How to be Christian without being religious
It’s one of my favourite books. The main message is that Christian faith focuses on living out Christ’s love for the whole of creation, rather than on religiosity – which is trying to control the behaviour of others, often through fear.
The latest census says fewer of us identify with a religion – well that’s no surprise.
Religion has a pretty bad press these days. For many it smacks of religiosity rather than faith, of extremism more than a love of all people.
When the churches were full, noone dared hang out washing or mow the lawn on Sunday. Was that Christianity or religiosity?
Today fewer claim a particular denomination or attend church, but I’d be surprised if those with no religion are full-blown atheists.
So where is faith today? While the major religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism are still significant, faith in the general population rarely calls itself religious, but we find it in those who commit themselves to the causes of the day, which on their better days are often as much about peace and justice for all people and the care of creation as the great faiths.
So what is faith? It’s a trust that goodness overcomes evil.
It is the opposite of doubt, trusting that what seems impossible can and must be achieved.
Faith today is often faith in the potential of humanity to do things better rather than in the power of God in creation, which underlies the major religions.
Faith today follows the Greta Thunbergs, berating world leaders who do nothing to prevent the climate change which threatens her generation.
Watching her, I recalled Jesus tossing out of the temple the money lenders and animal traders who preyed on faithful Jews.
How dare you, said Greta, do nothing to save our world! How dare you, said Jesus, turn a place built for non-Jews’ worship into a den of thieves.
Faith lies in the young activists in Hong Kong daring to seek a democratic future against the creeping hegemony of the Chinese state.
So, faith is shown not only in worship but on the streets of Hong Kong, and of all those cities where people protest over not only climate change but also local injustice, like those who stood in Christchurch against the mosque attacks, and those who support a wide gamut of causes through Givealittle.
Such faith may move mountains, but it lacks the undergirding of faith in something greater than itself.
History teaches us that many movements that looked to better people’s lives descended into tyranny, of dynasty or the state.
Others looked for a short-cut to success and found economic disaster.
The Revised Common Lectionary, which many churches use, has been following the cycle of Jeremiah the prophet, when the Jewish leadership was flirting with foreign alliances rather than relying on God’s grace.
They ignored the warnings and their allies turned on them; Jerusalem was destroyed and most of the people were driven into exile in Babylon.
They lamented their loss by the rivers of Babylon, and felt abandoned.
They learnt eventually that God is universal, not limited by time and space, and gracious, giving us another chance to get it right.
The drive for justice or protecting creation can galvanise a generation.
Remember ban the bomb, civil rights in the USA, or women’s suffrage in Britain?
Today it’s MeToo and the Extinction Rebellion movements.
These may change the world, become a new tyranny or peter out in bickering and dispute.
Historically, the most successful campaigns often underlay faith in the cause with a faith in God, which can focus the mind and obviate hubris, where the leader sees the movement as his own possession. It’s not only kings who say L’etat, c’est moi.
Just as evangelical Christians empowered the anti-slavery drive of the early nineteenth century, and Quakers the drive for prison reform, faith communities of every religion need always to remember the epistle writer James’ warning that faith without works is dead, and embrace the movements of the age which incorporate the drive for the common good, which underlies all the great faiths. The alternative is irrelevance, introspection and disintegration.