Jesus and Religion

The key to understanding Jesus' life and teaching is to see that Jesus called us out of a conventional blind religiosity of tribalism and scapegoating, of manipulating the divine order so as to gain divine beneficence, and into a genuine love-ethic. This is a call out of idolatry and its manipulation of God, out of hatred, fear, or mistrust of the 'other' and into true religion where there is love that knows no boundary.
Jesus was patient and deliberate in his teachings concerning love's boundaries throughout his life. But nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the parable of the Good Samaritan, addressed to a person steeped in religion but blind to the things of God and of the love-ethic of Jesus. Jesus cast no one into the realm of worthlessness. There are only people who are incapable of being like the infidel in Jesus' story, the Samaritan. When Jesus said, "Go and do likewise" it was not to the infidel, to the prostitute, to the criminal on the cross, but to the ones steeped in righteousness and religion.

Put into concrete language for today: It appears there is very little in white American Christianity that is free of the idolatry Jesus called us to leave behind. Indeed, the theological foundations of white supremacy and ethno-nationalism that now afflict the world are specifically the fruit of key branches of American Christianity - a full throated idolatry that is based on fear and resentment of 'other'. Even the the most innocuous forms of prosperity gospel and the gospel of personal salvation that plague our practical spirituality, our experience of church and worship, are forms of idolatry.

What's more, even as we are drowning in idolatry often the church's response is to compound the situation by feeding the weight of guilt for not being properly zealous for religion. When Jesus talked about taking on his yoke and burden which is light and coming to him for rest, he was talking specifically about the need to rest from false religion in which the Pharisees loaded people with religious burdens of self-righteousness and idolatry. In such a state is it any surprise that so many Christians rarely experience what it means to follow Jesus by centering their experiences on congregational life? It is virtually impossible in the life of most congregations to come to a place of authentic solidarity with the disinherited of the world and to find oneself in the places Jesus asked us to follow him. It would seem to me that escaping the trap of bad religion is a key step for many in the journey to align one's self with Jesus' life and teaching.