When Christianity Forgets Christ

When Christianity Forgets Christ

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the strange, sad little theatre of modern Christianity, especially the version that somehow wants to present itself as both endlessly persecuted and permanently entitled. You know the tone…

The trembling insistence that Christians are under attack.The dramatic sigh that the world has become hostile to “people of faith.”The exhausted performance of being the last righteous souls standing in a collapsing civilisation.

And yet, beneath all that noise, I keep suspecting that what is actually being mourned is not the loss of Christ, but the loss of control. That is the thing we do not always say plainly enough.

There is a difference between being persecuted for following Jesus and being irritated because the culture no longer gives you automatic deference. Those are not the same wound. They may feel similar to the ego, but spiritually and socially they are not the same thing at all.

And if we are going to speak honestly, and good Lord, honesty would be refreshing; much of what passes for Christian outrage today is not outrage on behalf of the poor, the prisoner, the stranger, the sick, or the broken-hearted. It is outrage on behalf of status. Outrage on behalf of familiarity. Outrage on behalf of a world in which Christianity once sat a little closer to the centre of the room and did not have to explain itself quite so much.

That is quite different from the Gospel. Because when I read the Gospels, I do not meet a Christ anxious about remaining culturally dominant. I meet a Christ who says, “Blessed are the merciful” and “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:7, 5:9). I meet a Christ who opens the scroll and declares good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed (Luke 4:18–19). I meet a Christ who says the nations will be judged by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and remembered the prisoner (Matthew 25:31–46).

That is not a platform of dominance. That is a summons to tenderness, courage, and moral inconvenience. And perhaps that is why so many Christians prefer a Jesus of abstraction to the Jesus of the text. Because the Jesus of the text is forever wandering into the wrong neighbourhood, touching the wrong people, forgiving the wrong failures, and speaking as though the measure of holiness is not how loudly one defends religion, but how deeply one loves in the places where human beings are most fragile.

That Jesus is beautiful. But he is also deeply inconvenient.

Howard Thurman understood this. In Jesus and the Disinherited, he insists that the Gospel must be read from the underside of history, from the lives of those who are cornered by fear, deception, and hatred. He presents Jesus not as a mascot for the comfortable, but as “a partner in the pain of the oppressed,” and reminds us with brutal simplicity that “hatred does not empower, it decays.”

That should be enough, honestly, to ruin quite a lot of modern Christian performance. Because a Christianity addicted to resentment is already drifting from Christ. A Christianity that needs enemies in order to feel alive is already becoming spiritually unwell. A Christianity that can muster endless energy for grievance but very little for mercy has begun to confuse righteousness with emotional theatre.

And then there is the writing of James Cone, who refused to let the cross become soft, decorative, or politically harmless. Cone’s whole theological project was to insist that the cross must be read in the company of those publicly shamed, brutalised, and crushed by systems of power. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he forces the Church to remember that the cross is not a polished ornament for respectable religion; it is a sign that God is found among the humiliated and the suffering, not merely among the winners, the rulers, or the morally self-impressed.

That matters. Because once the cross becomes a badge for tribal belonging rather than a symbol of solidarity, Christianity starts to rot from the inside.

Walter Brueggemann put his finger on this in a different way. He spent years warning about what he called the logic of “royal consciousness” i.e. the religious imagination that gets too cosy with power, too committed to order, too frightened of disruption, too invested in preserving the world as it is. Even in the appreciations written after his death, Brueggemann is remembered for his critique of nationalism and consumerism as anti-biblical, and for exposing the way religious language can be absorbed into imperial habits of self-protection.

If that does not preach in our times, I do not know what does. Because what is “royal consciousness” if not religion with a seat at the palace table? What is it if not faith that begins to prefer respectability over repentance? What is it if not a Church more worried about keeping influence than keeping company with the crucified?

I would assert that the prophets would recognise it in a heartbeat.

Isaiah certainly would. “Is not this the fast that I choose,” says the Lord, “to loose the bonds of injustice… to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?” (Isaiah 58:6–7). Not louder songs. Not shinier platforms. Not a more aggrieved tone on social media. Justice. Bread. Shelter. Solidarity.

And James, bless him, is even less interested in religious drama. “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17). Dead. Not complicated. Not nuanced. Dead.

Which is why I struggle, truly struggle, with the loud Christianity that keeps telling us it holds the secret to everything good while looking suspiciously unmoved by the actual ethical demands of Jesus.

You cannot spend all your time defending your tribe and then act surprised when people wonder whether you have met the Nazarene at all. You cannot build a whole culture of fear around outsiders, then quote “welcome the stranger” as though it were decorative. You cannot bless wealth, sneer at the poor, harden yourself against the refugee, dismiss the prisoner, and then expect applause because there is a Bible on the lectern.

You cannot mistake social dominance for discipleship. You simply cannot.

And yes, I know there are Christians genuinely doing the work we are taught by Jesus and his mates to do, feeding people, housing people, advocating, accompanying, standing with the grieving, fighting for dignity, making room for complexity, staying near the pain of the world without turning away.

Thank God for them. Truly. They are often quieter than the culture warriors, less theatrical than the outrage merchants, and much closer to the actual pulse of the Gospel. But that is part of the tragedy, isn’t it?

The public face of Christianity is so often handed over to the loudest, hardest, most brittle voices in the room the ones who know how to perform certainty but seem curiously untouched by humility. And humility, according to the Christian story, is not optional.

Philippians tells us Christ “emptied himself” and took the form of a servant (Philippians 2:5–8). Not the form of a ruler clutching for status. Not the form of a moral celebrity demanding cultural applause. A servant.

Pope Francis tried, in his own way, to drag the Church back to that centre for years. In Evangelii Gaudium, he wrote that the option for the poor is “primarily a theological category,” and he bluntly rejects the excuse that some Christians are simply too busy, too professional, too otherwise occupied to be close to the poor; he calls that what it is, an excuse. He goes further: the problems of the poor cannot be solved without confronting the structural causes of inequality.

That is not trendy progressivism. That is not political correctness in a cassock. That is Christianity remembering its own bloodstream.

So perhaps that is my unease with the whole “poor struggling Christians” performance. It is not that suffering Christians do not exist. Of course they do. Around the world, many do suffer. Some are harassed, imprisoned, attacked, even killed. That pain should never be mocked. Ever. But not every discomfort is persecution. Not every criticism is oppression. Not every loss of privilege is a wound. And not every challenge to Christian power is an attack on Christ.

Sometimes it is just the Gospel asking an overdue question. A very old question, really.

Did you feed anyone? Did you welcome anyone? Did you visit anyone?Did you loosen anything that was bound? Did you stand near the broken?Did your religion make you kinder, humbler, truer, more courageous in love? Or did it merely make you louder?

Because that, in the end, may be the deepest divide between the Christianity of Jesus and the Christianity of grievance. One kneels. One points fingers. One washes feet. One clutches status. One breaks itself open in love. One keeps demanding recognition. One sounds like mercy. The other sounds like a man frightened that the world no longer stands when he enters the room.

I suppose that is where I land. I do not want a Christianity that needs to dominate to feel true. I do not want a Christianity that confuses moral panic with holiness. I do not want a Christianity that can quote Scripture while ignoring the actual movement of Christ through the world, always toward the poor, the hurting, the ashamed, the outsider, the ordinary, the ones without a seat at the table.

I want the harder thing. The better thing. The Gospel that wounds my ego before it comforts my tribe. The Christ who ruins my appetite for superiority. The faith that asks not, “How do we stay in charge?” but, “How do we become more loving?”

That faith still has life in it. The rest is often just empire with a worship band.