Why I Think Jesus Hates Religion
Nov. 29th, 2014 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
levadeby Jefferson Bethke
It was that time of the year when you could feel a mixture of intense emotions in the air — the joy of the semester almost being done, along with the pressure of having to pass through final exams first. People were stressed. The campus was fairly quiet as students were trying to make up for all the studying they didn’t do the previous three and a half months.
I had come to expect a few breaks that included fun treats or programs during finals week that the student life department at my previous self-proclaimed Christian college make available. Sometimes there were free massages in the student lounge. Sometimes there was free food or candy.
Even though I had just transferred to a secular liberal arts university, I expected the same. While I was in my room studying — most likely Facebooking, but let’s not talk about that — I heard a knock at the door.
I answered it to be greeted by my lovely RA (resident assistant) who was holding a bucket of lollipops in one hand and a bucket of condoms in the other.
She cheerfully said, “Candies and condoms! Be safe and have a stress-free finals week!”
I remember thinking, Just what I needed to help me study for finals — high fructose corn syrup and latex birth control.
I definitely wasn’t at a Christian college anymore! Later that year they did something similar, where they taped “sex facts” and condoms to the walls of the dorm. I think they used to use staples, but as you can imagine, it wasn’t very effective.
Talk about a quick change. It didn’t take me more than a few hours to see the glaring difference between my strict Christian college in San Diego and my new liberal arts university in Portland. Whatever comes to mind when you think of Portland, that is exactly the essence of this school. It was the mecca of gay rights. They banned bottled water because it wasn’t environmentally friendly. Everyone had dreads, and none of the girls shaved their armpit hair. Well, that last one is not completely true. It was the type of university that had used books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as textbooks and dripped with a granola-liberal-progressive spirit. But I loved it. Really. I absolutely loved it. If I had to do it all over again, I would have gone there in the first place.
Now, what’s really funny is while I was at the Christian school, I wasn’t a Christian. But while I was at the secular school, I was a Christian.
You’d think I would have wanted to go back to the Christian school, right? It was the opposite.
I found the Christian school to be stuffy, hypocritical, and judgmental. I could no longer stand praying after baseball practice with thirty guys who wore crosses around their necks, knowing a few hours later they’d have a beer in one hand and a girl in the other (myself included). Weirdly, my new university felt accepting and loving. There was no guessing if someone was really a Christian or not. If you said you were a Christian at that school, it wasn’t to gain you any points — in fact, you probably lost some. There was something about that type of atmosphere that drew me in.
My senior year I was an RA — which pretty much means I was the dorm’s “dad.” I was the guy who would let you in if you locked yourself out, wrote you up if you broke the rules — there weren’t many — and would be there if you were having emotional or academic problems.
Dealing with students daily, I got a pulse on the common conceptions they held toward God, Jesus, religion, and Christians.
What constantly surprised me was the ignorance of most college students regarding Jesus. I heard things such as, “I could never follow Jesus; I still want to drink beer.” Or,
“Why would I like Jesus? He hates gays.” I remember thinking, Huh?
I still drink beer, and I don’t hate gays. My favorite was one of my baseball teammate’s responses after I asked him what he thought about Jesus: “Yeah, I love Jesus — and Buddha too. I’m a Christian Buddhist.” It took everything in me not to laugh. Christian Buddhist? That’s like saying you’re a lactose-intolerant cheese lover.
A college campus is an interesting place. Students have little to no responsibility, question everything they believe in, and live within one hundred feet of all their friends. There’s also a huge dark side to most colleges. As an RA I had a front row view of the pain in my generation. Colleges these days are breeding grounds for poor decisions, emotional brokenness, and sharp pain.
This is all behind the scenes, of course, because the girl who was raped freshman year and the guy who hates himself and struggles with depression don’t seem broken when sitting in a lecture hall debate.
People don’t flaunt their brokenness when trying to prove themselves. But in their dorm rooms in the middle of the night after another disaster or one-too-many shots, I got to see people become transparent over and over again. They’d continually admit their lives weren’t working. They were empty. Longing. Desiring. Searching.
One friend’s sister had just admitted she was gay to the family, and it was tearing them apart because their dad refused to “have a gay daughter.” Another friend admitted she hated herself for losing her virginity to her ex-boyfriend, whom she didn’t even speak to anymore. Another felt the immense pressure of balancing school and child care because she was caring for her little sister now that her dad had left and her mom had to work.
