Time Capsule

I am a Christian because I read the gospels. The gospels were not read to me—not on holidays, not at bedtime, not on Sundays. As far as my childhood self was concerned, Christianity had something to do with a baby in a manger who grew up and performed miracles and rose from the dead. If you could believe that, you were in the club. It’s continually strange to me that those remain the emphasized portions of Jesus’ story.

One day when an evangelist handed me a little orange New Testament on my walk home from school, I didn’t toss it on the sidewalk; I took it home and read it.

I am a Christian. Christians, however, make me ashamed to say that. Modern American Christianity, in most of its facets, is ignorant and damaging. What I find in it is a mockery of the life of Jesus. That which I’ve found in religious scholarship and the field of Comparative Religious Studies gives me faith—the message of Jesus continues to be profound and timeless, if it can only be communicated with a background of researched scholarship and in the forms of reason and compassion that I feel were at the core of Jesus’ ministry.

This message— Jesus’ message—will outlast the illogical, foolish, hateful movement that has taken the Christian name. Those of us who write such words now from within the tradition do so because we have faith that the lunacy of the Evangelical movement is unsustainable, but that Jesus’ message will survive it. We write for the foundation of Christianity’s resurrection.