Stripping Away the Doctrine

I have had a magical experience with my religion. I realize that most people have not because institutionalized religion tends to be boring and/or terrible.

I have mentioned before how damaging doctrine has been for the masses. So many people have never been able to relate to the Bible because someone told them what everything meant before they ever read it. It’s like Cliff Notes, if Cliff Notes gave you the wrong answer and then told you you were crap, even if you did your homework.

There are so many different Christian perspectives that it is difficult to make generalizations about what anyone believes, but it seems like no Christians know that. So-and-so talks about transubstantiation as if everyone knows and believes that.

Original sin and immaculate conception and apostolic succession and orthodoxy and papal infallibility and even if you know what all of those words mean, you are bored. Even the most pious of Christians seldom understand their church’s doctrinal positions because most of it doesn’t matter to us, it matters to some cardinals and dead Romans.

When our youth and young adults have their first experiences exploring the Bible, the passages are too often presented like math problems. Instead of letting people explore and get their hands dirty in the incredibly complex, horrifying, beautiful, and passionate stories that were so important to the generations telling them and passing them on, our churches tend to make them stories to memorize. Those stories have pre-determined meaning. In my mind, it’s like our churches are making us read Animal Farm in Mandarin and telling us it’s definitely about the diets of pigs and if we think it’s about something else, we are definitely going to Hell.

I mean, if your freshman English teacher tried that, you’d think they were a loon, yet when our churches do, we say, “Yes, sir,” because for some terrible reason, we think they speak for God.

I found Christianity as an adolescent and I really found it as an adult. After taking a class in my university’s Comparative Religious Studies program, I became far more religious and passionate than I ever did after a Sunday Mass or Worship. All of that reading I’d done to try to get closer to the Bible, all of those commentaries… I’d been letting a bunch of idiots tell me what to believe when it turned out that the Bible is messy and complicated and so much better than the wordy rule book that so many pastors try to sell us.

The problem is that by the time the young adult has made it to young adulthood, they’re often exhausted by their religion. Now that Mom and Dad aren’t making them get up every Sunday morning and sit through an hour of saccharine “Jesus Love You!” crap or “You’re Going to Hell!” crap or reciting a pledge to the One and Holy Catholic Church that exhibits exactly how antiquated Catholic practice is… now that no one’s forcing them to get up early in order to spend and hour watching that same parade of nonsense, they don’t want to. Surprise, surprise! They’re exhausted, bored, and bitter.

I’m in my 20s, guys. All of my friends are exhausted, bored, and bitter about their religious upbringings. They’re interested in my perspectives and the things I say about religion, but they don’t want to go to church because CHURCH SUCKS. Let’s have coffee or cocktails and talk about things, but stained glass and structure are a slippery slope toward a mailing list that it took a lot of work to unsubscribe from.

This ended up somewhere different than where it started.

The early church was onto something with that agape meal. They knew that compassion, conversation, and a community you could trust and confide in: those were things that would grow a church.