Where Faith Went Wrong

How modern Christianity bypasses grief, dodges responsibility, and calls it faith

In my work, I spend a lot of time with people on the day the story stops making sense.

A death. A hospital room. A sanctuary full of bodies trying to hold it together. A family looking for words sturdy enough to carry what just happened.

And in those rooms, whatever faith we have is no longer theoretical. It becomes practical. It becomes visible. It either helps us stay human, or it gives us an escape hatch.

This is a piece about the version of Christianity many of us inherited, the one that trains us to bypass grief and outsource responsibility, and how the earliest Jesus movement was pointing at something far more grounded. Not an exit strategy, but a way.

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The Whole Story

Earlier this week, I officiated a funeral. Now, if you’re new here, you might not know that this is a regular thing for me. My primary source of income is working with families who’ve lost a loved one but don’t have a pastor, priest, rabbi, or eloquent uncle to help with the actual service.

So a few times a week a funeral director connects me with a family. Together we create the funeral, celebration of life, or ritual to help people step into life after loss.

With one of the families I served this past week they asked me to select music for the service. I did, linking the selected songs to what I was going to say. And then, at the last minute, they swapped one of the songs.

They swapped out “How Great Thou Art” for “Amazing Grace.” That might sound like nothing. Two beloved hymns, both familiar, both beautiful. But I’ve learned to pay attention to what we reach for in rooms like this.

Because funerals can reveal what we believe the way fire reveals what was always inside the wood. When grief is in the room, we stop pretending. And what a lot of modern Christianity reaches for, especially in death, is not the way of Jesus. It’s afterlife insurance. It’s a story that sounds like comfort but often functions like anesthesia.

Your loved one is in a better place. So you shouldn’t feel this much. So you shouldn’t fall apart. So you shouldn’t rage or ache or collapse into the earth.

And in the same move, it quietly says something else. It says the point of your life was simply to get out of it.

Which means it has almost nothing to say about how to live. Not in a rich way. Not in a grounded way. Not in a way that actually makes humans more merciful, more truthful, more repair-capable.

Now, as an officiant I do funerals for militant atheists and devout Christians and everyone in between. I’m grateful for all of it. But the families I love working with most are the Christian-adjacent ones. The ones who are not trying to force the room into a neat religious script. Because in those rooms, there’s space.

Space to bring scripture in as story, not as a weapon. Space to talk about God as presence, not as a transaction. Space to name grief as sacred, not as a failure of faith. Space to ask the real question funerals always raise. Not “How do we get to heaven?” But “How do we live on the other side of loss?”

And if we’re honest, that is the question early Christianity was formed to answer. Not with moral scorekeeping. Not with an escape plan.

With a way. A way of living. A way of being human. A way that, from the start, ran directly against empire. And that’s the story I want to tell this week.

And even if you do not call yourself Christian, at some level you have still been shaped by this story. If you were raised inside it, it probably shaped you enough that it helps explain why you do not want the label now. Because when the version of Christianity we inherit is mostly escape, it does not just fail people in death. It fails them in life.

It turns grief into something to bypass. It turns hope into something to postpone. It turns love into something to earn.

And then, eventually, it shows up in public life too. It shows up when faith conforms itself to political power. It shows up when bombs dropping in places like Gaza and Iran are celebrated because they are squeezed into an end times storyline. It shows up when a religion that once formed people for mercy becomes a machine for certainty, domination, and holy indifference.

So yes, this is about a funeral hymn swap. But it is also about why so many of us have felt faith fail us, and why we need a path back to something truer. Something that once again invites us to stay human.

The gospel was a way, before it became an exit strategy

Did you know that the first Christians did not call their movement “Christianity?” That word comes later.

In the book of Acts, what they call it is simply “the Way.” That matters.

The Way is not an ideology you agree with. The Way is not a product you purchase. The Way is not a moral report card. The Way is a path you walk. It forms you by practice. By community. By the daily work of learning how to live inside a different reality.

Which means the gospel, at its roots, is not a reward system. It’s an apprenticeship. And the apprenticeship is not about earning a ticket out of earth. It’s about becoming the kind of person who can help heaven take root on earth.

And one of the strange, quiet proofs that it was working was not that Christians won arguments. It was that people started asking questions. Not because early Christians were more powerful, but because they were living differently.

There is a line in 1 Peter that always stops me: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” Notice what is assumed. The assumption is that hope is visible. That it is embodied. That it shows up in how you treat people, how you hold suffering, how you share resources, how you refuse to return violence for violence.

