Why I'm Still a Christian

An Easter hangover reflection

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I didn’t write anything for Easter yesterday, not necessarily because I took an Easter vow of internet abstinence, but because I was just a little too busy. I hope everyone had a good Easter, whether you went to church, or you didn’t, or you were reeling from some unexpected news at your older brother’s wedding. 

I still believe the Easter story, bodily resurrection and all. I’ve kept believing it even as good friends have deconstructed themselves out of it, a process I don’t begrudge anyone. I suspect at least a few friends think Christianity is a phase I’ll grow out of eventually. Others might think I already have, since outward examples of my own religious piety are few and far between. It’s a holdover from my evangelical era. When you desert the evangelical culture war, there’s very little else left to tie you to the religion itself. 

When you desert the evangelical culture war, you also start getting accused of deserting the faith altogether. It’s weird how quick that camp is to slam the “excommunicate” button. I get DMs every week from guys with Roman statue avatars daring me to post one of the creeds and accusing me of being a false prophet or a tool of the enemy or what have you. One very prominent online person who works for a media company that is extremely popular with white Christians tweeted that I was not a Christian because of the “he/him” in my bio. They’ll come up with an excuse to kick anyone out of church for the slightest provocation and then look around on Sunday morning wondering where everyone went. 

But I am still a Christian. It’s the word I use for myself. Not “Rabbi follower” or “studier of the way of Jesus” or whatever. Just “Christian.” I get asked why sometimes (the other day an acquaintance hit me with a literal “you still believe those old fairy tales?” in the wild) and I totally get it. There are plenty of reasons to not be a Christian, not least of which is the association with some very unsavory characters. But since I am a Christian and a lot of people in my ideological cohort are not*, I thought I’d outline a few reasons why. 

I’ll stress that I’m not doing apologetics here. You want evidence that demands a verdict, you know where to find Lee Strobel. There may be a place for apologetics, but I got bored of them after high school. They never seemed particularly meaningful or even all that useful outside giving pastors a few layups for seeker sensitive sermons. 

I’ll also stress that “Christianity” is a big word with a lot of different definitions, and when I explain why I’m still a Christian, I don’t mean I’m still the same kind of Christian I’ve always been. Like Mason Mennenga said in a recent YouTube video, Skillet and Foo Fighters may both be “rock bands” but that doesn’t mean everyone who loves rock music loves Skillet (I sure hope not anyway). There’s a lot of different kinds of rock music. There’s hard rock and Southern rock and punk rock and glam rock and, yes, Christian rock. And there’s oppressive Christianity and inclusive Christianity and slaveholder Christianity and liberating Christianity, and adhering to one type doesn’t mean you’re confessing to all of them.

So when I say I’m still a Christian, I’m not referring to the evangelical or nationalist variety. But I also am not absolving myself of all the stuff evangelicalism is responsible for. It’d be nice if I could, but I’m convinced that individually evolving in my personal beliefs doesn’t absolve me of Christianity’s global legacy. So while I might have a Christianity that leads me towards love and acceptance of queer folks, for example, that doesn’t mean I can just wash my hands entirely of all the hurt Christianity has caused for the LGBTQ community.. 

So, no apologetics and no self-absolution. This is more personal, which means it may or may not mean anything at all to you, the person reading this. But if you’re looking for one of Springsteen’s “reasons to believe,” here are a few that have kept me hanging around the banquet table. 

1. I Just Think It’s True 

This is the most boring possible reason but also maybe the best. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to come up with something more inspirational — some poetic explanation for my perseverance in the faith — but at some point it just felt a little try-hard. I’m a Christian because I just think it’s true. 

When I say “I think it’s true,” I don’t necessarily mean all of the excess doctrinal baggage that’s come along with it. I don’t really need the Bible to be infallible or earth to have been created in six days. That’s not what I mean when I say I believe it. What I mean is I believe that Jesus is the light of the world and his resurrection gives us hope that death does not have the final say. I mean, along with mewithoutyou, that “in our darkness a light shines …and though I may be mistaken on this or that point, that light is God.” 

