Cult of Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code Movie Discussion

Ah, but now you're distinguishing between what people believe and what they claim to believe--there's almost always going to be a significant difference there. As soon as these people decide that Jesus is not the Son of God, they cease to be "Christians" in the strictest sense, despite the fact that they continue to call themselves "Christians," attend services, and so forth.

The reasons are various, but there have always been people who hide behind a convenient religious label to avoid having to explain the nuances of their personal beliefs, and risk being ostracized in their communities for being "different." A lot of people who were born into Catholic families, for example, were baptised as Catholics as infants, went through the Confirmation ritual in adolescence and end up calling themselves "Catholics" for the rest of their lives, no matter how much their personal beliefs change over the years. It's not a phenomenon limited to Christianity either--Judaism and Islam also have their share of false claimants.

Sometimes it's because of simple laziness. As children their beliefs were pure and doctrinal, but as they grew older and learned more about the world they began to question aspects of the scripture, trying to find ways to reconcile science's version of reality with the miraculous world of religion. They may decide to drop bits and pieces of their faith's creed, but still consider themselves to be pious. This causes some of them to seek out other denominations that better reflect their chosen set of scriptural edits. They may simply not know what else to call themselves, and they rationalize that they share many of the Christian ideals, so therefore they're still "Christians in spirit."

Others go along with it for the "social ritual" of religion. A couple gets married, and the wife is far more devout than the husband. He respects her beliefs, and she respects his, but when they have children, they decide to attend religious services as a family, either "for the sake of the children," or because "it's the thing to do." On the surface you'd guess that everyone who bothered to go to church on Sunday was a Christian, but if you conducted a silent poll of those "worshippers" you'd find--as the poll you cite does--that many of them are there for other reasons.

For still others it's a case of social stigma. If you live in an area where the vast majority of your fellow citizens claim to adhere to a particular religion, you feel pressure to conform--outwardly, at least. Try calling yourself an atheist in a small town where everybody else claims to be a Catholic, for instance, and watch as you get singled out for special treatment that you really don't want. Between attempts to convert you and outright rudeness from others, and the unspoken threat of discrimination, it's often easiest just to say, "yeah, I'm one of you."

It's more hypocritical for the clergy, of course, to be leading a congregation in prayer and preaching doctrines they personally no longer believe. Nevertheless, it happens. Priests and ministers and rabbis and imams all have their "crises of faith" from time to time, but they often recognize that their duty--or at the very least their "job"--is to nurture the faith of their congregations, so they hide their own doubts and get back to work, perhaps hoping they'll be "re-inspired" eventually.

In the end, though, it is about semantics. If everyone had the ability to define "Christian" to suit their own personal set of scriptural edits, the word would soon become meaningless. Before the Reformation, the word "Christian" effectively implied "Catholic", but over the centuries with the many flavours of Protestantism splintering believers along doctrinal lines, the word has lost more and more of its specificity. Today the only thing that all of these Christian sects can agree upon is that there is one God, and that Jesus is His Son, the Messiah (i.e. the "Christ"). Take away that, and the word becomes so vague as to be all but meaningless. At that point, anybody who agrees with Jesus' "turn the other cheek" philosophy (which is hardly unique to Christianity) could call himself a "Christian," when in fact he does not believe in the "Christ" at all--at best he's a "Jesusist."

Besides the matter of semantic correctness, though, there's the issue of the confusion that gets promoted when people who believe widely different things choose to define their beliefs using the same word. What is someone supposed to think you believe when you tell them you're a "Christian"? What would you think I believed if I told you that I was a "Christian"? You seem to want to broaden the meaning of Christianity to make it equivalent to Jesusism, when in fact the crucial distinction between the two is the "Christ" nature--Christianity is a religion, whereas Jesusism is a non-religious philosophy.

That's the point of the Protestant "denomination" system, after all--a "naming" system for differences of interpretation. If your beliefs differ from those of every other denomination, you're free to start your own and give it a new name. But it would only be a Christian denomination if it held to the most fundamental tenets of Christianity, namely the belief in Jesus as the Christ. If you violate those fundamental tenets, then what you have is either a wholly different religion or a non-religious philosophy (depending on whether you posit the existence of any Supreme Being).

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