Years ago, a friend told me he thought the biggest problem with Christians is that they are afraid of dirt. He said the desire for purity puts a premium on postures that distance them from anything contaminating: the grime and messiness of life. “We send our broken away to get fixed,” he said, “afraid that we will be tainted by their dirt, rather than standing alongside each other no matter what. But that’s what you get when the institution is more important than its people or purposes.”
Since then, I have come to recognize how right he was. In my experience, churches are sometimes not the best places to bring one’s dirt; in fact, quite the contrary. All too often, our concern with purity means that those who gather dirt will find themselves ostracized. A community of people gathered in solidarity with their brokenness can quickly become a community where getting fixed is the order of the day and being clean is the goal.
But Christianity is a religion of dirt. Jesus walked in the dirt of the world, wrote in its dust, and gathered those around him who seemed the most sullied by life—tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners of all shapes and sizes. When it comes to Christianity, if you lose the vulgarity, then you lose the religion. Like many other things, Christianity suffers from our tendency to domesticate, clean things up, and make them appealing to wider audiences. But it’s a profane faith. After all, according to Saint Paul in one of his letters to the Corinthians, we are called to be the trash, the shit of the earth, and that is nothing if not base and vulgar.
One story in particular in the Gospel of Matthew makes me think about vulgar Christianity. After Jesus had called the tax collector Matthew to join him, he had dinner with a bunch of tax collectors and other assorted undesirables, much to the disdain of the present religious leaders. When they questioned Jesus’s choice of dining partners, his response is one I have been thinking about for years: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but the sinners” (Matt 9:12–13).
What strikes me about this encounter is the tension Jesus places between mercy and sacrifice. These two values pull us in different directions, and Jesus valued mercy above the other. What is the dividing line? To me it seems somehow connected to the company we keep. To his detractors, Jesus’s dining partners represented the vulgar, the dirty, the unsavory. Their religion precluded associating with anything unclean. Theirs was a religion of limits and boundaries, exclusions and removals. But Jesus saw things differently. For him, crossing boundaries and associating with transgressors was the very heart of who he was, how he saw the world, and what he thought the gospel was all about. Whereas the Pharisees were afraid of sullying their religious perspectives, Jesus refused to sacrifice people in order to become clean.
Miroslav Volf, in his 1996 book Exclusion and Embrace, speaks of the “will to purity” that sometimes dominates the faith experience. In those situations, two dynamics manifest. First, people who threaten our pure and clean place before God are pushed away and become stigmatized. This is prevalent in the Bible regarding tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners, and Jesus resisted this potently. Second, religion increasingly takes on a vertical direction, and God becomes a singular focus at the expense of our fellow human beings. “Love the Lord your God and your neighbor” (Matt 22:37–39) is how Jesus interpreted the law, with both God and neighbors carrying equal value. But a religion obsessed with purity has a tendency to neglect human need.
Now, I don’t think our hunger for sacrifice or purity is all wrong. Elsewhere, the Bible invites us to consider acceptable kinds of sacrifice. The problem is that something dangerous seems to happen whenever people do become obsessed with purity. Others get hurt and lives get damaged. How do we to navigate this? According to the radical theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, we must seek the sacred not by saying no to the radical profanity of our time, but by saying yes to it.
In other words, we should not fear all the dirt around us. If we spend some time in it, we just might find our way to a different and more authentic religious experience.