Leading a church can feel a little bit like being an Emergency Room doctor, except the pay is different and my mom isn’t as proud as doctors’ moms probably are. I once had a mentor who said 90% of first-time guests at your church are there due to one of the three C’s: Crisis, Change, or Children. In other words, non-religious people rarely think about going to church unless they’ve lost their way (crisis), lost their job (change), or lost their minds (children).
My mind’s cynical side races back to all the things I used to think and say about religion, like “religion is a coping mechanism for people who can’t deal with reality.” I used to walk past the “Christian Fiction” section at Barnes & Noble and chuckle at the redundancy. I believed, as Marx is so often quoted as saying, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
Side note: Marx never actually said that. This favorite (mis-) quote among anti-religion crusaders is cherry-picked from Marx’s much deeper, more optimistic reflection about the value of religion:
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Marxists, along with secularists of most every stripe, tend to agree that there are three ways humans may cope with our mortality. The first is some form of nihilism, or the belief that life is utterly meaningless and essentially worthless. The second is religion, or the belief that while life may seem miserable and meaningless, its real meaning comes from God or the gods. The third is some form of self-made meaning. For Marxists, this tends to be through the establishment of a Communist or Socialist state, but for other secular thinkers, coping with your mortality is a matter of creating your own sense of meaning within.
Scholastic philosophers go out of their way to make clear that honest intellectuals may only choose options one or three. Option two – religion – is only for the underdeveloped minds of the common folk in flyover country. And that goes for all religions, because according to secular pluralism, all religions are essentially the same.
That’s how I used to think about religion, but the last seven years have helped me to see my old worldview for what it really was: tyranny disguised as theory, willful ignorance dressed up like magnanimous inclusion. Saying “all religions are the same” is the easiest way to sound politically correct while simultaneously gutting all religions of any truth and meaning.
One pastor in Austin put it this way: “Religious pluralism is a religion of its own. It has its own religious absolute—all paths lead to the same God—and requires people of other faiths to embrace this absolute, without any religious backing at all.”
Three things really bother me about truth claims like “Religions are for the weak” and “All religions are basically the same”:
1. Different religions make vastly different claims about God, truth, and reality. Saying “They’re all the same” is akin to saying people of a certain race “all look alike” just because you’re too ignorant or lazy to notice their vital distinctions.
2. Two opposing Truth claims cannot logically be “the same” or equal. A religion that says “Love your enemies” cannot be equal to one that says, “Destroy your enemies.”
3. When people make such claims, they miscategorize as “religions” some phenomena that are better described as worldviews, philosophies, or movements. Christianity, for example, is a worldview, not a religion, because it doesn’t offer a moralistic, cosmic transaction like religions do. Church membership, charity, and morality provide no guarantee for salvation, and the lack of such good behavior does not condemn a person to hell.
Most religions, worldviews, and movements – including Christianity – may share some features in common, but the world has never seen anything like Jesus and his movement. Our guru is God Himself, not a man or council of men. Our book is not just one man’s secret discovery on some mountain or cave or field; the Bible was authored by over forty different people in three languages, on three continents, across three millennia. Our hope is in God’s grace, not in our capacity for righteousness. And our mantra is not “join this religion or else,” “get it together, or else,” “become like us, or else.” Our mantra is simple: “Love, as God first loved you.”
When cynicism sets in, it’s easy to say, “I’m not one of those religious people” and to lazily lump all religions into the same “opiate of the masses” category. But when you’re courageous enough to do your homework and bold enough to give Jesus an honest look, you might be surprised. You might find Jesus so compelling that you’ll want more and more of him. You might even find yourself longing for church this Sunday – not because of a crisis, change, or children – just because Jesus is the Truth we all seek.
