What makes Christianity unique…

A significant segment of Christianity in America has a deep emphasis on who is right and who is wrong, on correct beliefs and wrong beliefs. Much of this has to do with how one reads Scripture — literally (but based on a literal account of an English translation, rather than what Scripture was actually written in — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) vs. contextually vs. critically vs. allegorically vs. a combination of these and other ways of reading scripture.

There’s a large segment of American Christianity that is trapped in reading Scripture — all of it — in a literal sense (but again literal from an English translation). Is Scripture meant to be the answer book, or is it meant to be the start of a conversation? Those are two very different approaches and produce far different results.

If our emphasis as Christians is on who is right and who is wrong, then we’ve made God into something very common in human history — a dictator. Our “faith” can bear many names, but it’s no different than what so many have practiced in the past. Such focus on right/wrong has had many different names throughout time — Pharisees, Puritans, Fundamentalists, etc. But really, all of these ways are just a religious take on the broader foundational belief — that a select group of people are special and have all the right answers and get to impose them on others. Secular ways of describing this are tyranny, dictatorship, fascism, political communism, etc.

What makes Christianity unique and counter cultural isn’t its focus on what is…