Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned

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Not surprisingly, the Roman Empire saw Jesus and his nonviolent movement as a threat to their violent regime, so they had him tortured and publicly executed as a matter of standard procedure. By pinning a naked human being to wood the way a dead butterfly or grasshopper is pinned in a display case, the empire showed its own absolute dominance and its victim’s absolute defeat. The message was clear: Jesus’ message of truth and love meant nothing in the face of the empire’s crushing power and domination. Christianity can be defined politically, as a way of organizing people for political action (or inaction). To be a Christian is to act as part of a coalition with shared theo-political aims. Part I is divided into ten chapters providing ten reasons to say no. The chapter titles provide short descriptions of their contents. I've provided the ten chapter titles (i.e. ten reasons to say no) in the following spoiler. 1. Because Christianity Has Been Vicious to Its Mother (Anti-Semitism) Taken together, Faith After Doubt (January 2021) and Do I Stay Christian? (May 2022) provide an overview of my work over these last 20+ years. I hope you will find both books helpful — for your own spiritual journey, and also for those you love.

Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the

McLaren also encourages readers to stay Christian because of our love for Jesus—and because all religions (like all humans) are imperfect. While he believes that traditional theism (“that old Big White Guy on a Throne in the Sky”) has to go, he is convinced that Christianity can evolve into something far more beautiful. If we stay, he says, we can participate in that evolutionary movement toward a more enlightened faith. He offers several other reasons to stay Christian, and even more could have been included—such as the deeply felt human need for the friendship, support, and belonging of Christian community. It’s not hard to see how this kind of vicious rhetoric, smoldering deep in the German Christian psyche, caught fire in the Nazi death camps, gas chambers, and mass graves four centuries later.

Less than a hundred years later, the Protestant Reformation was born. It too perpetuated anti-Semitism with venomous fervor, as exemplified in the bone-chilling words of Martin Luther:

Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Dis…

What lies ahead is speculative, but it involves change both institutionally and personally. Any change, however, will rest on the foundation that proceeds from an honest assessment of what is. And that assessment is the most valuable contribution by McClaren..." Book Genre: Christian, Christianity, Faith, Health, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Religion, Self Help, Spirituality, TheologyI put my whole heart into parenting my four kids. They’re now adults, two with kids of their own, and judging by the way our kids turned out, you would think I was an amazing dad. But last night I wrote a letter to one of our adult children to ask forgiveness for a significant flaw in my fatherhood: my approach to discipline. So it is for reasons of moral integrity that I must ask myself: might it be necessary to turn off the religious network that turned so viciously on its own mother, and that continues to put her under threat? Might a religion that could make me a worse father also make me a worse neighbor or citizen? Don’t I owe it to my neighbors, especially my Jewish neighbors, to seriously reconsider my involvement in a religion that has been so cruel to them for so long?