My friend Kyle grew up in a conservative evangelical church in Florida. He was told since he was a child that he was spiritually gifted and called to ministry. As a teenager, he joined the church’s adults on trips to the local jail and prison to talk and pray with people. He also volunteered with his church to feed the homeless once a month.
Over time, tensions rose as he began noticing signs that he was taking his faith more seriously than his church expected him to. He wondered why the church only fed the homeless once a month since he was buying lunches for homeless people on his own more often than that. He also wanted to feed homeless people without being required to try to convert them to Christianity, especially because many of them were already Christians. He also became discouraged seeing people at his church mock and insult strippers at the strip club by his work while preaching about Jesus, who befriended sex workers and other marginalized people commonly excluded by religious people.
“I read the fucking footnotes!” Kyle passionately told me as he talked about reading the Bible and discovering the differences between the radical life of Jesus and the hypocritical lives of those around him. It wasn’t that he didn’t have enough faith, but that he had as much faith as humanly possible before realizing his faith was in something that doesn’t work.
Discovering that he was gay made following this path of evangelical ministry even more difficult. Gay people were one of the several marginalized groups his church discriminated against.
In college Kyle changed schools as he attempted to rediscover himself and his life’s path. He met some radical Christians who served people in need, not as a means to an end like he experienced growing up, but as an end in itself. These were the kinds of Christians he wished he grew up with, but eventually this desire to help people led Kyle out of Christian communities and into political advocacy groups. With half a religious studies degree, he gradually stopped attending church, stopped believing in the God he grew up with, and discovered a new passion in advocating for workers through organizing labor unions. He says it feels like he’s finally playing offense. Over the years his politics became more radical, he married his husband, and he started a local chapter for the Industrial Workers of the World, a worker-led international labor union.
Kyle’s story is fascinating to me because we can view the trajectory of his life in one of two ways. From the perspective of the version of God he and I grew up with, it’s a story of a man who started out passionately following God and living out his calling, but over time he started to go astray. Then he gave into his “homosexual desires” and really went off the rails. Now, as a Communist labor organizer, he couldn’t be further from God as he leads other people astray with secular ideologies in this sad story of a fall from grace.
Then I think of the God of the Exodus, who freed the Israelites from slavery. And I think of Jesus, when he quotes the prophet Isaiah and announces his mission to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, restore sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free. From the perspective of that God, Kyle has been on one long path of fulfilling the work of liberation that was planted in his heart as a child while serving people with his church. From that perspective Kyle followed God out of the church and into the world to help people who have no one to advocate for them.
This story reveals a common pattern in the lives of those who choose to take their faith seriously enough to take it to its radical conclusions. They fully embrace the teachings they heard from the church about sacrificial love and service to the world, and then those teachings lead them out of the church that raised them. Then they end up leading lives of radical political advocacy, which often positions them against their Christian peers, who seem to be uninterested in letting their faith lead them beyond the walls of the church. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because this happens to a lot of us. You are not alone.
One year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City, entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” In addition to opposing the Vietnam War, he criticized “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” He advocated for a “revolution of values” to solve these issues. Then he said something I often come back to, and it’s something I wish every Christian in the world would take seriously.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.1
The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of Jesus’s most famous parables.2 A man is beaten, robbed, and left half dead on the side of the road on the way to Jericho. A priest passes by and does nothing. A Levite—a descendant of Israelites who had a special role in facilitating Jewish offerings—passes by and also does nothing. These are the two people you would expect to be eager to help someone in need.
Then a Samaritan passes by. Jews and Samaritans had a long and violent cultural rivalry, so the Samaritan was the last person Jesus’s disciples expected to stop and help. And yet, as the parable goes, the Samaritan “was moved with pity.” The Samaritan cared for the man, bandaged his wounds, carried him on an animal, and paid for a room at the inn where the man could stay.
Identity does not determine goodness, and goodness transcends identity.
This parable is also used to inspire us to be courageously compassionate by helping others in need, even when others won’t. Most Christians have heard this message before. Countless sermons have been preached about the importance of helping poor individuals “on life’s roadside.” However, King insists that helping individuals you pass by should only be “the initial act” if you want to end their suffering. True compassion should lead us to address the systemic issues that cause the suffering of people you pass by.
