I grew up on the outskirts of the Bible Belt. Southern Baptist was the most popular flavor of Christianity I got exposed to, and for a long time I thought that was Christianity.
It left a lot to be desired.
The Flavor I Was Served
It was not a warm and welcoming environment for intellectual inquiry. It felt largely performative — more about forming a tribal group and judging others than building a bigger table to help the needy. People used it as a status marker. Where you went to church made you, rather than your actual behavior.
I do not mean every person in every pew. I mean the culture as I experienced it: belonging as performance, belief as membership card, and outsiders as a useful contrast. That version of Christianity did not invite questions. It invited compliance.
A Different Christianity
As I have gotten older, I have learned that was just a single flavor. That is not everything.
My wife was the one who really introduced me to Christianity as I know it now. She showed me the good elements of the religion — how it is really about uplifting people. I started to realize that what I had experienced was not how it has to be done. You can do Christianity in a way that is very inclusive.
And quite frankly, a lot of the things we were told to believe seemed to be very cherry-picked from the Bible. Not the whole text. Not the through-line. Selected verses that supported a culture that already knew what it wanted to believe.
The Lewis Lightbulb
I also read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I think his central thesis — the one in Book I about the Law of Human Nature — is a bit simple and flawed from an academic sense. It still helped flip the lightbulb on in my brain.
How do we as humans, across nations, races, genders, and so on, all seem to have this same innate conscience feeling? Stealing, for example, is something that is widely agreed to be bad. How do we all know it is bad? It is not really an instinct. It is more like an innate code of honor.
That certainly does not prove the existence of God. But in my opinion, it opens up the possibility. And that is where this journey really started.
I am still on it. I am not planting a flag. I am drawn in, taking it seriously, and trying to stay honest about what I do and do not know.
What Jesus Actually Spent Words On
I was surprised to see how little Jesus actually spoke of many of the more controversial takes of the Church. Abortion is a clear example. We spend a lot of time debating it. The Gospels, as far as I can tell, do not. Jesus does not weigh in on that fight.
What he does talk about is neighbor, the poor, the needy, and the stranger — the biblical language for the immigrant and the outsider. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40). The sheep and the goats, where the measuring stick is whether you fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46). The parable of the Good Samaritan, where the neighbor is the person who showed mercy across a tribal line (Luke 10:25–37).
I am not claiming those passages settle every modern policy debate. I am saying they are where Jesus put his emphasis. And I think it is a question worth asking: how did we get here? How is it possible that so many Christians do not seem to know what Jesus actually preached? Why does the focus tend to land so hard on niche issues that were hardly addressed in the Gospels, while the clear through-line about the poor and the outsider gets treated as optional?
Projecting Ourselves Onto God
I feel like we have a tendency to project our own feelings into God and Jesus when there is little evidence for it. And then we use our religion as a reason why we are superior to others.
That completely misses the point of what Jesus was warning us about.
He warned about judging others while ignoring your own faults — the speck and the log (Matthew 7:1–5). He told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, where the man who thanked God that he was not like other people walked away unjustified, and the man who asked for mercy went home right with God (Luke 18:9–14). The pattern is hard to miss if you are looking for it: religion as status is a trap. Religion as love of neighbor is the thing he kept returning to.
I do not have a neat ending. I am still figuring out what this faith means for me, and how much of what I was handed was the product rather than the thing itself. What I know so far is that the flavor I was served first is not the only one — and that a bigger table looks a lot more like the Jesus I am actually reading about than the tribal version I grew up around.
That question is worth sitting with.