It was not just doctrine to be defended. It was a way of life that made strangers lean in and say, “What is it about you?” It was a witness that had shape, not just personal piety, but a social imagination, a new kind of community.

And what did that community look like? There is a line in Galatians that is often quoted like a Hallmark card, but it was originally a declaration of a new world. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one.” Many scholars believe it echoes an early baptismal creed, a line you would hear spoken over your body as you came up dripping from the waters.

Not because differences were erased, but because the hierarchy of difference was.

In a world organized by ethnicity, status, and gendered power, the church was meant to be the place where those walls did not get the final word.

Which means the Way was never just about where your soul goes when you die. It was a practiced alternative to the way the world organizes itself.

That’s what Jesus teaches us to pray.

Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.
On earth.
As it is in heaven.

Not later. Not somewhere else. Not after you die. Here.

This is not a denial of the mystery of what comes after death. It’s just a refusal to turn “what comes after” into a bypass of what’s here. Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. And if that sounds too abstract, let’s make it concrete.

When hope becomes escape, it tends to produce a certain kind of Christian. A Christian who can be at peace with violence as long as they believe the end of the story is guaranteed. A Christian who can tolerate injustice as long as they believe God will sort it all out later. A Christian who can offer grace to perpetrators while withholding mercy from victims.

That last line is not theoretical for me. It comes from my own story.

Early in my theological formation, my faith was shaped by shame. Lots of guilt. Lots of fear. Lots of sin management. And the “good news” I learned was essentially this: You are awful, but Jesus died for you, so you can go to heaven.

It was supposed to create gratitude. But what it often created was moral and relational distortion.

Here is what I mean. When I believed I was fundamentally broken, I lived from brokenness. Shame did not make me holy. It made me desperate.

For me, that desperation showed up in compulsive behavior around sexuality. I was unfaithful. I lied about it. And then I used “grace” like a sedative, a loophole. As long as I could tell myself I was forgiven, I did not have to face the effects of what I had done.

There were consequences, but I treated the harm like it should evaporate. Like confession was the same thing as repair.

And while I told myself I was just trying to manage my chaotic inner world, my chaotic inner world was not contained inside me. It spilled onto the people closest to me.

My former wife once said something that landed in me like a stone. She said, “You have all kinds of grace for the perpetrator, but no mercy for the victim.”

That is what happens when grace becomes a legal loophole instead of a transforming presence. When salvation is framed as a transaction, it can absolve harm without repairing it.

It can comfort the guilty without protecting the wounded. It can soothe the conscience while leaving the world unchanged. And that is not the Way.

How faith got co-opted: three waypoints in the shift

If the early Jesus movement was a way of life that ran against empire, how did we end up with a Christianity that so often props empire up?

Not with conspiracy. With history. With ideas. With institutional power. With a slow drift that eventually became a new religion.

Here is the through line. When faith marries power, leaves the body, and sells an escape, it becomes controllable. The Way becomes an exit strategy.

Here are three waypoints that help us see the arc without turning this into a seminar.

First, power. Second, body. Third, hope. When those three shift, everything else shifts with them.

Waypoint 1: When empire made Christianity legal, and then useful

For the first few centuries, Christians were a vulnerable minority. They had no state power. They had no army. They had no mainstream cultural dominance.

They had practices. They had a table. They had a story of a crucified Messiah who refused the taking way of power.

Then comes Constantine.

And to be clear, this is where we need to tell the truth about what Constantine was, and what he was not. It was not a moment where someone sat down and decided which books would be in the Bible. It was not the first time Jesus “became” the Son of God, as if early Christians had never said anything divine about him until empire got involved.

It was a political moment. Constantine had an empire to stabilize. Christianity had become large enough to matter. And the church was in a deep internal conflict about how to understand the person of Jesus.

So Constantine convened bishops to debate, argue, and attempt a unified confession, not because he was a theologian trying to find truth in prayer, but because unity in the church helped produce unity in the empire.

That is the shift. The question was no longer only, “How do we follow the Way of a crucified Messiah?” It also became, “How do we make this faith work at scale, in the center of power?”

This is one of the first places the taking way starts to get baptized. The giving way becomes language, while the taking way becomes the engine.

Christianity moves from persecuted movement to sanctioned religion. And once the faith becomes socially advantageous, the incentives change.

When the religion of the poor becomes the religion of the powerful, it will be tempted to reshape itself so the powerful can keep being powerful while still feeling holy.

