Losing Green’s Religion

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.