Hating Religion, Loving Jesus: Why that Sentiment is Flawed
This week has seen a new viral sensation take over our computer screens. A spoken word artist who goes by the name Bball1989 released a video on Youtube that has, in less than a week, received more than six million hits called “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” So regardless of what any of us personally thinks about what he’s saying, it’s incumbent on us to listen up.
For starters, there’s some really good stuff in his message. He deconstructs the idea that those within the church have it all together, or that one should already understand what it is they believe before crossing the threshold. On the contrary, he rightly asserts that the church should be more like a “hospital for brokenness.”
He also drives a necessary wedge between faith and politics, critiquing the tendency of the evangelical right to claim that the words “Christian” and “Republican” are synonymous. Though this is more prevalent that it is for liberal Christians, I’d argue it’s worth noting that fundamentalism, whatever its stripe, is damaging and has no place drawing partisan lines around faith.
This is a young man who has obviously worked through a lot of tough times to get to where he is. He admits to struggling in the past with sex addiction, and decries the church’s tendency to gloss over such problems, not dealing with the core issues that can tear a life or family apart. But he is where he starts to make some problematic points. And there are several.
Yes, some churches do avoid talking about sex all together, or if they do, they take the Ed Young approach, telling married folks to have sex more and everything will be fine. As for the rest of you, well, pray for celibacy I guess.
He also claims that Jesus hated the church, and actually came to destroy religion, once and for all. I can certainly see where he would draw such conclusions, especially when Jesus quotes prophecies about the destruction of central Jewish temples, but I think he’s over-generalizing here. Though much of Jesus’ ministry was out in the streets and in homes, he hardly avoided the church. When there, he was prone to stirring things up, no doubt, but he was considered – and even called – a rabbi by many of his followers.
The video’s message also points out some necessary problems within organized religion, but as in other cases, he paints with a dangerously broad brush. Yes, some churches are doing more harm than good. Yes, some parts of religion are more about propping up doctrine or sustaining an institution than they are about living out the gospel in the world. But there also are millions of Christians who identify with one faith community or another (or even more than one) who are striving breathlessly to help invoke the kind of world Jesus claimed was possible.
To offer such plenary indictments is to become – to paraphrase Paul – the very thing that he claims to hate.
I could go on in this regard, picking the poem apart, but you get the idea. This is a voice of post-evangelicalism, longing for a foothold with his faith beyond the trappings of a religious system that clearly he feels added to the problem rather than guiding him to liberation. I totally get that. Millions of us have been there.
But some of us choose to keep working from within the system to try and make it more like what we believe it can and should be. Yes, I resonate with the anti-institutional sentiment, as do millions of my peers. Few of us feel we owe the institutions much of anything. But in them some of us do still see some potential for them to be repurposed, reoriented so that they may once again serve the people, rather than the other way around.
It’s well and good that he’s making claims from the outside, but when he says he’s not here to judge, that’s simply disingenuous. Also, he begins to hedge even these bold claims by saying he still loves the Church, while hating religion. There are even other videos online of him “preaching” in church. So if we’re going to cast stones, let’s decide which side of the wall we’re aiming for.
But all of this doesn’t get at the heart of my biggest issue with his spoken word piece. What bothers me the most is that, despite stretching out toward a post-religious understanding of Christ, he then falls right back into the same old lexicon of substitutionary atonement language. You know the drill: Jesus died for your sins, the blood flowed down, he absorbed your transgressions, and so on.
So my questions is this: though he seems to be bent on tearing at the fabric of at least the evangelical Christian church, if not organized religion as a whole, why does his central message sound pretty much like every evangelical altar call I’ve ever heard?
And believe me, I’ve heard a lot of them.
Props to the guy for examining his faith, and for not taking the Church’s word for how to be of what to think. But if we’re going to ascribe to Buenaventura Durruti’s claim that the only kind of church that illuminates is a burning one, let’s not shove all the old dogma in our jackets for safe keeping as we rush out the back door.
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I don't get all the haters. What is wrong with saying that Jesus is greater than religion? I loved this video and kudos to him for having the guts to produce it. He was obviously admonishing the already Christian Church to remember what Christianity is all about. And reaching out to those who were/are turned of by the hypocrites that lurk in the Church clothing themselves with self-righteousness while looking down their nose at those who haven't got it all together (no-one does - we are all sinners saved by Grace). He is explaining that institutionalized religion exists to control man by rules and regulations that are impossible to keep. Jesus said so himself, and that is why he died for our sins. He is speaking about the LOVE of God through Jesus that sets mankind truely free. He is reminding all believers that we are sinners saved by Grace alone -- not our works. Salvation is not about us, our works, following endless rules, regulations -- It's about HIM, His grace and mercy. I fail to see how any Christian can argue against the truth that Jesus' Love, Grace and Mercy which sets us free, triumphs over man-made religion which seeks to control. Just saying.
