More Than a Feeling: Why Christianity is Both a Relationship & a Religion, Part 2

The popular Christian slogan, It's not a religion, it's a relationship," belongs to a family of statements that should give us pause. Consider its close cousins: "I'm spiritual, but not religious" and "I don't go to church, but I love Jesus." These phrases share a lot in common. In every case, the warm interior of personal experience is set against the cold exterior of institutional obligation. What unites them is that they share in a particular cultural mood. This mood is what the late Alasdair MacIntyre called "expressive individualism." Expressive individualism is what happens when the self and its felt or lived experience becomes the measure of all things religious and otherwise.

Along similar lines, Philip Reiff identified and wrote about "the triumph of the therapeutic." Reiff described a cultural shift in which the goal of human life was no longer moral formation or covenant faithfulness, but personal psychological well-being.

Unfortunately, this therapeutic worldview has triumphed in many branches of the church. As a result, the church becomes a service provider. Doctrines become advice. Worship becomes therapy. And the gospel, stripped of its corporate, covenantal, and cosmic dimensions, becomes something like a spiritual technique for managing personal distress and securing emotional equilibrium.

This is a form of Christianity in which the goal has shifted from conforming the self to God to that of conforming God to the self.

The "relationship, not religion" slogan, however sincerely intended, often feeds into the therapeutic mindset. It grants the individual the right to define what the "relationship" looks like on their own terms, without the discipline of the church's liturgy, the accountability of the covenant community, and the corrective ministry of the word of Scripture.

It is, in the end, a form of Christianity that has been shaped more by the logic of the therapeutic consumer rather than the logic of the covenant Lord. In the next blog post, we'll consider the view of the church that is often implied by the popular slogan we've been considering.