Conservative Christianity

I’m taking a break from my more usual topic. So this is something of a filler.

I was a Christian from around age 11 to around age 23. I’m inclined to say that I was a liberal Christian in a conservative church. I perhaps should add that this was in Australia.

Conservative Christianity never made sense to me. I was a liberal Christian, because that made sense. My pastor encouraged me to read the Bible, so I did. I read the OT and the NT in parallel. When I got to the Adam & Eve story, my reaction was “Surely I am not expected to believe that this is true history!” It seemed so obvious that it had the genre of a fable, that I didn’t even bother to ask my pastor about that. And, of course, I had a similar reaction to the story of Noah and the flood, the story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Jonah. I guess I was already well on my way toward becoming a liberal Christian.

The Gospels

In my reading of the NT, I particularly (but not exclusively) concentrated on the gospels. After all, the religion was supposed to be about Jesus and his teachings. And I thought those teachings were pretty good. I read where Jesus taught that we should love our neighbor (Luke 10:27). And this was followed by the parable of the good Samaritan, which I took to be a lesson that we should care about all humans, even those from different ethnic backgrounds. This idea was reaffirmed in Matt. 25 — the parable of the sheep and the goats.

I guess this is what people mean by “The Social Gospel”. But the conservative churches, particularly so in America, reject that social gospel.

To me, based on what I learned during my period as a Christian, the conservative version of Christianity seems distinctly unchristian to me.