f2PointEight

The Right Hand of Fellowship (Withheld)

I didn’t lose my faith all at once. It loosened slowly, almost imperceptibly, worn thin by years of being practiced rather than challenged, inhabited rather than examined. By the time I found the language to call myself agnostic, the separation had already taken place. There was no dramatic rupture, no single argument that brought it down. What unsettled me came not from theology alone, but from the everyday life of the church. Its habits, its instincts, and the small moments that revealed what it truly knew how to see.

I had grown up inside Christianity. Its hymns and prayers were familiar long before I understood them. Its sermons and rituals formed the background rhythm of my childhood. I was baptised at ten, swept along partly by sincerity and partly by the quiet fear of being left behind as my friends stepped forward first. After a six-week evangelistic campaign, I stood in a baptismal pool with several others who had made the same decision. Together, we recited the denomination’s creeds, pledging our lives to God and trusting our place within the community gathered to witness it. One by one, we were immersed and emerged to raised hands, affirming smiles, and a chorus of amens. It felt, unmistakably, like the beginning of something sacred.

The following week, the church held a special service to formally welcome us into the congregation. I don’t remember every detail, nor the faces of everyone who stood beside me, but I remember one moment with painful clarity. Among us was a young woman. Unlike me, she didn’t have a lifetime of church familiarity to fall back on. She had no friends in the congregation, no family members seated proudly in the pews, no established place within this supposedly loving community. But she stood there glowing, moved by conviction, stepping hopefully into what she believed would be a life of faith and belonging.

After the service, small clusters of church members stayed behind for informal potluck lunches, each group quietly organising themselves around familiar social circles. I was already seated when I noticed her approach a nearby table. She hadn’t brought any food, and with sincere vulnerability she asked whether she could join them.

The reply came quickly and without malice, but with devastating clarity.

“Sorry. This is for family only.”

Her face fell. She apologised. She stepped back. A few minutes later, unnoticed, she slipped quietly out of the hall.

I never saw her return.

Moments like that linger. They lodge in the subconscious and begin to work on you. They fray the certainty that this body of believers truly reflects the Christ whose name it bears. That day did not destroy my faith, but it planted a question I could never quite silence.

How can a religion preach salvation, belonging, and divine love, while failing so completely at the most basic human welcome?

Private Salvation, Public Harm

Christianity speaks endlessly about saving souls, yet it often seems astonishingly careless with the people attached to them. Over time I realised that what happened to her was not an isolated incident. It was a symptom.

I didn’t yet have the words for it, but I knew instinctively it wasn’t simply a matter of one unkind remark or one awkward social moment. This wasn’t a personal failure, it was cultural. Everyone in that hall genuinely believed they were part of something sacred, loving, and grace-filled. And still, without intending harm, the collective behaviour told a different story. We did not welcome the outsider. We did not notice the vulnerable. We did not see the soul standing before us.

And when no one sees, no one feels responsible.

Years later, as my relationship with belief grew more complicated, I kept returning to that memory, peeling back its layers. It wasn’t embarrassment that haunted me. It wasn’t even cruelty. It was the quiet normality of it. That moment revealed something deeply embedded in Christianity, a theology that grants it permission to shrug indifferently at the human collateral created by its own actions. It preaches a salvation so intensely individual, so exclusively focused on “me and God,” that it has lost the ability to recognise harm when harm is social, cultural, or systemic. Christianity talks fervently about sin, but it imagines sin almost entirely as a private moral failing. Once the individual feels forgiven, the community assumes its work is done.

That young woman disappeared, and nobody went looking. Not because they were monsters. Not because they didn’t care. But because the culture of the church itself didn’t teach them that they should. Christianity has shaped believers to think in terms of individual spiritual journeys rather than shared responsibility for one another’s wellbeing. Her faith belonged to her. Her loneliness was her burden. Her loss was her story, not ours.

And with that, the fracture widens beyond one potluck table.           

The more I watched Christianity in practice, the clearer the pattern became. A faith shaped so narrowly around the individual struggles not only with hospitality, but with accountability. Churches draw benefit from systems of power while denying complicity. Institutions cause harm and then retreat into language of “personal forgiveness.” Faith communities inflict damage and treat the consequences as unfortunate, but spiritually irrelevant. Salvation becomes a private possession, and responsibility evaporates into abstraction.

