Why I am no longer a Christian.

[substitute]

In 1991 I underwent a religious conversion during a time of great personal stress. Since then I have been a Christian, but I’ve only gone to church for the first two years and very intermittently since. My particular faith is most easily described as “evangelical”.

The reason I haven’t had much to do with churches is that nothing about the culture of American evangelical Christianity is tolerable to me except the Gospel itself. This is a big problem, because you’re not just supposed to pray and learn, you’re supposed to interact with others. I’m instructed to be a member of a spiritual group and also to share the faith with others. At first it was just the problem of everyone being sort of corn-pone and not culturally aware, which is a lot more important when you’re in your 20s. Increasingly I ran into disagreements about science and politics that were a bit worse, and I stopped spending a lot of time with churchy people. After this election, though, I’m through. I’m walking out.

It’s time I stopped describing myself as Christian. I can’t do it. I look at the people who claim an evangelical faith and they make me physically ill. I can’t break bread with them.

The first thing that happens after a fellow believer discovers my spirituality is congratulation and a big smile.The second thing that happens is some political or theological litmus test. We are all supposed to support the war, support the current government, love capitalism, despise “liberals”, hate homosexuals, and deny the last 300 years of Western civilization. I am not to agree with the theory of evolution. I must support not only my own government’s wars but all those of the state of Israel. I am supposed to care very deeply about unborn children but let them starve or be bombed once they’re born. I’m supposed to reject the last 200 years of biology and embrace crackpot pseudo-science.

I look at the people around me that I love and you want me to hate all of them. I refuse. Hate me too, instead.

You people physically disgust me. All of you. I can’t be in fellowship with a nation of murderous ignorant hypocrites. Go back and read Amos and Isaiah, and think on this: are you the prophet, or the faithless nation?

You can call me a “liberal”, and I’ll thank you. You can call me a “humanist”, and I’ll smile. You can even tell me, as you have been lately, that I’m un-American and unwanted in your country, and I’ll respectfully disagree. But don’t call me Christian. My conscience won’t allow it.

Comments

[torgo-x.livejournal.com]

This is a big problem, because you’re not just supposed to pray and learn, you’re supposed to interact with others.

I'm a bit hazy on this, but wasn't the first few decades of Christianity full of hermits out in the wilderness being alone? I remember in my Western Civ class we had to read something about "desert fathers" (this?)

I hereby revert to my familiar role as a quote engine:

"Religion is always falling apart" - Alan Watts

And a longer one:

During the age of emergence of the world religions, stress shifted from lived ritual to transcendent doctrine, and in looks as if the wheel has come full circle, and that where religion contains some vigor, it does so by becoming civic once again. In North America, religious attendance is high, but religion celebrates a shared cult of the American way of life, rather than insisting on distinctions of theology or church organization, as it once it did. Apparent exceptions to the trend towards secularization turn out on examination to be special cases, explicable by special circumstances, as when a church is used as a counter-organization against an oppressive state committed to a secular belief-system. It is possible to disagree about the extent, homogeneity, or irreversibility of this trend, and, unquestionably, secularization does assume many quite different forms; but, by and large, it would seem reasonable to say that it is real.

-- Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion