Complicated Simplicity

In recent years, I've done a lot of reading about the religious history of America. It is a fascinating subject, because so many remarkable innovations in Christianity have been spawned on our shores.  Consider the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Christian Scientists -- to say nothing of the American manifestation of the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists.  Despite the complexity of American Christian traditions, there are common themes that I notice.  Foremost is the very American urge to return to what people define as the "original" church: what they presume to be the raw, uncut, unadulterated essence of Christian faith.  But in this typically American effort to boil things down to the fundamentals (is this why we spell it "color" and the British spell it "colour"?), Christianity has become adulterated even further.  This is evidenced by the elaborate beliefs of many uniquely American churches.  To get back to the fundamentals took a lot of explaining, and then the explanations became sacred.  When people started questioning the sacred explanations, the whole process of seeking the fundamentals started over again.  This cycle continues to this day in our country.  Europeans shake their heads at us in wonderment, boggled at the endless ferment and mutation in American religion.

It is sobering to read this history and see my own place in it.  I, too, am on a quest to get down to the basics of Christian faith and abandon many of the unhelpful accretions to Jesus' simple message of love for God and neighbor.  I had to write a whole book, after all, to explain how simple Christianity really is! 

I'm on the executive council of The Center for Progressive Christianity.  A few years ago, at a meeting of our council, we got into a discussion of whether or not to revise the 8 points of our Welcome Statement, which is a description of the progressive Christian movement.  Somebody said "No, we can't do that!  People count on those 8 points staying the same!"  But all of us, the speaker included, started laughing at the prospect that our group, dedicated as it is to opening the church to people who can't deal with dogma, would develop a fixed set of doctrines of its own.  The temptation to repeat history was strong.

This very American urge to boil religion down to the basics is a good thing, as long as we remember what can go wrong with it.   Christian faith really is simple -- it's about not much more than loving God and loving neighbor with heart, soul, mind and body.  In my church, we've been reading the Sermon on the Mount in our Wednesday night Bible study.  We see that it's simple, but not easy.  It's difficult to love God when bad things happen to good people.  It's hard to love difficult neighbors, and even harder to love the basically good but sometimes impossible members of our families.  It's hard to extend the concept of "neighbor" to people on the other side of the world, but more than ever, we are called to this challenge on our "globalized" planet.   The practice of Christianity is plenty difficult. There's no need to make it harder with complicated theology and bewildering, illogical beliefs.

So may history be our guide in keeping religion simple, so we can focus on the worthy challenge of living faithfully.