To be honest, I have a history of being a bad Christian.
Which is a weird thing to say coming from someone who has preached (a lot), regularly taught bible studies and small groups in church, led worship, gone on mission trips, and generally has identified and defined himself by his Christianity for his entire life. I’ve felt some sort of calling towards a vocation of ministry for most of my life. Even now, I host a podcast about Christian spirituality. I constantly write about trying to follow Jesus and make decisions based out of kenotic love in every area of my life. But even with all of this being true, I’m not really a good Christian.
Growing up, I was taught what it meant to be a good Christian. I was supposed to be sequestered from the world, set apart, holy. I wasn’t supposed to be a part of the secular life that was around me. While I moved through it, I wasn’t supposed to be part of it. “In the world but not of it” was the pithy sentiment that encapsulated this idea.
But it wasn’t enough to be passively different from the world. No, we were tasked with a mission. We, as Christians, were supposed to work to change the world, to transform it, to save it. As Christians, we held a specific set of moral beliefs, and those moral beliefs led us to vote a specific way, to engage with media in a specific way, have friendships for a specific purpose. Everything we did that put us in the world—but don’t forget to not be of the world—was done with a purpose. We were reaching out to the world in order to bring the people of the world, the cultures of the world, the society of the world into the kingdom of God where they would be transformed by the power of God to become holy, set apart, different from what they used to be. They were going to look more like those of us that were already in the church, already in the kingdom of God, already becoming holy as God is holy.
This was the mission of the church.
The Evangelical circus created its own subculture of music, merchandise, and media to cater to us church folk and to give us proof we weren’t regressive Luddites. We had rap music, pop music, rock and roll, and even singers that made appearances on secular radio stations. There were books, shirts, movies, memorabilia—anything that the world offered the church offered as well, just its own sanctified version.
I know, because I sold all this stuff at my first job: working in a Christian bookstore.
But even as I worked there, I thought most of this stuff was a joke.
Other than a handful of bands that were putting out music I liked—typically alternative rock—and some books about Christian living, I found everything in the Evangelical Christian subculture to be nothing but a knockoff of the larger culture. There were very few original things that came through that store. We had tee-shirts that were branded with logos and sayings cleverly snatched out of the mainstream and twisted and crammed into some Bible verse or Christian saying. There were paintings of serine scenes filled with light. There were enough books about marriage and self-help to rival the sections in Barnes and Noble. There were kids’ programs like Bible man so we could spare the children the secular Power Rangers while getting a good dose of moral lessons.
Knick knacks, birthday cards, posters, and of course a wall of bibles all crammed into this little corner shop kitty corner from a Burger King. It was a centralized, concentrated dose of the Evangelical Christian subculture I grew up in, this subculture where I learned how to be a good Christian.
A good Christian didn’t listen to secular music, only music created by Christians.
A good Christian only read Christian books and received advice from celebrity pastors and Christian thought leaders.
A good Christian proudly wore evangelistic Tee-shirts and jewelry that proclaimed to the world that you weren’t ashamed of the Gospel.
These were the outward expressions of a Good Christian, someone who fit in with the subculture, who was happy with the subculture, who was an expression of the subculture.
That wasn’t me.
From high school on, I had a rebellious streak in me. I wasn’t satisfied with the Evangelical Christian subculture pocket and lifestyle. I listened to secular devil music and kissed my girlfriends. I didn’t like the cheesy knock off tee-shirt designs. Most of the “literature” that was sold as Christian was dumb, money grabs, playing off fear and a narrow idea of life.
I wanted more. I wanted art. I wanted new ideas. I wanted new music that you could actually enjoy. I wanted beautiful words in beautiful books. I wanted raw and edgy; what I got was overdone and flaccid.
As a teenager, I just didn’t quite fit in with the church. I drank and smoked some. I cussed. I hung out with friends that smoked pot. I remember in 9th grade, hanging out at Rich’s house, listening to Nirvana, and studying for theology class at the Catholic school I was attending. I didn’t hang out with the bright, shining examples of Christianity. I hung out with the troublemakers, the bad kids, the ones that seemed against everything I was raised to believe.
As I became a young adult, this trend continued. I went to bars for fun. I hung out at a local coffee shop and read religious texts from other religions. I spent my time among people who were decidedly not Christian, who Christians would say needed to be saved. I didn’t hang out with them to save their souls. I hung out with them because they were interesting, cool people I liked to be around. All the while I was preaching and teaching and leading music in Church.
It was this dichotomy that saved my soul.
