Christians think they don’t change their message—it changes them, except they do and it doesn’t

By now, it’s almost an injoke for this blog: Despite Christians’ insistences, Jesus does not actually ever change anybody. He’s never changed anybody. If someone claims magical change from Jesus, either they’re deceiving themselves or others, or else something else actually accomplished that task—like hard work or real therapy. But I’ve been seeing yet another meaningless bit of Christianese floating around the Christ-o-sphere that speaks to this false belief in the power of Christianity to change anybody: We don’t change the message; the message changes us.

It’s a deepity, to be sure. That means that it has a surface meaning that looks obvious, but when you look into it more closely you discover that it says something really awful that the speaker doesn’t even notice.

Let’s check out this deepity’s brief history. And then, let’s explore the very different truth of the matter.

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We don’t change the message; the message changes us!

Out of every bit of Christianese I’ve heard lately, this might be one of the chirpiest and most annoying. It’s relatively new, too, but it’s now commonly used all over the Christ-o-sphere:

We don’t change the message. The message changes us!

Ugh, I can almost see the twee, cutesy-poo, precious smile on the Christian’s face as they type it out or say it. In character, it’s a lot like how they act when they brightly tell us, all sweetsie-syrupy and smarmy, that they don’t like “religion” either, implying (incorrectly) that their beliefs have nothing to do with ickie ol’ religion, eww.

Nowadays, you can buy the slogan as a wall sticker in various colors. You can hear it in sermons. You can read it in blog posts. It’s just an endless, cringeworthy, eye-rolling onslaught of chirpy bright precious cutesy-poo smarmy sweetsie-syrupy twee-ness.

Even Muslims have caught on to it as a thought stopper.

It’s also dead wrong on both counts.

That is likely exactly why it’s gotten so popular so quickly. The kind of Christians who say this tend also to be the kind who think that if they just say something untrue often enough, it magically becomes true.

What We don’t change the message; the message changes us even means

The Christians who like this phrase use it as a virtue signal to the rest of their tribe. It affirms several key beliefs:

• TRUE CHRISTIANS™ don’t go changing anything! Not a thing! Not one jot or tittle! Nope!
• Just knowing the “message,” whatever that might be, changes those who believe in it…
• … And sure enough, they themselves have been greatly changed by it.
• These changes are very desirable and help believers in significant ways.
• Magic changes through belief are also PROOF YES PROOF that Jesus Power is real.
• Using this phrase indicates that the speaker is a member in good standing in their tribe. Are you?
• But those poor widdle heathens! Pity them. And try to convert them, of course.

People outside Christian culture are not likely to hear this phrase. This is the highest level of Christianese, language so gauzy and meaningless that using it might just send its speaker launching into the stratosphere. So yes, it’s really only meant to be deployed around tribemates.

Even Christians know it won’t make much sense to anybody else. If you hear a Christian using it, they’re likely trying to hand-wave away something troublesome.

The history of We don’t change the message; the message changes us

It’s hard to tell, but this Christianese phrase might have originated with Mormon leaders in the 1950s. Google Books gives a tantalizing hint to it being in Journal of Discourses by Brigham Young (1956). But I couldn’t find the phrase anywhere in that book. Similarly, I see sporadic hints of the phrase all through the decades until 2000. The first specific and definite mention I can find of it in Google Books is in the 2003 book Inspirations from Above by David L. Everitt.

But Christianese tends to accrete and synthesize from a number of sources: sermons, books, missionaries’ notes, websites and blogs, and Minions memes. I’m not kidding about that last bit:

Whoever said this phrase first may be lost to the mists of time, but it clearly caught other Christians’ attention. Between 2003 and 2010, the phrase exploded in popularity throughout the Christian world. It is now common.

If you check out that list of links, by the way, you may notice that it especially resonates with “inspirational” dreck writers in the mid-to-late 2000s. One such representative of that breed is I Read It on a Church Sign, by Jeffery W. Dukes (2009). Indeed, I found several pictures of church signs bearing today’s saying:

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m looking forward to Dukes’ next book about the wit and wisdom of Minions memes.

In truth, Christians change ‘the message’ all the time

Christians’ understanding of “the message” itself changes constantly.

