Religion is all about control.
Jesus is not.
Religion is a form of crowd control.
It all depends on the crowd.
For me to explain my own processing, I have to talk for a minute about how the basics of what I would come to know as social science influenced my pathway back to finding Jesus.
Social science is looking at patterns in communities and individuals and finding out the why behind those patterns.
As humans, whether we realise it or not, we love in cultural bubbles. The Earth is a bubble. A country is a bubble. A culture is a bubble. A family is a bubble. A home is a bubble. A workplace is a bubble. A school is a bubble. Your tennis club on the weekends is a bubble. Your church is a bubble.
Within those bubbles we have micro-cultures of spoken and unspoken rules.
Some people in society like to think they are non-comformers. They rebel against the social norms. It happens everywhere. Culture wouldn’t be culture without the rebels. Perhaps teenagers are the biggest non-conforming group (in my experience based from my daily research project of 4 teenagers). They have learned societal rules in childhood - in a western country things like: don’t pick your nose. Don’t lick shopping trolley handles. Don’t scream in church or have a tantrum in the store. Go to school. Wear these type of clothes. Have this type of hairstyle etc, etc. When they start discovering themselves as teens and realising it’s all just adults trying to control them, they push back for a bit. Eventually, the majority come around and conform to the society they are functioning within. If they don’t, society has its ways of punishing them, putting them in the Out groups.
Culture dictates the rules of society. Rules dictate culture.
In my life experience of living in the chandelier-swinging happy place of Pentecostal Christianity to the starched collars of conservative, fundamental Christianity, and then into mainstream Christianity, this is no different.
Humans can’t help themselves. We have to form groups. In groups. Out groups. In-groups of the Out-groups. We like rules. We like boundaries and we like to have a leader to tell us what to do and to have someone to blame when it all goes belly-up. Think about it. Who leads your place of work? Who leads your country? Who leads your church? Who leads your school? Leaders are everywhere because we as humans demand it.
As the book The Lord of the Flies demonstrates, you put a group of people on an island in the middle of nowhere and a culture and leader will grow.
It’s the essence of the rise and fall of empires, civilisations, movements. Groups. Culture. Leaders. Rebels.
Groups. Culture. Leaders. Rebels.
A cycle of the history of the world in four words.
So what is my point in relating religion and culture?
Jesus knows that culture is man made. He knows that we will function within the cultures we adapt to, wherever we find ourselves. But that shouldn’t mean that the rules of that culture get attributed to Him.
He is not a rule-follower himself. He stirred up some trouble when he was here. He rebelled against the cultural norms of the day, especially the cultural norms of the religion of the day.
What if culture is blinding us to truth?
What if we can’t see the real Jesus because we’re too caught up in ritual and rules and cultural constructs? What if you start looking at everything around you from this point of view?
I did.
What happens when you start looking at Jesus beyond the boundaries of cultural context?
It changes the ways you see Jesus.
As I began to look at my belief system, my faith, I needed to separate out what was culturally-influenced Christianity and what was actually Jesus.