Across much of Christianity, faith has been steadily reduced to something intensely private and inward. Salvation becomes a personal decision. Sin becomes an individual failure. Repentance is imagined as an emotional experience rather than a communal reckoning. God deals with solitary souls while society, institutions, and systems sit safely beyond the frame.

This isn’t simply an unfortunate theological drift. It has moral consequences. Once faith collapses into “my soul and my God,” Christianity gains a convenient way to avoid confronting what it has built, endorsed, benefited from, or quietly tolerated. Churches can preach forgiveness while sidestepping responsibility. They can speak of love while refusing repair. They can declare their righteousness while leaving untouched the structures that sustain harm.

Hyper-individualised faith, intentionally or not, becomes a shield. A way to feel holy without ever having to be accountable.

This is the beating heart of my critique. Christianity is not devoid of goodness, compassion, or transformative potential. I have experienced those, too. But its dominant expression has crafted a theological escape hatch. By shrinking salvation into something uniquely private and internal, it has conveniently freed itself from facing what it has done collectively. A faith so focused on private salvation struggles to recognise that communities and institutions can cause damage on a shared scale, and that harm does not vanish simply because individuals feel forgiven. Any serious moral tradition requires a language for corporate responsibility, for naming injury, and for repairing what has been broken. Too often, Christianity no longer seems able, or willing, to speak that language.

That loss doesn’t just harm the church. It harms everyone who has ever walked through its doors hoping to belong. It distorts the societies Christianity inhabits, because a moral voice that refuses to examine itself eventually stops being moral at all. And in the end, it hollows Christianity from within, leaving behind a beautifully articulated faith unable to recognise the damage it leaves in its wake.

If salvation truly belongs to the individual alone, then Christianity has already surrendered something essential. It has abandoned any serious account of how faith shapes communities, institutions, and societies. The moral life is reduced to a private interior transaction while the outer world, where harm actually happens, remains largely unexamined. A faith narrowed to the soul may feel spiritually profound, but it becomes socially weightless. Worse, it becomes ethically evasive.

The Gospel of Corporate Fate

What makes this especially striking is how far this is from Christianity’s own origins. The biblical world did not imagine sin or salvation as private matters. Households, tribes, entire nations carried responsibility together. Blessing and judgment unfolded communally. One person’s wrongdoing imperilled the whole, and one person’s faithfulness could shelter others. Israel repented not only as individuals but as a people. Even the New Testament speaks of the church as a body in which the suffering or failure of one part affects the whole.

And it is here that we confront some of Scripture’s most troubling material.

Much of the Old Testament is written from within a worldview in which peoples, not merely individuals, sit under divine appraisal. Israel is judged as a nation, forgiven as a nation, saved as a nation, punished as a nation. But Israel is never alone in this. Whole cities, tribes, and kingdoms are collectively praised, condemned, blessed. And in some texts, annihilated. Modern readers recoil at the violence in these passages. They should. The language of total destruction, divinely sanctioned warfare, even genocide, is appalling to contemporary moral consciousness. Attempts to sanitise it often produce more dishonesty than comfort.

Yet if we treat these passages as though they simply reflect an especially cruel God, or as though ancient writers were moral monsters, we miss a crucial insight. These texts assume a world in which identity, destiny, and moral consequence are fundamentally shared. In that world, a people is bound together in such a way that when one part fails, all are implicated. When judgment falls, it falls collectively. The very notion of “innocent outsider” within a condemned people is barely conceivable in that worldview, not because those lives were valueless, but because personhood is so deeply embedded within community that individual and collective cannot easily be separated.

That does not make the violence right. It does not excuse it. But it explains why it was once morally intelligible.

This is the uncomfortable paradox. A religious tradition capable, at times terrifyingly, of thinking corporately now often clings to a spirituality that cannot bear the weight of corporate accountability at all. The theology that once justified collective destruction by appealing to shared identity now frequently resists acknowledging even shared responsibility. A faith once able to imagine humanity in profoundly communal terms has become selectively allergic to doing so.

Yet somewhere along the way, much of Christianity abandoned this vision. It settled into a kind of theological minimalism in which guilt is personal, repentance is personal, salvation is personal. Anything structurally harmful, historically damaging, or institutionally corrupt becomes functionally invisible to its spiritual imagination.

