view of Christians is coloured by having met people or seen churches that gave the impression that church and God is only there to judge and has no love. You have probably seen religion rather than Christianity.
You probably asking “if you don’t think Christianity is religion and rules, what do you think it is?” I want to offer an answer to that based on the short passage from Mark’s gospel that you have. If you haven’t read a gospel before, its an eyewitness account of Jesus Christ, written to show that he is God and that he is good news. Religion – bad news. Jesus Christ – good news You cannot read a gospel without seeing time and time again that Jesus runs up against religion and religious people who are the complete opposite of what he is like.
Read Mark 2:13-17
Jesus is walking by a lake, teaching a large crowd. He meets this man Levi, a tax collector. The tax collection system then bore rather more resemblance to the mob than to Her Majesties Revenue and Customs, so this man is the scum of the earth as far as the onlookers are concerned. Certainly no religious person would touch him with a barge pole, let alone invite him to be a follower. Let alone go to his house for dinner with him and all his tax collector and sinner friends.
You get the sense of shock and revulsion that Jesus did that by how often it repeats “tax collectors and sinners”. That word sinner here doesn’t mean someone who occasionally does naughty things, it means someone who is categorically beyond the pale as far as the rule book of religion is concerned. Maybe perpetually criminal, certainly perpetually immoral. It says there were lots of them who followed Jesus. The Pharisees – that is the voice of religion here – just can’t cope with it. It was a strongly held view that if you ate with people who were ritually unclean sinners, you got infected by them.
Jesus has had a previous run in with these people. On that occasion he implied that he was God because he claimed – and then demonstrated – that he could forgive sins. And their brains exploded, and so did their tempers. Now he’s at it again, interested in self-evidently sinful, rubbish people. The Pharisee just don’t get it – why does he eat with anti-religious people. He ought to be religious, he ought to be with us. He ought to actively distance himself from them.
Jesus heard what they had been saying and came out with this amazing one liner. “you think you are healthy, you think you are righteous, therefore you don’t think you need me. So I haven’t come for you.” "You won’t go to the doctor because you don’t think there is anything wrong with you. There is but you use your religion to hide it, or think that if you do your religion enough it will cure you."
The message here is that religion doesn’t cure you of anything. It might point out that things aren’t good with you, but it doesn’t do anything about it. A thermometer tells you that you have a temperature, but continuing to suck the thermometer doesn’t make it better any more than religion is the answer to sin.
There it is in the meeting of Jesus, Levi and the Pharisee. That’s the conflict between Jesus Christ and religion. The religious people didn’t want the real Jesus Christ, who wanted to relate to, care for, heal and accept sinners. They couldn’t cope with him. He just looked liked an anarchist, tearing down all the received rules on who God should like, and who God would want to follow him, and how to be good, and who was acceptable. And whether you could curry favour with God by concentrating hard on making yourself upright.
The religious people don’t follow Jesus. Eventually they will kill him. But the tax collectors and sinners follow. To them Jesus sounds like good news. “Hey, are you saying that God loves us and wants to know us, when religion has always told us that he hates us?”
The Bible says that God sent Jesus Christ into the world to save sinners. And that’s us. We are meant to read ourselves in here and realise that there are two alternatives – own up that we are sinners like Levi who get our greatest need for forgiveness and acceptance by God met by Jesus, or identify with the religious people who hate that and try to make themselves good.
Religion isn’t only limited to people who attach themselves to an organised structure. If we went out on the street right now and asked every passerby where they get their sense of value and worth, almost without exception they would say something that they do or contribute to, or have – their job, their possessions, their good works, their relationships, their intelligence, their charity. Those are good things but they are no less of a religious mindset because they all say “I can make myself acceptable by being good or wealthy or having a sense of value that I produce myself. I don’t need a Jesus Christ”
Religion is not Christianity. In fact it is the denial of Christianity. Christianity says I need Jesus to do it for me. Religion says I will do it myself by performing the religion. Christianity is Jesus and Levi. It is a place, a relationship with God for messed up people where he offers forgiveness, adoption, acceptance, power to change. A church is a family of sinful people who are loved by God and precious to him. He invites everybody in, including me and you. There is not a single person in this room, a single person in this world, who isn’t messed up. There is no one who is perfect, least of all people who are relying on religion. There is nobody who doesn’t need this from Jesus.
Is Christianity all about being religious? Of course it isn’t ladies and gentlemen. If Christianity was about religion then Levi wouldn’t get a look in and neither would any person who was honest about their own failings of life and heart. Jesus Christ is the opposite of religion, he says in the Bible that he loathes religion, he confronts it all over the place, and He is Christianity.
Jesus hates religion, I hate religion, all real Christians hate religion. And most importantly Marcus Brigstocke hates religion.