This isn’t the first time in history that people who call themselves Christians have been doing awful things. It isn’t the first time many of us who still seek meaning in our faith find ourselves questioning what our belief system truly stands for in the real world. Yet it feels a particularly acute moment nonetheless, one in which the need to speak out against hypocrisy and injustice is stronger than it has been in recent memory, and when the temptation to bail on belief seems on many days awfully appealing.
Author and minister Carol Howard Merritt understands. In her deeply personal, refreshingly honest memoir/guide “Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church,” she delves into her own difficult past in a strict Christian household, and her own hard-won lessons in practicing a more conscious Christianity. Merritt isn’t out to sell spirituality to anybody who doesn’t want it. Instead, she’s clear her book is aimed at those who, like her, have seen some of the worst aspects of the institution yet also can’t deny that they “see the world through an irremovable religious lens,” because they can’t deny having a “spiritual or theological orientation.”
In some ways I feel it’s a really hopeful time for people who care about those who are sleeping outside, people who care about poverty, people who care about peace making. Because all of a sudden we’re united in a way that we were not before. It feels like there’s more of a compelling voice that’s coming out of this group because of the resistance, that we’re having to really make ourselves known. I really care too in the midst of this, because there are a lot of evangelical Christians who woke up the day after the vote and just said, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be evangelical anymore and everything that I love about being evangelical has been taken away from me. So, I really hurt for them and hope in some ways they will be able to have a more life-giving, abundant faith.
When Jesus said to love your neighbor as you love yourself, he wasn’t living in a white gated community. He was living in the Middle East. We should be loving people as we love ourselves, and that doesn’t just mean that we love Christians as we love ourselves, that we love people who think like us or act like us. We should be a loving society.
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