Robin Meyers > Quotes

“The peddling of fear in any form as incentive to faith remains the most egregious sin that can be committed in the name of Jesus. It feels very good to name the enemy and thank God that you are not like “those people.” But if Christianity is to survive, someone needs to stand up in the middle of one of these hapless sermons and quote the comic-strip character Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“After Constantine engineered the merger of Christ worshipers with sun worshipers in the fourth century, the creeds solidified and finalized the view of faith we hold today. Not only was this politically expedient, but it gave the church many elements of Mithraism that survive to this day. Christ is depicted in early paintings as the Sun (with rays bursting from his head), Sun-Day is the day of rest, and Christmas was moved from January 6 (still the date for Eastern Orthodox churches) to December 25, the birthday of Mithra. The ornaments of Christian orthodoxy today are nearly identical to those of the Mithraic version: miters, wafers, water baptism, altar, and doxology. Mithra was a traveling teacher with twelve companions who was called the “good shepherd,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” and “redeemer,” “savior,” and “messiah.” He was buried in a tomb, and after three days he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated every year.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“It is sobering to remember that one does not become gracious by reading a good book on grace. What’s more, the incarnation itself argues against it, since by definition our claim is that theory and praxis were brought together in the pure compassion of one who wrote nothing down. Our faith is “commissional,” not rhetorical. We are commanded to “go and do likewise,” not to go and talk likewise. Disciples are empowered to heal and forgive sins, not to apply for endowed chairs or publish and debate papers on the Q gospel - important as these may be. The life of the mind is not the problem, unless of course our life begins and ends there. Words can be a form of action, but they can also be a substitute for action.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“In many American churches, Jesus still comes “as one unknown”— or perhaps as one so well known as to be unrecognizable. He was penniless and itinerant, yet his gospel is now attached to some of the richest and most powerful people on earth, and the good news is really bad news for the poor. Captives are not released; they are warehoused. The blind do not see; rather, the sighted wear blinders. The oppressed are not liberated; they have become the new scapegoats. Sermons are no longer dangerous; they are simply adapted to the appetites and anxieties of the audience. Conservatives rail against sins of the flesh, as if to exorcise their own demons, and liberals baptize political correctness at the expense of honesty.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“Strangely, we have come to a moment in human history when the message of the Sermon on the Mount could indeed save us, but it can no longer be heard above the din of dueling doctrines. Consider this: there is not a single word in that sermon about what to believe, only words about what to do. It is a behavioral manifesto, not a propositional one. Yet three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about what to do, only words about what to believe!

Thus the most important question we can ask in the church today concerns the object of faith itself. The earliest metaphors of the gospel speak of discipleship as transformation through an alternative community and the reversal of conventional wisdom. In much of the church today, our metaphors speak of individual salvation and the specific promises that accompany it. The first followers of Jesus trusted him enough to become instruments of radical change. Today, worshipers of Christ agree to believe things about him in order to receive benefits promised by the institution, not by Jesus.

This difference, between following and worshiping, is not insignificant. Worshiping is an inherently passive activity, since it involves the adoration of that to which the worshiper cannot aspire. It takes the form of praise, which can be both sentimental and self-satisfying, without any call to changed behavior or self-sacrifice. In fact, Christianity as a belief system requires nothing but acquiescence. Christianity as a way of life, as a path to follow, requires a second birth, the conquest of ego, and new eyes with which to see the world. It is no wonder that we have preferred to be saved.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“So when Republicans urge self-reliance for the poor and then fail to raise the minimum wage year after year as the cost of living rises, they are engaged in a cruel form of hypocrisy. When they cut programs that provide child care and job training to give more money to billionaires, they are revising the whole concept of compassion. By their actions, they are rewriting the text: "We will guarantee that the poor you shall have with you always.”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future

“The evidence abounds that not only do the self-righteous not have the market cornered on “clean living,” but they often lead secret, self-destructive lives. In my part of the world (Oklahoma is the reddest state in the union), there is actually a positive correlation between high church attendance and negative social statistics like teen pregnancy, divorce, physical and sexual abuse, and chemical dependency. Where there is denial there is dysfunction, and the more one’s faith resembles a fairy tale the sooner the clock strikes midnight.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“When I was a kid growing up, the message “Jesus is the Answer” was ubiquitous— painted on barns, outcroppings of rock, or as the final installment of a Burma Shave sign. The message, however, is distinctly unbiblical. The message should be “Jesus is the Assignment.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“People are not fleeing churches today because they have lost their deep hunger for a spiritual connection and participation in authentic spiritual communities. Rather, they are fleeing because so many churches now seem bereft of the very spirit that birthed them in the first place. If clergy want to find their people, they might try looking in coffee shops, in homeless shelters, among the young who have pitched their tents in parks to dramatize economic injustice. While we shop, salute, and worship celebrities and athletes, the world is falling apart. What we need today is a move to Occupy Religion.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“So long have we exalted Jesus as the Christ and robed him in purple prose, that we forget the simple fact that he was dirt poor, living just a notch above the degraded (outcasts) and the expendables (beggars, day laborers, and slaves). Likewise, so long have we studied the record of his remarkable teachings, especially the parables, that we assume he was literate. But 95 to 97 percent of the Jewish population was illiterate at the time of Jesus, so “it must be presumed that Jesus also was illiterate, that he knew, like the vast majority of his contemporaries in an oral culture, the foundational narratives, basic stories, and general expectations of his tradition but not the exact texts, precise citations, or intricate arguments of its scribal elites.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“It is ironic that none of those who took issue with Schweitzer’s theology and cursed his writings gave up fame and fortune or membership in the highest stratum of German society to live among the poorest of the poor. They prepared their critiques in the comfort of the pastor’s study or the university library, while Schweitzer nailed patches of tin on the roof of his free medical clinic at Lambarene by the banks of the Ogoove River. Theologians who sat in endowed chairs took his Christology to task, while he scraped infectious lesions off blue-black natives in the steaming misery of equatorial Africa.

Albert Schweitzer deserves to be remembered as the greatest Christian of the twentieth century, yet he did not believe in literal miracles— the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, or the second coming, just to name a few. All he did was walk away from everything the world calls good to follow Jesus.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“For a number of reasons, the church has become widely viewed as either irrelevant, the object of contempt, or both. The situation is complex, but two factors stand out. First, a narrow approach to the idea of salvation, as expressed in the blood atonement and with Jesus as the exclusive divine Savior, has played into the hands of a church seeking political power at the expense of the inclusive wisdom of its own gospel. “Getting saved” not only is a static and highly individualistic phenomenon but narrows and domesticates the redemptive activity of God in ways that conform all too conveniently to the worldview of the new American empire. In a land of entitled bargain hunters, salvation becomes the ultimate bargain.

Second, the notion of covenant as a collective expression of gratitude and mutuality has been trampled beneath a culture whose real devotion is to private ambition. The religious impulse, born in epiphanies that awaken us to our responsibilities to and for one another, is fundamentally corrupted when it is reduced to an individual balm. Faith is always supposed to make it harder, not easier, to ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers. In short, the church must make a crucial choice now between wisdom theology and salvation theology— between the Jesus who transforms and the Christ who saves. One is the biblical ethic of justice; the other is a postbiblical invention that came to fullness only after the Protestant Reformation.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“With every passing year, as the end of my own life draws nearer, there seems to be an ever-shrinking distance between the utterly mundane and the gloriously transcendent. Even my neighborhood at dawn is a burning bush.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving God from Religion: A Minister's Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age

