The Problem with Religion

“All religions are the same,” my Catholic coworker said as we drove together to our next job. I didn’t verbally answer, but internally I didn’t agree. I knew that Christianity was different. But is it?

“Religion has done a lot of harm,” my atheist disability client said to me as I assisted him with his ADL’s. “I know, it has,” I replied quietly. I know that history is full of people claiming to be Christians doing horrible things in the name of God and the Church. The Crusades are a case in point. So is the abuse that has been coming out in the church recently.

These conversations and others like them that I have had the past months with coworkers, clients, and mental health workers have got me thinking.

I realised that I actually agree with my coworker, that all religions are practically the same. In her book Religious Rebels, author Christy Lyne Wood quotes Mike Cosper, author of Recapturing the Wonder as saying, “Religion is the business of appeasing gods.”1 Do not religions, from Islam to Roman Catholicism to the religions of the ancient Greeks and Romans, involve people trying to do things to appease God or the gods for the purpose of earning his favour or salvation and stopping bad things from happening to them? Do they not all involve a series of rules, rituals, works, and things to do? Things that you do in order to earn or obtain something.

Christianity is often taught and presented like this and as a result it looks no different to the outside world which then causes non-believers to lump it in the same category as all the other religions. But is Christianity truly like this?

I would argue that, at it’s heart, Christianity is not a religion. We hear a lot in evangelical circles that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship. While I would agree, I still don’t think that fully captures what it truly is.

Here’s why I think that.

The Christianity I read about in the Bible and am growing in myself is different from everything else. Why? Because it’s not about what we do for God, but about what God has done for us through Christ. That’s the fundamental difference. In my article published on Providential History called, In the Fullness of Time: The World Prepared for the coming of Christ, I compared the religions of the ancient world with the “religion” of the Jews in the Old Testament. I wrote, “Where the religions of the ancient world focused on trying to please and appease the gods and find their way up to them, the Jew’s religion was one of God reaching down to man.”2 This is what we see over and over again in the Bible, God seeking out and reaching down to fallen sinful people, from that first question in the Garden of Eden, “Where are you?”

The Bible talks about how we are all in a broken, messed up, and fallen state along with the rest of creation, and nothing we can do, no striving and effort and work on our part, can fix it and make us pleasing to God, and restore our broken relationship with Him. So that leaves us pretty stuck, and in a pretty hopeless condition with no way out. I know this is a hard truth to hear. We don’t want to be broken. We don’t want to be stuck. We don’t want to be helpless on our own. We want to do things. That is, I believe, why we are so drawn to religions and religious systems, because they give us something to do. They feed our pride. Just give me a list, we say, a formula, steps one to five, and I’ll do them. I’ll be fine.

But friends, here is where we need to understand WHO God is. The Bible is not a rule book full of stuff to follow and do. It is primarily about GOD. In it, God reveals WHO He Is to us, His creation, His people. God primarily is LOVE. He doesn’t just have love. He doesn’t just act in a loving way. He IS love. It’s WHO He is. And everything He does is motivated by love. The Bible shows us over and over again that God shows that love through extending grace and mercy and compassion and loving-kindness to us sinful people who definitely don’t deserve it and can do nothing to earn it. He doesn’t love us because we are worthy of love. He doesn’t love us because we live good Christian lives. He loves us because He loves us. Full stop.3

The key way that He shows this love is through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. Because see, our sinful hopeless condition means that we’re all going to have to face death and judgement and eternity away from Christ. But Jesus, through His death on the cross, died that death and endured that punishment instead of us, so that we wouldn’t have to. Jesus’ death dealt with our sin problem. He defeated death by rising from the dead. He overcame it. He rose up victorious. While hanging on that bloody Roman cross, Jesus said three very important words: “It is finished.” What he meant was, that all the work that had to be done to deal with sin and it’s consequences and defeat death and make us right with the Father was done, completed, finished, 100%. That means, friends, that there is nothing else we need to do, nothing that we can do. To try to do things would be to try and add to Christ’s work and would be saying that His work was not enough.

The Bible is pretty clear that the only way we can enter into the salvation from sin that Christ offers to all humanity, is through faith alone in what He has done. It’s believing in who He is as the only beloved Son of God and in what He has accomplished. It’s putting our trust in that. Entrusting ourselves to Him, trusting in His mercy and grace. Trusting Him to save us. Trusting Him to forgive us for our sin. Trusting Him to restore our relationship with the Father. Trusting Him to redeem us and make us whole. See, it’s about Him, not about us. Then that faith leads to repentance, which is turning away from sin, and a transformation in our hearts and minds.

When we’re saved (and I’m sorry for the Christianese jargon… if you’re not familiar with this terminology and would like it explained, please don’t hesitate to message me or leave a comment. I’d be glad to explain it further for you. :)) we are made new creations in Christ. Our old sinful selves pass away and we’re made new on the inside. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t still sin, because we definitely can and do. The battle between our old selves and our new desire to be like Christ is real and one that I know well. But it means that we’re intrinsically changed in our heart at the core of our being and a new journey and process is begun. This is a lifelong process of transformation. Of putting off the old ways that don’t reflect who God is but instead our broken sinful natures…. Things like selfishness, lying, sexual immorality, pride, self-righteousness, stealing, hate, and so on. And instead putting on the new way that does reflect who God is. The fruit of the Spirit… love, joy, peace, patience, etc. We’re slowly being transformed by the Holy Spirit to be like Christ.

