Why Christianity Is Uncomfortable
In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was made aware that children born from 2023 onward will be AI children. They will never have known a world without being embedded in networks of artificial intelligence. They are the vanguard of what is now called “Generation AI.” Because they are entering a digitized world, they are already primed to think differently about everything, including personal identity, religion, and spirituality. Posthumanism is a term used to describe the new hyperpersonal person who lives in the ongoing fluid spaces of information. Posthuman identity is interstitial and persistently creative. Online presence and biological existence form a seamless flow of information. My own experience of posthumans has been teaching undergraduates born between 2004 and 2007. They are deeply concerned for the earth and its well-being, for the poor, and for justice. Born into a digital world, they are wired into the world and are deeply concerned for the world.
Yet despite technology’s promise of interconnectedness, we remain divided. Technology has overcome distances, but it has not created closeness. In fact, interconnectedness reveals and deepens enormous social and cultural disparities. Younger generations harbor the same spiritual hunger as their predecessors. While technology may promise to be the new religion—as Brett Robinson argues in Appletopia—it fails to provide the spiritual nourishment that marks the restless human heart. Central to this longing is the desire to belong meaningfully to the whole.
This summer I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a beautiful account of indigenous spirituality and culture. Kimmerer’s vision of reciprocal relationship between human and nature speaks powerfully to contemporary spiritual hunger. She describes nature’s vitality, celebrates earth’s gifts, and emphasizes our need for reciprocity and limits. “Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal,” she writes, “it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us… the earth gives to me daily and I must return the gift.”
Her teachings resonate with ancient wisdom: “Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others… Share. Give thanks for what you have been given… Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.” In our world grown deaf to earth’s cries, these words ring prophetic. “To be native to a place,” she reminds us, “we must learn to speak its language.”
Indigenous spirituality assumes earth as vital, spiritual wholeness—of which humans are merely part. All life has vitality; the divine spirit permeates every aspect of nature, weaving together sun, earth, human, and animal. Kimmerer mourns the harm caused to indigenous communities by Christian missionaries who traveled across America, dismissing native peoples and their cultures as “pagan” and “barbarian.” Their insistence on confessional faith in a single true God devastated indigenous communities, severing their connection to ancestral lands and compelling them to abandon their sacred beliefs and traditions.
While we now acknowledge the harm inflicted on indigenous peoples, we often fail to recognize that our treatment of native communities paralleled our treatment of the earth itself. In the name of monotheistic faith, Christians forcibly removed Native Americans from their territories and coerced them into baptism under threat of violence. The doctrine of one supreme God as Creator of all existence came at an enormous cost to both the land’s original inhabitants and the land that sustained them.
Christians proclaimed God as the sole Creator while insisting that the divine must not be conflated with creation, warning against idolatry. However, this Christian dismissal of animistic beliefs seems contradictory when considered alongside Christianity’s core tenet of incarnation. Christians affirm that the life-giving God enters into and inhabits the very fabric of existence. This belief bears striking resemblance to indigenous spiritual traditions. Francis of Assisi perhaps embodied the first genuinely indigenous expression of Christianity, discovering the divine presence within the natural world—in trees, flowers, soil, and all that creates life’s beauty. I think Francis of Assisi was an indigenous Christian.
I believe Jesus would have welcomed indigenous peoples with open arms. His ministry was deeply rooted in the natural world, emphasizing God’s immediate presence and indwelling spirit, teaching that authentic community must emerge from within. He related to God’s intimacy in everything and everyone by loving the least and tending the poor. He touched earth’s elements with reverence —rocks, dirt, water—as if the whole earth was pregnant with God. The suffering of indigenous peoples would have moved Jesus to tears.
Tomas Halik notes in The Afternoon of Christianity that early Christianity was not a religion in the ancient sense but rather a path of following Christ—one of the Jewish sects of a messianic type, based on universalist prophetic ideas. The Lord was not merely a local God of one chosen nation but Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, ruler of all nations. Jesus was a prophet and mystic who initially felt called to Israel’s lost sheep but wound up sending his apostles into all the world. Something erupted in Jesus larger than the restoration of Israel.