A God crucified by empire for challenging empire is inconvenient for empire. So the cross gets turned from an indictment of domination into a mechanism of personal forgiveness.

Sin becomes individualized. Salvation becomes privatized. The kingdom becomes future. And empire gets to keep running the world.

And this is not just about “bad leaders.” It is about formation. When your survival depends on belonging to empire, your theology will eventually start to sound like empire. Your God will start to feel like an emperor. And your hope will start to drift away from the work of being human here, into the promise of reward somewhere else.

Waypoint 2: When dualism offered an escape hatch from the body

Alongside political power, there was also a philosophical drift. A kind of spiritualized dualism that treated the body as suspect, the material world as temporary, the “real” story as happening elsewhere.

You can feel the Platonic influence in the background, the idea that the physical world is a shadow on the cave wall, and that the “real” reality is somewhere else, in pure spirit, pure idea, pure light.

And once that story gets under your skin, you do not just become less embodied. You become easier to control. Because if the body is not sacred, then suffering bodies are easier to ignore. If earth is a temporary waiting room, then earth is easier to exploit. If salvation is leaving, then the work of loving becomes optional.

And this is where you can start to see how spiritual dualism becomes a kind of spiritual self-centering. Not a pop-psychology insult, but a posture. A posture that turns faith into my transcendence, my escape, my private purity, while refusing the humility of being creaturely, finite, dependent. It is religion as self-protection instead of love.

The body becomes an inconvenience. Other people become background characters. The world becomes disposable.

And again, the taking way sneaks in, not always with violence, sometimes with sophistication. It teaches us to float above pain instead of entering it.

But the Christian story, at its center, is not disembodied. It’s resurrection. Not a ghost floating away. A wounded body made new. A world restored. A promise that matter matters.

Which means any Christianity that trains you to despise the body is not just spiritually unhealthy. It is politically convenient.

Because people disconnected from their bodies are easier to manage. People taught to endure suffering for a heavenly payout are easier to extract from. People trained to see earth as disposable are easier to recruit into systems that destroy it. And people taught to see their bodies as “less real” are less likely to listen when their bodies say, “This is not the Way.”

Waypoint 3: When hope became evacuation, and faith became a control mechanism

Once Christianity is aligned with power, a new kind of hope emerges. Not hope as a way of living, but hope as an exit.

And here too, the taking way shows up as a temptation. It offers control through fear, compliance through reward, and calls it salvation. The question shifts from “How do we become a people who embody God’s reign?” to “How do I make sure I’m in?”

And when that becomes the central frame, it’s only a matter of time before fear becomes the primary tool. Do the right things. Believe the right things. Avoid the wrong things. And if you fail, there’s a punishment.

Heaven becomes reward. Hell becomes threat. And the Way becomes an anxious moral project.

This is where Christianity stops forming people for love, and starts forming people for compliance.

Not always. Not everywhere. But enough that you can feel the pattern. And you can see the fruit.

You can see it in funeral language that can’t tolerate grief. You can see it in churches that can’t tell the truth about harm. You can see it in Christians who become more invested in being “right” than being merciful.

And you can see it in history. You can see it in slaveholder religion. You can see it in versions of Christianity that trained enslaved people to obey, endure, and wait for heaven, while those who held the whip called themselves saved.

You can see it whenever a theology of the next life is used to pacify people in this one. “Be good and you will be rewarded later.” “Suffer quietly and God will make it right after death.” “Accept your place now, because the real world is coming.”

That is not hope. That is sedation. And when you put sedation in the hands of those who benefit from the status quo, it becomes a tool. A way to keep people compliant. A way to keep harm unchallenged. A way to keep grief from turning into truth. A way to keep truth from turning into repair.

If that sounds extreme, look at our current world. Look at how many Christians are willing to bless war and nationalism and domination, as long as it can be squeezed into an apocalyptic storyline.

Escapist theology does not just bypass grief. It bypasses responsibility. It baptizes empire. And it trains people to call it faithfulness.

Amazing Grace, and the hinge between absolution and repair

This is why the hymn swap matters.

Amazing Grace is not a bad song. But many of us learned it inside a shame-based frame. I once was lost, but now am found. I was a wretch. And now I’m safe. For a lot of people, that becomes a private spiritual story disconnected from repair.

But the actual story behind the hymn is not private. John Newton was a slave trader. Not in some vague metaphorical sense. In an actual historical sense.

He hauled human beings from Africa to the Americas and sold them into bondage. His “wretchedness” had names. It had bodies. It had blood. And yes, he came to see the horror of what he had participated in. Grace found him.

