The Worst Parts of Being a Christian #1: Living with a Constrained Worldview
You learn to deceive yourself and/or others.
Imagine this for a moment: you’ve become a conservative Protestant as an adult. You’ll naturally want to associate with other conservative Protestants who share your newfound faith. One thing you’ll find is that if you want to fit in, you must suppress some of the things you’ve learned during your life about the world and about history. Because you’ve grown up outside the faith, you can see things that are invisible to those raised within the faith. If you let yourself think about some of those things while you are at church, you might say something that would distress the people around you.
For example, take the news. You may have heard about Jim Jones, ordained in the Disciples of Christ. Or David Koresh’s Seventh-Day Adventist splinter group. Or Christians killing abortion workers in the name of God in the 1990s. Maybe a couple of famous televangelists who made the news committing spectacular crimes, crimes that other Christians then worked hard to cover up. There are news reports of declining church attendance. If you followed events outside the US, you may have heard about abuses by Christian leaders in Africa, Asia, or South America. The global United Methodist denomination has been in the news these last few years — something about homosexuals.
If you see yourself as part of a global community of believers, you will be surprised at how invisible these other believers are to the people around you now. And it’s not just Christians in the news who no longer seem to exist. Even the Christians in the church down the street from your church must now become invisible to you if you want to fit in. Your particular church has become the entire Christian world.
As you spend more time with your new-found brothers and sisters in the Lord, you will find that you need to let go of some of the history you may have picked up before you became a Christian. When Israel is discussed, you will need to forget about Christianity’s 2000-year history of antisemitism, going back to the New Testament. When Jesus’ work on the cross is discussed, you will need to forget that Christianity existed for 1500 years without the doctrine Protestants now teach to explain it. Forget that Protestants once set up nighttime visits to the neighborhood Catholic church to smash religious art. The Christianity you now belong to has no past. The way it is now is the way it always has been.
This can create internal tension for you. There are two easy solutions: (1) let go of your integrity and pretend to go along with this constrained worldview when you are around other Christians, or (2) just give up and stop trying to think coherently at all.
You can see why people who were taught Christianity as children don’t have these problems. When you are completely surrounded by one worldview you don’t really realize there is any other view possible. The first clue that your parents and your church know they haven’t told you the full truth may not come until it’s time to leave home. Suddenly there is a panic that you will “fall away”.
This problem is most serious for those who go into the ministry. As part of their training, they learn at least a little about church history and the Bible. But when they take on leadership roles in the church, they can’t risk letting on what they know. Their followers expect sermons framed in the constrained worldview.
So you’ve just become a conservative Christian. The people in the pews around you don’t see themselves as part of a global body of Christ with a 2000-year history. And you can’t be sure if your pastor actually believes the misleading things he says or if he is just keeping the congregation who pays him happy. Dealing with this tension is one of the worst parts of being a Christian.