I saw some of my peers nearly drink themselves to death or try to kill themselves — and without the ambulances showing up so fast, they just might have.
I wondered, How am I any different? Just two years before, I had struggled with depression. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts. I had struggled with the guilt and shame that so often come with recreational dating. I had spent the first year of college shotgunning beers, messing around with girls, acting like the world existed to cater to my needs, and never taking a second to pull out the emotional, spiritual, and mental shrapnel that had been lodged in my soul by the “me” lifestyle. Inside I was just a scared little boy who had been deeply insecure his whole life and lived in hopes that others would tell me I was good enough.
Of course, none of us would admit it so plainly, and for nineteen years of my life, I wouldn’t have either, but isn’t it true? Why else do we do most of the things we do?
My generation is the most fatherless and insecure generation that’s ever lived, and we are willing to sacrifice everything if we just can be told we are loved.
If only we knew just how loved we really are.
So being a follower of Jesus now, and knowing just how gracious He had been to restore me, heal me, and pursue me, I longed so deeply to share His love with these students. Over and over again, though, I’d get the same response whenever I’d bring up Jesus. Literally, the overall essence of Jesus to these students had been boiled down to whether or not someone could say the F-word. Immediately, they’d bring up periphery issues that Jesus barely mentions as their biggest opposition to him. Ironically, the reasons they opposed Jesus were sometimes the reasons Jesus opposed the religious people of his day.
Half the time, they weren’t even rejecting Jesus; they were rejecting what He rejected!
I sat in bed one night and wondered, When on earth did “hates gays, can’t drink beer, and no tattoos” become the essence of Christianity?
It hit me that my friends weren’t the ones to blame for their confusion. They had gotten this idea from people they grew up with, churches they went to as kids, or preachers they saw on TV. It was the church’s fault that they thought this was what real Christianity was all about. As I’ve heard said, “Of 100 unsaved men, one might read the Bible, but the other 99 will read the Christian.”
Ouch.
I’m sure we’d have a very different Bible if it were written simply by observing modern-day Christians.
My peers couldn’t separate Jesus from religion because they weren’t reading the Bible to learn about Jesus; they were looking to the Christian religion to understand him. What they were rebelling against was religion.
People lamented that they had tried Christianity, and it didn’t work. But last time I checked, you don’t try Christianity; either your heart has been transformed by Jesus or it hasn’t.
But you can try religion.
You can try to follow the rules.
You can try to climb up to heaven.
But all you’ll do is white-knuckle your way to religious despair. It won’t work. It never does.
That’s when I started to notice an interesting trend: When I juxtaposed religion and Jesus in my conversations, they took a different turn. It allowed people to pull back a little and see him in a different light. They no longer were just brushing him off, but were actually pursuing, thinking, and investigating the man named Jesus. And that’s when I started to write the poem “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.”
It was that time of the year when you could feel a mixture of intense emotions in the air — the joy of the semester almost being done, along with the pressure of having to pass through final exams first. People were stressed. The campus was fairly quiet as students were trying to make up for all the studying they didn’t do the previous three and a half months.
I had come to expect a few breaks that included fun treats or programs during finals week that the student life department at my previous self-proclaimed Christian college make available. Sometimes there were free massages in the student lounge. Sometimes there was free food or candy.
Even though I had just transferred to a secular liberal arts university, I expected the same. While I was in my room studying — most likely Facebooking, but let’s not talk about that — I heard a knock at the door.
I answered it to be greeted by my lovely RA (resident assistant) who was holding a bucket of lollipops in one hand and a bucket of condoms in the other.
She cheerfully said, “Candies and condoms! Be safe and have a stress-free finals week!”
I remember thinking, Just what I needed to help me study for finals — high fructose corn syrup and latex birth control.
I definitely wasn’t at a Christian college anymore! Later that year they did something similar, where they taped “sex facts” and condoms to the walls of the dorm. I think they used to use staples, but as you can imagine, it wasn’t very effective.
Talk about a quick change. It didn’t take me more than a few hours to see the glaring difference between my strict Christian college in San Diego and my new liberal arts university in Portland. Whatever comes to mind when you think of Portland, that is exactly the essence of this school. It was the mecca of gay rights. They banned bottled water because it wasn’t environmentally friendly. Everyone had dreads, and none of the girls shaved their armpit hair. Well, that last one is not completely true. It was the type of university that had used books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as textbooks and dripped with a granola-liberal-progressive spirit. But I loved it. Really. I absolutely loved it. If I had to do it all over again, I would have gone there in the first place.
