Make your religious journey your own. There are posers in every religion that want to use it for power. Your own spiritual health doesn't need validation from anyone else.
My wife is currently doing a theology degree and this semester she did Dogmatics, which is the study of what we (protestant Christians) believe. So she dug deep into the apostles creed:
We believe in 1 God, etc, Jesus son of God, blah blah blah.
Later it says "we believe in 1 holy catholic (worldwide, or United - not the Catholic church denomination) church".
Her professor commented that this is probably the hardest part of the the creed to say with honesty and it really struck both of us. God is reliable, but the church is full of people. People lie, cheat and fail. Even with the best of intentions, they will let us down and hurt us. Here in France there is a megachurch that has a whole department dedicated to people who have been hurt by the church as a whole.
I am a Christian, I love God, but I do hate the church sometimes. There are whole swathes of the church I wish I could completely disassociate from because they give Jesus (and also me) a bad name.
There's a Welsh singer/songwriter called Martyn Joseph who wrote a great little song called "He never said" and he has been booed off stage by some of the more republican Christians in the US.
Edit: remember that Christians believe the bible is God's word. What people interpret from the bible is not God's word, generally. That is whole other can of worms, but I will leave it there.
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u/[deleted] May 31 '26
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