I try to hold this belief in a pretty open palm, which is to say I’ve got a lot of doubt too, as everyone should. Faith, by its very nature, has to include some doubt, because faith is not the same thing as “knowing.” Faith means not having all the evidence and taking the leap anyway. It wouldn’t be faith if it didn’t have doubt. “I’m full of doubt …but replete with belief, too,” as Nick Cave told the New Yorker recently. “Full of both things. Mostly, I inhabit a space between belief and unbelief.”

Doubt is very healthy, whatever your spiritual persuasion or lack thereof. It’s humility. It keeps you from hubris, dogmatism, extremism and all sorts of the worst parts of religion. So, when I say I believe it, I mostly mean that the particular cocktail of doubt and faith in my own heart has ended up keeping me right here, at more or less the same table I’ve been most of my life. 

2. Jesus Rocks 

On Easter, Justin Pearson preached this essential sermon here in Tennessee. Pearson is one of the Tennessee Three — the three state reps who protested gun violence following the mass shooting in Nashville and proved the GOP can actually take quick, decisive action in the wake of a gun tragedy, just not against guns. His sermon contains his response to being expelled by the House, and it is well worth your time. 

https://twitter.com/TylerHuckabee/status/1645192566537609222

Among the comments on Pearson’s sermon, I saw someone post something to the effect of “if my Jesus was more like Pearson’s, I’d still be a Christian.” You find a lot of sentiments like this, and it both breaks and warms my heart. Warms, because it demonstrates just how compelling Jesus really is. Breaks, because it shows how far the Jesus most people grow up with is from the real deal. 

I do believe that Jesus — the real Jesus, stripped from all the culture war bullshit and colonialism and dingbat John Wayne authoritarianism — offers hope for the world. And I think the natural reading of the Gospels would lead any honest person to this Jesus. At the very least, this is the Jesus I found through homeschool and an evangelical Bible college, lest anyone accuse me of being indoctrinated by well-educated liberals. 

And I now get so much from this Jesus, who told rich people to shove it and old men to be born again and women to go sin no more and fig trees to drop dead and everyone to love their enemies. And I think if you’ve ever thought you might still love Jesus if he was just a little better than the one you were told about, it might be worth your time to check that Jesus against the genuine article and make sure you didn’t get a dime store Billy Ray Cyrus ass knockoff. You might be surprised. 

3. The Cloud of Witness

This one’s a little corny, but it’s been important to me. One reason I’m still a Christian is that for all the bad company you find yourself in, there’s also a lot of good company. I’ve been so encouraged by the likes of James Cone, Dorothy Day, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, MLK, Dolores Huerta, Sufjan Stevens and so on. There are many more, and all of their contributions have helped me build a very different, better and, if I’m being honest, sturdier faith. 

Well-informed readers will note that nobody in the above list is perfect and few of them are quite a bit less than perfect, treading into cancellable territory. I’ve written about my own struggles with recent revelations about O’Connor’s naked racism. When you start to “deconstruct,” you often do so with the idea that your new faith community is going to be less problematic than the one you’re leaving. It’s a notion easily dispelled. 

But if it comes down to it, I’m partial to this new cloud of witnesses because someone like Flannery O’Connor was probably not surprised to find herself before the judgment seat and realize just how awful she’d been. I daresay she expected it. If you must be surrounded by imperfect people — and we all must — then I think the best you can hope for is that the people you’re around are deeply aware of how bad they are. Not in a vague, undefined “we’re all sinners” type of way that ends up being an excuse to ignore injustice in your ranks, but in concrete, specific ways that drive you to grace and humility, forgiving others because you’ve been forgiven so much. It’s a strange little bit of spiritual economy that we all end up looking up most to the people who’ve brought themselves down lowest. You take that economy to its full, logical conclusion and, boom, you’ve got Christianity in a nutshell.