God help us, it’s the holidays again, that strange secular/religious/materialistic hybrid that most of us hate/endure/secretly kind of like. While enduring the malls and packed airports and rush shipping charges with everyone else, I’m struck by something odd but interesting about the religious side of things that has really helped me and might help you. Almost everyone in my circle, churchgoers and non-churchgoers, mistrusts religion, sees it as the source of lots that’s bad in the world. And yet tons of these people feel a huge need for God, are extremely into their faith community, pray a ton, like the Bible just fine, often get together with a few other people weekly or thereabouts to try to help each other in this stuff. Hmm...

Some of my friends think they’ve figured this out. They regard the great religions of the world as being cultures every bit as much as they are faith systems. So, for instance, we all know plenty of Lutherans or Jews or Catholics or Muslims who don’t practice their faith but also don’t cut themselves off from their heritage.

On the other hand, I’m told that, in Calcutta alone, there are over a million “Hindus who follow Jesus,” who are rejected by local Christians—as, if they wanted to follow Jesus, why not join in with Christianity, whatever the social costs in terms of their culture or caste? But they’re not rejected by local Hindus because they’ve stayed in the culture. And, having spent a little time in the Middle East, I’m friends with a handful of “Muslims who follow Jesus” who have by no means left Muslim culture for a Christian one. (You’ll recall that, in Lebanon, for one example, Christians and Muslims spent a decade or so killing each other.)

So in that sense I suppose I’m a secularist who follows Jesus, since my background was secular/atheist and, to this day, that feels like my world. I’m baffled at the thought of “Christian fiction” rather than just fiction. Christian jargon (or pop music) seems alien to me. Even the idea of seeing this as a Christian nation is challenging for me, as my whole experience and upbringing seemed to be in a secular nation. But my friends who grew up in Christianity by and large see a different America. That’s what cultures do.

Awhile back, a man asked to meet with me. He’d grown up in a different faith tradition which was very important to him. “I was born it, and I’ll die it!” was his opening statement. He’d been dragged to our church by his girlfriend at the time, who’d decided to revisit the faith of her youth and had visited us. It had affected her to the point that she said she wouldn’t sleep with him anymore unless he agreed to come once to our church (a powerful strategy, I think you’ll agree). In exasperation, he did visit. But he kept returning on his own, which scared him. I asked why he’d kept coming back, and he said he had a huge anger problem, to the point that he’d go out some nights looking for fights. Since he’d been with us and had taken some suggestions I’d made, that problem seemed to be gone, which felt miraculous. So, to come back to the heart of things, was I going to try to make him a Christian if he stuck around? Because, just in case I’d missed it, he’d die first.

I told him—I think sincerely, but you be the judge—that I didn’t care if he ever became a Christian, that I, of all people, actually had very little investment in Christianity. After a pause, he asked if that was some sort of strange tactic. I said I thought I meant what I’d said, but I had a question for him. Was it all right if I regarded the good things that had been happening to him as being because of Jesus? He didn’t have to think that—that was his business—but was it all right with him if I believed that? Because my suggestions actually all came from things Jesus said to do, that if we did them, we’d get certain results—results which the man in my office was in fact experiencing.

In this most-hectic time of year, I think about that man—and about all the folks around the world who, without switching religions, have seen their lives change after doing their best to discover and act on the things Jesus said to do. Perhaps that can be one gift you experience this holiday season. This is one secularist who’s been astounded at how good that gift has been.