Christianity is a Religion and a Relationship

Among Christians, there's a popular saying that probably began as a bit of hyperbole, but has devolved into something less nuanced. I've heard it in church, read it in books, and watched it spread like crack-cocaine among theology-starved converts. The statement is always expressed the same way, without the slightest variation from the original anonymous quote: "Christianity is not a religion; it's a relationship."

I imagine that when the first long-haired, tie-dyed Jesus Freak spoke that line to his stoner friends, it meant something like the following: "The parts of religion that turn you off have nothing to do with real Christianity, which is so much more than meaningless rules and rituals." It made sense to phrase it that way, because "religion" had bad connotations, and "relationship" fit in with our felt-needs sensibilities. And it's true that Christianity really is more than what religion had been reduced to in the general society -- a weekly observance about as meaningful as the Easter Bunny, but less fun for children.

But as sometimes happens with hyperbole, it seems that somewhere along the way, people started taking it literally. The stoner friends tried the God thing, but never stepped into a church, because church equals religion, and religion is the opposite of relationship. Youth evangelists stopped condemning sin, because condemnation is religion, and they just wanted the kids to experience a relationship with the Lord. Protestant leaders equated religion with Roman Catholicism and with "man's attempt to reach God" as opposed to "God reaching down to man." And now the odd circumstance has come about that almost nobody is willing to admit to being religious: the atheists aren't, because they have no God to worship; the agnostics aren't, because they see no point in worrying about the afterlife; the baptized Catholics aren't, because they only go to church on Christmas; and the born-again Protestants aren't, because Christmas is the one day they never go to church.

In case you were wondering, that was hyperbole -- I do know Catholics who also go to church on Easter.

To make matters worse, the Christian faith in America has a specific legal status as a "religion." If we insist the term doesn't apply to us, then what is to be done with the protections and limitations placed upon us by the U.S. Constitution? As if the law were not vague enough and controversial enough already, how does a non-religious Christian claim religious discrimination? It seems the old Marxist slogan, "religion is the Opiate of the masses," never applied to us in the first place!

It's tempting to blow off the issue as a frivolous debate over semantics. A professor of mine once said, "Define your terms and move on." But the problem is just that: the terms are not well-defined. Even when society had a generally stable idea of what it meant to be religious, it wasn't easy to define. And now that we live in an age where atheists claim First Amendment protections, where conservatives love to condemn the "secular humanist religion," and where federal judges refuse on principle to give "religion" a definition, the English language is collapsing like the Chinese drywall industry. Whether used as a curse or a compliment, the word "religion" refuses to be pinned to an orbit of meaning.

What, then, is this horrible thing that my generation of Bible-reading, praise song-singing, churchgoing Christians avoids almost as fearfully as it avoids the word "Puritan"? If it were nothing, I could end my essay at this point. But men don't die defending nothing so readily as they die defending religion, or for that matter, attacking it. So at the least we can say it is something. And we can say that this thing is not what people accuse it of being. An "opiate of the masses" brings instant gratification and turns citizens into docile followers of tyrants, whereas a liturgy teaches patience to laymen and humbles emperors to the level of the worst sinners. No king invented the gods. The gods are the enemies of kings. Rome felt threatened enough by the gods to try to contain them inside the Pantheon, and then bestow a fraudulent divinity upon the dust of her fallen emperors -- a divinity so absurd that the peasants never really believed it. Their lack of faith is shown in the fact that Zeus still sits on Mount Olympus (psychologically speaking), while Caesar's ashes remain on the funeral pyre.

What is surprising is that the Bible, in English translations, rarely uses the word "religion." This absence would seem to support the view of those who preach against religion, but there's another side to the story. The word "relationship" is even less than rare -- it is completely absent. Don't believe me? Do your own word search.

"Religion" appears six times in the Bible, while the variant "religious" appears only twice. Of those, four instances refer to the religion of the Jews, without explicitly negative or positive connotations. One refers to the religions of the Greeks. The last three are found in James 1:26-27, "If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world."

The more we look into it, the more the anti-religionists resemble the silliness of a bridegroom who tells his wedding guests, "My wife and I have not come here to marry, but to celebrate a loving friendship."

Is Christianity a relationship? Certainly! But so is everything that involves two conscious, interactive beings, or even non-living, interactive particules. The word "religion," for all its flaws, gives that relationship a shape -- not a sharply-defined shape, but enough of a shape for a man to know when he's been excreted from the amoeba.

If prayer, ceremonial bathings, symbolic feasts of bread and wine, divinely-inspired books, and a blood sacrifice for the world are not the stuff of religion, I can't even guess what is. And if Christianity is not a religion, I can't for the life of me explain what I've been doing every Sunday for the last thirty years.