Catholics: “The “core” message of Christianity is a message of love and redemption, salvation and hope. It is the message of the person of Jesus Christ, who walked this earth 2000 years ago.”

Worldwide Church of God: “[Jesus’] core message was the Kingdom of God. . . the Kingdom of God is to be the No. 1 focus and emphasis in the lives of His followers.”

Grace to You: “We need to preach the message that God forgives sin.”

Got Questions: “[T]he essential elements of the gospel: the sin of all men, the death of Christ on the cross to pay for those sins, the resurrection of Christ to provide life everlasting for those who follow Him, and the offer of the free gift of salvation to all.”

We can see many common elements between answers, but Christians simply lack a cohesive, coherent answer to the question of what “the message” even is.

And just to be a little stinker, I’ll just gently point out that even all of these variations represent significant changes from what the earliest Christians believed.

I don’t say that to sniff about Original Christianity, because I don’t think there really could be said to be one in the first place. Instead, I mean that the earliest Christians were a howling cacophony of wildly disparate beliefs, practices, and doctrines. Even past the 1st century, many of them clearly thought the world was literally ending Any Day Now™. So the earliest Christians likely didn’t really have a long-term, real-world understanding of “the message,” not in the same way as today’s Christians.

Whatever it is, ‘the message’ doesn’t change anyone

Even if Christians could make a case for not ever changing “the message,” which they categorically can’t, this saying would still suffer from one other big nasty dealbreaker:

Whatever Christians even mean by “the message,” it doesn’t make appreciable or tangible changes in anybody.

Heck, if I’d heard this phrase as a Pentecostal in the 1980s and 1990s, I’d have assumed whoever said it was idolizing the Bible itself. Jesus was the central part of Christianity, in my opinion, and if anyone was going to magically change anyone, it’d be him, not his message.

Nor did it take me long to realize that Jesus was not changing anybody. People who claimed he’d magically changed them were either lying to themselves or others. (My Evil Ex Biff was a prime offender here.)

Anyone who did change for real had to fight for it every step of the way. They had to learn all new habits and ways of responding to people and situations. They had to keep doggedly practicing new skills that might be very alien to them. At any time, they could relapse into old behaviors. They had to be vigilant for failures and willing to climb back onto the wagon every time it happened.

The kind of Christians who say we don’t change the message; the message changes us, they don’t want to do any of that. They just want a Jesus button they can hit to give them instant change without all that painful, difficult, time-consuming work.

Christian leaders know perfectly well that ‘the message’ doesn’t change anyone

For many years now, Christian leaders have lamented the sheer lack of positive changes in their flocks. We saw that lament in sharp relief in the book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience by Ronald Sider (1995). Before that, we saw it in The Gathering Storm in the Churches by Jeffrey Hadden (1969).

I even saw it in my first Pentecostal church. The first time I really saw it, it came from a pastor’s elderly mother, a lifelong Pentecostal “raised in the Word,” as the Christianese goes. An utterly unrepentant racist, she’d just openly (and loudly) say the most shockingly evil, racist things. But she attended every church service her own pastor ever gave, and always acted there like sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

It was a real struggle for me, back then, to realize that Jesus didn’t make Christians better people at all, and that non-Christians often were much better people than Christians.

For that matter, I’ve never seen any reputable survey that found positive differences between the behavior of TRUE CHRISTIANS™ and heathens of any kind. Anecdotally at least, many people see a great many negative differences. Just ask anyone who works at a restaurant about the after-church Sunday crowd.

If ‘the message’ changed Christians, that would definitely be a first

Of course, if believing exactly the right package of Christian nonsense actually changed believers, that really would be interesting. It might not point to the existence of Yahweh or Jesus, nor even to the existence of life after death. But it’d be interesting, to say the least. Humans are very good at believing things and then not acting too differently at all.

Nothing in Christianity is unique in and of itself (though of course, its exact blended makeup of individual claims does vary from those of other religions). So I would be very surprised indeed to discover that conversion to Christianity actually created real and lasting changes in new Christians, the same as I would be if I found out that conversion to Ásatrú created real and lasting changes in its believers.

