religious memory loss

One symbol of our post religious time is that the religious folks among us have lost their memories. Culturally we have forgotten what is means to be a person of Christian faith or followers of Jesus. So we say think that are clearly unbiblical wrap them in patriotic words and call it religion. Diana Bass Butler writes about this dilemma recently on the Huffington Post.

At the present juncture of history, Western Christianity is suffering from a bad case of spiritual amnesia. Even those who claim to be devout or conservative often know little about the history of their faith traditions. Our loss of memory began more than two centuries ago, at the high tide of the Enlightenment. As modern society developed, the condition of broken memory — being disconnected from the past — became more widespread. Indeed, in the words of one French Catholic thinker, the primary spiritual dilemma of contemporary religion is the “loss and reconstruction” of memory.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/is-western-christianity-s_b_554231.html

When we get into this memory loss or maybe memory block, then we forget that Jesus didn’t come for the church but those disconnected from God. We forget that Jesus critiqued the religious institutions of the day as not being in touch with God’s mission. We forget that the Christian  faith  did not start with our most recent experience of it. We forgot that Jesus Christ calls us to sacrifice for the other and not preservation of self. We forget what it means to live faithfully beyond religious patterns. This is who we got to a post religious world and why we need a post religious church