Spiritual Data: New Christian Behaviors

Christianity represents three distinct classes:

  1. An incredibly small minority of tested believers who do not demonstrate any of the below traits. They are often clergy, but can sometimes simply be within the laity, and the Holy Spirit’s presence often gives them tremendous influence.
  2. A very significant minority of legitimate believers who haven’t had their faith tested heavily by fire yet and perform many specific out-of-place behaviors as a consequence.
  3. A dramatic majority of likely or potential believers who have false beliefs, but they imitate the culture of the significant minority.

Most stereotypes and opinions about Christianity come from those last two classes.

Human nature has certain universal qualities, and God is most certainly the same God throughout all history. So, when He begins a new work on a Christian, people will always show the same approximate characteristics, with a variance coming through the scope of their personality and culture.

Legitimate Christians don’t exhibit these behaviors for very long, probably 1–4 years. Eventually, they’ll keep building healthier habits and put their spiritual infancy behind them. However, it’s a weird time, and it has shown itself with the same silly representations across two millennia.

Odd Doctrines

Anti-denominational sentiments.

  • Anti-Catholic over their vast variety of rituals.
  • Anti-Protestant over their limited scope of ritual.
  • Belief that one denomination is more spiritual or correct than the rest.
  • Belief that everyone in a particular denomination with a false doctrine is also non-Christian as a result.

Belief in extraterrestrials, potentially interpreting or referring to God Himself as an alien entity.

  • Technically, God is an extraterrestrial, but also our Creator, so there’s a much greater power discrepancy than simply a difference in technology or understanding.
  • If other sentient life existed in this universe, those people would look stunningly close to us (i.e., be in God’s image as well), and they’d have a similar story to our Garden of Eden.

Pantheistic leanings, which imply that all (or several) faiths point to the same God.

  • World religion theologies are logically incompatible, so someone is clearly wrong.
  • There’s a clear set of consequences for non-practitioners of any faith, so there will always be some type of exclusivity based on some type of condition, even if it’s simply purgatory or nonexistence.

Assertion that the scientific community’s long-term time estimations have authority.

  • Science itself is a powerful mechanism for understanding reality, but scientists are a community of fallen people, mostly atheists, who are usually trying to make everything in their environment completely certain, even when things can’t be certain.
  • The other end of this extreme is the assertion that the scientific community’s assertions are entirely wrong about empirically known things.

Odd non-Christian beliefs that closely identify with Christian values (e.g., Rastafarianism, Mormonism).

Extremism

Absolute terror about committing an unpardonable sin, typically including “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” (Mark 3:28–29).

  • They typically haven’t internalized God’s undying love and have contextualized one Bible verse against the context of many other far more articulated parts of Scripture (e.g., a Christian’s new identity).
  • Every sin can be forgiven, and has been in Christ, but that doesn’t mean it always feels that way.

Moral extremism, typically about things they previously idolized.

  • They tend to attack their interpretation of things much more than the moral reality of those things.
  • Their efforts must stay contained toward their sins, and then expand only to the things they have legitimate influence over.

Treating their body as a despicable, awful thing they must perpetually damage or thwart.

  • While our flesh has certainly died in Christ (Romans 6:6), it’s a past-tense reality.
  • God’s long-term goal is that we may be resurrected, free of sin, with a new body (Romans 6:8, 2 Corinthians 5:1–10, Revelation 21:1–4).
  • The true way to live in Christ is through self-discipline, not self-effacement.

Condemning specific genres of media (e.g., music, movies, video games).

Complete individualism or antisocial behavior (e.g., claiming they only need Jesus and nobody else).

Extreme insistence on creating large-scale political changes for a Christian cause (e.g., “end all poverty”).

Dismissiveness

Maintains habitual sins out of ignorance or unawareness.

  • Obviously, we all battle with sins, but they’ll generally try to avoid the consequences of their sins while finding ways to keep doing it.
  • Most denominational cultures always have at least a few that even the leadership dismisses as benign.

Confrontational or inappropriate behavior as a type of “ministry”.

  • They typically imply that God loves people but still permits awful things to happen to them, so sharing the truth is acting in God’s will, even if they’re being rude.
  • They’re projecting their family background onto who God is and don’t understand His loving and gracious nature.
  • Long-term, magnified conflicts can provoke them to believe the logical consequence of their actions is a type of martyrdom.

Engages in cultural activities that God doesn’t like.

  • Most mind-altering substances open spiritual gateways, which are an inherent risk to our souls.
  • Any relationship with spiritual beings (e.g., divination, Ouija boards) builds implicit contracts that interfere with what Jesus has done and plans to do.
  • Sometimes, this can simply be over-identification with rebellious or anti-God cultural movements (e.g., punk, emo, goth).

