Faith Without Works

I want to be upfront about something before I say any of this: I'm an atheist. I was raised in a Catholic household, went through the rituals, absorbed the teachings, and somewhere along the way decided I didn't believe in God. That's my honest position, and I'm not here to argue anyone out of theirs.

What I am here to say is that a lot of what Christianity teaches makes complete sense to me, separate from the question of whether God exists. Love your neighbor. Give to the poor. Care for the sick. Don't build yourself up above others. Don't judge people for the same things you do yourself. These aren't just religious instructions. They're a pretty solid blueprint for how to be a decent human being, and you don't need to believe in an afterlife to see that.

I don't avoid cruelty because I'm afraid of being punished by an all-knowing god. I avoid it because it's wrong. The outcome is the same. The reasoning is different. And frankly, I think the reasoning matters less than what you actually do.

Which is why I'm genuinely confused by what I'm watching right now.

The Teachings, As I Understand Them

I'm not a theologian, but I did sit through enough Sunday masses to pick up the main ideas. Jesus spent his time with the poor, the sick, the outcast, and the marginalized. He fed people who were hungry. He healed people who couldn't afford to be healed. He told a crowd ready to stone a woman that whoever among them was without sin should throw the first rock. Nobody threw a rock.

He didn't spend his time accumulating power or demanding loyalty. He washed feet. He said the meek would inherit the earth. He said it was harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

These aren't obscure passages. These are the core of the thing.

What I'm Watching Doesn't Match

So help me understand how someone who calls themselves a Christian squares that faith with the following.

Families seeking asylum being treated as an infestation to be removed rather than as human beings seeking safety. The very institutions built to feed the hungry and care for the sick being dismantled in the name of efficiency. And a political leader whose name and image are plastered on everything from Bibles to gold coins, who speaks in the language of divine mission, who demands loyalty that starts to look less like political support and more like worship.

That last one in particular. There's a commandment specifically about that. It's near the top of the list.

I understand that politics is complicated and that people vote based on many factors. I'm not saying everyone who votes a certain way is a bad Christian. What I'm saying is that the loudest voices claiming the Christian mantle right now seem to be advancing an agenda that is in direct conflict with what that faith actually teaches.

You can support those policies. That's your right. But maybe don't claim you're doing it in the name of Christ, because from where I'm standing, someone who never believed in any of it in the first place can see pretty clearly that it isn't.

Let's Say I'm Wrong

I'll give you this scenario. Let's assume you're right and I'm wrong. There is a heaven, and one day you find yourself at the pearly gates. Saint Peter is there, and he sits you down for a performance review.

He asks how you lived your life. You tell him you followed Christ's teachings. You went to church. You said the prayers. And then he opens the ledger and reviews your actual words, your actual actions, your actual deeds.

Do you think your rhetoric about immigrants is going to help your case? The language that treated desperate families as vermin, as criminals, as an infestation? Do you think your bigotry toward gay people makes you pure in his eyes?

Because I'm pretty sure there was no caveat on "love thy neighbor." It didn't say love thy neighbor unless they crossed a border without paperwork. It didn't say love thy neighbor unless they love someone you don't approve of. And even if you believe homosexuality is a sin, isn't that God's job to judge? Since when did that authority get delegated down to you?

The same crowd that quotes scripture at dinner tables and puts crosses on their lawns has spent years throwing the first stone at people they've already decided are beneath them. That's not faith. That's tribalism wearing a cross.

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

The Bible talks a lot about false prophets. About people who perform faith publicly but don't live it privately. About wolves in sheep's clothing. I'm not the one who wrote any of that. I'm just reading it.

If the teachings matter, they have to matter in practice, not just in declaration. Faith without works, as the book of James puts it, is dead.

I'm an atheist who seems to believe in the teachings of Jesus more than some of the people who claim to follow him. I don't know exactly what to do with that. But I think it's worth saying out loud.