Jesus vs Religion – Final Thoughts

I know, I know….this topic has been done to death, but I wanted to offer some closing thoughts on Jeff Bethke’s Jesus > Religion YouTube video…

The Meaning of Words

There’s been a lot of discussion online about the video. In one such discussion I came across someone who seemed indifferent to the fact that Jeff didn’t appear to know the difference between the words “Religion”, “Hypocrisy” and “Legalism”. This person argued that it’s fine because the “religion” referenced in the video referred to the self-righteous, legalistic kind. To this I responded:

Words matter. Words shape how we think (see George Orwell’s book “1984”). What they mean matters.

It would be like my saying to you “Jesus came to abolish Christianity”. I may mean “self-righteousness” or “legalism”, but that’s not the word I used – I said “Christianity”.  I would expect a poet to care about words and to care about what they mean.

Words matter.

“What if I told you…I’ve changed my mind?”

I’m really happy to say that it does appear Jeff has had a change of heart:

“God has been working with me in the last 6 months on loving Jesus AND loving his church. For the first few years of walking with Jesus…I had a warped/poor paradigm of the church and it didn’t build up, unify, or glorify His…Bride… If I redid the video tomorrow, I’d keep the overall message, but would articulate, elaborate, and expand on the parts where my words and delivery were chosen poorly…” – Jeff Bethke

I think it shows great character and humility. It’ll be interesting to see if he ever does a follow-up video…

Strong Response

Finally, I wanted to say is that I’ve been really pleased with the strong Catholic response to this video. I found this engagement by the Catholic world with New Media really encouraging.

There were some rather amusing images:

…and many high-quality video responses:

…and my personal favourite: