Confessions of an Irreligious Christian

One of my favorite theologians, David Bentley Hart, recently made a fascinating admission. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and writer known for his brilliant prose, biting wit, and provocative takes on faith and culture. Here's what he wrote:

The best designation I seem able to come up with for describing my general spiritual sensibility is that of "irreligious Christian," though I acknowledge that it is an obscure phrase.

Obscure, perhaps. But also deeply relatable.

Because for many of us, the word religious has picked up a sour aftertaste. It brings to mind the culture wars, the moral scorekeeping, the church bulletin designed in Microsoft Word 2003, and more recently, the blind obedience to Trump. And yet, here we are. Still holding on to Jesus. Still believing that something happened in the resurrection that changed everything. Still convinced there’s a depth to the world that can’t be explained away.

Hart goes further:

I do not mean to say that I am wanting in reverence or the ability to feel awe; I have all of that in sufficient quantity. I simply find that what excites those aspects of my character is rarely if ever found in a conventionally "religious" context. I have come to accept that I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.

That last sentence captures how I've come to understand my faith over the past few years. 

This tension is the heartbeat of irreligious Christianity. Awe and reverence intact but rarely stirred in the places we’re told it should be. It’s not that we don’t believe, it’s that we can’t pretend the Sunday morning production schedule is where God shows up most vividly. Some of us feel God more in a glass of Pinot by a firepit, or in the laughter of our kids, or in a quiet moment watching the sky turn orange over the desert.

This doesn’t make us less Christian. It may actually make us more honest.

But here’s the rub:

Not that I do not take some satisfaction in having made a theological argument well, at least by my lights, but even my most sympathetic readers have as a rule noticed an occasional tendency toward the combative, the flippant, and the satirical even when I am dealing with matters of the utmost spiritual import, which is certainly a personal flaw to which I have all too often and too gleefully surrendered. Persons naturally suited to theology do not do that.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many irreligious Christians carry that same mix. We're serious about Jesus, but allergic to pretense. Reverent about mystery, but a little irreverent about the machinery we’ve built around it. We can be sarcastic about the church worship service while still crying at communion.

Maybe that’s a gift.

Irreligious Christians are less interested in guarding the castle of religion and more interested in exploring the wild landscape of faith outside its walls. We’re the ones asking if the Bible is a diving board instead of the pool. We’re the ones wondering what it looks like to fly without a pilot’s license. We’re the ones who suspect that God is still doing something bigger than our categories.

So maybe the way forward isn’t trying to look more religious. Maybe it’s embracing the obscurity of Hart’s phrase and wearing it like a badge: irreligious Christians. And here's the amusing part that's easy to overlook if you're not already familiar with David Bentley Hart. I think he might be the most brilliant Christian living today. And I'm not exaggerating.

Here are a few sentences from the same article in which I pulled the other quotes above. I wouldn't recommend you try to make sense of this; just look at it from afar and admire someone who could write this (and actually understand it, too).

Much less do I mean something like Gianni Vattimo’s Heideggerean reduction of the metaphysical inheritance of Christianity to a historical stream of ontological dispensations or a redemptive nihilism or a hermeneutical Überlieferung consequent upon the annunciation of God’s kenosis in Christ, which culminates in secularization and the irreversible weakening of all 'strong structures of thought’. (I see a certain solvency in the historical analysis, but not so much in the ontology.) Least of all do I mean something like Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian-Feuerbachian-Marxist-Heideggerean-Lacanian ‘Christian atheism’, which is a fairly obvious philosophical move but one better explored by way of Ernst Bloch (who lacked Žižek’s theatrical flair, but who had a more genuinely prophetic soul).

Ha! That makes me chuckle every time I read it. I have no idea what it means. But if focusing on the resurrection can help someone as brilliant as DBH to follow Jesus, I should be just fine. You probably will be too.

I would encourage you to start by being honest about what doesn’t stir you. You don’t need to fake goosebumps for a worship set or pretend a sermon moved you when it didn’t. Naming where God doesn’t show up for you can free you to recognize where God actually does. 

Which means we should spend time paying attention to where we actually feel awe. If God seems more alive in an honest conversation with friends or on a walk through nature than in a Sunday service, don’t dismiss that. Notice it. Name it. Lean into it. Find ways to experience more of it. As the psychologist Richard Beck writes, "If you’re struggling with disenchantment, odds are you’re thinking rather than paying attention."

I have come to accept that I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. 

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash