I have heard this from a few different sources recently: "I am Christian and believe in God and Jesus but I hate religion and think it's wrong. All you need to do is read the Bible and love God".
It seems to me that one would have to perform the most tortuous mental gymnastics to arrive at this position. For a start, the dictionary definition of 'religious' is having a belief in a deity/deities and/or following a Holy text.
It seems to be that people are realising that there are a lot of negatives in religion but still want the security of having a benevolent deity caring for them. They seem to reject a 'rule based' religion - ie having to conform to any particular code of behaviour or lifestyle in order to call oneself Christian, and a dislike of traditional religious practice.
The thing that makes me uneasy about this is twofold. Firstly, it ignores the fact that there are still 'rules' to be followed: you can't just go and create your own definition of what god is or how god would behave, but have to confirm to what is an accepted definition. Same with Jesus and ideas of the afterlife and evil etc. There seems to be no awareness of how these concepts have been redefined by the Christian religion over the last 2000 years.
Secondly, is the change in emphasis from 'doing' to 'believing'. I know that Christianity has always been more about belief than action (unlike Islam, for example) but this seems to be taken to extremes. Gone are the days of your wooly Anglican priest who was happy to confess that he struggled at times with his belief in god but knew that as long as he kept up his prayer and religious reflection god would be happy with that and would still love him. No, this form of Christianity expects your belief in and love for god to be constant. The trouble with this is that it soon becomes another stick to beat people with: you have suffered misfortune and god has not answered your prayers? Must be because you don't love him enough. I had a conversation with someone who told me quite seriously, when I pointed out the famines that god has allowed to ravage Christian Ethiopia that she "couldn't be sure how committed those people were in their faith", unlike her, who as a white, middle class, landowning woman with a large family, has always been blessed with god's abundance. It just seems bizarre to me that it is seen as a positive, less harmful, more egalitarian way of doing things to set rules about how people are supposed to think, rather than just what they do. They are still rules. They are still a way of making a division between those who are doing 'the right thing' and those who are not. It still seems to walk and quack like a religion to me.
I really don't get why these people are trying to distance themselves from the idea of religion. Why not take ownership of the fact they are religious but say 'but we don't like how the old religions are doing things so we are creating a new one'.
Or have I missed something? Is it actually possible to be Christian but not religious and that this is a new and better way of doing things?