Seen against this backdrop, the modern situation is deeply ironic. Christianity inherits texts formed by an imagination of shared life, shared fate, shared harm, and shared obligation. Yet so much of modern Christianity now lives as though none of this were true. It rallies around metaphors of unity, of “the body,” of fellowship and belonging, but withdraws into individualism whenever accountability knocks at the door.

This helps explain why so many Christians instinctively retreat into innocence when confronted with structural harm. Faced with racial injustice, the response is so often, “I didn’t personally do it.” Faced with economic suffering, “I worked hard to get what I have, so why shouldn’t everyone else?” Faced with institutional abuse, “Those were isolated failures. The church itself remains holy.”

This is not moral courage. It is moral insulation wrapped in religious language.

And the contradiction runs even deeper. Christianity already has conceptual tools to understand inherited brokenness and shared consequence. It freely proclaims doctrines like original sin, an inherited, shared brokenness, when it serves a soteriological purpose. But when the conversation turns toward slavery, colonialism, state violence, empire, exploitation, or institutional abuse, suddenly Christianity becomes fiercely individualistic. Guilt? Personal only. Responsibility? Personal only. History? Something best forgotten.

The inconsistency is striking.

A friend recently shared a line he came across online:

“Western Christianity preaches a hyper-individualistic salvation so it doesn’t have to repent from its systemic sin.”

Christians may bristle at the accusation. Yet the more closely one examines the shape of modern Christianity, the harder it becomes to deny how close to the mark it lands.

The challenge, then, is not to smooth the rough edges of Scripture or to pretend the violent parts are easily reconciled. It is to recognise what those parts reveal. That Christianity, and its progenitors, once possessed a robust imagination of shared life, shared destiny, shared harm, and shared obligation. That imagination can be dangerous when weaponised, but its absence creates its own devastation. When Christianity forgets how deeply entangled we are with one another, it becomes capable of doing great harm while sincerely believing itself righteous.

If Christianity is to become morally serious again, it will need to recover, not the violence of its ancient texts, but the honesty of their worldview. That what we do together matters, that communities shape lives, that institutions bear responsibility, and that a faith worth keeping must be able to say not only I have sinned, but we have.

Only then can Christianity hope to recognise the people it wounds.

Only then can it begin to imagine what repair might look like.

When the Body Remembers Itself

If Christianity wishes to continue speaking meaningfully into the world, it cannot afford to keep retreating into the language of private faith and private guilt. It cannot keep insisting that harm evaporates simply because individuals feel spiritually resolved. The world does not work that way. People do not heal that way. Communities are shaped by what they do together and by what they allow to be done in their name. A moral tradition that refuses to acknowledge that reality slowly loses the right to be taken seriously.

And the tragedy is that it does not have to be this way.

Christianity already carries, within its own story, the resources to be better. It has a language for community. It has a vision of shared human life. It has a theology capable of recognising that what we build collectively can bless or destroy. It has, at its best, imagined people bound together not by exclusion, fear, or self-protection, but by care, accountability, and love wide enough to include the stranger at the table.

The problem is not that Christianity lacks the tools. It is that too often it refuses to pick them up.

I think about that young woman sometimes, not as a symbol or as a metaphor, but as a person whose hope, for a brief moment, rested in the idea that she might belong somewhere sacred. She stepped toward a community believing it would hold her. Instead, she discovered a faith that preached belonging but practised indifference, that spoke of family but guarded its tables, that promised eternal welcome while failing the most ordinary kind.

And she slipped quietly away.

If there is any plea in what I write, it is not for Christianity to disappear. It is for Christianity to look honestly at what it has become, and what it has left undone. It is for the church to recognise that when it forgets its corporate self, it forgets something deeply human and profoundly moral. It is for believers to realise that faith which never grapples with its own collective failures is not courageously spiritual, it is morally avoidant.

A religion that claims to speak about love, justice, redemption, and the shape of a good life cannot remain credible if it consistently fails to notice, and address, the bruises it leaves behind.

Whether I stand inside Christianity or outside it now matters less than the question Christianity must ask itself next. It faces a choice to continue shielding itself behind private salvation, insisting that collective harm lies beyond its responsibility. Or it can recover the courage to say, with seriousness and humility, we have harmed, we are responsible, and we must do better together.

Because the mark of a living faith is not how confidently it proclaims its purity, but how bravely it confronts the pain it has caused, and how deeply it commits to repairing it. Only then will the body remember itself.