Ok, I confess that I haven't gotten around to watching the video yet, but I found some thing interesting here:
"He also claims that Jesus hated the church, and actually came to destroy religion, once and for all. I can certainly see where he would draw such conclusions, especially when Jesus quotes prophecies about the destruction of central Jewish temples, but I think he’s over-generalizing here. Though much of Jesus’ ministry was out in the streets and in homes, he hardly avoided the church"
Problem is - there WASN'T any such thing as a church yet in Jesus' day! Jesus frequented the synagogues and the Temple...
He NEVER said that Jesus hated the Chruch. In fact, he said he the opposite. That was a misquote in the article. Also shouldn't you actually watch the video maybe two or three time before commenting on and criticizing it. This is just a video by one admittedly flawed human being who is trying to help other flawed human beings find the true meaning of Christianity -- Jesus -- nothing more nothing less.
I spent ages 25 through 45 as a Bible-literalist Christian; I've been, for lack of a more precise label, "agnostic" for the past eleven years since honesty led me to dismiss Christianity and any notion of the Bible being the inspired word of God revealing himself and truth to mankind.
Although I'm glad that Christianity apparently was a tool for successfully changing their behaviors and attitudes, both Bball 1989 and Christian Platt miss the point that, in the end, they are ultimately no different than the organized systems of Christianity to which they object. The question that gets to that core sameness is this :Upon what source of information do they base their beliefs about "Jesus"?
For example, did bBall 1989 come to his "... claims that Jesus hated the church, and actually came to destroy religion..." out of thin air? Does bBall 1989 allege that God/Jesus/the Spirit directly communicated this "truth" to him, and did so in a manner which can be objectively verified and which would be acknowledged as authentic (although begrudgingly) by even hostile investigators? Or, as is more likely, does bBall 1989 derive his ideas from the text called "The New Testament Scriptures" ?
Those organized religions bBall and Platt object to are merely other interpretative derivations of that text. Fact is, the text is too ambiguous to derive a "correct' or even "more-nearly-correct' interpretation of its meanings. The multitude of conflicting interpretational variations couldn't exist if the text's meanings were explicit and self-explanatory. As Platt himself admits, bBall 1989 is weighting certain NT passages (those in which the text says Iesus condemned alleged certain Pharisaic and Sadduccic behaviors and attitudes and faulty practices associated with the temple and corporate worship) yet minimizing or ignoring the NT passages showing Iesus practicing, approbating, and teaching organized worship; and bBall is also ignoring the weight of frequent NT passages in the so-called "Acts of The Apostles" and in the several Epistles, especially those attributed to Paul and Peter, which indicate organized Christianity as not only as normal but as indeed necessary for correctly following Christ. Some, just as sincere and committed to Christ as bball, have gone the opposite direction as bBall in their reading of the NT text, and weighted the organizational NT passages but minimized the passages upon which bBall builds, and seen a hyper-structured organizational version of Christianity in the NT. The organizationals sincerely believe that bball is in error and of damage to Christianity as much as he believes they are.
Point is, all versions in the spectrum of Christianity, from the "lone-ranger" version of bBall 1989 to the hyper-structured organizations these men lament, are ultimately no more than someone's or someones' interpretation of the same source of information. Can any one of them conclusively prove that their interpretation is correct and the others not? The fact that such conflicting interpretations are able to exist simultaneously demonstrates that no one can prove his is the "correct" or at least "more-nearly-correct". If that was possible to prove, then incorrect interpretations would have no ability to exist for very long, at least not without their misinterpretations of the NT text being obvious even to outside observers. The problem is that the source of Christians' information about "Jesus" and Christianity, the text called "the Scriptures" they're using, is ambiguous and incomplete concerning foundational and major issues and questions. That incompleteness and ambiguity makes it impossible for there not to be interpretative divisiveness.
The inescapable interpretative ambiguity of the "source", which not only allows but actually causes the conflicts and contentions among the varied sincere Christian groups and believers, should ring warning alarms about the text's authority and credibility, to any reasoning mind.
Christian has no meaning. You have to explain yourself anytime you use it. Same with conservative, liberal or engineer.
Everything I do, I do it for you.
It's the old "spiritual not religious" claim. Anything that's bad can be pinned on "organized religion" while I can be saved without having to attend church or listen to talk about things I should be doing. I can call myself a Christian without accepting anything that's inconvenient.
6 million hits? Sounds to me like people want a new version of the old religion. A 2.0 version. Something new, a clean slate. Not long before the Catholic church applies for a name change I'm guessing.