Vaccinated Against God

I.

In medical terms, vaccines work because our immune systems have the ability to learn from previous attacks by foreign agents. Our bodies can experience a pathogen and remember how to fight it next time. It’s remarkable, really, that repeated exposure to a virus or bacterium can make us stronger, not weaker. A vaccine piggybacks on this function of the human immune system by introducing dead or weakened versions of pathogens so our immune system can be trained to fight the real thing. Ultimately, the goal of being vaccinated is that you never have to experience the real virus — your immune system has been trained so well that you don’t even notice that the pathogen has entered your body.

Vaccines are incredibly effective. Which is why, from a spiritual perspective, they are so dangerous.

II.

Two years ago, when I was on mission in South Asia, a friend sent me E. Stanley Jones’ 1925 book of his missionary years in India, which is titled The Christ of the Indian Road. It’s a great book for those interested in the history of Christianity in the region, especially given it was written at a vital juncture in India’s national development., and Jones’ central argument that Christ is just as relevant to Indian culture and society as to Europeans is a fantastic reminder of an important truth. But there is one sentence that stayed with me more than any other, haunting every church service I’ve attended since. In writing about European and American Christendom, Jones laments that “vast areas of the Christian world are inoculated with a mild form of Christianity, and the real thing seems strange and impossible.” Or to put it more bluntly: we are vaccinated against Christ by the way we practice Christianity.

For this analogy to work, we have to momentarily invert our assessment that viruses are bad and vaccines are good. The teachings of Christ — which represented a break from accepted Jewish religious teachings in the first century and were countercultural to much of the world at the time — managed to spread and gain purchase within the hearts and minds of a great many Jews and non-Jews to such an extent that in 300 years the faith went from a fringe cult to the official religion of the Roman Empire and, subsequently, the defining belief system of European civilisation. This incredibly fast change of religion did not happen at swordpoint, but like a viral infection: invading and becoming part of the host’s body before spreading to others, hopping from person to person as they made contact. A more palatable analogy might be that of a flame being passed from candle to candle, illuminating the darkness as it spreads. But that would rob us of the more helpful metaphor of the vaccine. 

If belief in Jesus as the Son of the one true God and also each person’s saviour can be likened to a virus — an idea that spreads incredibly rapidly and takes hold of its hosts, transforming them before using them as a launching pad for more infections — then that means it can be defeated by a vaccine, by something that looks like the virus while training the body to reject the real thing.

III.

Let’s use a slightly less incendiary example before I go completely Kierkegaardian in my attacks on Christendom. The rise of social media and resulting decline in attention spans has led to an increase in people sharing quotes from their favourite writers, and Christians may be at the forefront of this trend, thrilling in the ability to reduce complex philosophical and metaphysical concepts into soundbites. This means that those writers whose ideas can be most reduced, who wrote the most pithy one-liners, become the most heavily valued because their ideas are the most digestible and shareable. This is not to disparage those writers who knew how to turn a phrase. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton (to name two of the most-quoted Christian writers) were incredibly skilled at communicating Christian truths in a comprehensible way, which is no easy task. But they were not setting out to be aphorists. They were highly educated thinkers engaging with important questions of faith and Christian living, and they never intended their work to be shredded into standalone quotes. If you actually read Mere Christianity or Orthodoxy, you are subjected to well-constructed arguments, sentences woven together into complex tapestries. It is a shame to tug out a few brightly coloured threads and walk away. These works are more nuanced and more challenging than you expect, and if you engage with them, you are likely to find an idea or concept that you don’t like — which is a major reason why you should read them. It’s far better to be challenged by a well-written book than soothed by an affirming quote.

The danger of engaging with a writer through quotes that you enjoy is that you think you understand them, you think their worldview aligns with your own, and so you preclude the possibility that they may hold views different from what you expect (and that they may be right and you may be wrong). It seems there are many who prefer this way of engaging with Christian writing instead of doing the harder but more rewarding work of actually grappling with the perspectives these high-quality thinkers are communicating. For example, I do not agree with everything Chesterton writes because I am not a Catholic, but I find engaging with his ideas on saints and stigmata extremely rewarding, partially because I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything. I don’t want to be vaccinated against his most challenging views because I’ve already placed him into a neat category in my mind.

