John Green, the author of the mega-hit The Fault in Our Stars, recently posted a video titled “My Religion.” Green is, by all accounts, a tremendously successful and thoughtful man: He’s a New York Times bestselling author (with over 50 million books sold), a global health advocate dedicated to fighting tuberculosis, and, with his brother Hank, the co-host of a tremendously popular YouTube channel that boasts millions of subscribers. He’s even been listed in Time magazine as one of the “most influential people in the world (2014).
But this video, however sincere, is a very shallow snapshot of what I’ve termed “earthward” Christianity—a spiritually horizontal enterprise that privileges the earthly over the heavenly.
Green, an Episcopalian, opens by cautioning that Christianity is “tremendously diverse,” and that his beliefs might appear “unorthodox or even heretical” to some people. He then answers the questions he gets asked most often about religion, beginning with the first: “Do you believe in God?” His answer is affirmative, but with no small qualification: God, he says, might really be a human construct, one that “becomes” real “by virtue of shared belief.”
In other words, “God” might not really exist at all, not apart from human thought and speech.
Next, Green tackles the afterlife: “The problem with the afterlife,” he says, borrowing from Harper Lee, “is that you spend all your time in this world preparing for the next.” Eternity, he argues, makes this life “irrelevant” by comparison: “What’s one hundred years next to hundreds of trillions of years?” As a result, religious people spend all their time on earth with their backs turned to it. Instead, Green argues, we should get to work in this world, together, defending the oppressed, poor, and marginalized. He also holds a “radical hope” that forgiveness is available to us not only in life but even “beyond death.”
What about the Bible? Does Green believe it’s the literal Word of God?
Not so much: “Text is inherently figurative,” he answers. “Text is scratches on a page that we turn into ideas in our head. That’s a figurative experience.” Green then emphasizes the historicity of the sacred texts and the application of our own “interpretative lens” to them: “There’s a lot in the Bible that I find out of step with my worldview,” he explains. “I don’t believe that my friends who are divorced are separated from God’s love because of that divorce, even though Jesus says otherwise.”
Does Green believe in evolution? His answer is tongue-in-cheek: “Yeah, I also believe in a heliocentric solar system and that the Earth is round.” Does he believe in “trans rights and marriage equality”? “I do. I simply believe that being the person God made you to be cannot separate you from God’s love.”
He has a much harder time, he admits, with the question of why evil exists: “For me, ‘everything happens for a reason’ kind of worldviews just aren’t sufficient because I’ve seen too many things that definitely didn’t happen for a reason” (“at least not a reason I can fathom,” he added on screen postproduction).
Does he think Christianity is the “right” religion? “No, I don’t labor under the delusion that Christianity is a better religious tradition than other ones—or for that matter, that those who reject religion are wrong.” Why, then, is Green a Christian? Because he’s “a worshipful creature” and enjoys prayer, which “is like an exercise of my empathy muscles.” And does he worry about the soul of his brother, Hank, an atheist? “No, I do not. Because in almost every way, we are called by the same voice. We disagree about where the voice comes from—I think it comes from on high, you think it’s of and from the world—but we agree that the voice calls humans to try to make a world that is more equitable, less hierarchical, and less marked by injustice.” Fighting over “where” the voice comes from is “a waste of time” because “there’s so much work to do.”
Now, to be fair, Green wasn’t making any kind of religious argument here; he was simply expressing his personal views about religion, honestly and informally. But as he laid out his positions, I couldn’t help but think of the great dilemmas of the history of ideas—the tug-of-war between heavenly and earthly categories—and how Christianity transcends those dilemmas. An important part of this picture of “the Way of heaven and earth” is that it’s always the heavenly that has the primacy and takes the lead. And what struck me in Green’s video is how consistently he risks inverting that order, making the earthly primary. He’s not wrong, of course, that the earthly matters—even that it matters a great deal—but across the board, it seems to take center stage for him.
