Am I self-righteous?

“Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."”

Mark 2:17

A few years ago, I was approached by a woman handing out food. She was wearing a ‘Muslims love Jesus’ t-shirt. A thought went through my head: you don’t know who Jesus is, and I do. I said no, thank you and walked on. Was I being self-righteous? Yes. I was sure that I was right and she was wrong. More than that, I thought that made be better than her. But there is nothing in my faith that gives me the right to feel like superior to anyone else. In that moment, I was being self-righteous in spite of my faith, not because of it.  

Sometimes, we are justified in our belief that some Christians are acting self-righteously.  At other times, though, a Christian may come across as self-righteous because the way she approaches faith differently to someone who doesn’t share her beliefs.

We live in a culture of self-improvement. Whether it’s your personal best or your curriculum, it seems like most of us are trying to improve ourselves in one way or another. And so ‘spirituality’ becomes just another aspect of self-improvement. Through anything from mindfulness to the power of reason alone, we can become spiritually or morally enlightened. It is something each of us achieves in our own way and through our own effort. In this mindset, the plethora of spiritual and religious practices around us are merely alternative ways of seeking the same God.

Sometimes, the parable of the blind men and the elephant is used to explain how this works. You’ve probably heard it before. Three blind men touch different parts of an elephant to try and find out what it is. The first man feels the trunk and decides that it must be a snake. The second touches the side of the elephant and is certain that it is a wall. The last man, after putting his hand on the trunk, assumes that he is holding a spear. The idea, of course, is that we each perceive God in different but equally valid ways.

From that perspective, the Christian who claims to be right about God seems to be saying that he is wiser and more spiritually enlightened than anybody else. But Christians don’t believe that you can come to a greater knowledge of God through human effort. In Christianity, we can only know God because He has revealed Himself to us. (Surprisingly, God doesn’t necessarily reveal himself to the most ‘spiritual’ people. In fact, it’s often the opposite.)

In that way, the God of Christianity is vastly different to the God of that parable. It’s no coincidence that the story uses an animal to represent God. The God of the parable is an unknown, even unknowable that cannot speak to the people he has created. Another parable, one where the blind men touch the hands, feet and chest of another human being, would have a very different ending. No one with an ounce of compassion would let the blind men come to such flawed conclusions about the object that are touching. Yet that is the God of the parable. And what kind of a God is that?

While the claim that only Christians can know God may seem exclusive, the God of the parable is even more exclusive because everyone is excluded from fully knowing that God.

When the Apostle Paul, one of the earliest Christian missionaries, came across a group of people who believed in such a God, he didn’t claim to be superior to them. Instead, he told them that he himself knew the God they were trying so hard to find:

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: . So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you…God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him, (Acts 7:22-27)

According to Paul, the unknown God was not unknowable. In fact, that unknown God wants us to know Him. While Paul might sound self-righteous when he claims to know God when they do not, he was not claiming to have gained an understanding of God through his own effort.

Paul was never an ideal candidate for spiritual enlightenment. Though he had led a deeply ‘religious’ life, all his spiritual practices hadn’t led him anywhere near a state of moral perfection. In fact, when God was first revealed to him, Paul was his way to Damascus, where he hoped to find and kill Christians. As he was travelling, a light came down from heaven and Paul heard a voice saying; “Why do you persecute me?” Moments later, the person speaking revealed His identity: Jesus.

None of this gave Paul any reason to be self-righteous. He had considered Jesus a heretic, yet Jesus was revealed Himself to him. Far from claiming to be spiritually superior, Paul would later describe himself ‘the worst of sinners’ (1 Timothy 1:15). Elsewhere in the Bible, he wrote that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

When I thought I was better than that Muslim woman, I was being unchristian. Far from being superior to anyone else, I am just a ‘weak thing of this world’. Yet the God who created me has revealed Himself to me. And He revealed Himself to all of us when, unlike the unknowable God of the parable, He entered our world so that we could know Him. He died and rose from the dead so that man’s broken relationship with God could be restored. And since the offer of a personal relationship with God is open to everyone, weak, unenlightened and morally-imperfect Christians like me really have nothing to be self-righteous about.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Romans 5:8

Have I been brainwashed?

