Do I Stay Christian? by Brian D. McLaren

Author:Brian D. McLaren [McLaren, Brian D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250262790
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

18

BECAUSE CHRISTIANITY IS CHANGING (FOR THE WORSE AND FOR THE BETTER)

I wish you could see what I see.

It’s a story that’s been unfolding since long before we were born.

Right at this point where major sectors of Christianity have never looked more misguided or regressive (at least, not in our lifetimes), we are closer to a breakthrough than we’ve been in a long, long time.

The theological progress we’ve made is breathtaking. Most of that progress is due to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, and other previously excluded minorities who have, against all odds, gained a hearing. It’s like they’ve gone out into the fields and harvested an enormous supply of fresh food. They’ve brought their bounty to a huge kitchen table and generously invited everyone, including straight white men like me who created and presided over the mess we’re in, to help cook up a nourishing and tasty feast to enjoy together. Their hospitality is most gracious. It is truly Christian.

I expected them to resent me and people like me. I feared they would bar me from the house just as white patriarchal Christians in the past did to them. But as a wise Black woman once said to me, “No, Brian. We don’t want to treat white people the way they treated us. Why would we ever want to behave like white people, after all they’ve done to us?”

Their gracious welcome, of course, doesn’t mean they don’t feel a certain suspicion. They have every reason to expect that white Christian men like me will come in and try to take over. They’ve seen it happen so many times; they know we can’t help it. It’s how we’ve been socialized since childhood. So they have every right to test me, to challenge me, until I prove that I won’t ruin the party by dominating the conversation and ordering people around. They have every right to be tough on me and help me see what I have been trained my whole life not to see.

Now imagine if, at this critical moment, under these unprecedented circumstances, I decide to leave Christianity. Right when I’m being welcomed to what my friend John Pavlovitz calls “a bigger table” by the people who have every reason to reject me … what if that’s when I decide to walk away from the table forever?1 Wouldn’t they have every reason to wonder if I simply didn’t want to be a Christian under the new terms of equality?

Howard Thurman, one of America’s greatest theologians said, “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”2 If that process of redeeming Christianity is continuing (as I know it is), can you see how tragic—even ungrateful—it would be to leave Christianity now, of all times? Why not give the voices of the oppressed at least a few centuries to heal what the oppressors desecrated for the better part of twenty centuries? Why not join the party

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