Vaccines have become oddly controversial. Even so, I don’t want to give them up as a metaphor that I have used to make a point about Christianity in America.
When I came back from Tanzania, where we saw about 7,000 people begin following Jesus over the course of eight years, people thought that I might know a way to do something like that here. My short answer is “no”. The truth is that America is not receptive to the gospel because most here have been inoculated against Jesus.
My analogy is that a flu shot gives you an inactivated dose of the flu virus which cannot replicate and make you sick, but is able to prompt your body to produce natural defenses against the flu virus. Once you have been exposed to the dead virus, you are much less likely to be infected by the live version.
This is what I think is the situation in America. Most everyone has gotten a dead version of Jesus, a non-replicating form of religion and church, and are therefore immune to the real radical Jesus and communities alive with the Spirit’s moving.
We think we know Jesus and have experienced the spiritual life. But actually, we’ve been immunized in a way that can keep us content with civil religion, politics veiled as faith, ideology rather than transformation, and social respectability instead of selfless living. Churches that are a business enterprise are appealing rather than seen as a grotesque distortion.
If we wear our Jesus apparel, accessorize with jewelry displaying Christian symbols, and share Jesus-themed memes on social media, we can pass for fervent believers. Make sure to like pages dedicated to Christian apologetics, mark as favorite movies and music with the ubiquitous triumphal Christian theme, and you will be seen as dedicated.
The Jesus vaccine also has the opposite effect in some people, totally turning some off. Unlike what those giving the shot are hoping, these recipients can become atheists and agnostics, despisers of religion, and cynics about it all. The dead dose of Jesus and church they get is enough to make them to reject any formal Christianity at all. While some people thrive in the shallow, church-as-spectacle on Sunday, and America as God’s chosen people who always do what is right, others want nothing at all to do with it.
But there is hope. Just like you have to have a yearly flu shot, the Jesus inoculation has to be administered regularly to have any effectiveness. People may skip their next dose, and become receptive to the real Jesus and his gospel of peace through love, of communities with people together striving to follow Jesus rather than build an enterprise. Great love or great suffering can also rid a person of the vaccine’s effects.
Further hope is that when someone catches the real Jesus and discover that mystery of a spiritual walk, the Jesus shot loses all future effectiveness. No matter how others might try and administer the vaccine, it has no effect.
In fact, a person alive with the Spirit from the risen Christ, is repulsed by even thought of the Jesus shot. No longer can political agendas be confused with God’s work, national triumphalism with the new creation, material prosperity with salvation, or group superiority with piety.
They neither hate nor despise those immunized against the King and his kingdom of human wholeness and unity, but are humbly ready to assist anyone, for whom this shot have lost its potency, to be introduced to life eternal.