Now, what’s really funny is while I was at the Christian school, I wasn’t a Christian. But while I was at the secular school, I was a Christian.
You’d think I would have wanted to go back to the Christian school, right? It was the opposite.
I found the Christian school to be stuffy, hypocritical, and judgmental. I could no longer stand praying after baseball practice with thirty guys who wore crosses around their necks, knowing a few hours later they’d have a beer in one hand and a girl in the other (myself included). Weirdly, my new university felt accepting and loving. There was no guessing if someone was really a Christian or not. If you said you were a Christian at that school, it wasn’t to gain you any points — in fact, you probably lost some. There was something about that type of atmosphere that drew me in.
My senior year I was an RA — which pretty much means I was the dorm’s “dad.” I was the guy who would let you in if you locked yourself out, wrote you up if you broke the rules — there weren’t many — and would be there if you were having emotional or academic problems.
Dealing with students daily, I got a pulse on the common conceptions they held toward God, Jesus, religion, and Christians.
What constantly surprised me was the ignorance of most college students regarding Jesus. I heard things such as, “I could never follow Jesus; I still want to drink beer.” Or,
“Why would I like Jesus? He hates gays.” I remember thinking, Huh?
I still drink beer, and I don’t hate gays. My favorite was one of my baseball teammate’s responses after I asked him what he thought about Jesus: “Yeah, I love Jesus — and Buddha too. I’m a Christian Buddhist.” It took everything in me not to laugh. Christian Buddhist? That’s like saying you’re a lactose-intolerant cheese lover.
A college campus is an interesting place. Students have little to no responsibility, question everything they believe in, and live within one hundred feet of all their friends. There’s also a huge dark side to most colleges. As an RA I had a front row view of the pain in my generation. Colleges these days are breeding grounds for poor decisions, emotional brokenness, and sharp pain.
This is all behind the scenes, of course, because the girl who was raped freshman year and the guy who hates himself and struggles with depression don’t seem broken when sitting in a lecture hall debate.
People don’t flaunt their brokenness when trying to prove themselves. But in their dorm rooms in the middle of the night after another disaster or one-too-many shots, I got to see people become transparent over and over again. They’d continually admit their lives weren’t working. They were empty. Longing. Desiring. Searching.
One friend’s sister had just admitted she was gay to the family, and it was tearing them apart because their dad refused to “have a gay daughter.” Another friend admitted she hated herself for losing her virginity to her ex-boyfriend, whom she didn’t even speak to anymore. Another felt the immense pressure of balancing school and child care because she was caring for her little sister now that her dad had left and her mom had to work.
I saw some of my peers nearly drink themselves to death or try to kill themselves — and without the ambulances showing up so fast, they just might have.
I wondered, How am I any different? Just two years before, I had struggled with depression. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts. I had struggled with the guilt and shame that so often come with recreational dating. I had spent the first year of college shotgunning beers, messing around with girls, acting like the world existed to cater to my needs, and never taking a second to pull out the emotional, spiritual, and mental shrapnel that had been lodged in my soul by the “me” lifestyle. Inside I was just a scared little boy who had been deeply insecure his whole life and lived in hopes that others would tell me I was good enough.
Of course, none of us would admit it so plainly, and for nineteen years of my life, I wouldn’t have either, but isn’t it true? Why else do we do most of the things we do?
My generation is the most fatherless and insecure generation that’s ever lived, and we are willing to sacrifice everything if we just can be told we are loved.
If only we knew just how loved we really are.
So being a follower of Jesus now, and knowing just how gracious He had been to restore me, heal me, and pursue me, I longed so deeply to share His love with these students. Over and over again, though, I’d get the same response whenever I’d bring up Jesus. Literally, the overall essence of Jesus to these students had been boiled down to whether or not someone could say the F-word. Immediately, they’d bring up periphery issues that Jesus barely mentions as their biggest opposition to him. Ironically, the reasons they opposed Jesus were sometimes the reasons Jesus opposed the religious people of his day.
Half the time, they weren’t even rejecting Jesus; they were rejecting what He rejected!
