Alternative “gospel” messages

There have always been a multitude of “gospel” messages in societies. A gospel message is simply a message that offers some kind of salvation to people. Let me be clear by what I mean by the term salvation. Salvation can be afterlife, or right here, right now. Salvation, in the general sense is just something that saves us from something else.

Often salvation messages paint a picture of a possible future — either a future missing certain things or people, or adding in something or someone else, or some kind of combination of the two.

In our society currently, we have a wide variety of alternative salvation narratives running pretty strongly.

There’s the toxic individualism salvation message. It’s all about you. You are the center of the universe and the only one that matters. Do what you want, to whomever, and don’t worry about the mess. You are god, so you whatever you choose to do is saving you. Except it isn’t. It’s just misery and destructive. And when people go down this path, they have to keep doing more in order to distract them from this fact. Toxic individualism is a death spiral that leaves a person empty ultimately — people leave them, lose respect for the person. They start to live into Martin Luther’s definition of sin — turning inward on oneself. When we do that, everyone else, including God is shunned and turned away. You can welcome others into your life if you are always looking at yourself. Toxic individualism is narcissistic to its core. And deeply related to many other alternative gospel…