“Thus the fundamental illusion from which we must be disentangled, or “undone,” is that the proper definition of the life of faith itself is first and foremost a belief system with behavioral consequences, rather than a way of being in the world whose behavior consequences make clear the things we believe. In other words, we are not acting upon beliefs so much as we are believing through action—we are not believers who act but actors who believe.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“Or that Ayn Rand and Jesus are truly strange bedfellows? Why can’t we say this? Because we are afraid. Why are we afraid? Because we care too much about what people think of us, and not enough about whether we say what needs to be said at a time like this.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“To the best-selling atheists of our time, who have lumped us all together into one ridiculous religious cartoon and then proudly announce that they don’t believe in the God that most of us don’t believe in either, I say, for the love of God … RESIST!”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. Instead of seeing the benefits of a vital conversation between the academy and the average person in the pew about how a third-millennium man or woman might still follow a first-century Jewish sage, many Christians view scholarship as a threat to church doctrine. They believe that professors who make clever arguments against the virgin birth, for example, are careless vandals poking holes in the dike of faith. To shore up that dike, they believe they need to show “true faith” by accepting uncritically the tenets of their particular tradition without question. Such defiance is captured in a popular bumper sticker: “THE BIBLE SAYS IT, GOD WROTE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT!”

Ironically, biblical scholars are actually interested in the same “trinity” of ideas, but they put question marks where others put exclamation points. What does the Bible really say? What does it mean to say it is inspired by God? And why do we believe that God’s voice is exclusively in the past tense? Perhaps, as my denomination is fond of saying, God is still speaking.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“Countless Christians have mouthed these lines in worship for centuries: “Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…” Look carefully at what separates the birth of Christ from his death. The world’s greatest life is reduced to a comma.”
― Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

“It is a victory for the empire, but not for the kingdom of God, that if you are “too big to fail” it means that your rewards are privatized but your risks are socialized. You can gamble with other people’s money, and if you win, you win. But if you lose, we lose. I don’t know what economic model that is, but it’s not God’s economy, so I say, for the love of God … RESIST!”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“America is one of the last places left on earth where every citizen, until the day he or she dies, is exposed to the risk of personal bankruptcy because of illness or disease. It does not matter how industrious we are, how carefully we save and invest, or how moral we are in our personal and family life. We are all just one long hospital stay away from losing everything.”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future

“Fundamentalists of all stripes love a bully pulpit but hate a roundtable. Why share power when you are right and everyone else is wrong? Who needs dialogue when your monologue is sacrosanct? Why let false prophets into the room when you can bolt the door and preach to the choir?”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future

“Because there is no fight like a church fight, all hell broke loose.”
― Robin Meyers, The Underground Church: Reclaiming the subversive way of Jesus

“If we don't exhibit a basic respect for the sacred in all living things, including our enemies (which is the real definition of "pro-life"), then we have done more than change the DNA structure of what it means to be an American. We have mangled it when it comes to being a Christian.”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future

“A less well known but much more ominous text, however, concerns the fate of anyone who would harm a child or make children's lives more difficult: "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matthew 18:6-7).
The national debt is just such a stumbling block. It is the antithesis of "family values." It is neither pro-life nor pro-child. It is, instead, a economic version of the plagues, sent out by a modern pharaoh upon his own house.”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future

“America is going fascist, and it's doing so with the help of religious zealots whose real passion is for the politics of privilege, not the radically disturbing presence of Jesus. This will sound alarmist to some, but the truth is that no country ever thinks it is going fascist until it wakes up one day to that indisputable reality. Then the people will say, "How did this happen?" And the answer is "one day at a time, and with the blessing of the church.”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future

“If there are rules against taking advantage of resident aliens, then why are so many Christians the first to call for deportation of migrants? It’s as if we expect these strangers to provide us with cheap manual labor, roofing our houses, landscaping our yards, pouring concrete, and caring for our children, but then we want them to disappear after sundown.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. —THOMAS MERTON”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“As for gifted preachers, I like a smooth voice in the pulpit as much as anyone. But there are times when I would prefer some gravel, some red-faced stammering, even a little public anguish from a preacher who has tasted the bread of heaven and lifted the cup of kindness and now feels a little drunk for justice.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“If we allow ourselves to be intimidated in our search for truth by the gatekeepers of empire—the billionaires who are now buying up all our newspapers and television stations in order to report from the corporate mountaintop news that is so fake that a whole generation now gets its real news from fake news programs, then we are all wandering in the wilderness. By the way, would that more preachers of the gospel had the fearlessness of Jon Stewart.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“The answer is: all of us who care about the Gospel. The ministry of Jesus was never based on what someone deserved. There is never a questionnaire given out in advance of a healing.”
― Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future