Churches will give to charity every day but never question why so many people need charity. If you keep helping people beaten on the side of the road, you would be foolish to not ask why people keep getting beaten on the side of the road. If you keep giving to beggars, you would be foolish to not ask why our society keeps producing beggars.
It’s dangerous to consider questions like this because it threatens the power dynamics of the current world. Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Helder Camara is famous for having said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.”
Some of the Christians who asked these questions have literally become Communists as they sought to transform a society that produces so much poverty. In 1979 in Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza dictatorship through guerrilla warfare. Catholic priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, one of my heroes, supported the Sandinistas and took part in their revolution, leading to Cardenal’s election as the minister of culture for Nicaragua’s new revolutionary government. As the Sandinistas worked to democratize the country in brand-new ways, Cardenal’s role was to democratize art and culture. He drove the development of various cultural workshops, including a literacy initiative, which taught five hundred thousand Nicaraguans how to read and write.
In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Cardenal and publicly rebuked him upon his arrival at the Managua airport. You can find photos and video footage online of Cardenal kneeling and looking up at the pope with a smile as the pope wags his finger sternly at Cardenal. “You must fix your affairs with the church,” the pope demanded. Clergy are forbidden from assuming public office according to the Canon Law of the Catholic Church. However, this wasn’t just about the technicalities of canon law. The pope was also committed to eliminating all forms of Communist influence in the church, and that meant condemning Latin American liberation theologians, like Cardenal, for collaborating with Marxists.
Most people don’t know what to do with the idea of Catholic priests working with Marxists. But in the midst of intolerable poverty, Marxism offered a socioeconomic analysis of the exploitation at the root of poverty. For Marxists it all came down to who owned and controlled the means of producing and distributing goods and services. As long as a small class of owners owns and controls everything workers make, inequality will always exist. This contradiction is solved through workers transforming their workplaces and taking control. Private ownership is solved through collective ownership of the means of production to facilitate the equal distribution of resources.
Whether you agree with this solution or not, consider this. The church should have already been critiquing class inequality in Latin America and working to eliminate their exploitation, but instead the church justified their unjust conditions as the will of God.
So when Christians in Latin America were unable to tolerate their exploitation, the only other people who were speaking to their desire for justice were Marxists. They didn’t replace their Christian faith with Marxism but used Marxist analysis as a tool for understanding socioeconomic problems. Some say Latin American Christians were tricked into believing Marxist ideas by outside agitators from the Soviet Union, or some other dubious source, but that conspiracy theory is often rooted in the bigoted trope that marginalized people can’t think for themselves. It also ignores the fact that poverty itself is often the biggest culprit in radicalizing people to join revolutionary struggles against inequality.
In the early 1970s, the Brazilian Catholic priest Frei Betto was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned by Brazil’s military dictatorship for his activism, along with the Marxist guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella. The police interrogator asked Betto, “How can a Christian collaborate with a Communist?”3
Betto replied, “For me, men are divided not into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice.”
The interrogator shot back, “Have you forgotten that Marx considered religion to be the opium of the people?”
Betto insisted, “It is the bourgeoisie which has turned religion into an opium of the people by preaching a God lord of the heavens only, while taking possession of the earth for itself.”
I am reminded of a parable Jesus tells in Matthew 21 as he’s teaching in the temple. The chief priests and elders begin challenging Jesus’s authority and Jesus responds with a couple of parables, beginning with one about two sons:
“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”4
This is a provocative story. A father tells one son to work in the vineyard, the son says no, but then later does it anyway. The father tells the other son to work in the vineyard, the son says yes, but never did it. In a culture that centered honor and shame in relationships, it is clear that both sons brought shame to their father. One brought shame by disobeying his father and the other, in spite of doing what his father asked, still brought shame on his father by rejecting his command. So when Jesus asks which of the two did the will of his father, this is not a question about which son is morally righteous. Neither son is. Jesus is asking which of the unrighteous sons ultimately did what the father asked. There is only one correct answer. It’s the son who said he wouldn’t work in the field but did it anyway.
Jesus uses this parable to condemn the chief priests and elders. By society’s standards, the chief priests and elders were far more righteous than the tax collectors and the prostitutes. However, the question is not about who is more righteous, and the assumption is that both parties are unrighteous. The question is about who is doing the will of God. Jesus says he sees tax collectors and prostitutes doing the will of God before the chief priests and elders, which naturally makes them seek Jesus’s arrest.
