Dead Christianity vs. the Gospel: A Reflection from Tbilisi

Jun 5, 2025

People are naturally drawn to things of value — especially when that value takes the form of beauty, truth, and goodness. The Gospel, when truly lived out, embodies and produces these very qualities, as shown in Galatians 5:22–23:

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

It is only logical, then, that institutions throughout history would try to capitalize on this value — not to serve it, but to control people through it. You don’t manipulate people by offering them what they don’t want; you use what they already desire.

It’s not unlike the food industry. People naturally want food — real, good food. But then there is profit, so then come the additives, preservatives, colorings, slogans, branding, and packaging. Food becomes an antithesis of itself. The result? Obesity, addiction, and disease. What began as nourishment becomes poison, and the original purpose — health — is lost.

Such can be applied to the Gospel itself. After spending time in Tbilisi and becoming more immersed in scripture, I’ve been struck by a painful contrast. The Gospel is meant to make us more alive — more joyful, more loving, more kind. And yet the public atmosphere in this “Christian country” often feels the opposite: closed, joyless, unkind. What I feel instead is a heavy presence of cultural Christianity and churchianity — the worship of tradition, structure, and appearances, but not Christ.

Scripture actually encourages us to rebuke fellow believers (Luke 17:3; Galatians 6:1), and so this is exactly what I’m doing.

Having traveled the world, I can’t help but notice a glaring contradiction, one that I suspect many sincere nomadic followers of Christ would have noticed themelves — the irony that in some pagan nations, the general atmosphere would appear to actually be more Christlike in the sense of bearing the fruits of gentleness, joy, kindness, and hospitality.

Ivan Illich, a radical Catholic thinker and critic of institutionalization, warned that good things — like the Church, education, or medicine — are often taken over by systems that try to “improve” them until they’re unrecognizable or their own antithesis. What once was wholesome becomes an instrument of control.

Yet all of this only echoes the Eden story. Adam and Eve had everything — they walked with God, knew peace, lived in perfect communion. But they reached out to try to improve what was already perfect, to fix what wasn’t broken. That act — the desire to possess and improve what should have been received with reverence — is the primordial temptation. And it’s still with us.

What we’re witnessing, in places like Tbilisi, is the cost of turning a good thing into a monster — culture and institution replacing Christ with something inert, polished, and dead. The Gospel has not failed — but it has been dressed up, packaged, and institutionalized into its antithesis. We don’t need more polish, but more people to drop their cultural conditioning and return to the roots of their faith — living it out rather than clinging to its cultural decorations.

All of this is likely a major reason why so many have been disillusioned with the faith throughout the world — witnessing how deeply it’s been distorted in practice. It’s strange to think that the very church or Christian cultural tradition someone turns to might be the very thing distancing them from God. I know it was part of what led me to walk away from it in my teens despite my Christian upbringing.

Yet we also know that true faith was never meant to be defined by people, since we’re all broken. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). But what we can do is live out the Gospel genuinely among one another — anchored in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — which is a most subversive act these days.