Churchianity

I had started this post with an observation that showed that a couple of people have quietly rejected me, but by the time I composed the next few paragraphs, I realised that anybody reading it who knows me and the people concerned might read this as a personal attack on them. It isn't, so I've removed the original first few sentences and will just say that the observations I've made here are quite generic. They could be applied to people I know, or to some of the people involved in this story about a boy who went to preschool in a girl Halloween costume.

It's interesting to note that the least accepting people are consistently active in a church. I'm heading into walking on eggshell territory again here, but I'm going to make a comment that is something that I've been aware of in some churches for over 20 years now. I see a big difference between what I call Churchianity and Christianity. While Christianity means thinking "what would Christ do?", Churchianity means thinking "what does the church tell me I should do?"

Even an atheist can understand the principles of loving your fellow man and such, that Christ was supposed to have preached, even if they don't believe that the man ever existed. A Churchian, in contrast, seems to have lost sight of the underlying principles behind Christ's teachings.

So I'll continue to turn the other cheek and hope that one day they will see that they have failed to follow the teachings of Christ and will mend their ways, or that they at least won't harass other people merely for being different.

Hopefully before people start sending me hateful messages for attacking churches, they'll stop to ask themselves whether the guidance given by their church, and every other church that claims to be Christian, faithfully follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. Really? Every church?