Scandalized by the Church

I spent one hot summer reading internet stories, along with a few books, of people who had walked from the faith. I don’t mean by this that they gave up on the church. I mean what theologians have historically called apostasy. The stories that captured my academic interest were of people who knew they had been Christians but were no longer Christians.

Before I delineate the reasons some people walk away from the faith I want to make a distinction often ignored in our context. Though many talk today about being in a season of deconstruction, I don’t want to dwell on that either. Instead, we need to distinguish walking from the faith and being scandalized at the deep level by the church and its leaders.

If walking from the faith completely is apostasy and if deconstruction painfully peels away layers of the faith learned and absorbed over time, scandalization points to a person’s deep-seated and heart-felt incapacity to endure Christianity as a church or institution. Those scandalized, so I find, still love Jesus and in some degree affirm major teachings of the faith but their experience of the church is so painful they want to go it alone – or with only some cherished, trusted friends.

Apostasy, deconstruction, and scandalization occur for more or less the same reasons, and they include the following, which I take from a book I wrote with Hauna Ondrey (Johnson) called Finding Faith, Losing Faith.

The Bible – yes, that’s right. Not the good parts, but the hard parts.

Science and the Bible: that is, a rigid creationism that either distrusts science or that makes the Bible fit science in concordist ways that strike such persons as artificial and blatantly wrong.

Christians and the church – how some persons have been treated by the church and by some Christians.

Hell – how Christians have taught it, sometimes with glee and revenge and pride.

God of the Bible – usually called the “God of the Old Testament” but it’s not that simple. Rather, many have been struck numb by the angles taken by the God of some passages in the Bible, not least some of the judgment passages.

Education – some have their faith broken by history or pluralism or the lack of tolerance.

Unfulfilled promises in the Bible – or their seeming eternal suspension of fulfillment.

Social location – some are undone when they come to terms with the reality that they are Christians only because they grew up in a Christian setting and that others are not and may never truly hear the gospel.

Control – some churches are so zealous for conformity they become institutions of control and lack empathy and toleration of differences. They become coercive and manipulative.

Desire – frankly, some walk because they’d rather indulge their desires.

Intellectual independence – I found this quite often, or at least it became the major rationale for those telling their stories. They want to think for themselves. They don’t want God, the Bible, or the church telling them what to think or believe or do.

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In my study I found one stunning absence: apostates do not leave because of Jesus but neither did I find stories that they missed Jesus. This reveals a serious issue in how the Christian faith is taught: if it is not Jesus centered, it is not truly Christian.

Now to scandals. I find many today have had it with pastors, with priests, with theological debates, or with moral claims and intolerances, but they still love Jesus, talk to him, read about him, and want to pattern their life after him. But the church is for them in the rear view mirror.

Sometimes I hear folks say they have walked but they haven’t left Jesus at all.

Sometimes I hear folks are deconstructing but they are hanging on to Jesus.

The word for what some are experiencing is scandal: they have been scandalized by the church. Not by Jesus but by the church.

They are right.

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Scandalized by the Church