Now is the time…

Christians in America haven’t really had to be all that Christian.

Christianity has taken on many forms in this nation. We’ve done the whole Christendom thing, or some variation of it — certainly not to the extent that the Europeans did in the past. Christendom has always been this weird twisting of Christianity with state power that insisted on people acting certain ways and following supposedly Christian laws, which were really nothing more than trying to dictate a morality that some people imposed, usually because they struggled with those very things themselves.

We’ve tried cultural Christianity, which felt like junk food — tasted good initially but was really empty calories and left people hungering.

We’ve tried a version of Christianity that focused on scaring people, using fear, using force. The Puritans were really good at that — it was supposedly religious freedom, but really it was the freedom to impose their religious beliefs on others. There’s nothing free about any of it.

We’re tried a compartmentalized Christianity — where we think we only need to practice the supposed niceness of Jesus on Sunday mornings in our segregated worship spaces, and then set it aside and practice the ways of the world the other 6 1/2 days. All that did was show people that Christians didn’t actually believe what they claimed to believe.

We’re tried a version of Christianity in which we gave all sorts of authority and power to those in charge because they clearly must have some kind of…