Thou Shalt Not Litmus Test

Every believer’s journey differs

A shorter version of this post was originally published as “Twelve Christians, One Bible, and Zero Agreement: What That Tells Us” in Backyard Church, June 11, 2025.

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MY LIFE, LITERALLY, BEGAN WITH A DEBATE over matters of faith. As a Southern Baptist minister (and considered a heretic by more conservative Baptists in our family), my father believed dancing was a sin. My mother, being raised Presbyterian (worse than interracial marriage to both families), thought dancing was perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the Lord.

The argument escalated to a shouting match when my mother reminded my father that he drag raced cars as a teenager, which was far more dangerous than dancing. To which my father replied: “I’d rather my son die in a drag race than go to hell on a dance floor.”

Doctrinal disagreement was the lifeblood of my family. You couldn’t eat at the same table without stepping on the toes of belief. I once found the entire section on Darwin and evolution in my grandfather’s Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia inked out in red. With a fountain pen.

Not that we argued over big questions like evolution. We quarreled over the tiniest minutia of Christian ethics. For example, although my family preached the sinfulness of card playing, they played a game called 64 using dominoes. I once asked why it was okay to play dominoes but not cards.

My uncle assured me with a familiar combination of smugness and piety that cards originated with Tarot decks, which were used for fortune telling and magic. Therefore, playing cards was flirting with the devil. Were I a modern, homeschooled Christian child, I probably would have accepted the answer.

Ah, the curse of literacy, libraries, and a public education. I then asked him, “But didn’t dice originate as bones and runes that were cast to tell the future, too?”

I’ll end the story there, but the discussion that followed reminded me of a line from the play Greater Tuna: “That family fights like cats and dogs. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they was Christians.”¹

Despite many Christians’ desire for doctrinal purity, we do not have a hive mind. Unlike the Borgs, there is no Christ collective. The thought that the act of conversion comes with a brain wipe that resets to Jesus mode is both naïve and laughable. If conversion came with a theologically correct setting, we wouldn’t need pastors, sermons, Bibles, or Bible study guides.

Christians inevitably understand the nature of God, the nature of Jesus, and the nature of faith differently. To believe in doctrinal purity is like believing in common sense. If common sense were really common, we wouldn’t be arguing all the time. But with Christianity, delusions about doctrinal purity don’t promote love, service, and sharing. They promote dissension, disunity, and sometimes persecution.

Denominations fragment, which shouldn’t surprise us because fragmentation created the denominations. Churches split across doctrinal fault lines. Even families and friends sever relations over questions of belief, which is the opposite of the fellowship Jesus preached.

Once we prioritize belief over love, we’ve already doomed the church to failure.