What the Bible Says About Christians Judging Non-Christians

I frequently get chastised for “picking on Christians.” Some have suggested that I might not be a true believer. “Why focus on the bad behavior inside the church while completely ignoring the mountain of sin that happens outside the church?” my friends ask.

You have to cut me some slack here. My social media feed is full of Jesus-followers, not merely critiquing non-Christians but demeaning and vilifying. I’m tired of it.

I don’t see the point in critiquing the non-Christian behavior of non-Christians. And who said we’re not supposed to critique the church, like that’s some kind of sin? Almost every time the New Testament talks about bad behavior, it’s referring to folks inside the church.

Christians.

But there’s one passage that goes into great detail about the evil deeds of those outside the church, people who “don’t know God” as we like to say. It’s frequently referenced when Christians take to social media to belittle non-Christians for their behavior.

What is commonly missed is that this passage is a bait-and-switch for the next passage, one that rarely sees any Sunday AM pulpit time.

It’s in a letter from St. Paul to the church in Rome, typically referred to as the “Book of Romans” in the New Testament. Chapter 1 contains a very long list of sins that the non-Christian world of Paul’s day was allegedly guilty of. To name a few: Godlessness, wickedness, the suppression of truth, foolishness, idolatry, sexual impurity, depravity, evil, greed, envy, murder, deceit, malice, strife, gossip, slander, God-hating, insolence, arrogance, and everyone’s favorite to condemn, same sex relationships:

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. ~ Romans 1:26-27

This is frequently referenced as one of the Bible’s anti-Gay passages, but if you read on, you’ll understand that bashing Queer folk wasn’t Paul’s intent.

Either way, “If we’re not supposed to condemn the non-Chrisitan world’s sins,” I’m asked, “what the hell is Paul doing here?”

First, his very Jewish audience would read this and think, “oh yeah, those godless sinners… God’s going to get ’em. Preach it Paul!!!” That’s why Paul uses “they” over and over again. He’s not teaching his readers something they don’t already know. He’s simply working them into a self-righteous lather so that he can spring his trap in the next chapter.

“Therefore,” he continues:

“…YOU have no excuse, YOU who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point YOU judge another, YOU are condemning yourself, because YOU who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when YOU, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do YOU think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do YOU show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead YOU to repentance?”

“But because of YOUR stubbornness and YOUR unrepentant heart, YOU are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed… For God does not show favoritism.”

Yikes.

Today’s Christian might say that this doesn’t apply to us because we’re not guilty of the activities outlined in Chapter 1. But neither was the church that Paul wrote to. There is no evidence that the fledgling congregation in Rome was regularly perpetrating such. In fact, Paul begins his letter with praise for how amazing and famous this church is.

How can he accuse them of being so guilty?

Remember that the founder of our religion equated hatred with murder, and “lustful thoughts” with adultery, which is an “abomination” according to the Old Testament.

This is where New Testament Christianity gets tricky, and often rejected. The Bible teaches that everyone sins, nobody can stop sinning, and nobody’s sin is better or worse than anyone else’s. It’s brilliant by the way. This puts us all on the same level. If everyone’s guilty, we’re all in need of the unconditional mercy and forgiveness that lay at the core of Jesus’ teaching.

No spiritual caste system can survive here.

Either way, when we, for example, accuse the Transgender movement of threatening our children or demeaning women, while utterly refusing to admit all the threatening and demeaning aspects of our religion, we condemn ourselves, according to St. Paul’s line of thinking.

In many ways, we condemn our religion.

We’re so focused on the non-churchy world’s behavior that we frequently turn a blind eye to the mess that’s making us one of the most clueless, culturally irrelevant organizations on the planet.

People think we’re crazy. Nobody wants to listen to anything we have to say.

But that’s because they’re hopeless sinners, right? They “don’t know God” like we do. We are “indwelt by the Spirit of God” which is why our moral code is so much higher and righteous than theirs. They don’t have anything to guide them. They wouldn’t know righteousness if it bit them in the ass. They don’t know the truth that we know. Their sins are repulsive.

They, they, they.

If God’s spirit has led us to be so repulsed by non-Christian misdeeds, it would lead us into a similar repulsion of the sins that thrive in today’s church. They might look/feel/act/smell different but, according to Paul, they’re just as bad.

You might be tempted to throw all of that back in my face, asking why I’m so repulsed by Christian misdeeds and not equally repulsed by the mountain of sin outside the church.

There are many things about our culture that I find repulsive, some because I’m a 56-year-old male raised in the south who needs to grow up, some because they truly are repulsive, and all points in between. Just because I don’t comment on a certain cultural facet doesn’t mean I’m OK with it.

But I’ll ask again, why rip on the non-Christian behavior of non-Christians? What’s the point? And why does the New Testament – the very “Word of God” – so frequently rip on Christian behavior while almost categorically ignoring everyone else’s shenanigans?

How do we miss this?

Whatever Christianity’s job is in this world, it’s not condemnation. We’re not qualified. We’ve been doing this long enough and it’s gotten us less than nowhere.

Instead, let’s change us, audit us, correct us, work on us. Let’s make us better, an institution unlike any other – as the bible seems to intend – one that’s full of mercy, understanding, grace, and the kind of painful truth that comes part and parcel with waving the Word of God around like it’s intended for someone else.

I’ll argue that Jesus sent his disciples into the world to change it like it’s never been changed before, not by force and certainly not by condemnation, but by something much more peaceful, and full of hope; something that ripples far beyond the bearer into the most broken, “repulsive” parts of our world.

Zero of that happens when we – Christian sinners – decide instead to pick on non-Christian sinners. That makes me mad, so I blog. But in this particular case, I’m not picking on you, or taking swats at you with the Word of God.

St. Paul is. Read it for yourself, as one literary unit, here, and never again use Romans 1 to condemn anyone but us.