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Abuses of the Christian Faith Are Not Jesus' Fault

by Max Aplin
8/26/2024 / Christian Apologetics

It is sadly all too common to find people who reject Jesus and the salvation that He gives, because of a bad experience they have had of something connected to the Christian faith. This is a real tragedy and it happens all the time.

Examples of people being put off the faith

For example, over the years I have heard a number of people lamenting how they were raised to be Christians by parents who were strong on discipline and enforcing strict rules, but who were weak on love and affection. As they got older, these people rightly saw that the way they had been raised wasn’t good. But they wrongly assumed that the Christian faith was itself something that was weak on love and affection, and so they rejected the faith as a result.

I myself had a different sort of bad experience when I was a boy. I wasn’t raised Christian, but for a year or two when I was about seven or eight years old, I was sent off to Sunday School once a week in a local church. This church was pretty dead, and the way they did things left a bad impression that led me to lose interest and think that the Christian faith was boring and irrelevant.

A common and much more serious example is the sexual abuse of children. We have all surely seen news reports of some so-called Christian leader who has been convicted of child sex abuse. This seems to happen with alarming frequency. Of course, anyone who does this is not a real Christian, but even so, there are many people who want nothing to do with the Christian faith as a result.

Another well-known example concerns Jewish people. At various points in history, people calling themselves Christians have taken it on themselves to start killing Jews in the name of Christ. Of course, none of this was remotely the right thing to do, and the perpetrators were distorting the Christian faith in a particularly evil way. But the result is that today many Jews, as well as some non-Jews, want nothing to do with our faith.

Rejecting the Christian faith for reasons like these doesn’t make sense

In all the examples I have given, people have seen an abuse of the Christian faith and have drawn negative conclusions about the faith itself. Everyone who reasons in this way, however, is making a big mistake. The way they are thinking makes no sense.

It should be obvious that just because something is abused, that does not at all have to mean that there is anything wrong with the thing itself. And in each of the cases I listed above, there was a distortion of how the Christian faith should actually be. In reality, our faith is not weak on love and affection, it is not boring and irrelevant, it is horrified by child sex abuse and even more horrified by murdering people.

Anyone can choose to call themself a Christian, but this doesn’t mean that they actually are. And anyone can neglect important parts of biblical teaching, but this doesn’t mean that they should.

So when people choose to reject the Christian faith for any of these and other similar reasons, they are not basing their decision on reality. Instead of making a rational choice, they are being influenced by a caricature of our faith.

It’s all about Jesus

The Christian faith, however, is more than just a set of principles, although it certainly includes these. Our faith is focused on the Person who is Jesus Christ.

This Person is utterly good, loving and wonderful. This Person volunteered to be tortured and executed on our behalf to rescue us from the punishment we deserve for what we do wrong.

And the irony is that this Person really hates abuses of the Christian faith. So when someone rejects our faith and the Jesus at the centre of that faith because of abuses, they are actually rejecting the Person who agrees wholeheartedly that the abuses are awful!

To put it simply, abuses of the Christian faith are in no way Jesus’ fault. Whoever exactly is to blame for what goes wrong, it certainly isn’t Him.

A plea

If anyone reading this has had a bad experience of something connected to the Christian faith, please don’t let that cause you to conclude that the faith itself is to blame. The undistorted, true version of our faith is beautiful. It’s great. Even more importantly, the undistorted, true version of Jesus is beautiful and great.

And please don’t use abuses of the Christian faith as an excuse not to spend time considering whether our faith might actually be true and Jesus might actually be the way to God that He claimed to be. You might end up getting to know the One who hates abuses of the faith more than anyone.