See, I never hid that I was a Christian among the “heathens” I spent time with. People knew I was also studying the Bible at the coffee shop. It wasn’t something that rubbed people the wrong way with me, though. There were other Christians at the coffee shop, usually having Bible study or something. They were loud and sometimes confrontational, challenging the way people presented, spoke, and lived. So, when people found out I was a Christian, they were a bit surprised I wasn’t like the other obnoxious Bible wielding church goers. People liked me, liked to hang out with me, invited me to their parties, to hang out on the smoking deck with them, to go to the bar with them, all the while knowing I was a Christian, knowing that in some way I was trying to live a different kind of life—even if in many ways it looked just like everyone else.
Living this way—living between two worlds—did something to me, changed me. It gave me the ability to humanize people, not turn them into evangelistic projects. It became fashionable in the 90s for Evangelical Christians to promote the idea of intentional friendships. The concept was to be friendly with neighbors, coworkers, and other people you came in contact with regularly so that you could eventually invite them to your church and convert them to Christianity. People became projects, things to fix, to tamper with, to save. I never viewed the people around me that way.
I knew their stories, their very human stories. Many of them had a religious upbringing. Many of them were raised in the Evangelical subculture I was. Many of them had spiritual—some physical as well—violence done to them that brought them to the point of hatred and utter rejection of all things Christian. This was twenty years ago. Religious trauma and deconstruction are nothing new. I was surrounded by people who were deconstructing. Some from hurt, some from ideas that broke apart the shallow, confining theology of the Evangelical world, some from coming to terms with their own sexuality.
I was going through my own deconstruction at the time. I was trying to make sense of a theology that told me one thing and friends—actual people—who told me another by their very existence. Goodness wasn’t confined to the church walls. These people were good, did good, acted good, dare I say even were trying to love their neighbor with a complete absence of Christian religion. I struggled to figure out what made Christianity different, because all the hallmarks I had been raised to believe that were supposedly unique to Christianity were just moralism in various forms. How did the doctrine and person of Jesus impact people to bring about a change? What did it mean to have a soul saved?
These questions and more rolled around my head as I went to church, preached, taught, and led worship. My theology began to shift and hasn’t stopped since. It’s that shift that has kept me far away from Christian Nationalism.
See, I was raised with all the seeds of Christian nationalism buried deep, deep in my psyche. I was indoctrinated, kept sheltered, taught to fear and/or hate everything that wasn’t my brand of Christianity. I was raised to be a fundamentalist and a Christian nationalist.
But Stone Temple Pilots, P.O.D, Pearl Jam, Johnny Q. Public, and all the other bands (some Christian, some not) that played the alternative music that drew me in cracked the shell of indoctrination. Books like House of Leaves, Fight Club, and Ragamuffin Gospel gave me new ideas about theology, thought, and what words could do. Girls like Amanda, Jennifer, and Nikki helped me steer clear of kissing dating goodbye. Grounds for Coffee and the bar Beatnik’s kept me from burying my entire existence in a church building. The Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching expanded my religious thinking and questions to places I never imagined when I was younger.
All these things that made me a bad—or at least questionable—Christian saved me from becoming a hate and fear driven disciple of an American Jesus. By challenging what I thought I knew and presenting me with a different narrative, these things and people stretched my ideas about God and theology as well as life and morality. Through these “sinful” things, God worked to bring me into a theology of love, embrace, and salvation for everyone.
Maybe bad Christians are what we need to combat Christian nationalism.
Instead of yelling across the aisles or posting quips and dunks on social media, maybe we need Christians in the bars, in the coffee shops, at universities, with friends (not projects). Christians who make compelling music, beautiful literature, and live lives of dirt and clay. This Earthy spirituality and embraces people’s narratives and doesn’t think of things in terms of profane and holy, of sacred and secular is the way we can redeem Christianity and wrest it back from Christina Nationalism. The fact that people assume that all Christians believe some monolithic idea of heaven, hell, who’s saved and how simply isn’t true… but it is the popular understanding because the people that have been the loudest about their faith are the ones who—don’t forget fueled by fear and hate—believe these hurtful doctrines.
It’s time for the bad Christians, the dirtbag Christians, the wonky, wobbly, unorthodox Christians to speak up, to say we embrace all, we love all, and we are in the process of transformation so we can be what the world needs: salt and light, not against the darkness of a world going to hell, but against the flavorlessness of fundamental Christianity expressing itself in a stale form of Christian nationalism.
Friends, The Book of Common Words is 100% reader supported. Here we explore the Christian spirituality of being human through podcast, poetry, and prose about my life, art, and the Christian faith. If you would like to support this exploration, and gain early access to all the podcasts, poems, and prose, consider joining my Patreon community.
As a 100% reader supported publication, the best way to find new readers is word of mouth. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider referring a friend. Referrals help more people get exposed to my writing. Thank you for your support.
Thank you for stopping by my little corner of the internet. If you would like to be notified and receive my posts, poems, and podcast episodes in your email, just fill out the form below.
Leave a Reply