Why the Church must Defy Religion

Why the Church must Defy Religion

I was a student at Southwest Baptist University from 1996 to 2001. Yes, I was there for one more year than a good studious student out to be. I was not studious. I was trouble. I had doubts and questions and wrestled with God over so many issues. I should have been named Jacob instead of David. I had grown up in the church, but never felt part of the church. I spent time with young men and women who were certain of their faith. They had bedrock beliefs and values that I couldn’t always accept. My life has been a struggle with religion and its rules and its people.

I went from SBU to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. A wiser head would have known that my rebellious and questioning heart would have been miserable there. And I was miserable, but not wise. I never found anyplace as oppressive as Seminary. People can accuse me of being a sinner and that’s why I found it oppressive. And I can’t deny I was a sinner and continue to be a sinner. But I was opposed by the very culture at NOBTS.

The culture is religious. It is rules and it requires acceptance. They have all the answers. They have thought out all the problems. All one has to to is to learn their solutions to all the problems. And once you have learned all the solutions to the problems, you will never have doubts and questions. You will become a full-proof Christian. Nothing will shake your faith.

Yet, nothing shook my faith more than NOBTS even though I had experienced spiritual abuse at the hands of deacons and their wives from my dad’s church. In one situation, the Deacons had been on the School Board and had tried to keep me from graduating to punish me because my Dad wasn’t punishing me according to their standards. They tried to use religion to impact the state. I survived that abuse (and more) and still went to SBU and NOBTS.

But NOBTS broke my faith. These were meant to be the high priests of the faith. These men were the great thinkers of the faith. These men were the guardians of the faith and truth and these men were cruel and liars and petty and vindictive. They had all the answers, but they had no love.

I left NOBTS. I quit it after they rejected me. I struggled with my faith and attending church and finding God in my life. My life continued on and I had a second son and yet, I couldn’t escape my faith which was now also operating as my trauma.

Over the next few years, I attended a secular university to earn an MA In Religious Studies. I studied and wrote my thesis over the schism in the Southern Baptist Convention as it played out in the Missouri Baptist Convention. My professors, some who were Christian and some who were not, restored my faith in faith because they allowed me to ask the tough questions. They allowed me to doubt what I had been taught. I was able to ask God all the monstrous questions and it did not destroy God. At Seminary, God was fragile and delicate. At a secular school, God was robust and strong and not afraid of me.

Before I attended Missouri State University, a friend reached out to me concerned I would lose my faith and to guard myself.

My friends from SBU, who were better at being Christian then me, had gone to seminary. They had gone through the process and earned the approval of the religion’s high priests. They were called by God. I was rejected by the high priests and therefore by God and did not get to serve him most of my life as I had planned. I spent many years in spiritual decline where I believed that Satan and I just happened to be on the same path, and I told myself we had some understanding. I would follow God, but not too seriously. I would recognize God, but I would also recognize Satan’s place in my life. Obviously, I was a sinner and that's why I couldn't get along with Christians. I would reason my sin wasn’t destroying me and I could control the outcomes of my sin because I had faith.

I have not been a good man. I have floundered in my faith because of the sin in my life. I allowed childhood trauma and abuse to form my opinion of God and the people in the pew instead of facing the abuse and declaring I was no longer its victim. For a long time, I would tell myself I loved God, but hated Christians. Christians had hurt me so I separated myself from their fellowship. I couldn’t understand why non-believers were better friends to me than Christian friends. Despite living deeply in my own sin, God still dwelled in me. I had been told God abandons sinners my entire life. Yet, wherever I went to find sin, God came along with me. He showed through me, despite me. Even non-believers could recognize that God in me didn’t really belong in their world. But when they were drawn to me, it wasn’t me that they were seeing, it was God showing through my cracks. God's revealed presence was so rare in their world, they hungered for it. Even in the hell I created for myself, God was still redeeming me to be more than my animal self.

God never gave up on me. After I became sick, I started to face my mental trauma through therapy and it helped relieved me of my desire to sin to numb the pain of the trauma.

