Lose gracefully

When the world seems unhinged, finding a religion can be a sincere attempt to slow it down—a tool for what seems like imminent disaster. The problem is that, if that's the case, becoming religious becomes more of a means than an end. I confess I view such phenomena with some suspicion. When alms are plentiful, the poor become suspicious, and when religion grows, the pastor becomes suspicious.
Given that the relationship between religion and politics has been the subject of millennia of intense debate, simplifying it runs the obvious risk of caricature. Even so, if I were to consider a renewed interest in religion facilitated by the digital age, I would side with those who see in the phenomenon a call for cultural Christianity in a time that appears to be one of social disintegration.
Since I'm not a sociologist but a pastor, I consider this cultural Christianity a well-intentioned attempt to primarily heal the ills of the world, rather than the ills of the individual—and of course, I'm using a dichotomy. It's no coincidence that some of the people who stand out in the political sphere today by talking about Christianity are more inclined to point out others' sins than to confess their own.
In writing this, I don't want to devalue the courage that can be found in these new voices. If the world hadn't wasted decades on the excesses of the opposite direction, driven mad by progressive utopias imposed by the privileged, we wouldn't have these new excesses. For every bourgeois who appears today with a retro-religious discourse of brutal correction of revolutionary fantasies, ten madmen of the opposite pole were previously endured.
But recognizing that my faith is being vulgarized in the mouths of these new reactionary voices, I also admit that we need people who publicly invoke Christianity to their own detriment. How so? If Christ is proclaimed primarily to demonstrate the superiority of my arguments, it will be difficult to believe in him as a Savior of sinners. And this new cultural Christianity that is emerging places Jesus more at handing out prizes to victors than raising up the defeated.
In a world that has stopped believing in sin, there's little point in preaching salvation. The greatest moral problem of our time is feeling so healthy. Jesus says something striking in the Gospel of John: "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, 'We see,' therefore your sin remains." In a culture that doesn't know how to lose, for Christians to be winners is like sweeping sand on the beach. By healing that blind man, Jesus was also teaching that everyone else's vision was worse.
When Jesus treats us, we give up trying to be the solution for others. Christianity doesn't begin with the solution, but with the problem that precedes us: we are called to be patient before posing as doctors. All the obvious weaknesses of Christians are a fundamental part of healing the world. If Christianity offers to heal the world before offering itself to be healed by Christ, it will do the work of the devil, not God.
In this sense, and with all the intentional simplification of the argument, I hope this new cultural Christianity fails. I hope all these champions of morality learn to confess privately before their public coronation. Nor do I wish their adversaries triumph. To that extent, I want the new right and the old left to die in hell so that someone can finally begin to enter heaven. Not because they won, but because they knew how to lose gracefully.
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