Many Christians who grow up in fundamentalist environments begin questioning what they are taught when they are confronted with its contradictions. One of the most striking contradictions is the realization that a group of people whom your church calls bad are actually not that bad after all. This group may be the stoners, the gang members, the gay kids, the partygoers, and all the non-Christians. But when you interact with these groups, you are surprised to discover that some of them seem to live by even higher moral ideals than you and your Christian friends. That discovery is earth-shattering to a young fundamentalist. You begin to notice that the compassionate and liberating way of Jesus is being lived out even more effectively by some of your non-Christian friends than by the Christians you know.
We encounter a similar inversion in this parable. There are people who reject the message but still follow the mission. And there are people who embrace the message but do not follow the mission. There are non-Christians living a more Christlike life than many Christians you know. The reason for this inversion is twofold: first, the failure of Christianity to live up to its calling; and second, people committing to the work of liberation from all kinds of perspectives because liberation is so desperately needed.
The point is not to say that non-Christians who follow the work of liberation are actually Christians without realizing it. That interpretation erases the diverse perspectives and motivations that compel people to work for liberation, and also enforces Christian hegemony by defining people in Christian terms against their will.
The parable wasn’t for the tax collectors and the prostitutes. It was meant for the chief priests and elders. This specific message isn’t meant to give Christians permission to call non-Christians Christian. It’s meant to expand the perspective of Christians, so they may discover that there are many people—even those you may consider unrighteous—who are fulfilling God’s work of liberation. So following the work of liberation yourself will often look like joining forces with all kinds of different people from all kinds of different perspectives, perhaps even Marxist guerrilla fighters.
I imagine Jesus would look at the problems of poverty and unfair distribution and tell the Latin American priests who justified that injustice, “The Marxists are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” If you find that offensive, then you have an idea of how the chief priests and elders felt after hearing Jesus’s parable.
When we widen our perspectives in this way, our faith is challenged to grow, especially when we see non-Christians fulfill the work that Christians have said yes to but won’t do.
In 1969, the Young Lords, a New York Puerto Rican street gang turned radical political organization, asked the First Spanish United Methodist Church if they could use their building to run a breakfast program and a day care center for the local children. The church was in the middle of the neighborhood and sat locked up and empty every day except for a few hours on Sunday. The church said no. After weeks of the Young Lords attending services and being ignored, tensions culminated during a testimony service where members of the church could speak to the congregation. When Felipe Luciano, chairman of the Young Lords, stood up to speak, police rushed in and brutally beat him and the group of Young Lords with him in the middle of the sanctuary, leaving some with broken arms and legs.
Three weeks later the Young Lords broke in and took over the church building and renamed it The People’s Church. They ran the breakfast program and day care, along with free clothing drives, political education classes, free health programs, and nightly entertainment for thousands of community members for eleven days until the police shut it down and arrested over one hundred Young Lord members and supporters.5
During those eleven days, the People’s Church of the Young Lords did the work of caring for the community that the First Spanish United Methodist Church should have been doing all along. The church may have said yes to their calling, but they didn’t follow it.
Who was obedient to God?
The Young Lords’ mission was to care for their community the way they deserved to be cared for, and they knew they were following the teachings of Jesus more authentically than the leaders of that church. They said that if Christ were alive in their day, he would be a Young Lord.6
I think back to Pope John Paul II sternly wagging his finger down at Ernesto Cardenal for helping liberate the Nicaraguan people and saying to Cardenal, “You must fix your affairs with the Church,” and I feel like his perspective of “the church” was tragically small.
In 1310, the French Christian mystic Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake by Catholic Church authorities for heresy. She had written a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls, about achieving union with God through completely surrendering your will to the will of God. The problem for the Catholic Church was that this unification meant she had no need for the church to mediate between God and the human soul.
To the clergy’s dismay, Porete made a sharp distinction between “Sainte Eglise la Petite” (Holy Church the Little) and “Sainte Eglise la Grande” (Holy Church the Great), or as John Caputo paraphrases it: “little c” church and “Big C” Church.7 Typically we’d refer to a local congregation as the “little c” church and refer to the larger institution with all its laws, sacraments, and doctrines as the “Big C” Church. Porete inverted that and insisted that the institution was the little church, and the big Church was the work of love in the world, inspiring the institution.
