Posted by Roberta Grimes • March 08, 2025 • 0 Comment
Book News, Jesus
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, See his banners go!
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers, On to victory.
Hell’s foundations quiver At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices, Loud your anthems raise.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)
Last week we considered the entire history of Christianity to date, trying to summarize two thousand complex and too often bloody and venal years in a few quick paragraphs. Of course, my own problems with Christianity began when I was eight years old, and I was awakened at what I think was four in the morning by a brilliant flash of light and then the comforting voice of my spirit guide. Because of that light and that voice, I began so young to disdain kiddie Sunday School, and instead I was glad to attend grownup church. I began to read the Bible repeatedly from cover to cover when I was eleven, and my college major had to be early Christian history. I was eager back then to learn so much more! And my college advisor, Miss Corwin, took me to a much deeper personal understanding and love for Jesus than I ever had found even in gownup church, together with a resentment of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s role that I have never in my life managed to get over.
While it was my childhood experience of light that first transformed me into an eager Christian, it was my college major that much later soured me on the Roman Christianity that has long been the world’s most prominent religion. Now I look at Christians that I respect, and especially the smartest ones, the ones that I know love and honor Jesus, and sometimes I want to say to them, “Oh my very dear one, how can you possibly believe all that Christianity as a religion still insists that you must believe? My darling, where in this is your mind?” But I never actually do say that to anyone.
The core Roman Christian teaching is that Jesus was born pure and sinless so He could then assume all of humankind’s sins, and He could suffer and die for all of us as our pure sacrifice to God. And you know that makes no sense at all. Just think about it! That whole idea is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. Please consider what it says about both of them. God gentlly insists that you and I must learn to forgive whatever happens to us in order for us to grow spiritually. And yet God is not willing to forgive us for anything unless God first gets to watch God’s own Son being tortured and murdered? Does that make sense? And Jesus taught us for three and a half years the greatest wisdom of all the ages, but when it comes right down to it, Jesus’s greatest and most sacred role is not to teach us anything, but rather it is just to be our blood-sacrifice to God for our sins? He is a sacrificial lamb, dumb and mute, and nothing more? When we truly love and respect God, and when we also truly love and respect Jesus, each in their own pure and perfect light, we can see that none of this makes sense. Obviously, it makes no spiritual sense! But even beyond that, it makes no literal, factual, objective sense when we actively apply to it our God-given minds. It is frankly and on every level a fundamentally stupid idea.
It was wonderful Miss Corwin very long ago who first pointed all of this out to me. I can remember that seminal afternoon in her study to this day, her somewhat disorderly books and papers, and how angry at some long-dead Roman Emperor named Constantine she still was, that he had fabricated this nonsensical dogma that made fools of both God and man, and then he had formed his own version of Christianity around his dumb idea. To me, at barely nineteen, she looked to be maybe old enough to herself have known that ancient Roman Emperor personally. And yet, she probably was not even as old then as I am now.
It is said that if you love hot dogs, then you never should watch hot dogs being made. And the same can surely be said of Christianity! I began college as an ardently devout Christian who was planning to become a minister. But by the time I graduated from college, my Christian feelings were deeply nuanced. I still kept my daily Bible-reading habit; and in fact, I kept that up into my early fifties. I still loved Jesus, and even more deeply, just as Miss Corwin very deeply loved Jesus; but then a few years later I met the love of my life. Edward was and remains an ardent Catholic, so that ended my ambitions toward entering the Protestant clergy! And after I had watched Christianity being made at the First Council of Nicaea, I had kind of lost my taste for Constantine’s brand of Christianity, anyway.
My Thomas is the lead author of these weekly offerings for you, and he wants me to point out whenever I mention First Nicaea in any way derisively that it did accomplish two very good things:
My much-beloved Thomas reminds us that the First Nicaean Councilors could so easily have filled their Bible with Jesus spouting lots of invented nonsense taken from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s ideas! And you and I would be none the wiser. Nowhere do we find Jesus saying, “I go to the cross now to die for your sins!” or anything like that sort of nonsense. Thomas tells me that he and Jesus were indeed actually present at the First Council of Nicaea, gently influencing the Councilors’ minds at key moments, and keeping pure the Christian Bible that resulted from their efforts. As a result, the Bible that Roman Christianity uses now is one that Jesus’s followers still will be able to use, even after Constantine’s faulty religion eventually fades.