Last year, I found a new church. Or I should say, God gave me a new church. I sat in the pew angry for months of my new church. But the more I was around Christians who put God first and me second and themselves third, it wore down the anger and frustration I had with the church. I finally began to heal after years and years of mistrust of Christians.

And then I started to serve God by volunteering and putting my name out there. With my new adult-onset disabilities, I was so mad at God because I no longer felt useful; I was little more than decoration in my own life. And when I started to serve, I healed a little more. To serve, I had to study God again and his Word, and I healed a little more.

Sin still wanted to offer me a way to ignore my trauma and when I indulged in the sin, it made the trauma worse. It fed into the feelings of anger and shame. But being back in a healthy church was different. It slowly started to heal my trauma. My pain started to resolve and become smaller. My anger started to dissipate. I felt peace. I hadn’t remembered ever knowing peace in the presence of God and church people. It had always been God alone.

But while I have been finding healing in my faith, I have seen people I attended SBU with who were the best examples of Christianity wrestling with God and so angry at him. Religion had told them that there would be hiccups, but that by being accepted by the High Priests, it would sanctify their lives and families. But pain had torn the veil between them and God and he no longer comforted them. He was a torment to them. God had become the enemy in their life. The trauma they experienced, such as divorce, loss of family, sick children, and more had all weighed them down until their faith just shattered. God had not come to rescue them. God had let their lives fall apart. They had been the religious ones while I had been the irreligious one. They had received awards and recognition by the high priests while I had been cast out. They had been approved by the high priests. So why did they feel left out to dry like meat on a cross, forsaken by God?

One of my dear friends, a friend who saved my life, reached out with questions for me about God. I’m not worthy to answer their questions, but I want to try. Their questions are valid and God can take their anger and frustration. If God can’t take our worst frustrations and accusations, then what good is this weak God. Religion too often supports a weak God. This God that religion preaches about is paper-thin and cowardly and has no value to you or to me.

God, if he exists, must be robust and dangerous and unshakable. God must be fighting alongside us, not from some unassailable throne and ivory tower god. He cannot be a babbling, incoherent god. God must be willing to do anything and everything to help me defeat the demons seeking to destroy not only my physical body, but my soul. If God is only accessible to the purists, the religious, he is the least interesting of gods. He's common. He's mundane. He's a sidewalk chalk of a god, washed away as soon as it rains. And in some ways, Fundamentalism and Progressivism in Christianity create sidewalk chalk gods. They lock away their god because he's too weak to stand up and too much a reflection of their animal brains. They remake god into their own image, like kids on a summer day before a storm, and their god has no value for grown ups who struggle with real everyday problems like cancer, death, disability, and hateful bosses. For the fundamentalists, God is distant, cold, and easily offended. For the Progressives, God is weak, vacillates, and can never be offended, which I promise is no better than always being offended. Both groups make God useless. And we are living with the results of both religions and their decaying, soft, rotten bodies. Both progressives and fundamentalists become managers of the faith, determining who can and cannot belong. They decide that faith can only look like them. Fundamentalists commit crimes against children and we look away. Progressives commit crimes against children and celebrate them. Religion can never be a place to find God. Religion is the only place where your animal brain is given the moral authority to act out your worst impulses. Are you cruel? Religion welcomes you. Are you vindictive? Religion welcomes you. Are you petty? Religion welcomes you. Are you looking for a place to justify or satisfy your sexual perversions? Religion welcomes you. Religion ordains the seven deadly sins as sacraments as long as you perform them in service to the sidewalk chalk god they make.

So what is the church? Why do I hold the church is separate from Religion? For starters, religion has been a driving force in humanity for as long as we have had a political structure. Religion of the past is little different from religion of today. It fed the appetites and gave moral justification from pillaging your neighbor to raping your neighbor’s wife to murdering innocents, most especially children and slaves. The Ten Commandments were given by God to prevent religious overreach. This is what religion was, is, and will be until humanity ends. Revelations promises it. The Old Testament testifies to it. Christ condemned it.

The Church stands against this. It is what religion ought to be. Religion is not meant to serve the high priests, but to serve the poor, the widows, the orphans, the imprisoned, the sick, the healthy, the wealthy, the kind, the cruel, the traumatized, and the satisfied.

