It's In the Code, Ep. 8: It's a Relationship, Not a Religion
Building from the previous episode, Dan explores what’s going on when people say that Christianity is “a religion, not a relationship,” when salvation is understood as requiring a “personal relationship” with Jesus, and so on. Like so many other uses of popular religious language, this language tells us a great deal about the identity of those who talk this way, who the “real” Christian are, and who they aren’t.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And this is the series, It's in the Code, that I put together on Wednesdays, looking at the use of religious language, kind of the way that people talk about religion in America, the way that some religious folks, especially Christians, might use that.
And as always, I'm looking for insight from all of you.
You can email me at danielmillerswag, that's danielmillerswag, at gmail.com and share thoughts that you have, phrases that you've heard, slogans that you've maybe read, things you've heard pastors say, the things that pop up on church billboards that you want to take a look at.
As always, I welcome those.
We're going to be looking today at an example that a lot of people have sent in, but please keep them coming.
As always, I don't have time to respond to every email.
I do respond to as many as I'm able to each week.
But I love the things that you're sending in.
Sometimes, as I've said, I sort of bundle them together into themes.
Sometimes I'm able to look at something that a specific person brings in and brings to my attention.
But I want to thank everybody for that, ask you to keep that coming.
I also want to remind everybody that we are hosted in partnership with the CAP Center at UCSB, so we thank them.
And as always, I thank all of you who listen, all of you who support us, all of you who keep us going and doing what we do with the podcast.
So I'm just going to dive right in here.
Last episode, we looked at the language of being saved.
A lot of people had emailed me and said, look, like, you know, I'm a Christian.
I go to church, or I've been confirmed, or I've gone to catechism, or I believe Christian things, or whatever.
And somebody else will ask me, you know, are you a Christian?
I'll say yes.
They'll be like, well, yeah, but are you saved?
People were sort of questioning what that meant, and we looked at that and kind of did our decoding thing and took a look at, you know, what does it mean if somebody asks you that?
What does it tell you about how they understand Christianity?
What does it tell you about the kind of Christian they probably are?
What might it tell them about the kind of Christian that you are, or that they think you are, and so forth?
And we said last episode that we were going to get into a related theme this episode, and that's the language of The way that this language of salvation and an understanding of Christianity ties in with the concept of relationship.
And for a lot of you, this is going to be really familiar language.
If you're not a religious person, but you've paid any attention to American religion at all, or you've encountered people who are, or maybe family members, you will have heard this.
If you have grown up or are part of certain religious traditions in the U.S., this language will be very, very familiar to you.
And it's the language that says basically that for one to be quote-unquote saved means they have to have a personal relationship with Jesus or that they have another way they'll say it is to be a Christian means that you have accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.
And within this framework, the daily Christian life, like what it means to be a Christian on a day-to-day basis, to do Christian things and so forth, is often spoken of in terms of having a relationship with Jesus or a relationship with the Lord or some such language, right?
So again, this is language that's going to be familiar to a lot of people.
And It sometimes expands into a form that goes so far as to say that Christianity itself is not a religion, it's a relationship.
And this is the specific thing, this language of relationship.
Relationship with Jesus being, you know, personal relationship with Jesus.
Christianity is a relationship, not a religion.
These are the things that people have reached out to me about, and this is what I want to sort of take a look at today.
And again, If people haven't listened to the prior episode, I invite you to do so because they really do fit together.
The prior episode and this one as a kind of pair.
So let's start with this.
Let's take sort of a broader view and then sort of work our way in.
And the thing we could start with is, what can it even mean to say that Christianity is a relationship, not a religion?
I've had people who are not Christians, who do not come from an evangelical background, who have never heard this kind of language as part of their own religious life, who have reached out and said, you know, I have a relative who says this, who says that Christianity is a religion, or excuse me, is a relationship, not a religion.
I have no idea what that means.
Can you explain what that means, right?
It's a strange way of speaking and talking.
So I'm not going to dive into all the history of this, but there is a long history, far predating us, that has several streams that kind of influence this.
And basically, this language in its contemporary form goes back to forms of Christianity that emphasize a direct, immediate experience of God.
And when I say immediate, what I mean is it's not mediated by things like formal religious institutions, like the church, or by priests, or by having performed certain rituals and so forth, right?
It's non-mediated.
It's immediate.
And this develops in different forms of Christianity, and it basically was a way of bypassing a lot of the traditional structures within Christianity, right?
Because it's this emphasis that individuals can have a direct encounter with God.
That means I don't need a priest.
I don't need a church.
I don't need maybe the sacraments.
I don't need these things to bring me into contact with God.
I can contact God Directly, and through a long history, this leads to kind of a democratizing of Christianity, right?
Being a Christian, encountering God is something that regular people can do.
I don't need you, priest, or church, or formal institution, to help me do this.
And so it becomes a very popular form of Christianity.
And it spreads in the general population.
And when you get into the U.S.
context, the American context, in the British colonies and later, it becomes very, very popular and spreads through the general population.
And you can think of big historical events running all the way from, say, the Great Awakening to Billy Graham Crusades or to modern televangelism and different things like this.
That it spreads and it spreads among not just really typically not among the elite, the socially elite, but among kind of the masses.
And when I talk about it democratizing Christianity, what that means is that it represents a form of Christianity that it doesn't require education.
You don't have to be able to read or write.
You don't have to be able to understand complex doctrines or theology.
You don't need to have a seminary trained professional clergy.
All you need to do is just be a person capable of having this kind of encounter with God.
And it comes to represent a form of Christianity where the evidence of salvation is not just the confession of certain beliefs.
You are supposed to confess certain beliefs.
You are supposed to believe certain things.
You're supposed to live a certain way and so forth.
But the real evidence of a Christian life is an experience of a kind of intense and ongoing encounter with God.
And this is the kind of emphasis that develops over a long period of time and really, really takes root in the U.S.
It is not unique to the U.S.
It is not only an American phenomenon, but it is a really, really, really defining feature of American Christianity and especially American Protestantism.
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