Defanging Jesus

The Compromised Gospel of Personal Salvation vs. the Gospel of Collective Liberation

I’m continuing a series on shifts to unf*ck your spirituality (see here for part 1: shifting from escapism to incarnation, and part 2: shifting from christian separatism to human solidarity). These are the shifts that have helped me hold onto the Christian story in a new way that is not only more loving and human, but also a better reflection of the spirituality of Jesus.

This shift? Shifting from personal salvation to collective liberation. This is essential, not only for your own spiritual life, but for the life of the world.

White Jesus—the sanitized figure constructed by white American Christianity—may want to be your personal savior, but the real Jesus spoke about “the kingdom of God,” which was a political and social reality in which the last would be first, the poor would be blessed, the hungry filled, the strangers welcomed, the naked clothed, and the imprisoned cared for in their humanity. In other words, every person would be treated as a child of God. This is more than a slightly different approach to the gospel. These two visions are in conflict with each other.

We can see this playing out in our country almost every day.

For example, over the weekend, nonviolent protesters in Minneapolis burst into Cities Church, disrupting their services. They did this because one of the pastors there—David Easterwood—is also the field director for ICE in St. Paul, MN.

Easterwood has publicly defended his ICE department’s brutal tactics in Minnesota, including breaking into private homes without warrants and spraying protesters with chemical weapons that are banned from use in warfare under international law.

The protesters were agitated that a pastor who was managing violent kidnapping operations Monday through Friday could claim to preach the gospel on Sunday. This is the same narrow view of the gospel that once allowed many Christian pastors to be slaveholders.

A gospel that only saves individuals for the afterlife will always make peace with violence and dehumanization in this world.

There was an illuminating moment when the journalist Don Lemon interviewed a Cities Church member as he left the chaotic service, asking him, “Do you understand why they’re angry?”
The man replied, “I don’t understand any of this, ’cause I’m just a simple man who loves the Lord… this is what we look forward to, is coming to be with our family and worship Jesus.”

This is a version of the gospel that can exist side by side with authoritarian violence and shrug: It ain’t got nothing to do with me.
The church member concluded, “This is kind of a bad day for us, but you know, we’re going to heaven, so that’s the best news we got.”

As perverse as this logic is, those of us who grew up in white evangelicalism fully understand what he means. The gospel we learned was not a gospel about justice in this world, but salvation in the next. Hey, at least we’re going to heaven. Worshiping Jesus with your family did not mean your family became invested in the lives of your neighbors or pursued liberation for the people Jesus spent his ministry with—it was a private transaction, achieved by assenting to the correct doctrines.

Many people have told me that as a progressive, I’ve “watered down the gospel.” But it seems very clear to me that it is this individualistic gospel that has truly defanged Jesus. Unfortunately, this lukewarm message is the conventional version of the gospel, at least in white Christian America. It is often explained through what some Christians call the “Romans Road,” a curated selection of Bible verses from the book of Romans that offers a step-by-step guide to becoming a Christian according to this understanding of the gospel.

Here’s how it goes:

Step one: Romans 3:23
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

The evangelical interpretation of this verse is that because of Adam and Eve, we inherited a sin nature—we were born fundamentally wicked, not because of anything we did, but because of who we were.

Step two: Romans 6:23
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

We were taught that the just punishment for being born a sinner was death in this life and hell in the next. This is what every person on earth deserved, simply for having the grave misfortune of being born a human being. I was told that my sin separated me from God—that there was a chasm between me and God that I was powerless to cross.

But don’t worry. This is where Jesus comes in.

Step three: Romans 5:8
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Jesus was God’s answer to the sin problem.

The gospel of personal salvation is, at its core, a story about punishment. I (along with everybody else) was born deserving of punishment, but I was told that if I “believed in Jesus”—which essentially meant believing that Jesus was God and that he died for my sins—then he would stand in for me and take the punishment in my place.

The fundamental premise is that somebody has to be punished. God’s hands are tied. He’s gotta punish somebody: it’s either Jesus… or you.

Then comes the decision point.

Step four: Romans 10:9
“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

As simple as that. Pray the prayer, confess belief, and you’re saved.

I’m going to be blunt. I do not believe this is the gospel.
It is not only a distortion—it actively hamstrings Jesus’ true message. The passion of Jesus Christ was not for people to believe the “right” things about God so they could get out of hell and into heaven. His passion was for heaven to come to earth—for people to have their daily bread and their debts forgiven, on earth as in heaven.

