Q & R: Maintaining Christian identity?

Here’s the Q:

Loving “We Make The Road By Walking.” You’re always looking at things from a fresh perspective with a great set of questions.
Is there any real point to being a Christian, or maintaining a Christian identity? I don’t ask this from a place of despair and frustration but I ask out of contentment, joy and surplus. I went to seminary, planted a church, expanded as a person and now haven’t been a part of a church for a couple of years. I’m not asking the tired question of whether we should keep Jesus and forget the church or whether we should have a relationship with God and discard religion (for me, I found that when I’ve asked those questions, I’ve been frustrated and disillusioned)…but even more fundamentally, what is the point of aligning one’s self with this thing that eventually got called Christianity? I’m just not seeing the point anymore.
I’ve found love, life and light in Christianity and Jesus (and am forever thankful for that), but that has not come separate from my discovery of all that is good, right and true that I see in Taoism and Lao Tsu (for example), or in my meditation journey, or in my creative endeavors, or in my health, nutrition and exercise practices, etc. I found your “Why Did Jesus, Buddha, Moses and Muhammad Cross The Road?” as a great help, but I now just don’t see any compelling reason to remain identified as a Christian, despite my love and admiration of Jesus. There’s lots I could go on about, but I think you get my point.
Thanks, man. Keep up the great work.

Here’s the R:
This is such an important question. I’m working on my next book, entitled This Way of LIfe (due out September 2016), and just wrote a few paragraphs that I think will be helpful … not on the specific question of why Christian, but on the more general question of why identify with any tradition at all. (You may be interested in the ways I addressed the why Christian question in a book I wrote called A Generous Orthodoxy.)

To my mind, nobody has written more lucidly about the connection between spirituality and religion than Catholic educator Catherine Maresca, building on the work of Maria Cavalletti. In her work on developing spiritual literacy in children, she offers insights that are equally relevant to adults. Generalized spirituality, she says, must be “made specific” in some religious context, because

You can’t teach children language without teaching children a language. [Cavalletti] writes, “Wishing to stay on a vague level without any specific content is the same as wanting a child to talk without using any particular language.” Some parents say they don’t want their children to learn a particular religion because they want them to be free to choose their own. But these children are missing the opportunity to become spiritually literate.

… While we don’t reject other traditions, a particular religion has to be our starting point. To say, “I’m spiritual but not religious” is like saying, “I’m linguistic but don’t speak any particular language.” Everyone has innate linguistic capacity that gets activated as one learns a particular language or languages. Likewise, everyone has spiritual capacity that gets activated and mobilized through becoming religious in a particular way.

At this point in human history, our religious communities are especially conflicted, so it’s understandable why people would want to put a “but” in between spiritual and religious. If thoughtful spiritual people leave the destiny of our religions to the unthoughtful and unspiritual, then their destiny is to be conservative in the worst possible way: the last to accept good new ideas, the last to abandon ugly old prejudices, the last to admit they’ve been wrong. I believe religion is meant to lead, not lag, as a critically progressive community. As a progressive community, it should attract the brightest minds, the most sensitive and courageous hearts, to help lead the way into a brighter future by discerning and embodying the vision and values of tomorrow today, in the fierce urgency of now. As a critically progressive community, it should not blindly accept every new idea, but ground its foresight in hindsight and insight gained from thinking critically about the past and present. (From This Way of Life, Brian McLaren, Convergent Books, September 2016)