Labels can be useful… until they aren’t. They help locate us, find each other and build a shared language. They suggest a shape to a self that sometimes feels a need to be shaped. But the self they point to is never fixed, never finished, never the full truth.

I wore my first label at secondary school. When my friends began wearing badges on the inside of their lapels (the closest to rebellion our school would allow) I didn’t know what Yes or Led Zeppelin meant so I wore an Abba badge because it was the only music I was allowed to listen to at home. This taught me that labels can get you into trouble.

Labels can also be confusing. I stopped using the title ‘Reverend’ when a group of school governors began apologising to me every time they swore. It was clearly an impediment. Both conservative and liberal Christians have called themselves ‘Evangelicals’ at different moments in history, but for each it meant something completely different.

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Simon’s excellent post rightly identifies two problems with a brand of Christianity he grew up with: an obsession with ‘personal’ sin and a simplistic package called ‘salvation’ bear little resemblance to the actual message of Jesus. We are witnessing what happens when deep theological ideas are reduced to a transactional formula, the binary nature of which is well designed to produce converts, most of whom are either unwilling or unable to follow Jesus. Simon is correct: the Church, as it was designed post-Constantine, was neutered and appropriated by the same class of people Jesus opposed. 

Simon is also right that it is significant that Jesus did not reject his Jewish heritage. I love his suggestion that “the teaching of Jesus [was] a kind of ‘gene therapy’ for Judaism”. You can’t be a prophet from outside an institution. But Jesus’ followers weren’t schooled by Jesus to be prophets. Rather they were apprenticed and sent out to be ambassadors for the Jesus who was roundly rejected by those who wished to retain their hold on the religious institution.

The only disagreement I have with Simon up to this point is his dismissal of John’s Gospel as ‘trippy’. John’s Gospel is a work of genius – for reasons I have explored at some length in my own Substack blog. Whilst these early followers of Jesus were permitted to attend places of Jewish worship, those who were seeking to model themselves on Jesus’ distinctive teachings called themselves ‘followers of The Way’ with every intention of becoming a new stream within Judaism. They were first named those of The Way in Acts 9, and again by Paul in Acts 22 and 24, which suggests to me that the term ‘Christian’ hadn’t yet been coined. In Acts 24 Paul also refers twice to them as a Jewish sect which affirms my view.

The title ‘Christian’ may even have been given to followers of Jesus by others. We read in Acts 11 that “the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch”. Today branding is everything, but Jesus never suggested any label he wanted his followers to adopt. The assumption in the early days was that his disciples would carry on worshipping in the Temple and their synagogues, which of course was exactly what happened. They were Jews, and had no need to define themselves differently. Those followers were eventually rejected by the synagogues they attended in the years following Jesus’ death and were forced to start anew. 

There were also Gentiles who wanted to follow Jesus which soon became a point of tension. Most of Paul’s letters were written to address the divisive question whether a convert should become a Jew first, and then a fully-fledged follower of Jesus. Paul insisted a desire to follow Jesus didn’t need a detour through Judaism, but Peter and others thought differently. Paul won the argument and the break between Judaism and The Way was now permanent.

All this really means is that what we call ourselves doesn’t matter. Except that to some people it does. Simon rightly mentions that Christian can be a way of referring to the existence of ‘little Christs’ and, if this was the way the term was understood today, I wouldn’t be writing this post. 

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To quote myself in a previous blog post:

“If you are bold enough to allow someone to be a mentor and a guide it seems to me that a minimum requirement is to take what they say and do seriously. The very word ‘Christian’ implies someone is in the camp of ‘Christ’, and yet most of us take the majority of our theology from [misunderstanding] Paul.

Thinking again, maybe Christianity is named rightly since ‘Christ’ is not a surname but a title. It means ‘Messiah’ or ‘Saviour’. So maybe in calling ourselves Christians we are just being honest: yes to being Messiahed, but no to the call to follow Jesus.”

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Which brings me to my point of departure from the conclusion reached by my good friend who writes of his own ambition to one day be seen by others as a ‘Little Christ’. From this day forward I refuse to use the label ‘Christian‘, and maybe for the same reason Simon retains it.

If you are a follower of Jesus, I am not disowning you, and I don’t mind what you call me. But if you aren’t, I don’t want any label I use to give you a reason for not looking more closely at my life. This is important to me because nearly everyone I am currently connected to has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with organised religion. Many of these friends have told me harrowing stories of being disappointed, rejected or abused by Christian churches. For them, the numerous stories of clerical abuse of power and status by individuals in Christian churches of all kinds are mirroring their own real-world experiences. To my mind, the accounts of abuse have filled the news for so long that they outweigh the many more instances of followers of Jesus running food banks, excellent community projects and youth work which still go on in villages, towns and cities all across our land. It is my judgement that, for my friends at least, the label that no longer seems to define me represents all the things they no longer trust. I agree with Jim Palmer:

“The crisis unfolding around Christianity may not simply be a rejection of Jesus. In many cases, it may reflect growing disillusionment with the systems, power structures, certainty frameworks, identity formations, and institutional distortions constructed around him over centuries. Many people who reject Christianity are not necessarily rejecting compassion, liberation, forgiveness, contemplation, human dignity, nonviolence, radical belonging, or the critique of domination and hypocrisy associated with Jesus’ teachings. In some cases, they are leaving precisely because institutional religion has betrayed those values.”

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My original post closed with a conversation between a couple of American Christians at the top of the US government that shocked me at the time, but has since been joined by so many more crass, cruel and violent statements that there is no longer any shock factor. I have removed the conversation from this revised post because it now weakens my argument – my rejection of the label Christian is not a reaction against anyone. It is in solidarity with those who have been, and are still being, damaged by people in positions of power who define themselves as Christians that I no longer want to wear that badge. The label Christian has become irredeemably toxic.

Although I’m tempted to berate myself as a coward for abandoning a label that’s defined me for 50 years I choose to define my stand as a sign of strength, given that it opens me to misrepresentation and misunderstanding.  The world has changed dramatically. I have also changed, although I am still trying to live my life according to what I believe to be godly wisdom embodied by Jesus. I note that Jesus chose to build bridges for individuals the religion of his day were unconcerned about, and I feel that the term Christian now implies all the wrong things, and has come to represent almost nothing I currently live for. It has become a cultural denotation and, although I live within that culture, I am rejecting its trivial and obscene values.

Simon wishes to become a Little Christ. I want my life to look like Jesus. There is absolutely no difference between these two sentences and, because we are friends, we are on a journey to achieving our goal together. And for that reason I am thankful.

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In the months since leaving the label Christian behind, I came across these beautifully honest words:

Now… living without the label is preferable to pretending it still describes me.

Perhaps this is a revision. The ongoing project of becoming more honest about what I actually see when looking at my life, my values, my experience of being alive in this strange and indifferent and beautiful world. This is not a loss of faith. It is a clarification of it.

The vows I took in good faith are now, in equal good faith, being returned. The commitments made by the person I was belong to that person. The person I am becoming cannot keep them. Both those people meant what they said.