The apostle Paul initially shaped Christianity into a distinct form by liberating young Christianity from contemporary Judaism’s confines and radicalizing Jesus to dispute rigid Mosaic law interpreters. He removed the obligation to become Jews, centering the expression of faith in neighborly love. As Paul conceived it, faith transcends all boundaries—all are equal in Christ, all are part of a new creation. By emancipating himself from Peter, James, and the other early disciples of Jesus, and emphasizing faith as a new existence and freedom, Paul preserved emerging Christianity from becoming a legal religion, although legalism became a constant thread running through the history of the Church.
It was Paul who brought Christianity and Christian universalism to a world shaped by Hellenistic philosophy and Roman politics. However, the idea of a new Israel without borders eventually ran up against the limits of this culture of antiquity. Instead of an Israel without borders, the Church became a second Israel and a third religion, alongside Judaism and Hellenistic paganism. It was not until the fourth century that Christianity was formally cast into the role of religion. This shift to formal religion called for the establishment of a canon of writings to legitimize it. In short, Christianity shifted from a personal call to radical love (orthopraxis) to faith in a transcendent God and right teaching (orthodoxy). Halik states that as “the Christian faith became increasingly embodied in philosophy, combining the Hebrew spirit with the spirit of Hellenistic thought, it acquired the form of metaphysical Christian theology with different emphases in its Roman and Greek versions. Faith was increasingly understood as a teaching, as a doctrine.”
Halik asks if the fusion of faith with political power in the form of doctrine gradually brought about a weakening of the divine power that had so captivated the first disciples of Jesus. Was the novelty of Jesus distorted by transforming Christianity into a formal religion? Did the mixture of politics and religion put out the fire that Jesus sought to ignite? “I have come to cast fire upon the earth and how I wish it were ablaze already,” Jesus proclaimed (Luke 12:49).
Fire speaks of purification, destruction, melding, forging. If fire symbolizes Jesus’s primary mission, then Christianity should exist in the tension between creative transformation and purification—welcoming the refining fire that consumes whatever obstructs love while building communities of profound compassion. This tension reveals something fundamental about Christian faith: it extends far beyond comfort or maintaining the status quo, encompassing instead the active process of transformation. Fire does not leave things unchanged. It either purifies precious metals, making them stronger and more beautiful, or it consumes what cannot withstand its heat.
Living in this space of creative love means Christians must constantly discern what needs to be preserved and what needs to be released. Old prejudices, systems of oppression, and hardened hearts might need the destructive aspect of fire’s work. Meanwhile, justice, mercy, and compassion can emerge stronger through fire’s refining process. Authentic Christianity is neither static nor safe—it is the ongoing work of allowing the divine fire to shape both individuals and communities into something closer to the vision of a new earth and a new heaven, even when that transformation requires letting go of what we thought we needed to keep.
Liturgy should be the celebration of fired-up lives, not merely a place of social engagement. Will Herberg showed in Protestant, Catholic, Jew that most people attend Church or temple primarily for social gathering. This is not entirely negative but Christian liturgy should ignite the heart and mind. Does liturgy empower Christian life to imagine, create, surrender through love’s energies? Or does it obsess over dogmatic rightness? Do the symbols of water, bread, wine, and cross draw us together toward something greater and more compelling than the present reality? Are we being formed with a consciousness of radical love?
Halik notes that Jesus was not a priest but a layperson. His prophetic words about temple destruction and priestly corruption cost his life. Jesus did not make the circle of his twelve friends into priests, in the sense of the temple religion of Israel. He wanted them to follow his example, striving to be least and servants of all. Jesus established no hierarchy or holy government as a ruling class among God’s people. He empowered his disciples to be provocative in contrast to the powers of the world and religious-political manipulation. Jesus grounded his faithful disciples in a spirit of kenosis, agapic love: “If you try to save your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for the Gospel’s sake, you will find it” (Matt 16:25). His teachings were daring, bold, possibly dangerous, and yet it is this new spirit of love that Jesus sought to ignite.
