1. Be Like Jesus: Hang With The Sinners and Judge The Judgers
2. Form Genuine Relationships With People, Don’t Treat Them As Projects.
3. Actions Speak Louder Than Words.
4. When Talking About Religious and Philosophical Matters, Ask More Questions And Do Less Preaching.
5. Don’t Give Unsolicited Advice or Judgments. Support People and Wait For Them To Ask For Your Input If They Want It.
6. Appreciate That Nominal Christians Are Still Christians.
7. Don’t Try To Force Others Into Christian Participation.
8. Understand Atheists and Embrace The Opportunity Confrontational Atheists Afford You.
9. Respect Other Religions Even As You Evangelize Their Members.
10. Love Your Enemies, Not Just Your Tribe.
1. Be Like Jesus: Hang With The Sinners and Judge The Judgers.
We all do well when we have two basic kinds of relationships. Those with people who think like us and those who think differently from us.
The value of relationships with those we think similarly to are numerous and obvious: When we are with people who share our values and beliefs and assumptions, we can build on what we share to work out new ideas. We can also figure out how our mostly similar views and our mostly similar values apply to new circumstances and should be affected by them. Talking to people who generally agree with us about difficult problems means we will be more likely to get proposals and insights we find plausible. This avoids the frustration of every conversation being a fight about the most basic of principles such that one never gets much farther than that. Plus it’s great to be in community with people who share our views and values so we can do constructive things together. This lets us live by our views and implement our values in a rich way. This is all great. This is why church and other forms of fellowship with other Christians are a rich part of your life. This is why I love connecting with my fellow Humanists so much and why I’ve made working towards Humanist community a central part of my life.
But if you want to both reach out to non-Christians (or to less involved Christians) and to grow as a person, you need to pursue connections outside of Christian bubbles. You need to invest time and energy in individuals and in general scenes where people hold very different views and live by very different values than your own. Because while it is undeniably good to spend time with likeminded people, it is also undeniably good to be challenged by what other people have to offer and to challenge them with what you have to offer.
The most admirable part of the story of Jesus, even to an atheist like me that thinks that both Christians and non-Christians give Jesus an overblown reputation, is the way that the Gospels portray him as a morally condemnatory preacher who focused his sermons against those who abused their wealth and religious power, rather than against those demonized already by his religion, while he spent his time hanging out with the outcasts loathed by his community. From his use of a hated Samaritan as a role model in his story about what kind of love God most demands of us, to his reputation for hanging out with the hated tax collectors and the prostitutes who were held in so much contempt, to his endless attacks on the rich and on the self-righteous religious leaders, the Jesus of the Gospels is a role model of how to simultaneously have strong opinions about morality without being a judgmental and alienating person.
We do not have stories in which Jesus rails against the tax collectors and prostitutes. We do not have stories of him sitting around with them haranguing them about how they must change their lives. Yes, we have the moment where he tells the woman caught in adultery to “go and sin no more” but the crux of that story is his heroic effort to save her from a bloodthirsty mob of self-righteous people. We live in a society that has more than filled up its quota of Evangelical Christian Pharisees organizing contempt and condemnation for the sinners. We have plenty of highly visible Evangelical Christians invested in saying “sin no more”. They should be vastly outnumbered by Christians who stand up to them and say, “let ye who is without sin, cast the first stone”. We should have many more Christians who leave it to Jesus, presumably the only one with a right to judge on Christian doctrine, to be the one to tell the sinner to “sin no more”. The end of that story was not that those equally guilty of sin as the woman put down their stones and then stood in a circle chastising her and telling her not to sin lest next time she gets stoned for real. The end of that story was that the fellow sinners shut up and meted out no penalties nor condemnations. And Jesus alone dealt with the issue of her sin.
According to your Evangelical Christian beliefs, you are as much a sinner as anyone else. That doesn’t change with your salvation by Jesus. You may believe that thanks to Jesus, you are able to sin less and by his grace do more good works. But neither of these things theologically should trump Jesus’s commands not to judge other people. Because, as the saying goes, “there but for the grace of God, go you”. You are no different or better in yourself. Even after being saved.
Some Evangelical Christians perversely think that because they admit they are sinners too, they can judge other people’s sins–even ones they don’t share themselves. They think that by saying, “well, I’m not saying I’m better than you” that it’s okay to follow through with a judgment. Jesus didn’t say, “He who admits that he has also sinned may cast the first stone.” He said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
You must overcome your temptations to feel superior to your fellow human beings. I don’t think it is exactly right to call us “sinners”, but I think that if that principle helps you keep in mind your fundamental equality with your fellow human beings, even those you see as unsaved, then it is valuable to that extent. I would rather we centered our feelings of equality in a feeling of mutual appreciation and respect for the beauty of human potential, if only we are all empowered. But basing our empathy in our common vulnerability (as compassion does) and fallibility (as the doctrine of original sin does) has some merits too. We can all be weak, we can all be strong, so our focus should be on how we might understand and empower each other above all else.
If you take that attitude when you sit down with (your fellow) sinners, you might just focus more on respecting them, listening to them, learning from them, figuring out how to tangibly love them in the ways they really want, need, and will appreciate. You will be much more likely to find the ways to empower them to be stronger and happier people. If you are that kind of influence in someone’s life, then you have your best odds of earning their trust and respect enough that maybe they will open up to you about spiritual matters, knowing you are a Christian. And maybe they won’t ever. If you are a Christian, you have to put faith in God to save people. It’s not a human job. But starting to put your faith before your friendship will risk alienating your friends. I would even say it should alienate your friends. Not because your faith is wrong. But because it becomes a temptation to push your friends into what they’re not comfortable with yet. And if you cannot love people without an agenda of saving them, then you cannot love them. You do not know what love is. You are a threat to their well-being, because you are willing to put your own perceptions about what other people need above their own freedom to think for themselves.
Am I saying we should not ever make moral judgments? No, read this post and this post for my advice on how to judge ethically, we should be very deliberate and conscientious people who scrupulously investigate how we ourselves can be better people. When dealing with others, our first focus should be on understanding them in their particularity and in their actual needs and conditions of flourishing in their situation. And that means focusing less on figuring out what they’re doing wrong and how they can be as good at being themselves as they can.
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