I sat in bed one night and wondered, When on earth did “hates gays, can’t drink beer, and no tattoos” become the essence of Christianity?
It hit me that my friends weren’t the ones to blame for their confusion. They had gotten this idea from people they grew up with, churches they went to as kids, or preachers they saw on TV. It was the church’s fault that they thought this was what real Christianity was all about. As I’ve heard said, “Of 100 unsaved men, one might read the Bible, but the other 99 will read the Christian.”
Ouch.
I’m sure we’d have a very different Bible if it were written simply by observing modern-day Christians.
My peers couldn’t separate Jesus from religion because they weren’t reading the Bible to learn about Jesus; they were looking to the Christian religion to understand him. What they were rebelling against was religion.
People lamented that they had tried Christianity, and it didn’t work. But last time I checked, you don’t try Christianity; either your heart has been transformed by Jesus or it hasn’t.
But you can try religion.
You can try to follow the rules.
You can try to climb up to heaven.
But all you’ll do is white-knuckle your way to religious despair. It won’t work. It never does.
That’s when I started to notice an interesting trend: When I juxtaposed religion and Jesus in my conversations, they took a different turn. It allowed people to pull back a little and see him in a different light. They no longer were just brushing him off, but were actually pursuing, thinking, and investigating the man named Jesus. And that’s when I started to write the poem “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.”
no subject
Date: Nov. 29th, 2014 07:04 pm (UTC)But even after I became a Christian in my own right, it wasn't easy. I followed a very legalistic dogma; I'd make a type, and be convinced that it was a sin, because I hadn't done my best before God. It didn't help that at the same time, I was dealing with way too many people that wanted to "help"; the woman who told me that I didn't write, it was God. (Rather than, God gave me the ability to write, which is what I currently believe.) There was also a woman who told me if I wasn't baptised by immersion, and didn't come up speaking in tongues, I wasn't saved. (Because of this I asked my then-pastor if he would do baptism by immersion, God bless him he did--but I didn't come up speaking in tongues, and to this day I've only ever had one person tell me that I ever did in an unrelated circumstance, but I didn't think I was.) Strangely enough, at that time, it was my pagan friends who were the most accepting and helpful with my newfound faith. There are still many, many things that I struggle with to this day, fears of questions I don't want to ask, things I'm not sure how to understand, or if I do, how to live with. I just trust in His forgiveness and love and keep trying, even if it means keeping falling too.
*The one thing I will disagree with is that you can't be a Buddhist Christian. I think it's in how you mean it. I am a Christian first and foremost, I don't believe in reincarnation and many Buddhist teachings... but at the same time, I think you can apply some of their wisdom to your daily life, so long as it doesn't contradict Scripture. It's actually been quite helpful for me in dealing with a pretty quick and terrible temper.
Thanks for sharing this. :)
no subject
Date: Dec. 2nd, 2014 06:56 pm (UTC)that I didn't care--something that still horrifies me to this day, and makes me terrified of those people who say once you reject Jesus, there's no going back.)
"And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand."
-John 10:28 (NKJV)
This Biblical doctrine that a person who has received Jesus Christ, been born into the family of God, and justified by faith, can never again be lost is sometimes called eternal security. Others speak of it as the perseverance of the saints. The latter expression might better be termed the perseverance of God in behalf of the saints, because the security of our salvation does not rest on us but on God—it is based on the work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
I really think you can set that fear aside, Kate. If it was OUR work that got us saved, then it might be lost because we're not perfect. But it's not our work or our deeds, or even our words. It's the belief that we hold -- CS Lewis went really in-depth into this subject and I wish I could explain it half as well as he can but basically?
Let's say you have someone born into utter poverty who stole to survive and did lots of bad things to survive. One day that person changes her mind, meets the real Jesus and accepts him as Savior. She might not become a "model" citizen, but Jesus doesn't judge just on one scale of 1-10. For this girl not stealing and praying might be as acceptable to God as a life-long Christian going out and being a missionary.
The point is...we don't know and can't judge the heart. We see the outer person. God sees inside, to our thoughts and our heart, our deepest desires. He knows very well what our inner person is believing.
And it's Jesus who saves, it's his power to keep us and hold us and not let us go. Not our own will power or whatever strength we have.