The crisis of contemporary Christianity is not merely about Church structures or metaphysics but about faith itself. What is weakening is not only the power of the Church to control and discipline the life of faith, but also the link between the language used in expressing the faith and the way it is lived. There is a widening gulf between what the Church proclaims and how it proclaims it on one hand, and the ideas and opinions of the faithful on the other. Charles Taylor points out that Christians have been repeating many of the same words in the liturgy for millennia, such as when they recite the Creed, but they understand them differently and some do not understand them at all. Many of these texts were created as part of a picture of the world that is very remote from our own. This is why the Latin Mass is disturbing. It is nostalgic Catholicism focused on transcendence and mystery. But Catholicism without Christianity is dangerous.
Christianity began as a movement, but today evolution invites us to see Christianity is movement—happening, becoming, still unfinished because it journeys toward eschatological fulfillment, what Teilhard called Omega. Christianity means being born again repeatedly; it is about ongoing transformation. Its main task is not doctrine, moral rightness, or belief in one true God. God is true wherever love exists, and love is deeply personal, expressed uniquely by each person. Christianity concerns the personal call of God and our response to that call: “I have called you by name and you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1).
Each person is called to inner transformation, to continually renew our minds and hearts, to constantly strive to see the world and one another with new eyes. To be a Christian is to fall in love over and over, living through the failures of love, enduring in love, suffering in love, and trusting that love will prevail through every storm, darkness, and destruction. The Christian sees life as one long act of death and resurrection strengthened by God’s unconditional love.
Christ did not offer doctrine but a journey, where we continually learn to transform our human lives—our way of being human, including all relationships to ourselves, others, nature, society, and God. Jesus’s teaching is an ongoing learning and listening process, inviting us to realize that life is unstable, unpredictable, spontaneous, and creative. The antithesis to the message of Jesus is absolutism, fundamentalism, and moral righteousness. Jesus’s message is simple: let go, let God, and trust the Spirit within.
The Christian message has never been more necessary than it is today. We are invited to create the world from the inside to the outside, to create the world in love. How do we know if Christianity is fulfilling its mission? I think nature can provide a lesson, for a tree does nothing more than be a tree, and in being a tree, it gives glory to God. Similarly, we must constantly ask if Christianity is deepening our humanity by firing up our hearts for a greater love. If love for another humanizes us, then Christianity will succeed when we become fully human—ultrahuman. Then we will no longer have to talk about religion or God, for God will be all in all.
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Oh my! Ilia you hit it out of the park again. For me, it’s very sad to hear laments. Historic flaws exist–many about our faith. Let me speak from my heart, not history books, not learned authors who moaned about “what was not present in our writings, presentations, teaching.” Isn’t critiquing a past actually escaping responsibility to work to develop a new future based on a higher level of consciousness that we appear to currently lack?
I am a futurist & proud of it; laments do not inspire me; they do not tickle my dreams to grow to examine what could be and what I need to do about it in small ways, in dramatically big ways. We’ve given over the very responsibility our faith calls us to exercise. We wanted the church to change when we are (or were) the church. We’ve given away are creative ability to craft a future that is not only our right but our responsibility. I’ve come to believe that railing on a past that didn’t meet our expectations is really an excuse for being sedentary, continuing the lament on one view of life that died with its authors.
Ilia is a presence that opens bigger paradigms. She envisions responsible believers who take their views into our chaotic, circle-thinking population out to a place where a growing handful of Christian thinkers reside, at least ideologically. Hers is a faith version of accountability. No longer Christians in name only! Christians who avoid the cultural quicksand we live in watch from outside the welcoming circle. Faith is the garden-laden path, the Emmaus walk. Destination: a new reality, if we choose to act.
The Divine Disrupter (the original one!) got us here for a reason: to rub our noses in a raw reality that our silence and inaction built. That cultural reality has us accepting myths about who we are and our purpose indirectly and directly. Sadly, we act act accordingly. He delivered a delicious wake-up call awaiting our response to co-develop a conscience-driven future with faith as its foundation. I applaud Ilia’s continued efforts to get us there.