And speaking of the long decline of Roman Christianity, which is something that we have been expecting, it may be a bit longer in coming than we have been imagining would be the case. A recent Pew poll suggests that, in the United States at least, the decline of Roman Christianity has slowed, and it may now even have effectively been halted. The Pew Research Center calls itself a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C. which provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. It recently surveyed more than thirty-five thousand American adults across all fifty states, making this one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. The results of this most recent survey are striking:
Christianity experienced a steep decline percentage-wise in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. In 1990, roughly 90% of Americans still identified as Christians, which seems to be an astonishing statistic when you learn that by 2007, that percentage had already dropped to 78%. The last major Pew religious survey prior to the one just conducted was in 2014, and it recorded Christians at 65%. Pew calls it “not insignificant” that the steepest declines took place during the eight Obama years.
Some observers note that there seems to be a correlation between the decline of religious feeling and political leftism. For example, as was noted above, the steepest decline in Christian religious feeling in the United States in recent years seems to have happened during Barack Obama’s leftist presidency. And over several years beginning in 2020, more traditionally leftist Canada to America’s north devoted some three hundred and twenty million dollars to finding any evidence at all that nineteenth-century Christian schools for indigenous children there had buried many of those children in unmarked graves, which project inspired quite a lot of anti-Christian Canadian hatred. When little to no evidence for such a travesty could be found, after a few years the project was abandoned, but not without the waste of so many millions of dollars and the vandalizing or the outright burning down of fifty-five Canadian churches.
It feels comforting to find that the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians seems to be perhaps no longer declining! If this percentage eventually stabilizes at something like fifty percent of Americans who are still willing to hold to Roman Christianity with its deep flaws in dogma in order to keep their relationship with Jesus, and also their relationship with our culture’s old-time religion, well then, perhaps we might gently re-mold Roman Christianity into something more loving and less fear-based. Edward tells me that some old Catholic traditions, like confession, simply don’t seem to happen anymore. However, even gentling the old religion now would still leave some forty percent of formerly Christian Americans without a real spiritual home. And what we still don’t know for sure is what Jesus wants to do now for those who have fallen away from Roman Christianity but still want a relationship with Him.
Pew tells us that ninety percent of Americans were professed Christians thirty-five years ago, and that percentage has declined by one-third now. So it is worth asking what those thirty percent of Americans who already have abandoned the Christian religion are doing today for their spiritual sustenance. Jesus has lately suggested to Thomas and me that for those who have left Roman Christianity, He intends to begin His original Way once again. “The Way” was Jesus’s movement that thrived during the three centuries following His death and resurrection, and it quickly grew to millions of people before Constantine destroyed it. Jesus and Thomas have channeled through me two books that Jesus tells us His new Way will use, and He has asked us to begin a website called teachingsbyjesus.com that will not become fully operational until He tells us how He wants us to complete it. And so, my dear ones, here we are. We have framed our blog post this week with the swashbuckling words of a hymn that I recall so well from my childhood spent attending and loving grownup church. I smile to find that there still is life and a possible way forward for the old-time religion that I once loved, and Thomas and I are talking now about writing for next week a post about what it might take to save it. And meanwhile, in the timeless, glorious reality where Jesus now plans His eternal Way’s next stage, we are watching Jesus, and wondering, and waiting for His next stage to begin.
Like a mighty army Moves the Church of God;
Brothers, we are treading Where the Saints have trod.
We are not divided; All one body we:
One in hope and doctrine, One in charity.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Onward, then, ye people; Join our happy throng.
Blend with ours your voices In the triumph song:
Glory, laud, and honor Unto Christ, the King.
This through countless ages Men and angels sing.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
