Review Unlike with Jesus Revolution, no revivalist Christian campaigns have been started to get Leaving Jesus shown in the big cinemas, but I hope they go and see it, writes David Eklind Kloo.
Look at a four year old. Is this an innocent child? Or a carrier of original sin?
Should a four-year-old be different?
The question is asked at a retreat in San Fransisco, where people who want to leave a literal Christianity behind have gathered to find a new foundation to build their lives and self-esteem on. In the movie Leaving Jesus follows the Swedish documentary filmmaker Ellen Fiske as they dance with their eyes closed, put each other around in a ring, go to a queer club and finally nestle each other like babies worthy only to be held and loved. Just the way they are.
In group conversations, they share their despair, their fear and their anger with each other.
A woman tells Fiske about how her newborn daughter was terminally ill. Only six days old, she had to undergo a difficult operation. The woman promised God that she would follow him if he saved her child.
The girl survived. But the mother still cannot believe, no matter how hard she tries. Now she fears that the child will be taken from her.
Insight into a faith that can limit
Last fall, Swedish revival Christians made a pilgrimage to the cinemas to see the American drama Jesus Revolution. It describes how a wave of revival moves forward among hippies in California, and contributes to reshaping the charismatic worship life. The consequences of this are still visible in many Swedish churches. That the young hippie Lonnie Frisbee, who drives the emerging movement, later comes out as gay is conveniently forgotten in the film, just as he is relegated from the historiography of the movement.
Many hoped that the film, which was shown in Filmstaden cinemas across the country, would win new souls to Christianity.
Ellen Fiske’s documentary Leaving Jesus however, will not make anyone long to be gloriously saved. It gives an insight into how faith can not only limit one from the outside, but also enslave the individual under her own notions of what is right and wrong, truth and lies, life and death. So that one believes one must deny fundamental aspects of one’s own person.
That one is fundamentally corrupted. All marked by original sin. And therefore in constant need of being forgiven.
One of the participants at the retreat in San Francisco has received a letter from his father. There he warns his adult child about a life without God. The consequences of such a choice would be devastating. “I love you too much to lie to you.”
Grown before God
People often talk about being a child of God, a child of God, is ascertained at the retreat. But never about being an adult of God, an adult of God.
There is, of course, something extremely enticing in, like a child in front of its parents, completely letting go and trusting to be carried.
But a small child is subject to adults’ assessment of how life should be lived. Over time, it will rub off, the child will require greater room for action. That her own judgment should be allowed to weigh as much as her parents’. Heavier, when it comes to her own life.
It is perhaps the most difficult thing in parenthood, to let the child grow up to be an equal but at the same time guard his feeling of not being left to himself. That there is always something – someone – to fall back on.
But the religiosity that labels certain life choices as ungodly shackles the individual to the immaturity of childhood. Denies her to be a co-creator of the world she is destined to live in.
It is no coincidence that authoritarian religious movements fear equal relations between sect members. They can realize that their judgment also counts in relation to God.
We are used to contrasting children with adults, writes priest and psychotherapist Göran Bergstrand in the book Not just Knutby. But when the Bible is recorded, the word child also has another opposite: slave. “When the Bible speaks of us as God’s children, it usually means that we are God’s adult children, who should live in freedom but with responsibility for life and for the earth. It is not the question of God’s little irresponsible but obedient children.”
Being a child of God then instead requires one to take one’s own judgment seriously.
God cannot blame anyone
When I allowed myself to do just that—to take my own judgment seriously—the very notion of original sin was one of the mainstays of my teenage beliefs that I had to deal with. We all commit transgressions and must atone with those we wrong. But that we would be lost at our core, and have an all-encompassing need to be forgiven by God himself, I could no longer believe that.
A four year old should be no different.
If there is something that we can call God, then this is infinite. Everything else therefore existing within this infinite. There is nothing outside. All our impulses and desires then ultimately have their origin in God.
That we can act on these in ways that become destructive is obvious. That we then need to ask for forgiveness is equally obvious.
But God cannot blame anyone else.
For me it was a liberation, to see that we all share a humanity that does not corrupt our souls. That the most basic reconciliation we need is to reconcile with ourselves.
Unlike with Jesus Revolution no revivalist Christian campaigns have been started to get Leaving Jesus shown in the big cinemas. But when it is now shown at Folkets Cinema, I still hope that those who saw the first mentioned film have the courage to also see the latter.
Many people have been hurt by beliefs they acquired and then made their own. Confronting this is necessary to identify the conditions for creating contexts where people are allowed to reconcile with themselves. As adults, with a confidence in not being left to fend for themselves.
David Eklind Kloo, will come out this autumn with the book “The road is wide” on Atlas publishing house.