Take Green’s approach to the two greatest dilemmas: God or man, and the next world or this world. In both cases, he places all the emphasis on the earthly (man and this world), rendering the heavenly (God and the next world) secondary, even nonexistent. For Green, God may well be a mere epiphenomenon of our minds and heaven a mere distraction from this world. In framing Christianity this way, he seems to be guarding against a heavenward distortion—a Gnostic Christianity that would cut man and the world out of the picture.
But while he’s right to resist that path, its earthward opposite isn’t the solution; traditional Christianity is. The Church Fathers resisted both the heavenward and earthward extremes; they fought vigorously against Gnosticism’s flight to heaven—and, conversely, for our attention to earth. The paradox is captured in a line of Saint Augustine’s referenced by Pope Leo XIV in 2006, however much it sounds to our twentieth-century ears like a heavenward fuga mundi: “The life of mortal life is the hope of an everlasting life.”
In all the other dilemmas Green touches on in his video—unity or diversity, the Word of God or the words of men, contemplation or action, truth or love, sexual order or openness, religion or science, Christianity or world religions, etc.—the same pattern unfurls again and again. He lays such a strong emphasis on the earthly that the heavenly is reduced to a sort of decorative frame or optional enhancement.
This is the whole spirit of liberal theology—an embrace of the “here and now” at the expense of the “not here and not yet”—and it’s in steep decline. One thinks not only of the collapse of mainline Protestant denominations, but also, in my Catholic context, of the emptying of pews in more liberal churches, cities, and countries. However sincere its adherents may be, liberal Christianity mimics the moves of secularism while maintaining a veneer of religion, without really offering either in the end. It’s a byway between traditional religion and postmodern ideology—a dwindling church soon to be converted into a quiet art center. It’s a sterile spirituality, an uncompelling Christianity.
Recent polls are showing a slight uptick of interest in religion, especially among young people. It’s unclear whether this is an aberration or the new normal—and, if the latter, whether we’ll see a heavenward counterreaction or a move to the faith both “ever ancient and ever new.” But it’s increasingly clear that any recovery of Christianity, in the long term, won’t be of John Green’s earthward variety—and that Christianity, and the whole Western world, will be better for having left it behind.
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I have a hard time taking this guy (Green, to be clear) seriously.
This Catholic website has successfully illustrated that anyone can say they profess Christianity but come nowhere near the truth. This article affirms for me that ONLY IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH does the fullness of the Faith reside. All the rest may as well be disregarded as a bloody waste of time and ink.
PS To be considered an “influencer” in this bankrupt culture of our doesn’t really convey much of anything.
Thank you. Poor guy looks like a mess. Only teenagers can consume his cotton candy without heartburn. We are made for the Word of God, our Eternal Food. (John 6:55).
God cannot be changed to satisfy the shallow sentiments of some meretricious scribbler.
“Remember that Jesus Christ, a descendant of David, was raised from the dead. You can depend on this: If we have died with Him, we shall also live with Him; if we hold out to the end, we shall also reign with Him. But if we deny Him, He will deny us. If we are unfaithful, He will still remain faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.” (2 Timothy 2:8, 11-13)
Another incarnation of Anglican Bishop Robinson’s “God is dead “ theology of the 60’s ?
“I don’t believe that my friends who are divorced are separated from God’s love because of that divorce, even though Jesus says otherwise.”
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I think it’s the re-marriage aspect that can be a problem.
Precisely, mrscracker. Civil divorce never annuls a marriage validly contracted in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
Clearly he is confused and emotionally and intellectually restless–“My heart is restless until it rests in you.” The only good news here is, while misguided, perhaps his thoughtful nature will lead him to discover the absolute truth of the Catholic faith and he is deserving of our prayers.
He could have just said “No, I’m not actually a Christian. Next video.” Poor man.
Thank you; your comment was significantly briefer but better said than my comment.
This is clearly not even an “earthward” form of Christianity. I’m not sure why anyone would be interested in his take on anything spiritual.
