Two Things I Liked About the Christianity of My Childhood

Finding Balance in Deconstruction

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Most atheists will have little difficulty telling you why they left religion behind. It isn’t something we did by accident or on a whim. If we’ve done it, we know why we’ve done it.

Criticizing religion is easy. Identifying what we didn’t like about our childhood religion requires little effort. This is a common part of our deconstruction process. Identifying what we liked about our childhood religion often takes more effort. That doesn’t make it any less valuable, though. In this post, I’ll share two things I liked about my childhood religion.

A Form of Christian Humanism

The first thing I liked about my childhood religion is what I’ll label a kind of Christian humanism. The basic idea couldn’t be any simpler: treat others with kindness and compassion. Treat them how they’d like others to treat them.

I like this sentiment today, and I always have. I have little doubt that the world would be a better place if more of us behaved like this. I don’t need Christianity for this, as I find it in secular humanism.

Many Christians have told me that their faith leads them to treat others better than they otherwise would. I’m skeptical of this claim. I’ve never needed Christianity to treat others well. It seems like I’m giving these Christians more credit than they give themselves. Doesn’t how they treat others have more to do with the kind of people they are than what they believe?

But this isn’t fair. They know themselves better than I do. If they say they need faith to treat others kindly, they could be right. We are different people, and we may need different motivations to behave well. If this is what works for them, great.

I’ve lost count of the number of fundamentalist Christians who have told me that I heard this wrong. They insist that kindness was never intended to apply to non-Christians. “Be nice to our own kind and screw everybody else!”

You know what? I’ll still take it. If somebody’s faith leads them to be nicer to anybody, that’s better than nothing. It would be nice if “anybody” included me, but something is better than nothing. Even if they…