Christians Behaving Badly

If you are a Christian, I hope that you’ll be able to acknowledge that sometimes we do stupid, harmful, even evil things. Over the course of 200 years Christians killed approximately one million people in the Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition killed, tortured, or exiled as many as another 350,000. We have conducted witch hunts, we have hurt people by encouraging them to only pray for a medical cure instead of seeing a doctor, we have ruined lives by running people down instead of building them up, we have at times neglected our responsibility to care for the environment assuming God will take care of it.

We are responsible for tragedy all across the globe. The critics are right. We are hypocrites. All
too often we say one thing and do another. We could respond to the critics by pointing out that it’s not just Christians who are responsible for tragedy in the world. That is unquestionably true. Sociologist Rudolph Rummel estimates that in the 20th century approximately 262 million people were killed by genocide. 76 million of those were in communist China. 62 million were from the Soviet Union. Those were both officially atheistic countries at the time. Rummel concludes that the best predictor of genocide is the concentration of power. “He says absolute power kills absolutely.” Sociologically, it’s pretty clear that people who want an excuse to kill or abuse will find an excuse. If it’s not religion it will be something else.

But if we really believe in Jesus we should be better than that. When Peter cut off the ear of the person arresting Jesus, here’s what Jesus did:

Jesus commanded Peter “Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” Then the detachment of soldiers with its commander and the Jewish officials arrested Jesus. They bound him and brought him first to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year.

Peter’s inclination was to defend Jesus violently. Jesus preferred to be arrested and killed. He lived out the command to turn the other cheek. He wouldn’t allow his followers to attack even if it cost him his life. That’s who we are supposed to follow. If a Christian is one who follows Christ then every time we stop following, every time we do something different than Jesus would want us to do, in that moment we stop being a Christian. Our life of faith is like a never-ending pendulum between faith and doubt, following Christ’s will and our will, listening to God and listening to others. In one moment we follow precisely and in the next moment we fail. We are hypocrites. I think that makes us no better or worse than anyone else. It’s evidence that we need a Savior.