The other danger of engaging with formidable thinkers by way of quotable phrases instead of their actual writing is that you are more easily fooled by fake quotes. There is seemingly no end to the number of quotes that have been attributed to Lewis, many of which are halfway plausible on first glance given how prolific he was (the C. S. Lewis foundation has to maintain a webpage just to combat this phenomenon). My most favourite is the fake Screwtape politics letter, purporting to be from Lewis’ epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters, which is regularly shared across the internet during election seasons. If you’ve read the book, it’s immediately clear that this is not the kind of thing Lewis would have written in the UK in 1941. And yet, because people have formed a view of who C. S. Lewis is and what he stands for, you can slap his name on a string of words and people will eat it up.

IV.

If we can agree that engaging with writers like Lewis or Chesterton (or Augustine or Aquinas) only at the level of their most pithy quotes is a poor substitute for actually reading their books, and that it can actually numb your ability to properly engage with them, can we agree that the same dynamic plays out every week in churches across the world?

Let’s imagine three types of churchgoers who sit near each other on plastic chairs on a Sunday morning: a passionate new convert, a longstanding and dutiful believer, and an irregular attendee who could be called a backslider. Who is more in danger of being vaccinated against Christ? Counterintuitively, it’s the longstanding believer. The dutiful, religious Christian who is the backbone of every church is the most susceptible to missing the forest for the trees, most at risk of missing Christ for all the Christianity. This happens whenever we water down the harder sayings of Jesus to reassure ourselves that we really are good Christians, despite not giving our money to the poor and making financial decisions from a place of fear. This happens wherever we sanitise the emotions we are permitted to feel within church so that only those of positive victory are expressed. This happens whenever we transform the Gospel into a moral self-improvement project and build our liturgical seasons around sermon series like ‘How to Have a Better Marriage’, ‘Managing Stress God's Way’, or ‘Five5 Keys to Financial Peace.’. These are all ways we vaccinate ourselves against what early Jesus followers referred to simply as ‘the Way’ — following Christ with your whole life, no matter the cost. We put Jesus’ actions and teachings into a box that suits us, we are susceptible to skewed or untrue versions of Jesus, and slowly become good Christians who are no longer willing to accept the Christ who says or does difficult or confusing things, who cuts across our selfish and fleshly natures.

The passionate convert is caught up in that first feverish experience of being infected with the foreign pathogen of Christ, and the irregular attendee is in the midst of wrestling with the virus of Christian belief. Neither are neutral, neither are lukewarm, neither have acquiesced to that ‘moderated religion’ that Lewis warned of in The Screwtape Letters (yes, I am hypocritically using a Lewis quote that suits my point). And while it’s true that neither the passion of the new convert nor the doubt of the irregular attendee are permanent states of being, the vaccinated state of the longstanding believer who can no longer be overwhelmed by Christ may be the most dangerous. It may be that this is the type of person Jesus warns of in Revelation 3:16.

As a longstanding believer myself — who was raised in a Christian family and who never had a dramatic conversion or a long drawn-out struggle with God — I am concerned by how little concern many churches seem to have about believers like me. We are in danger of numbness, of moderation, of being vaccinated against God. And because there are so many of us, we are in danger of creating herd immunity within churches. Our vaccinated state can prevent the more passionate amongst us from truly following Christ, because in our majority, we prevent Christ from getting into our churches. When I read the Gospels or Paul’s letters, it seems that there must be a way to follow Jesus with the passionate love of a disciple and the wrestling doubts of a backslider while still growing in maturity and wisdom. I believe that passion and doubt and maturity do not have to be mutually exclusive. But where are the shepherds to lead us on this narrow and winding path? Where are the doctors who know how to combat the dangers of spiritual vaccination? 

V.

Jesus came to give people the opportunity to be one with God, this much is clear from his prayer at the Last Supper (John 17:20–23). And oneness with God cannot merely mean mental assent to certain facts or continuation of tradition or being part of a community of like-minded people. These are all good things, of course, but they are second-order good things. They are not the main good thing.

Just as we cannot get to know Lewis or Chesterton or any serious writer on the basis of a few pithy quotes, we are foolish to think following Christ is about attending church or serving our communities or evangelising or studying the Bible or tithing or prayer. It is all of these things, but it is much higher and deeper than any of these things. As Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, being a follower of Christ is an all-in living sacrifice. And if we don’t find this to be both an agony (like the irregular attendee) and an ecstasy (like the passionate convert), then we may be doing something wrong. If we believe Jesus when He says that most will not walk through the narrow gate (Matt. 7:13–14) and instead will betray Him at the end times (Matt. 24:10–12), it may be because of how inoculated many of us have become to His actual teachings. It may turn out that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was allowing us to be so comfortable in our Christianity that we no longer have any need for Christ.