Don’t Throw out the Baby With the Bathwater!
When the news broke about Ravi Zacharias, this phrase kept coming to mind.
I heard this so many times in conversations with family and friends about my personal faith journey and leaving the church.“ Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Nothing and nobody is perfect! Don’t throw everything away just because of a bad experience.”
“You’ve just been hurt.”
“What you’ve experienced is not Christianity.”
“Don’t turn your back on the church because of human sin.”
“That’s not the God of love that I know.”
Sound familiar?
I know these statements come from love (and concern for my eternal soul). I do. Not too long ago, I would have said the same.
And with each new wave of evangelical scandal, I feel what I can only articulate as a reciprocal concern for their spiritual journey. I so wish I could sneak a whisper into their concrete bunkers of certainty.
“Yes. This theology is hurtful — to victims and perpetrators alike.”
“But this is what we are seeing from the leaders of Christianity as an institution today. How much more pain and scandal do you need to see to believe that it’s real? That these incidents aren’t isolated.”
“How long will Christians (namely, the white American evangelical church) run from asking one very necessary, very scary, and very simple question: are these leaders, these abusers, merely a product of their environment?”
Because the theology of the white American evangelical Church as an institution is a theology that enables — dare I say, promotes? — abuse.
Those are loaded statements. I’m not here to unpack them. There are a lot of people doing a much better job of doing that than I ever could.
What I do want to do is challenge my dear friends and family who are still evangelicals to take courage and ask scary questions.
Because, like it or not, American Christianity has some reckoning to do. Millennials, my generation, value authenticity and empathy. And it’s no coincidence that we are leaving the church in droves.
So, please. Here’s a place to start:
Is there a baby in the bathwater? And if so, who is it? Jesus? Or the American Church, Inc.?
