War of the World

When I was in high school, I was hijacked by Christ. It wasn’t bad. My girlfriend had asked if I wanted to go to a Young Life meeting with her. 

“Uh, what’s that?”

“Just a bunch of singing and hanging out and doing skits and stuff.” 

My family had relocated to Phoenix from Boulder, Colorado, the year before. I had a few friends but was not yet the gregarious conversationalist I would, much later in life, never become. I was a dweeb in the Fantastic Four mold; superheroically chained to that jaw-dropping magnitude of dweebness typically conferred through an intense blast of cosmic radiation. My girlfriend was not a dweeb per se, but was a theater geek like me. Unlike me, she had talent and could sing the birds from the trees. Our secret language featured words like Fresnel, Loft, and Pin Rail. She made a compelling case for going to this Young Life thing and I nervously agreed.

“Sure.”

The meeting was an hour of singing and hanging out. I couldn’t help but notice the songs were about joy and Jesus – but whatever! These kids were fun and clever and the scene was jumping. The closing moments of the meeting included a sort of skit in which three mortified teens selected from the audience had to cluelessly “sell” what was concealed in a brown paper bag. A newbie, I was of course selected. 

I said a few things and got some laughs; an audience response comparable in effect to pouring vodka down the neck of an alcoholic. I started riffing and ended by theatrically hollering “..what is in this bag will lift you to new heights of ecstasy!” The place went wild. I vividly remember Young Life leader Mike Jacobs helplessly laughing and clapping his hands. When I opened the bag it contained a bikini, and I briefly feared my face would literally catch fire. Some weeks later, and following many late-night conversations, I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. 

Hard Ass 

Christ preached love and was a real hard ass about it. He asked a lot of his disciples. He still does. He asked a lot of me, and it cost me my faith. That’s a feature of being a pal of Christ, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that today. He asks a lot of you. When terrible times befell a family member I prayed until my knuckles popped and it did not change the situation. God of course has His own plan and if our desperate ministrations and beseeching were to change that by one iota, He would be a bargain basement God. It’s called Faith for a reason. 

Faith is not evidence-based – and in a possible nod to cosmic humor we have been given rational minds. These tend to war with faith. Go figure. In the case of my family travails, when my absolutely feverish prayers went unanswered, my faith broke. One might reasonably suggest that calls into question the purity of my faith in the first place. I can’t argue too vociferously against that position. But I considered myself a believing, practicing Christian, and when terrible hardship arrived, I wondered at God’s intransigence. The bible says not to expect thanks for just doing what’s expected of us anyway, but sometimes the brute ingratitude from On High is too much for the rational heart to want to bear. That’s what happened to me. 

Today I am what you would call an agnostic. “I don’t know whether or not there is a God.” To my mind, the faithful are also agnostic by this definition; they also don’t know if their God exists; but faith bridges doubt. I no longer consider myself a Christian, but my experience gave me a perspective for which I’m eternally grateful. No, I’m not trying to be ironic.

A theme that runs through Christ’s very intentional commentary (apart from his incessant command to Love – ho hum!) is the idea that the Christian is not a part of the World. In 1 Corinthians 4:10, the often-dyspeptic apostle Paul excoriates the Christians of Corinth (a town in southern Greece and the seat of that province’s Roman gov’t at the time) for taking too much pleasure in titles and other worldly crap; for being swaggering fake Christians still “of the World.” Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is also a delicious example of remonstrative New Testament sarcasm. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson had his own wry metric for spotting phonies. “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” 

Lionized

Once upon a time the Christian was the scariest freak in the room; a hunted radical and a magnet for state torture. In those days, following Jesus was not something one did to make friends. The Christians scared Rome badly. This was not the joyous Rome of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn happily astride a Vespa. The imaginative Roman torments visited upon captured Christians included burning, drowning, being thrown to wild animals, and so on. 

Simply renouncing Christ would get you off the hook with the Romans. Interestingly, plenty of Christians would see their compatriots savagely torn to pieces by starved jackals and would still refuse to renounce Jesus. That would seem to suggest something. And it’s not mere “courage.”

Today there are comparatively few Christians who would submit to being eaten alive by lions – a punitive measure that reportedly really, really hurts. Can’t we serve Christ without being eaten? Yes, we can! Or we can anyway profess Christ. In a supreme twist of irony that might’ve upset St. Peter (who was crucified upside down for his faith), Christianity today actually confers bragging rights, most spectacularly in the sphere of public service. A phrase you wouldn’t have dared utter in 32 AD is, in 2025 AD, a ringing song of public self-celebration. “Heck yeah, I’m a Christian!” 

A Statistically Anomalous Agglomeration of the Faithful

Not to complain, but we may be adrift in a period of startling ethical torpor. This opinion won’t surprise anyone. The element of surprise is, in fact, yesterday’s news. At this historical moment, looking the other way is so normalized the neck brace threatens to surpass crypto currency as Wall Street’s preferred dashboard figurine. We’re fortunate, then, to have Christians in positions of power in this Christian nation.

At this writing, about 88% of Congress’ members self-identify as Christian, which is more than 20% higher than the 63% of U.S. adults who identify as Christian. That is, our lawmaking body in Washington, D.C. is a statistically anomalous agglomeration of the faithful. Congress’ collective fealty to Jesus Christ has most assuredly informed the legislation produced by this Christ-centered legislative body. The Lord famously said “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). Fortunately for our unblinking Christian legislators there is lots of wiggle room in that probable mistranslation. We all know how fraught biblical interpretation can be. Keep up the great work, Christian Soldiers®!

Love, Factually

And then – “Love”. The word sags under the weight of all the saccharine baggage it has to haul around. BUT. Sages, wise men, and ragged, ascetic weirdos down through the millennia – both the well-known and the obscure – have jawboned exhaustively on the subject of love. St. Augustine, Pythagoras, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Empedocles, Islam, Christianity. Love Love Love! The nagging persistence of the “Love message” suggests this eternal directive transcends the sentimental. The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin went so far as to describe love as a cosmological force directing the universe to an evolutionary apex he called the Omega Point.

If only Love had a more scientifically obtuse name, like The Higgs Field or the Exclusion Principle, we might be more inclined to consider its possible role as both the quantized “stuff” that gifts the universe its physical coherence, and the unsung periodic element that infuses the living with fundamental meaning and purpose.

In any case, our curious, collective fate is now in the hands of the 119^th Congress, 88% of whose membership holds Love to be a guiding principle. Plain sailing.