Faith Distorted: Confronting Superficiality and Reclaiming Depth
Richard Rohr on Jesus, Justice, and the Crisis of Shallow Spirituality
For over twenty years, I had the pleasure of hosting a weekly radio show titled JourneysFire with Richard Brendan, which featured leading visionaries and social change artists. Among the most profound conversations featured on the show was an interview with bestselling author and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, Fr. Richard Rohr. The following is an excerpt from our conversation, in which Rohr confronts the distortion of faith, the too-often-ignored radical nature of Jesus, and the urgent need for deeper reflection in our world today.
RB (Richard Brendan): Richard, what do you see? As a religious leader yourself, what do you see as the top issues that we need to be addressing in our country? For so long, what we call the religious right has dominated the discussion around "family values," around the abortion issue, same-sex marriage, but there are so many more issues that need to come to the forefront that has everything to do with values.
RR (Richard Rohr): Yes. It's amazing that we've been able to create, like the two you mentioned, litmus tests that have not been litmus tests for the first 1,900 years of Christianity. It's like, where did these come from as a prooftext of whether you're really a Christian or not? And as a Catholic who tries to honor the whole tradition, I want to say where did that come from? You know it's dealing with cultural issues and purity codes and the need to feel superior and right much more than any reliance upon the teachings of Jesus, who never talks about either of those issues, for example, whereas almost every other story of Jesus is talking about love and concern for the poor. So it's really amazing that people who consider themselves followers of Jesus have been able to ignore many of the major things that Jesus talked about.
RB: Talk more about what I would consider the radical nature of Jesus that we often don't hear about, but I think we are now. but just how radical was he?
RR: We have churchified Jesus and we took him out of his historical Jewish reformist context, and we pretty much made him a white, middle-class American, concerned about the same issues that we are obsessed with or preoccupied with. And once you do that, once you pull him out of his Jewish context as a reformer of his own religion, and therefore a reformer of all religion, I think you pretty much have domesticated Jesus. And the things that we are concerned about are very different from the much more radical concerns of his, which have to do with justice, with mercy, and the poor.
RB: Richard, do you see any issues overriding any others that are taking place in the world today, that you deem most important?
RR: This is what comes to my mind right now. I think our biggest problem is superficiality. We have an amazing preoccupation with silliness, with issues of no account, with the lives of movie stars. I think this superficiality is leading us to miss the heart of most issues because we just don't go deep. We settle for cliches', for one-liners, for very quick explanations for everything, and that's what allows us to not to see the evil of war, not to see the global warming issue as a moral issue, not to see the oppression of the poor as a moral issue. It's just that - we're not bad people. We;re just not very deep people.
Fr. Richard Rohr’s insights remind us that honest spirituality calls us to transcend superficiality and engage with the deeper, frequently uncomfortable realities of justice, mercy, and the human condition. His reflections urge us to reclaim a faith rooted in love and concern for the marginalized instead of one reduced to cultural litmus tests. As we navigate the complexities of modern life, can we choose depth over distraction? Will we choose transformation over mere tradition?