Of course they killed her.
Porete was inspired by 1 John 4, which reads as pretty scandalous with these ideas in mind.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.8
Everyone who loves knows God. Those who say they know God, but do not love, do not know God. Being governed by love transcends religious identity. Even the way that John speaks of “the Son” is fascinating. God is revealed as love through the Son, Jesus Christ. Even though love exists beyond the Christian story, the Christian story teaches that love is revealed to us particularly through the sacrifice of Jesus, but it doesn’t stop there. After we experience this love particularly, we become capable of discovering love universally, now that we know what to look for. So, of course, we find this universal love in all kinds of unexpected places, beyond religious boundaries. That’s the big Church, outdoing the little church in its institution.
Porete writes, “I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love.”9
My friend Kyle told me about one of the first pickets he took a group of volunteers to where he experienced the power of solidarity on a visceral level with all his senses. The crowd chanted in unison, “Thank you, we love you! Thank you, we love you! Thank you, we love you!”
This is a common chant in activist circles shouted by a crowd as someone is released from jail for civil disobedience. “Thank you, we love you!” is chanted when someone is released after being arrested in an anti-war protest or a Black Lives Matter protest, or a worker strike. “Thank you, we love you!” is sometimes even chanted when someone joins a picket. Kyle’s first time hearing this chant made him tear up and realize this was a new type of love he hadn’t recognized before. And that love was working-class solidarity.
Thank you, we love you!
It’s a common experience to go to a protest or a strike and feel something spiritual. Some even say it feels like church, except somehow it feels even more like church than actual church ever felt. Individual bodies join together to create one body fighting for justice for one another, and if you know what that feels like, then you know what the church is supposed to feel like.
The church is called to be the collective body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul says that if one member of the body suffers, we all suffer. The slogan for the Industrial Workers of the World is “an injury to one is an injury to all.” This kind of solidarity cannot be contained by the little church in its institution.
The God of the big church—the God that is love—shows up in all the places you would least expect, including (perhaps especially) in places where we might have assumed there was a rejection of God. This shouldn’t surprise us anymore. This God is bigger than that.
On my last night leading the youth group as an evangelical youth pastor, I told the students that I felt like God was calling me elsewhere. I felt called to speak to a more post-Christian environment.
Because of my openness I had constantly found myself in conversations with Christians who would feel comfortable telling me things like, “I usually believe in all this stuff, but sometimes I doubt, and I don’t know what to do with that.” And I was able to tell those people, “That’s okay. That’s part of it. Explore that.” Then eventually I noticed that my openness also led me to conversations with non-religious people who would feel comfortable telling me things like, “I usually doubt all this stuff, but sometimes I believe, and I don’t know what to do with that.” And I was able to tell those people, “That’s okay. That’s part of it. Explore that.” So I told my youth group that I was becoming a lot more interested in those latter conversations.
Then I told them that after years of struggling with questions about God, the only thing I’m certain of is that God is revealed to the fullest when we love one another. I was paraphrasing 1 John 4:12, which says, “No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.”
When you follow this love, life naturally leads you beyond limited conceptions of God, and you discover God in the most unexpected places. I wanted those students to remember that truth more than anything I had ever said to them. And that’s probably why my pastor/boss didn’t let me speak to the larger congregation when he announced my departure.
The Christianity of Christ has become so unfamiliar to those committed to the Christianity of this land that they cannot recognize the work of Christ being done outside of the institutional church. In fact, they actively fight against it.
When Jesus announced his mission to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, restore sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free, I am certain he wasn’t too concerned with that holy work of liberation being done under the banner of a specific religion. The mission was the work. The mission was not to get everyone to use the same name for the work.
Many of us who have left Christian communities continue this work, even if we stop using the same old names for it. And for many of us, giving up those old names is what enabled us to authentically commit ourselves to this work.
You have not gone astray. You have been on one long path. And this path leads us to discover God in more authentic ways than we ever could have by following the Christianity of this land. They cannot stop us from doing the holy work of liberation God calls us to.