Why is Jesus so irrelevant for so many who claim to be Christian?
Does it matter that swarms of the most loudly proclaiming Christians in America — who have professed Jesus as savior and lord — do not take seriously his life, teachings and calling?
It is time to ask these hard but obvious questions — rather than sheepishly choosing silence in the name of keeping peace or seeking some nonexistent balance of blame with false equivalencies.
The answer to those questions is not that we need more people in church.
No, we need those who have spent a lifetime in worship, Bible study and other aspects of church life to actually heed what Jesus said was the all-encompassing, two-fold “greatest commandment” (his designation)— on which all others depend — to love God with all one’s being and one’s broadly defined neighbor as oneself.
Instead, in large numbers today, white Americanized Christians show little interest in Jesus beyond his role as a sacrificial lamb who hands out advance tickets to heaven and offers a few other exclusive favors.
We must address these relevant questions.
How did white Americanized Christians become the primary driving force behind overt public dishonesty, raw power-seeking, open corruption, and the tragic and growing abuse of vulnerable people?
Why are these professing Christians so eager to embrace the very opposite values and characteristics of Jesus that he called his followers to emulate?
Answers — or at least hints at them — are threefold.
One reason for Jesus’ irrelevance within Americanized Christianity is rooted in a misguided view of salvation that considers Jesus as little more than a soul-saving sacrifice.
It stems from an incomplete if not cheap “plan of salvation” that grew out of revivalism and became an initiation rite to the Christian faith and church membership.
This instantaneous, transactional reduction of Christianity makes Jesus’ life, teachings and calling appear optional if not irrelevant.
A weaving of Pauline passages forms a bypass around Jesus’ calling and commandments. This prescribed salvation plan focuses on what one gets out of the deal rather than what Jesus’ followers are called to give and give up.
Is it not odd that these simplified formulas completely ignore what Jesus himself said about salvation and eternity in very different and stark terms?
“Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?” He will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.(Matthew 25: 44-46 NIV)
Nothing about reciting highly-selected and prescribed words. Nothing about holding to narrow doctrinal or political beliefs. Yet those words don’t appear in any evangelistic material I’ve ever seen.
The church’s reduced invitation to “accept Jesus” often omits Jesus’ serious invitation to “follow me.”
For many of us, our “profession of faith” was deeply meaningful and often life changing. But it is insufficient when viewed as a conclusive act rather than the start of an ongoing journey of self-denial, expansive love and counter-cultural inclusion to which Jesus calls his followers.
Exiting the Roman Road to find the path of Jesus would be a good corrective start.
A second hint — growing out of the first — is doctrinal distractions. Without a primary commitment to follow Jesus, professing Christians are often led to define their faith in selective, rigid doctrinal requirements about which Jesus said nothing.
It is a way of imposing certain beliefs “about” the Bible over doing what Jesus said “in” the Bible.
Concepts like “Christian worldview” and “biblical worldview” — growing alongside the rise of the Religious Right over the last half century — have helped to redefine the Christian faith with almost no regard for Jesus.
These results are seen clearly in Project 2025 that portents to be Christian while carrying out a nationalistic agenda that is strikingly at odds with everything Jesus said and did and calls his followers to emulate.
I have been investigating these redefinitions of worldview for several years now and can assure you that Jesus is largely absent from such boastful prescriptions of “authentic” Christianity.
It is out of this denigration of the Christian faith that the Jesus Worldview Initiative emerged to raise awareness and provide resources for seeing and seeking to live through the lens of Jesus’ life, teachings and calling.
A third and also related hint is that when so-called Christianity doesn’t take Jesus seriously its adherents become highly susceptible to false, fear-driven ideologies that offer favoritism to themselves at the expense of the basic human decency of others.
Pointing out the absence of Jesus is not often appreciated by those who prefer a perversion of the Christian faith that permits — even encourages — attitudes and action in direct conflict with the life and teachings of Jesus.
Denials and deflections fly even in the face of direct evidence. Living in an alternative reality from truth, however, is not the best way to live in relationship to the one who is the way, the truth and the life.
Without doubt we know Christianity has been fully and grossly redefined when the precise things Jesus called his followers to be and do are scoffed at and easily dismissed while values in stark contrast to his life and teachings are empowered by voice, vote or silence.
Including overwhelming support for the same kind of strongarmed powers that put Jesus on a cross.
The larger answer to these most pertinent and deeply troubling questions should be obvious.
Jesus — all of him— must be resurrected within — or, if resisted, apart from — the expressions of Americanized Christianity today that have drowned out the voice that still compels would-be disciples to “Follow me.”
You mean we can’t just recite a quick prayer, affirm a few doctrinal beliefs and then align with self-serving ideologues out of fear — and be good Christians?
Ask Jesus, not me.
John D. Pierce is director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative (jesusworldview.org), part of Belmont University’s Rev. Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership. Join us for the first Jesus Worldview Conference, October 13-15, in Nashville.