Are We--Dare I Ask--Christians?

So I got mixed traction on the "religion as demon" idea. 

If I can continue to push here, I think this idea is not a minor one in our discussion.  I do think that religion, as understood in broader, secular culture (and, again, arguably as Jesus described it) is very much something we should be suspect of and should be loathe to align ourselves with.  This will cause the occasional awkward or semantic conversation.  ("So you're a committed, really involved churchgoer but it's important to you to make clear that you're not 'religious'...  Okey-dokey."  As they roll their eyes.)  But to my mind this is not a frill; it's not word games; it's right at the heart of whatever it is we're hoping to offer to the world around us.

And, in the "in for a penny, in for a pound" spirit, I'm tempted to push for the whole she-bang and ask how much utility you find in the word "Christian" as a label you embrace.  If you've read my book, you'll know some of my thoughts on the matter, but I was very much helped by meeting "Muslims who follow Jesus" in the Middle East.  Their regarding of their Muslim background as an important part of their culture and heritage that they planned on identifying with for the rest of their lives on those terms--but which was separate from the "following Jesus" part was revolutionary for me.  One of my friends there talked of himself as a "Christian who followed Jesus"--his background and culture was Christian.  Which then freed me to realize I was a "secularist who followed Jesus"--I had no Christian background at all and had never identified with Christian culture in any way.

It was pointed out to me that "Christian" only comes up in the New Testament three times, two of which are epithets tossed the way of Jesus' people by their enemies.  And Jesus is not the God of the Christians while Allah is God of the Muslims and Hindus have lots of gods and so on.  Jesus' claim is to be the only universal God.  He's everybody's God--Buddhist, Confucian, Muslim, Christian, secular, and everyone else.  The developing sin of the Old Testament was regarding the God there as the God exclusively of the Jews. 

And "Christian" is, by definition, a bounded-set term.  It's something you either are or aren't.  It's a pool you jump into or you don't. 

That said, you could justly push back that I, who write this, pastor a church with the phrase "Christian Fellowship" in its name.  Touche.  But it's not that we haven't weighed that.  We decided to stick with it as we interviewed a sampling of secularists who'd encountered Jesus through us--would they prefer that we ditch the "Christian" designation?  No, they said.  While they didn't identify with it themselves, it helped them feel safe that we weren't being shifty.  In other words, they loved that we were centered-set.  But it made it safe for them to explore a centered-set faith if we pretended to be bounded-set up front.

And I realize that this conversation may differ radically from culture to culture.  In Ohio or Orange County, California or Texas or Oklahoma, there might just be no mileage at all to be gained by avoiding calling oneself a "Christian."  And even in Boston, periodically I do end up in a conversation with someone who asks me, "So are you a Christian?"  And I find myself saying, "Absolutely in the sense that I'm doing my best to follow Jesus.  But, strangely, I've always much more strongly identified with secular culture and I have no cultural background as a Christian. So in that sense I identify more with being a secularist."  And I pretty much never self-label as "Christian."

I realize I got minimal traction with my pushing against being "religious," so I may be asking a bit much here.  But, with full trepidation, let me ask...thoughts?