“As in heaven” means that it is God’s will for everybody to have enough—to experience shalom, wholeness, and the flourishing of the beloved community.
“On earth” means God wants us to take that will seriously and put it into practice in the societies we create.

Perhaps a healing way for disaffected post-evangelicals to grasp this shift is to revisit and repave that old Romans Road. Many of us struggle to interpret the Bible in fresh ways, outside of the lens of private salvation, so I think addressing each of these verses could be helpful in catching the bigger story of collective liberation.

The Romans Road, Revisited

1. Romans 3:23

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Paul is not diagnosing individual depravity, but our shared bondage to the powers of sin. The book of Romans is not framed around getting individual souls into heaven or keeping them out of hell. Paul never mentions hell at all, and he never presents heaven as the goal of salvation. Romans is about how God is creating a unified people, liberated from the powers of sin and death, living under the lordship of Jesus instead of empire—under the lordship of love instead of systems of domination.

To “fall short of the glory of God” is to fall short of what humanity is meant to be together. We were not made for brutal hierarchies of division and oppression, but for connection and mutual relationship.

We all “fall short” because sin is a collective problem, not a personal shame.

2. Romans 6:23

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“Death” is not a metaphor for suffering forever in hell. Death is the all-encompassing power of the systems we live under that produce exclusion, violence, and dehumanization. Sin pays wages: the natural consequences of racism, exploitation, scapegoating, and othering is death. The way of domination can never lead to the beloved community.

This verse does not mean we deserve punishment. God is not forced to punish sin—sin is its own punishment. Sin is what disconnects us from love, from God, and from our own humanity.

The free gift of God is love and life. Grace always comes as an invitation to life, though we are often blind to it. That’s why salvation is described with metaphors like being “born again,” or saying, “I was blind, but now I see.”

Eternal life—zōē aiōnios—does not mean endless life. It means “the life of the age.” It announces a different way of being human. The kingdom of God, inaugurated in Christ and embodied by those following the Spirit of Christ, is a way of life no longer defined by death, but by abundance, community, mutuality, and interconnectedness.

3. Romans 5:8

“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

The traditional reading is that Jesus paid our sin debt so God could take us to heaven instead of damning us to hell. But Paul says Christ died not to appease God’s wrath, but to prove God’s love.

Jesus is not killed by God, but by domination systems—by state power, aided by religious collaboration. Like ICE officers who roam our streets with violent impunity, sanctioned by evangelical elites who proof-text their way into condoning authoritarian violence, Jesus’ crucifixion under empire unmasks the brutal logic of domination. These systems promise law and order, but they lead to death, not life.

This is not transactional salvation. It is radical solidarity with the victims of history, with the scapegoats. And it calls us to take up our cross and join Jesus among those still being crucified by these same systems.

4. Romans 10:9

“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

This is a political confession. Not magic words that change the status of your eternal soul, but words that reorient your allegiance. We trade loyalty to empire for what Martin Luther King called “an overriding loyalty to mankind.”

Recognizing that we are all in this together, we put an end to othering and scapegoating. We put our faith in the Lamb of God, trusting that although the powers of death threaten to kill us, God raises the dead.

“Believing in the resurrection” is not simply agreeing that a miracle happened two thousand years ago. It is a summons to live in resurrection power in confrontation with the forces of death. That hope saves us—not for the afterlife, but for God’s kingdom here and now. We turn from violence to justice, from domination to love.

Do you see how the small gospel of personal salvation shrinks our world and trains us to neglect our neighbors? Jesus has something so much better for us.

The mission statement at the bottom of the Cities Church website says, “Worshiping Jesus. Loving one another. Seeking the good of the Cities.” But if “loving and seeking the good of the Cities” includes authoritarian violence, kidnapping children, spraying chemicals in people’s faces, and targeting minorities, then the Jesus being worshiped is not the man of sorrows, the friend of sinners, or the savior of the least of these. He is simply a mascot for empire.

In contrast to the defanged gospel being embodied by Cities Church, I think of another recent church experience—attending an ICE observer training in a local church near my home. This was a church that understands the gospel is meant for this world, for the collective liberation of our neighbors, or it does no good at all. People from many faiths gathered to learn how to protect and care for the most vulnerable.

That solidarity was powerfully expressed by Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, who said at the memorial for Renee Good, “It may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”

The gospel Jesus preached is still available to us—but it is dangerous and demanding. It does not just mean agreeing with doctrines, but disinvesting from systems of oppression.
Not just praying for “the lost,” but creating welcoming communities that include those scorned by society.
Not just worshiping Jesus, but doing what he commanded with our whole lives.