The church is not tribal. It is not white. It is not black. It is not Baptist. It is not Catholic. It is not gay. It is not straight. It is not an identity. The church brings us all in as individuals who have fallen short and gives us healing from our sins and the trauma of our sins and the sins of others. The ability to forgive someone who has hurt you is one of the greatest gifts from God the church can help us experience.

The church is not based on one person's idea of God. It is not a God of religion like in Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity. God is established and revealed by Christ who is the same substance as the triune God, who is fully man and fully God. It is established by a God we do not have the imagination to invent nor the ability to control. This Christ is dangerous and demands us to act on faith in him alone and not faith in a God who looks slightly resembles him. If your God is 75% like Christ, it is not God. Is your creation of God poisoned and diseased by your limitations and your own impulses? Do you really want a God limited by you? Or do you want the infinite God of Creation, Salvation, and Resurrection?

The church is a fulfillment of religion and what a group of individuals who worship and serve Christ can accomplish. The church allows us to see God has freed humanity from the state. The church allows us to see that God hated slavery and racism. The church bonds men and women in common purpose to create acts of charity, mercy, love, kindness, and calls us to be Good Citizens of Heaven and of Earth.

But there are times where the church is corrupted into religion. It turns into a religion of Moloch, Baal, or Istrid, an unholy Trinity of dark spirits and gods. When the church turns into religion, it sacrifices children, possesses everything, and starts wars. It becomes the great manager. It condones sexual abuse of minors by pretending it doesn’t happen or it celebrates abortion. It says this building is all there is to the church. It possesses lands and demands impossible tithes. It starts wars within, without, and encourages wars with other nations when the religion captures the church. Every sexual perversion find its home in the church when the individual is killed to make way for the tribe of Creedalism.

I used to think that there was little point is saying these things about the church, but now I realize it wasn't the church. It was religion all along. I used to think the church inside religion was deaf and couldn’t hear the truths over the prophets of Baal, Moloch, and Istrid. But I think Covid allowed many who were religious an excuse to leave the church. The religious separated themselves from the church. And the people who were left were more committed to the real God and not an image of God. I think the people left behind are able to hear truth now that the high priests have lost their voices. But the high priests haven’t gone silent; thye have moved into the state.

The High Priests think they have sent the church packing and out of the affairs of the state and they can reignite the open worship of Baal, Moloch, and Istrid. They think they have won the state and they don’t mind using the garbs of Christianity to say they are Christians. It defames the name of Christ when they commit evil using his name. It’s a win for them. They are Chancellor Palpatine and the Sith Lord Sidious. They don’t care who kills who because they own both sides of the state.

This is the church’s opportunity and responsibility to rise up and to strengthen their own with truth, education, history, faith,grace, and mercy. The church should be bold, more bold than ever, because we have a real opportunity to change the communities where we are. Not to take over the state, but stand against the state and its tribalism and its animal brain impulses. We have the room to breathe and become rational oases in a pagan world of irrationalism. We have science and logic on our sides because they are part of our infinite God who has perfect logic and science in him. We shouldn’t be afraid of philosophy, theology, science, and faith. God is the origin of all truth, whether that truth comes from a microscope or whether it comes from a Dostoevsky. We have a chance to be brave and evangelical and to have no fear. Before, the religious might have stifled the church like vines over growing a tree. But they have moved on in many ways from us.

When we have these moments of clarity, we can stand against religion and the state. We can demonstrate the qualities of compassion and charity Christ modeled for us in his sermons. We can be a group of individuals, led by the Holy Spirit, defying the false Gods of possession, war, and sex. We can tell Baal, Moloch, and Istrid that they have no power here. God defeated them at the cross and they can never win. We can face them without fear and recognize who we truly are. Individuals who matter so much to the creator God; he died for individuals and then rose again, to bury spiritual death and destruction. We no longer have to be traumatized by demons through our sin, which is spiritual destruction.

Only by being the church and not being religion, are we able to reach our friends, families, and neighbors with God’s love. I will explore more about the differences between Religion and the Church to help us understand how to be the church instead of replacing Christ with Baal, Moloch, and Istrid.