Now this is where many of us as evangelicals bring in works. Maybe we believe in faith alone for salvation, but then we believe that when it comes to living a good, holy Christian life, the work is up to us. This is where we bring in the rules, the fences, the formulas, the steps, the standards, the behaviors, and the morals. David was brave when he faced Goliath, we teach, so we need to be brave too. This is what a good Christian looks like and how a good Christian behaves, we teach, these are the things we need to do to be like that and live like that so that God will be pleased with us. If we don’t do these things, we teach, then God will cause horrible things to happen to us to discipline and punish us. Sound familiar? Doesn’t that sound like the religion I described at the beginning of this blog post? We use fear to motivate people to follow God. We shame them when they fall short and shun them if they choose a different path to us. We try to control what they believe and how they live and what choices they make. We judge them if we disagree with their choices. We take away their freedom in Christ. We leave out grace. We leave out Jesus.

See friends, we don’t just need the Gospel to be saved. We need it to live the Christian life too. As we have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so we are to walk in Him. How do we receive Him? By grace through faith. So how are we to walk in Him? By grace through faith. It’s not about our works at all.

So much of this process of transformation and becoming like Christ is learning to know our God for who He is. Not for who we think He is, not for who we want Him to be, but who He actually is as revealed in the Bible. Because as we know Him and fixate on Him, we become like Him, and that’s a really beautiful thing.

It’s not like other religions and religious systems where we’re moralistically trying to live a good, moral, and upright life, and building good character in our own effort. It is something that God does in us as we focus on Him and walk with Him. And it’s a work that, once He’s started it, He promises to complete in us.

So that’s what makes Christianity different from all other religions.

But I would argue that Christianity isn’t a religion at all. It’s reality. It’s truth.

Before I close this post, I would like to add something that is very, very important. If someone who claims to be a Christian is teaching a form of Christianity that involves doing things to earn God’s love or favour or blessing, and is presenting Christianity in a legalistic, formulaic way, then run. Run away from it. Get out of there. Run to Christ. Because they’re preaching a false gospel. It’s not real Christianity, and it’ll lead you away from Christ. It’ll cause you to lean on your own efforts and works and trust in your own self-righteousness rather than in the righteousness of Christ. It’ll make you prideful and self-righteous. It’ll cause you to judge and look down on and shun others who aren’t as ‘spiritual’ as you. It’ll get you obsessed with right morals and good behaviors and cause you to moralize the Bible and miss who Jesus is. It’ll cause you to do the right thing out of fear and trap you in a prison of fear. It’ll trap you in an endless vicious cycle of striving and failing and never being enough. It’ll entrap you in piles of guilt and shame. I’ll make you hide the real you behind piles of fake masks that you wear to look good to everyone else. And worst, it’ll push you further and further away from Christ and cause you to miss the real God and His crazy love and limitless grace and the amazing relationship you could have with Him. And that’s a tremendous tragedy.

How do I know? Because I’ve been there. I’ve lived it. I’ve wrestled with it. And I still do. I am currently deconstructing fourteen years of growing up in a legalistic religious system full of rules and lies, and rebuilding it based on who God is and the Gospel of grace. But I’ve also known the Real God. I’ve also known His mercy and grace and love. I have received His salvation by faith in Christ. And slowly I am learning to let go of my own works, my own effort, my own fear and shame, my own hurt and pain, and to trust Jesus and cry out to Him. I am learning that it’s all about the Gospel. “We are all about the Gospel here,” I was excited to hear the pastor say at church yesterday. Are you all about the Gospel? Is the evangelical church all about the Gospel? Or are we all about behaviors and morals and doing this and that? Are we heaping burdens on the shoulders of the people of God that Jesus never intended for us to carry? Are we rejecting people that Jesus loved and died for and welcomed because they are broken and don’t measure up to our “Christian” standards?

I just want us to think. Is the church like Jesus? Or are we like all the other religious systems?

I’ll leave that for you to answer in your heart with Jesus.

Grace and peace,

Caitlin

P.S. Again, if you have any questions or thoughts regarding this post or would like clarification on something, or if you are on your own journey out of legalism and into knowing the Real God, please leave a comment or send me a message. I would LOVE to chat with you. 🙂

P.P.S. If you would like to dig deeper into this topic, I highly recommend you read the brand new book Religious Rebels: Finding Jesus in the Awkward Middle Way by Christy Lyne Wood, now available for sale on Amazon. Her stuff has helped me so much. 😀

P.P.P.S. Please… most importantly… go and read Romans 1-8 and the book of Galatians and the book of Ephesians. Go and see for yourself if what I am saying is true. 😀 And ask Jesus to open your eyes to who He truly is and what He has truly done for you.

Citations

1. Wood, Christy Lyne; Religious Rebels: Finding Jesus in the Awkward Middle Way; ch 3; published 2023 by Credo House Publishers.
2. Mullon, Caitlin; The Fullness of Time: The World Prepared for the Coming of Christ; providentialhistory.org; published Dec 24 2015; accessed June 19 2023.
3. Washer, Paul; Why Did God Choose You?; https://youtu.be/hej1cyIVFUw; Dec 29 2020; You Tube. This video shifted my perspective on God’s love so much. Highly recommend! 😀

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