But here is the hinge. There is a difference between absolution and repair.

Absolution is the removal of guilt. Repair is the restoration of what was harmed. And if all you have is absolution, Christianity becomes an exit strategy, even from your own responsibility.

Years ago, I was teaching in Africa. One of my students asked me, in reference to Newton, “What did he do to restore Africa? To repair Africa? To replace what he had taken?”

At the time, I did not have a theology that required repair so the question left me dumbfounded. I had a theology that offered forgiveness. I had a theology that could wash the perpetrator clean. I did not yet have a theology that demanded mercy for the victim.

That question became part of my transformation. Because it forced me to admit something. If grace only moves guilt off the perpetrator’s conscience, but does not move the perpetrator toward repair, then what we are calling grace is not the Way. It’s absolution without transformation. It’s spiritual laundering. It’s cheap hope.

But grace, in the way of Jesus, does something else. Grace moves us from guilt to grief. Not as self-hatred. As awakening. As the moment you finally feel what you have refused to feel. The moment you finally tell the truth about what has been done, and what you have done. The moment you finally let your heart break open enough that you can no longer live the old way.

Grief is not the enemy of faith. Grief is often the doorway into it. Because grief is how we become human again. And humans who can grieve honestly are harder to recruit into empire.

The Way: two paths, two engines

If you want a philosophical compass for all of this, here it is. There are two ways to be in the world.

Henri Nouwen once named it like this. The taking way. And the giving way. One is the way of power. The other is the way of love.

The taking way is driven by fear. It grasps. It controls. It extracts. It has to win. It has to secure itself. It is always building higher walls.

The giving way is guided by belovedness. It shares. It restores. It tells the truth. It practices repair. It knows that life is found in communion, not domination.

The tragedy is that a lot of Christianity ended up preaching the giving way while serving the taking way. It preached forgiveness while protecting exploitation. It preached heaven while abandoning earth. It preached grace while bypassing grief.

And the result is what you see all around you. A faith that is supposed to make us more human often makes us less.

More afraid. More brittle. More certain. More willing to harm. Less able to grieve. Less able to repair. Less able to be present.

So here is the invitation. Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. The Way is not an exit strategy. It is apprenticeship into a different reality.

A reality where heaven is not a destination. It’s a practice. A reality where the prayer is not “get me out of here.” The prayer is, “Make me the kind of person who can participate in your healing of what is here.” A reality where grace does not just forgive. Grace transforms. Grace moves guilt into grief. And grief becomes the engine of repair.

What it looks like to live this way (not morally, but philosophically)

Not “do this, don’t do that.” Something deeper. A reorientation. A new operating system.

To live the Way is to be guided by a different set of engines than the ones empire offers.

Guided by love, not driven by fear. Guided by embodied presence, not driven by escapism. Guided by mercy that protects the wounded, not driven by grace-as-loophole. Guided by solidarity, not driven by comfort. Guided by hope-as-practice, not driven by hope-as-evacuation.

If you want a simple diagnostic, ask yourself this. What does my faith do to my body?

Does it make me more available to grief, more capable of truth, more able to love real people in real places?

Or does it make me numb? Does it make me certain? Does it make me impatient with pain? Does it make me hungry for a cosmic escape hatch?

The Way is not tidy. It is not efficient. It does not bypass grief. It walks through it. Because the only kind of faith that can resist empire is a faith that has been trained to stay present.

Not just in joy. In loss. In complexity. In the body. In the earth. In the suffering of your neighbor. And yes, in the slow work of repair.

Closing: the prayer we forgot we were praying

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we are not praying for evacuation. We are praying for infiltration. For the life of God to move into the life of the world. For the heaven we keep talking about to start shaping the earth we keep abandoning.

“Thy kingdom come. On earth. As it is in heaven.”

If Christianity is the Way, then the question is not whether you believe in heaven. The question is what kind of person your hope is forming you to become.

A person who can tolerate injustice because “it’s all going to burn anyway.” Or a person who can grieve honestly enough to refuse the taking way. A person who can love. A person who can repair. A person who can help bring heaven to earth.

Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. And the Way is still here, waiting for us. It’s inviting us to stay human.

Before I draw the paywall line, one clear invitation. If you feel grace moving you from guilt to grief, and you want help moving through grief in a way that makes you more present, more human, and more useful to the world around you, I’m creating a course of practices for that. Here’s the link so I can let you know when I’m done and you can get it at a launch discount: PASTE_LINK

Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.