I must confess, I find myself with a rather wearied impression concerning the practical outworkings of Episcopalian tenets. I consistently observe a particular recurrence of pastoral misapprehensions amongst certain adherents. Of course, I acknowledge the possibility that my observations may spring from an exposure to but a circumscribed segment of their communion.
Yet, for me, at the very heart of the matter lies the primacy of foundational Christological doctrine. For if, indeed, there was a Crucifixion, then the profound, indeed universal, necessity of a Savior is unveiled—a necessity not confined to those who presently bear the Christian name, but one that embraces the whole of humanity. Therefore, it follows inexorably that Jesus Christ stands as the superlative meaning of existence for all mankind. His teachings, consequently, do not merely supplement, but rather transcend and complete the insights of all other religious traditions.
Twenty years before COVID, a high-level alert was issued about the nervous-system degenerative disease in cattle, called “mad cow disease”…
About which: “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” (BSE), is a fatal neurological disease in cattle that results from a prion, an abnormal protein. While there was a speculative concern at the time, humans cannot contract mad cow disease, however they can develop a related, fatal human disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) by consuming contaminated products from infected cattle. The incubation period was said to be maybe twenty years.
The question is whether this guy Green might have been one of the very few unlucky ones (barely two dozen) who might have become infected by consuming too many tainted beef hamburgers back in the day.
His lines of reasoning trail off into neurological incoherence “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Not really Shakespearean, the resemblance is unmistakable between Green’s “earthward” Christianity and a trail of green bovine feces–the real “decorative frame or optional enhancement.”
https://www.google.com/search?q=Creutzfeldt-Jakob+disease+(vCJD+and+iron+deregulation&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari&sei=Bel_aKmAHIaBqtsPrtH0qQo
That being said, Only God, The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Who Proceeds From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Has The Ability And Desire to take us from Death to Life Everlasting.
Thus we can know through both Faith and Reason, that The Most Holy Blessed Trinity, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque ), As The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, Is The Author of our Inherent, Unalienable Right To Life, To Liberty, And To The Pursuit Of Happiness, The Purpose of which can only be, what God intended.
We are here to learn how to Love one another according to The Word Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Incarnate, Our Savior, Jesus The Christ.
At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved.
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“What’s one hundred years next to hundreds of trillions of years?” Mr. Green has the formula and its consequences backwards. Man has infinite value because he lives forever. Otherwise, what difference does it make to live one year (or even nine months in utero) or 100 years? That is nothing compared to eternity. History is clear: Those who concentrate solely on making the Earth into a heaven inevitably create a living hell. While striving for the benefit of “humanity,” humans end up getting crushed in the gears of totalitarian altruism.
The claim that man has “infinite value” requires a proportional amount of pride and arrogance; a fantastical, almost unfathomable and limitless amount of arrogance. Religious folks can only see themselves in dumbed-down, simplistic, binary terms. If God exists, life has infinite worth, but if not, life is completely worthless and meaningless. Good people go here, bad people go there, etc. It’s comical due to how childlike the thinking is. Life has some reasonable amount of value, but it’s certainly not infinity, which isn’t even a real quantity anyway.
Yes, it’s childish how simplistic your thinking is. And how juvenile, posting your atheistic bigotry on a Catholic website.
It’s difficult to see that something which by its nature is finite in its essence can have any quality which is infinite.
Perhaps John Green should consider a book titled, “Iron Deregulation Is Everything.”
Just a thought:
tuberculosis and iron deregulation – Google Search
tuberculosis and hepcidin – Google Search
another name for Furin – Google Search
treating tuberculosis by using hepcidin to draw out iron – Google Search
🙏✝️💕🌹
“As a result, religious people spend all their time on earth with their backs turned to it.”
Quite the contrary; no one does more to serve all people than Christians!
“we should get to work in this world, together, defending the oppressed, poor, and marginalized”
Exactly what Christians do.
He is a misguided soul developing an ideology while looking in the mirror; it reflects only him!