In Teilhard’s cosmogenic model, the christogenic stage is where the material and spiritual stages, radial and tangential energies, physics and metaphysics, qualia and quanta meet in complexity and unitive consciousness.
Such is an integrative experience of wholeness (holiness in the Cosmic Christ) via an invisible organic substance “within,” the interior counterpart of tangential energy, and its most sacred dimension on the road to Omega.
What’s your best guess is to what that energy is, and where the best scientific data can be found that supports it?
The world awaits the fulfillment of Teilhard’s ultra synthesis, and s/he that can channel it to a waiting world. (Hint, hint)
I also suggest heeding the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel who clarifies the presence of God, God’s pursuit of humanity as the ultimate move of Love. He masterfully shows humanity’s partnership with God in concrete word and deed as the expression of God in materiality. I see this as incarnation and appreciate Jesus as the revelation of what God had been doing since the beginning. There was no intent to break away and form a “New Testament”; Jesus was continuing God’s blossoming of Creation. Heschel notes the difference between authentic faith and Greek philosophy which places “values” in the role of the gods; Plato asks “What is good?” Moses asks “What does God require of thee?” Jesus renews God’s call to be God’s on-going development by living God in the concrete world.
I vividly recall the days following the assassination of J.F.K. Three days when virtually the ‘globe’ – friend, foe, ally and indifferent focused on the same event, scene. It was a naive insight into a common global thought, a shared global emotion, speculation, anticipation and largely grief. The mystery of TV and its reach, the video tapes ‘jetted’ world-wide ‘almost’ instantly, almost simultaneously shared, pondered, felt. A global community for that instant. Yes, compared to the internet, “Wi-Fi”, “Blue-Tooth” – and now AI, how naive and in today’s world even primitive.
A ‘years-ago’ philosophy professor reflected that in his opinion – if St. Francis were alive he would compose his hymn to the ‘bull-dozer’.
There are, will be abuses of this incredible thing. I’ve already seen it – humorously and harmfully. It can be for the good,. It is up to human intelligence, but more so, human will – bene-volent and male-volent.
Thank you so much, Ilia!
I really appreciated that you mentioned St. Francis of Assisi, who brings to mind his “Canticle of the Creatures”, as well as the encyclical “Laudato Si’” and the book “Nostra Madre Terra,” both by Pope Francis.
Ilia, your writings always inspire and energize me! Don’t ever stop writing speaking and helping us see a new way forward.
Wonderful news that inspires me to more actively participate in the transformation of the world, the church and most importantly myself. The words ofer me hope and provide sustenance for me as I continue to unfold into the truth of my often unrecognized beauty.
There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that Jesus came to create a new religion named after him. The record shows that he did everything he could to prevent the disciples from creating more religious forms, figureheads, rituals, and ceremonies, and building churches.
His was a one-on-one transformational initiation of human hearts, minds, and consciousness into higher levels of being, seeing, and doing in real, alive, and loving ways. That art has been mostly lost, save in the contemplative traditions.
Teilhard understood in his own way that spirituality is the physics, both in his time, and now in ours, that is not yet fully understood, and his vision pointed to that day when science would find the synthesis key identifying the organic nature of the Christ embedded everywhere in matter, and how to unleash it.
Institutional religion is and has been a dead end in that regard, the new, forward looking wine will not come out of it. Let the dead traffic in deadness. Find the seam where science and mystery meet, proclaim it, and give the gospels the contemporary octane and fire it needs moving forward. There’s no life in a cemetery, only dead bones. Keep sifting through them at your own peril.
Splendid summary of what ails Christianity today and some great clues about being fire in the world and cosmos. I learned about Ilia from fellow pilgrims on Iona and am doing a deep dive into her books. Rings so true and loving.
Thank you Sister Ilia! Your synthesis always makes sense to me..You are sunlight!!