'What a child should never be taught is that you are a Catholic or Muslim child, therefore that is what you believe. That's child abuse.'

Richard Dawkins

According to Richard Dawkins, I have been brainwashed. While perhaps not everyone would go as far as he does, I don’t think it’s uncommon to assume that children will just believe whatever religious truths their parents tell them. Even other Christians I know sometimes assume I accepted my parents’ faith unquestioningly. But those of us from Christian backgrounds don’t all pop out of the womb reciting the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit..."

Like many of my friends from Christian families, I only fully accepted my parents’ faith as a teenager.

I wonder if Richard Dawkins has forgotten what it is like to be a child. Of course, children are more likely to hold irrational beliefs. Most children believe in Father Christmas just because their parents tell them it is true. But even young children eventually question that belief. And if a child questions what their parents tell them about Santa, why wouldn’t they question was their parents tell them about God?

As it happens, I questioned the existence of God a few years before I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I remember coming home from church one Sunday and wondering whether God existed. I was perhaps three or four, maybe even young. I decided at that moment that God did exist. While I seem to remember having a vague idea that God must be the explanation for everything around me, I doubt I had any clear reason for coming to that conclusion.  I’m not sure anyone at that age would have been able to make a rational decision about the existence of God. But the fact that I even thought about it shows that I was able to accept or reject what my parents told me about God. I chose to believe in God. Though that choice may have been influenced by the beliefs of my parents, it was nevertheless a choice.

As a child, I always knew that most people didn’t share my belief in God. After all, it’s not like I grew up in a monastery. I grew up in a working-class community with just two small churches. There were perhaps 50 or 60 Christians out of the 3000 people living in Maerdy.

At school, I couldn’t avoid being challenged about my belief in God, particularly not when everyone knew that my father was a ‘priest’ or ‘vicar’ (though technically he was neither). My classmates loved to tell me that what I believed was a load of rubbish. And, like any child, I was more than happy to tell them that they were wrong. Even in infants’ school, I was asked questions like ‘Where did God come from?’ and ‘Doesn’t science explain everything?’. I hear the same objections from adults today. If anything, the kids on the school bus were more sceptical than most atheists I know. Those children questioned whether Jesus had even existed.

Although I have believed in God since I was three or four, it wasn’t until the age of thirteen or fourteen that I became a Christian. It’s not that I didn’t believe in the core truths of Christianity. I didn’t doubt that Jesus was the Son of God who had died on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven. I was sure that He had risen from the dead, meaning that those who believed in Him could go to Heaven. I thought of them as facts, but nothing more than that. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus seemed irrelevant to me. It had less of an impact of my life than my beloved Doctor Who.

When I became a Christian as a teenager, I finally understood that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection restored the broken relationship between man and God. I realised that I could have a personal relationship with God if I accepted that Jesus had died for me on the cross. I had always been told that I needed to respond personally to Jesus’ death on the cross. When I finally I did respond, it was again my own choice to do so.

Not all Christians from church-going backgrounds will have a similar story to mine. I know plenty of ‘cradle Christians’ who can’t remember a time when they didn’t believe. That doesn’t make them gullible. In fact, many of the brightest Christians I know can’t remember a time when they didn’t believe in Christianity. Ultimately, they have made a decision to carry on practicing their faith into adulthood. Others have not.

As a child, I knew that I believed in God without knowing why. Twenty years later, I know exactly why I continue to believe in God. And while I never really questioned the core beliefs of Christianity in my childhood, I know now why I continue to believe them.

I haven’t been brainwashed. When I came to a belief in God, I knew perfectly well that not everyone shared that belief. When I became a Christian, I did so not because my parents forced me to, but because I had decided that I needed to follow God. Ten years later, it’s a decision I make, with the help of God, every day.