This is how Washington poet Jefferson Bethke begins his viral and controversial video “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus”: “What if I told you that Jesus came to abolish religion?” Bethke (known as bball1989 on YouTube) has garnered more than 17 million views from this spoken word poem that claims that Jesus and religion are in opposition.
“[It is] a poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion,” Bethke said in the video’s description. “In the Scriptures, Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At its core, Jesus’ gospel and the good news of the cross [are] in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification.”
Fair enough. Indeed, Bethke boldly points out some of the hypocrisies and faults that have plagued the church for centuries.
“If grace is water, then the church should be an ocean,” Bethke says. “It’s not a museum for good people. It’s a hospital for the broken.”
He criticizes those whose lives are not a reflection of the God they claim to represent, and even admits to a time when he struggled with this kind of hypocrisy.
While I applaud Bethke for his honesty and his insight, I wish his video had targeted Christians in general. I wish he had simply said that we ought to look at ourselves and discern whether we are truly following in the footsteps of Christ. Instead, he attacks religion as a whole, and as I listened to him I began to wonder if he even knows what the word means.
Merriam-Webster defines “religion” as “the service and worship of God or the supernatural” or “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs and practices.” While Christianity is about more than rules and rituals, does it not still fit these definitions?
Bethke sees religion in an entirely different light, emphasizing its rules and restrictions over the freedom and comfort it can bring. He said it is “of man-made invention,” he calls it “the infection,” and he even claims that Jesus himself hated it.
I believe Bethke had great intentions when he made this video, but his logic makes no sense to me. While Jesus did criticize many religious people, he never claimed to hate religion. He regularly went to the synagogue and observed Jewish customs. In Matthew 5:17, he warns people not to think that he came to “abolish the Law or the Prophets.” Jesus came to bring the religion God established in the Old Testament to completion, not to disband it altogether.
Bethke has recently disabled comments on his controversial video — which is one of the worst things one can do after making such a bold claim, I think — and many other YouTubers have posted videos responding to it. One of my favorites is Father Claude Burns’ (known as spiritjuicestudios on YouTube) “Why I Love Religion and Love Jesus” which is also in spoken verse.
Burns acknowledges that Bethke “has a heart for Jesus, but that it’s feeding atheistic opinions.” He claims that in order to truly follow Jesus we must obey his commandments and that the church’s flaws are not to be blamed on organized religion.
“We all detest hypocrisy,” Burns says. “Empty show is just the worst. But blaming religion for contradiction is like staring at death and blaming the hearse.”
While I prefer Burns’ argument over Bethke’s, I would strongly recommend watching both videos. No matter which side of the debate you lean toward, I assure you you’ll walk away with questions that could (and should) make you think seriously about your faith.
