I don’t have a problem identifying myself as a Christian. I was born into the Church and though I’m not as active as I used to be, I foresee a time in the future when I will exit through it as well. I was brought up to understand the impact that a loving and forgiving God had in my life.  Throughout it, especially in times that were both the most challenging and the most rewarding, I have called upon Him in thanks, desperation, need and celebration. Most people who know me have heard nary a word of this coming out of my mouth because I was also brought up in a tradition that doesn’t see a need to throw it out in people’s faces when they’re not looking for it. Faith and belief are personal issues and I do thank God that I had a family around me when I was young that imbued a sense of personal responsibility and character along with humility, forgiveness and repentance.  And my immigrant grandmother who made sure I went to church every Sunday.

This is why I have such a problem with “Christians” today. Throughout history, they have failed humanity, themselves and their God in the name of Christ, or Jesus, or The Savior, or whatever moniker the latest sect chooses to identify Him.  For the most part, they feel justified in doing so.  And right now, they’re really pissing me off.  Especially the American ones.

I grew up as an Eastern Orthodox Christian where faith is a choice; correct actions are a choice and we were born with free will to decide how to behave. We also learned that as humans we are fallen creatures and our failings are the essence of our humanity: we sometimes make bad choices and finding grace in one’s life is the recovery from them. This concept was supposed to bind us together, this knowledge that we all fail, we all have weaknesses, but we would have this common faith in God and in ourselves to lift each other up.  It is the essence of what it is to be human.  But the Christianity that I see and hear in the national conversation is not the one I recognize; this one takes the position that we are kings of the universe and have an inherent right to force our beliefs on others, that “choices” are directed by God or Satan.  That our failings have been thrust on us from afar, that we are constantly under attack and must be ever vigilant to fend off the evil that can corrupt us.  This interpretation is what the the holy fathers of my faith would call an abomination, a heresy and my good friends outside of Christianity should take heart that these are not the central tenets of the true Christian faith.

The exercise of faith is a choice. You may be born into a faith and it may be bestowed on you by your family, but how you behave in that faith is your choosing, and following it means choosing to do so.  No one, particularly Jesus or Satan, are forcing you to make the choice.  You are responsible for your own actions against others and when those actions take you away from the path God has laid out in the teachings of the Old and primarily New Testament, you must find a corrective course to take.  Primary above all is the directive to love one another above oneself.  If you’re looking for the real meaning of Christianity, this is it.  A sin against mankind is in reality a sin against God.

This is where the concept of obedience enters.  While I’m not going to get into a theological debate about what obedience means, let’s just say that its a virtue and an excellent placeholder for other forms of preferred behavior like respect, honor and fealty.  This is as instructional in the governing of our behavior as the ancient myths of Olympus were to the Greeks: in every society on Earth since the dawn of time, something like “religion” has been created to codify behavior between ourselves, and the desired effect is obedience.  You only have to ask yourself “why” to come to an understanding that we as a species know that we are prone to failure to another and as a community, we’ve formulated ways to keep ourselves moving forward in time.  In Christianity, our job as the faithful is to use our limited time on Earth to get back to God when we “cast off this mortal coil”; for each of us individually to follow the path that His Son has laid out in those few years of teachings that had been revealed to us as our new covenant, or agreement, with God.   Therein lay the irony, because this covenant, The New Testament of the Bible, was  written down and interpreted by flawed humans hundreds of years later. (And wait…it was not translated into English until the 16th century!). This gets to the heart of my argument and it is the one that anti-Christian writers consistently use to challenge the core tenets of our faith: if the Bible is the “word of God”, and humans are so inconsistent and petty, how can we trust anything they’ve “written”?  How can you base a faith that has been at the heart of some of the world’s worst atrocities, that has been spouted by some of humankind’s worst offenders and used as a justification for bad behavior against ourselves?