Misplaced Loyalties

Believing “Christian” media to be a vastly superior classification of media, even when it’s low-quality.

  • Many Christian stories are absolute garbage because they don’t give room for the experience to express itself.
    • Great stories tell fair-handed depictions of both sides of a concept, then show the character deciding what the creator believes is the superior decision.
  • For whatever reason, many Christian creatives have zero faith in their ability to convey the correct meaning:
    1. The audience might not understand the implication that a bad thing is bad.
    2. The audience might understand the implication of a bad thing, but have moral sensitivities that may offend them.
    3. The audience may misunderstand why the creator is portraying a bad thing and attack them over it.

Allegiance to a denomination or its culture more than the collective body of believers in Christ.

  • They don’t see God’s ever-present efforts to draw people from every nation, tribe, people group, and language (Revelation 7:9).
  • They can often engage in trying to convert others to their perspective more than converting others to the way of Christ.
  • Frequently, they’ll spend more effort arguing about how wrong other people are (and enhancing their understanding to that end) than loving other people enough to respect (and politely disagree with) their beliefs.
  • At their most extreme, they’ll believe all other denominations will go to hell, or that all heresies have equal spiritual significance.

Believing prayer to answer every single problem.

Ambitious

Trying to achieve righteousness through their strength and willpower alone.

Complete belief that they can accomplish anything whatsoever as long as they trust God intensely enough to provide.

Seeking spiritual experiences over self-management.

  • Frequently, denominations that draw in people like this can create a dramatic spectacle of unregulated emotional expression.
  • They still haven’t learned the scope of God’s power, so they interpret unusual things but overlook God’s amazing feats of engineering that He designed into our day-to-day existence.
  • They also haven’t realized yet that a spectacular redemption story doesn’t show growth in Christ nearly as much as enduring trials (1 Peter 1:6-7).

Chronic Symptoms

Much later, after a few months or years, if a person hasn’t grown through integrating God’s truths into themselves, they’ll create many new habits that merge the above domains into new, disgusting forms of religiousness.

Asceticism, or some other deep belief that the body is a bad thing.

  • Frequently, they’ll make tremendous sacrifices that self-abase and deprive their bodies in the name of spirituality, often associating the pain of self-deprivation as a form of spirituality itself.
  • They haven’t realized that their very essence is partly a body and that it’s essentially an advanced animal they’re supposed to restrain every day for other moral purposes (Matthew 6:16).

Rigidity and denial to even think about speculative elements that expand on what the Bible alludes to.

  • If we dwell on the Bible, we’re going to ask questions (and form theories) about what God may have done before He created us, whether God has always been a Trinity, etc.
  • Most of this is driven by fear of heresy, but Christians will be improving their understanding for all eternity, so these ideas are worth peacefully discussing and wrestling with.

Complete openness to discussing speculative elements that have absolutely no grounding in the Bible.

  • We must constantly renew our minds by conforming to the truths we discover (Romans 12:2), so we must curb our imaginations to the constraints of what we know to be reality.
  • The ideas we entertain are often heavily influenced by those around us, which is why we must be careful who we associate with and for how long (1 Corinthians 15:33).

Confronting others over broader-reaching spiritual matters that have zero day-to-day significance.

Jealousy over another person’s spiritual status.

  • We all must maintain a quiet humility about the station in life God has placed us in.
  • Each person has their walk, and God holds them individually responsible (Romans 14:4).

Harsh or inconsiderate decision-making about others’ lives.

Once in a while, they’ll become the leaders of an organization that, in some way, advances many of the above.

  • They have a worse fate waiting for them if they don’t repent (Luke 17:1-2).

Signs of Growth

Some things are pretty clear demonstrations when they’re not a new Christian anymore.

They’ve been at least somewhat persecuted for their faith.

  • This can represent as simply being turned down in a job interview or rejected from a social gathering.
  • However, many contexts can extend it to public shame on an internet message board or an inter-church conflict.

A general sense of peace about others’ decisions.

They’ll find something lacking in mainstream Christian church services.

  • They’ll feel the weekly homily is weak or theologically sparse compared to their personal studies.
  • They will feel like many other believers are frequently not as committed to following Jesus as they are.
  • Many times, they’ll have moved through at least a few denominations to seek more mature believers.

They may even accept a particular cultural value they completely eschewed.

  • They’ll typically see how it may be a sin for them to engage in it, but that it may be fine for others (1 Corinthians 8).

The long-term goals they aspire toward start incorporating the constant question over whether their actions are loving (1 Corinthians 13).