Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote something that has stayed with me: “The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor… Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.”
That last sentence will probably make some religious people uncomfortable. Maybe it should. Because Jesus said a great deal about love. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. Love one another. Care for the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Visit the prisoner. Show mercy. Forgive. But love your religion? I can’t find that one.
Religion can be a beautiful thing. It can give us community, provide language for mysteries we cannot explain, connect us to generations who came before us, and create traditions that remind us there is something larger than ourselves. Churches and religious communities have fed hungry people, sheltered people without homes, cared for the sick, comforted the grieving, fought injustice, and given countless people a place where they discovered they belonged. Religion can absolutely help us love our neighbor. The problem begins when religion becomes the reason we don’t.
And that is why Taylor’s words feel particularly relevant right now. We live in a time when people can become so committed to defending their religious beliefs that they seem strangely willing to disregard the people standing right in front of them. Doctrine becomes more important than dignity. Being correct becomes more important than being compassionate. Winning the argument becomes more important than understanding the person. Somewhere along the way, defending what we believe can become more important than living what we believe.
Religion is particularly good at drawing lines. Believer and unbeliever. Saved and unsaved. Righteous and sinner. Us and them. Once those categories are established, it becomes remarkably easy to convince ourselves that God approves of whatever happens to the people on the other side of the line. But Jesus had an irritating habit of crossing those lines. He touched people considered unclean. He ate with people respectable religious folks avoided. He spoke with people social customs told him he shouldn’t. He made a Samaritan, theologically and ethnically suspect to his audience, the hero of one of his most famous stories. When religious leaders complained about the company he kept, Jesus didn’t seem terribly concerned about protecting his reputation. He kept eating with them.
That should tell us something.
The question Jesus repeatedly placed before people wasn’t simply, “What do you believe?” It was also, “What does your belief cause you to do?” Does what you believe make you more merciful, compassionate, generous, forgiving, and willing to sit at a table with someone whose life, politics, theology, sexuality, nationality, background, or worldview differs from yours? Or has religion simply given you better vocabulary for explaining why certain people don’t deserve a seat at your table?
That’s where things become uncomfortable, because religion can become a remarkably effective permission slip for withholding compassion. We can quote Scripture while ignoring suffering. We can defend morality while humiliating people. We can talk endlessly about biblical truth while forgetting that the person we’re talking about is somebody’s child, parent, sibling, friend—somebody made in the image of God.
Perhaps most dangerously, we can convince ourselves that cruelty somehow becomes righteousness when God is included in the explanation.
Jesus seemed particularly bothered by that kind of religion. Some of his sharpest criticism wasn’t directed toward the people considered sinful by the religious establishment. It was directed toward religious leaders who knew the rules but had forgotten mercy. When asked about the greatest commandments, Jesus summarized everything with astonishing simplicity: love God and love your neighbor. Naturally, someone wanted clarification. “Who is my neighbor?” It’s the kind of question religious people are still asking. Where exactly does my responsibility end? Who qualifies? Who doesn’t? Surely there must be some exceptions.
Jesus answered with the story of the Good Samaritan. The brilliance of that story is that Jesus doesn’t really answer the question the way it was asked. Instead of carefully defining the boundaries of “neighbor,” he tells a story about becoming one. The neighbor isn’t simply a category of people we are obligated to love. Being a neighbor is something we choose to do, particularly when the person in front of us is someone we’re expected to distrust, dislike, or avoid.
Which brings me back to Barbara Brown Taylor: “When my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor.” I don’t see that as abandoning faith. Increasingly, I think it may be one of the purest expressions of it. Because if my theology requires me to stop seeing another person’s humanity, something has gone terribly wrong with my theology. If my doctrine requires cruelty, perhaps I should question my doctrine before questioning the worth of my neighbor. And if defending Christianity requires me to behave unlike Christ, perhaps Christianity isn’t what I’m actually defending anymore.
That doesn’t mean loving someone requires agreeing with them. Thank God, because otherwise Jesus’ command to love our enemies wouldn’t make much sense. Love isn’t agreement. It isn’t endorsement. It isn’t pretending differences don’t exist. Love is refusing to allow those differences to erase another person’s humanity. I can disagree with someone’s politics, theology, worldview, or choices and still insist that they be treated with dignity, compassion, fairness, and grace. In fact, that may be where love becomes most meaningful. When there is nothing requiring me to offer it except the recognition that the person in front of me is my neighbor.
That distinction matters enormously in our society today. Political disagreement has increasingly become moral condemnation. Religious disagreement becomes spiritual suspicion. Social media rewards outrage more than empathy. Entire groups of human beings are discussed as problems rather than people. Immigrants, LGBTQ people, Muslims, atheists, evangelicals, liberals, conservatives, the undocumented, the incarcerated, the poor, the wealthy—we reduce complicated human beings to convenient labels, and labels are much easier to dismiss than neighbors.
But Jesus keeps bringing us back to the person. Do you love them?
Not do you understand everything about them. Not do you agree with them. Not did they vote correctly. Not do they attend the right church. Not have they interpreted every verse the way you have. Do you love them? Suddenly religion becomes much more difficult, because defending a belief is relatively easy. Loving an actual human being costs something. It may require listening when we’d rather lecture, sitting beside someone we’d normally avoid, defending the dignity of someone whose choices we don’t understand, or offering mercy when judgment would feel much more satisfying.
Sometimes it may even require admitting that the line we were absolutely certain God had drawn was actually drawn by us.
I’ve spent enough of my life around religion to know how frightening that possibility can be. But I’ve also come to believe that grace rarely asks for identification before entering the room. Grace doesn’t stand at the door checking theology. Grace pulls up another chair.
That’s increasingly the kind of faith I want. I don’t need a religion that teaches me how to decide who deserves my love. Human beings have been remarkably good at inventing reasons not to love each other without any divine assistance. I need a faith that keeps expanding my definition of neighbor. A faith that makes my table longer. A faith that makes my certainty a little less important and another person’s dignity a little more important. A faith that reminds me that grace received becomes grace given, without fine print.
So, if I’m ever forced to choose between protecting my religion and loving my neighbor, I’ll choose my neighbor. Every time. Not because religion doesn’t matter, but because I believe the purpose of faith is to move us toward love, not away from it.
Religion should help us recognize the image of God in one another, not provide theological justification for pretending it isn’t there.
Jesus never commanded me to love Christianity.
He commanded me to love people.
And maybe one of the best ways we can honor the religion that bears his name is to stop worrying quite so much about protecting it and start paying much closer attention to actually doing what He said.
Choose your neighbor. Especially when religion tells you not to.
Still finding my way….
Patrick Carden
Leave a comment