Ever since I knew enough to call myself a Christian at all, and we’re talking here in terms of early childhood, I really wanted my belief in Jesus to permanently change me. Every time my exact package of beliefs changed, I wanted that new moment of sparked belief to be this shining turnaround in me.

But as every Christian ever has discovered, it didn’t happen.

My beliefs changed every so often, but I really didn’t

After the thrill of joining a new Christian flavor wore off, I remained the same person afterward. Just with each shift in beliefs, I was disappointed vastly all over again⁠. I blamed myself for Jesus-ing wrong yet again.

And of course I blamed myself. That is one of the few universal practices of Christian groups, especially on the evangelical side of the pool. The message itself must always be considered perfect, so if an individual doesn’t have the right experience, then the individual is the problem here. They did something wrong. That’s why the magic isn’t working for them.

Everyone around me kept saying that Christianity changed people. Almost every single testimony I ever heard detailed big personal changes as a result of belief. But I knew I had not really changed, as fervent as I was, as hard as I prayed, as much as I wanted that change.

Since I was completely certain that my overall faith and fervor were not at fault, only one option remained to explore:

I must have had the wrong beliefs.

So I tumbled into an ever-deepening spiral of extremism and scrupulosity trying to find the perfect set of beliefs that would finally get me where I wanted to be as a Christian.

In short, I was an anxious mess before long.

As the night the day: embrace of ‘the message’ should lead to the right behavior. Right? Right?

Indeed, by now we’ve seen it in countless sermons and cries-from-the-wilderness across the whole of Christendom:

A huge gulf exists between what Christians know they ought to do and what they actually do. What’s more, that gulf has always existed, at least since the 1960s. That’s about when Christians first began to be able to defy their leaders without fear of brutal retaliation.

With the sheer proliferation of different flavors of Christianity, part of me really wonders if that’s why so many Christians drill down so hard on their variant of “the message.” I’ve heard many Christian leaders claim that hypocrites act out because they believe the wrong things. They also claim the reverse: that believing all of the right things leads to un-hypocritical behavior, as the night the day.

[Citation needed], as they say. I’ve seen no evidence for either.

But nothing will change here, and really it can’t

Unfortunately, this saying just feels incredibly good to Christians. In the moment they utter it or hear it performed for their edification, they get all euphoric. Nothing real can possibly interfere with the feeling they get from this one phrase. It’s got that bantering, semi-rhyming feel that they like in their worse-than-meaningless deepities. Really, to me it sounds like the kind of clever wordplay someone like C.S. Lewis would write, he of the deepities that so engross shallow Christians—like the Lunatic/Liar/Lord false trilemma, not a TAME lion, and that gross and creepy ravish-vs-woo imagery.

So I don’t count on them ending this saying’s use any time soon. Its rewards are too high, and the risks of using it too low still.

But risks can change.

In politics, “family values” politicians got caught so often with their dicks in the wrong people that now the phrase itself is purely toxic. (The slogan was already long dead when Slate declared it so in 2018.) It’s not that Christians can’t learn. It just takes a whole lot of mockery and pushback for the chirpy ones among them to bother.

I just wish the same thing would happen to any Christianese that implies lasting, positive change as a result of just believing the correct “message.” The people who suffer most with that belief, as usual, will always be the ones who try to take its deepities the most seriously.

Endnote

Speaking of correct beliefs ensuring correct behavior, a surprising number of Christians think that holding all the correct beliefs will deconversion-proof a believer. LOL oh my—no.

I wish I had a nickel for every Christian who’s ever tried to be all sly by asking me what I believed about Jesus before deconversion. It’s like they expect me to say something radically weird.

Like they expect me to say, “I totally believed that Jesus is a used mattress abandoned by space aliens along the Atlanta Highway in 1974. A cult dedicated to the giraffe gods now controls it.”

And then they could slam a finger at me: “J’ACCUSE! That’s why you deconverted! You believed the wrong package of nonsense! Now I shall feed you the correct package, thus making you morally required to reconvert! On your knees, wretch! Repent!”

They get mad at me when I don’t follow their script.

In truth, aside from me having been Oneness rather than a heretical, pagan-tainted Trinitarian, chances are good that our beliefs were largely identical.

I’d have a shiny little handful of nickels at least, which sounds nice.

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