I hope you will stop fearing this one. It's a big lie from the pit of Satan's heart and he uses it to scare a lot of Christians who believe more from fear because that's how a lot of churches teach. Especially Southern ones.
Look at God's character. He didn't let the woman at the well be stoned even though he knew very well she was guilty of sin. He confronted her tormentors, and then spoke to her gently and kindly. He ate with tax collectors (ultimate baddies back then) and prostitutes. He defended widows who could only give the smallest tithe and said they gave more than the wealthy who put gobs of money into the church.
Look at his promises. Look at his faithfulness. He never changes (the same yesterday, today and forever), he is unfailing, he has perfect timing, he holds us in the palms of his hands and our names are carved into those palms.
This is the one being in life that will never let you down even when you don't understand, even when you don't think he's there.
I love the 'if you don't speak in tongues then you're not a Christian' thing. WHERE did they find that? Where does scripture say that, I'd really like to know because I was baptised in college and I didn't come up speaking tongues. I still don't. I never heard this until I met people from the South - it certainly was never preached in any church I've attended! And it's not Biblical. Gifts are given, some to interpret, some to speak tongues, some to teach and some to preach.
The "Church" gets some crazy ideas sometimes and people start to believe those doctrines even though they're only vaguely Bible-based.
And yes, writing is a Gift. :) God uses people, and he works through them and their gifts, but that doesn't mean he's dictating each word.
All I could say to folks who say things like this is to show me the passages in the Bible where they pulled it out. THen read it in context and cross-reference it. The Bible is THE guide to all questions and I wouldn't believe even my pastor if he said something that contradicted what I was reading in my Bible.
I took what he meant about Buddhist Christian to mean the conflicting doctrines -- you can't have both. All religions I've looked into have some wisdom and usually you can find the same thing said differently in the Bible as in the Koran or the Book of Mormon or the Catholic Bibles or any of the Eastern religions. They have truths in them or people wouldn't believe -- if you tried to form a church out of "Pigs Fly" you wouldn't last long. ;) But add some truth and there you go.
So what he was saying I think is that you can't serve Man and God -- but I don't think that's what you're doing in seeing the wisdom in the quotes. If you believed in reincarnation then we might be a huge odds on that.
I've been talking about this to another writer friend and we both agree that ....there's too often a disconnect between Christians and the World. Yes, we're told to not be "of" the world but we do live in it, and we have to understand how to talk to those still of it or we'll be throwing darts in the dark.
Jesus took our form and came to live among us so that we could understand him. I think we need to do the same for those we try to talk to -- to not be so part of church talk that people don't understand or want to listen to us.
So we've been talking about how do you do that in writing without sounding preachy or too worldly? It's made me really look at things I do and say!
But I still and will always think the biggest thing is love that sets us apart. Not just love for other Christians, that's too easy, but for the homeless and the drug-addicted, the prostitutes and the kids on skateboards with a million tats and piercings. For all of those "outcasts" who are just human beings with hurts and hopes and feelings.
And this has grown far too long! Thank you for sharing! *HUG* I know it's hard sometimes... I was saved when I was 13 and still struggled most of my life to believe I was really saved and safe. I wish I'd known then what I know now!! It's all so simple when it's broken down to what Jesus actually said and did. But man, we complicate it.
*hugs*
no subject
Date: Dec. 6th, 2014 05:51 pm (UTC)Oh, no, I don't follow all the Buddhist teachings, and as far as I'm concerned, "the" Buddha was just a guy who had some good wisdom. I really think that wisdom can be found in all people, whether or not they're Christian--it's just how you take it and use it, you can't blindly follow. So for me, it's more like... okay, I can't find the quote I want, so this is off the cuff. Say I'm angry about something, I've prayed about it, but am still dealing with it. I might search for a Buddhist quote as well, because they are good at helping me reach calm. Of course, the one I come up with right now is more fact than useful, but as an example: "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned." So that might get me thinking, and thinking can then turn to more prayer as I'm thinking. Stuff like that, not sure how well I'm explaining.
I firmly believe that God let me be hungry--not starving--those last months in TN, so that I would have a heart for the hungry. Everyone always seemed to have their mission or cause, but I didn't. Not until then. All things to the greater good, right there. I think... I got to notice one of my best friends being negative, because it made me realise how I sound, and want to change. Though now I can't recall what led me to bring that up. (Sorry, it's also that time of month and I am really worn out right now.)