My faith is theologically complex but simple in execution and understanding: Jesus was both God and man, he was born to a mortal woman and lived through our mortal life and our limitations, failings and temptations to show us the way back into his Father’s house.  In this way, Christ is us.  We do dumb, stupid things; we choose to succumb to evil; it is in our power to make the morally and ethically right decisions and we choose not to.  There is no “the Devil made me do it” about it.  But the Christianity I read about on the web and listen to on TV justifies every failing by twisting the virtue of forgiveness and repentance, turning the love of God and the force of evil into something anthropomorphic, each tiny being perched on opposite shoulders in a tug-of-war for our souls: angel vs. devil.  And by doing so, by creating this tangible division, it becomes all the easier to assign those roles to the others in our lives, those around us, those who affect in ways real and unreal.  The real essence of these twin forces, right and wrong, is to bring to front of mind the wrongness of our chosen acts so that we can make the correct choices, to not repeat the wrong ones. It is not about layering guilt on someone, casting them into the abyss, condemning them to eternal fire as a way of punishment.  Nor is it about promoting unrealistic assumptions of one’s goodness, creating demi-gods of unimpeachable integrity and saintliness, people who’s feet do not touch the ground but hover slightly above it so as not to dirty themselves.  Jesus himself wore rags and his feet were caked in dirt.  The lesson is about the acknowledgement that that both forces are within us, the power of good and the destruction of evil; the instruction is in helping all of us, who choose to believe, to lead a better life for ourselves and others by not repeating our failures, and understanding that we may.  In doing so, by placing the good of others above ourselves, we have followed in the steps of Jesus the man as he became the Christ, the mortal incarnation of the God of Abraham.  By failing again, we acknowledge that there is still wisdom to attain in how we lead our lives and that perfection can only be attained at the end of it with His help.  Jesus’ act of sacrifice, of giving himself over for us, is why we are Christians, an acknowledgement that are weak and our acceptance of this is our humility.  When we are humble, we seek to help others, not ourselves.

When you compare Christianity with every other religion on Earth, the paths are startlingly similar. Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, the teachings of many aboriginal and locally nativist faiths as well, all follow similar tenets. Love others, treat each other as you would have them treat you, be of service. These are not solely Christian or Abrahamic concepts, they are universal. Those without a chosen faith, whether atheist or agnostic, will find themselves on a similar path if they choose to be so, as these truths are self-evident in what Immanuel Kant called “moral imperatives”.

But there is a strain of Christianity that is uniquely American that is perverting these ancient beliefs. It comes out of the Scottish kirks of the 15th and 16th centuries that were caked with the harshness and unforgiving nature of Calvinism as a reaction to Anglican overrule from English kings; it was molded by the secular clashes in Northern Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries that culminated in the antipathy of Protestants and Catholics. It was brought to America by the Scots of the Ulster Plantation of Northern Ireland, known as the Scots Irish, the largest ethnic migration of the Colonial era and forged in the harsh mountains of Appalachia and Allegheny. It was mixed with the Protestant Baptism of English settlers in the south and fueled by the guilt of human bondage in a slave-driven economy. It is founded on a patriarchy that is a perverted reading of the Old Testament and shaped by the irrational emphasis on the Apocalypse of John and the Second Coming. It believes in individualistic self-determination as if it were one of the Ten Commandments and interprets Jesus as if he were a hard-bitten, vengeful entrepreneur wearing buckskin and beaver pelts carrying a Winchester rifle through the Cumberland Pass.

Its early field interpreters were Charles Taze Russell, Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, Fulton J. Sheen, Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, each latching onto a part that allowed their own personalities to shine, to be the individual interpreters of the message of Jesus; its apostates were Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, each caught up in scandals; and its perverted extremes were the demi-gods David Koresh and Jim Jones.  Its present day incarnations run from Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen to James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Charlie Kirk and, God help us, Pete Hegseth. Thousands of self-appointed interpreters of the Word of God preaching in city storefronts and rural gatherings, huge mega-churches and TV ministries.  Each one of them preys upon the disjointedness of the modern condition of alienation and uses Christianity as a vengeful weapon against their own perceived injustices.  This is not Christianity. From the perspective of eons ago, this would be considered “heresy”. And it would have been condemned.