5. “Christian”: What kind are you?

I grew up in Christianity.

My Grandpa was a preacher in the Free Methodist and Pilgrim Holiness denominations. He and my Grandma led many small churches in the Midwest and the South. Several of my family members—uncles, cousins, brothers—are ministers, Sunday school teachers, missionaries, or lay leaders of their churches, in denominations ranging from Wesleyans to Charismatics to Episcopalians.

In the same way that some people look to Europe or some other ancestral homeland as the “old country,” I look to a very specific slice of American Christianity as my ancestral home.

This is when someone hearing my story might ask me, “What kind of Christian do you mean?”

Are you that kind of Christian?

For many, including many non-Christians—especially non-Christians—this is an important question. What they are really asking is, how do you interpret the message and mission of Christianity—and how are you going to use it to treat me?

Are you the kind of Christian who is focused on salvation, on Heaven and Hell, on being rewarded for good behavior in the next world, on the Bible being literal and accurate historically and scientifically, on sexual purity, on passing laws for controlling marriage and bathroom use, on making sure Christianity is represented in schools and government, and so on, or are you the kind of Christian who is focused on social justice, on equality and inclusion, doing good works in this world, on the Bible being nuanced and symbolic and mysterious, on sexual liberation, on passing laws for gun control and social programs, on fighting for systemic racism and homophobia, et cetera—or do you fall somewhere on the continuum between them?

This could be the difference between us having a conversation or an argument, between sharing communion and a fist fight.

“Just Christian”

The church denomination that I grew up in is called the Church of the Nazarene. If I were to place us somewhere on the spectrum above, were fundamentalists, Midwestern, largely Republican, largely White. In the current parlance, we would be called White Evangelicals. (At least what Evangelical looked like in the age before churches had smoke machines and worship bands.)

When I was growing up, I didn’t yet have a sense of the many different branches and expressions of Christianity as legitimate or valid. We just called ourselves “Christians.”

I thought our tradition was representative of the “true” Christianity—that is, the set of beliefs that any reasonable believer would come to after a plain, simple reading of the Bible.

I didn’t yet know anything about interpretation, about theology, about hermeneutics. I didn’t yet know how many manifestations of Christian thought had come and gone over the last two millennia.

My approach to the Bible was to simply take what the preacher was saying as gospel truth, and to read the scriptures through that already established lens. It just so happened that everything the pastor said Sunday after Sunday agreed with what I already thought, and vice versa.  

Denominations and Differences

I knew there were other types of Christians, different denominations and movements that each fell into their own places along their own spectrum from orthodoxy to heresy.

Our closest brethren seemed to be the Baptists, with whom we shared a lot of the same beliefs about which worldly behaviors were sinful, namely drinking and drugs and sex outside of marriage and the like. Our major difference was about whether you could lose your salvation if you backslid into sin after you were born again (They were “once in grace, always in grace,” while on the Nazarene side, I was still paranoid about falling out of favor with God—a very basic version of the conflict between the theologians Calvin and Arminius, I would later learn.) But we shared the same ultimate concerns about the wrath of God that we were being saved from, and whether we were going to be seen as good enough on this Earth to make it to heaven in the afterlife.

I knew less about churches outside of the Evangelical tradition, other than that while their music may be beautiful, their teachings ranged from merely suspect to outright wrong.

I had heard of the Mainline traditions, such as the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. From what I knew, they were the spiritual homes of many good people and their congregation members did good things in the community, such as soup kitchens, coat giveaways, and the like, but they were dangerously liberal.

Based on their history, these churches had some kind of claim to being “the main line” of denominations in the United States, although, by the end of the 20th century, that claim seemed to have more to do with their relative wealth and perceived prestige than to their dwindling numbers, which were being overtaken by the Southern Baptists and other more conservative denominations.

At the time, these churches, also sometimes called “oldline” churches, were not spoken well of in my conservative Christian community, especially when those denominations started to ask unorthodox questions, such as whether being gay was actually a sin or it was just another God-given way to love another human, or whether one could be saved in other religions other than Christianity. It was reported that many of them even voted Democrat, which in the midst of Reagan-era Religious Right Christendom was seen as a major sin.

Because of their rejection of what I knew as Biblical teaching, I tended to dismiss these historic churches as religious-themed social clubs, with a faith almost as watered-down as the Unitarians (who I held in particularly low regard, as I thought that by believing everything, they basically believed nothing).

It seemed like these churches were compromising their mission by trying to get along with the world, even if it meant ignoring some parts of the Bible, rather than doing what we were doing, which was trying to get the world to conform to the Bible.

Then there was the Catholic Church. Although the Catholic Church had been The Original Church, tracing its origins all the way back to the Apostles of Jesus himself, many Evangelicals wondered if they could still be considered Christians at all.

At the very least, their form of worship was very confusing to an outsider. They seemed to place little importance on things like salvation or a personal relationship with Jesus, but gave high status to things like communion—which we only celebrated twice a year with Welch’s grape juice—and the elevation of Mary to an almost goddess-like status. With an infallible Pope, celibate priests, confession booths, and so on, it seemed like this church had drifted so far from the only foundation of Christian faith that I knew—the Bible itself.

Of course, growing up in and around South Bend, Indiana, which is fully 20% Catholic, and is home to legendary Catholic university Notre Dame, my questions and concerns about Catholics were not necessarily something I brought up for public debate, even with my friends. Especially when sitting under the famed “Touchdown Jesus” mural at one of their popular Saturday football games.

I remember being amazed when I became good friends with a Catholic girl I knew in junior high, and we were able to really sit down and talk about God. When I visited her church with her, the space and the music and the liturgy were so beautiful, it felt very holy and almost magical—although I was put out by not being able to take communion.  When we talked about God, I was surprised to hear that her faith was as strong as mine, and that she faithfully believed in Jesus and Heaven and all the rest.

It was the first of many experiences that would eventually lead me to take a larger look at Christianity, and a more generous view of other expressions of the faith.