# people love Jesus.. so why not the Church?

An episode of [AfterMass](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1823710125), 11 Mar 2026, 14 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1267289912.mp3

Why do so many people say they love Jesus but reject the Church? In this episode we look at the growing cultural trend of separating Jesus from the Church and why that split would have made no sense to early Christians. If you admire Jesus but struggle with religion, this conversation is for you. Check out our private community: www.patreon.com/anamunley Follow for more conversations on faith, culture and Catholicism!

## Transcript

[0:00] Something that I keep noticing in different conversations
[0:02] online, and I do see it in real life too, but people saying
[0:06] things like I love Jesus but I just don't like organized
[0:09] religion. Or they'll say that they believe
[0:11] in Jesus, but they don't need the church.
[0:13] And that sentiment, I think I've seen it everywhere right now.
[0:17] And even people who don't consider themselves Christian
[0:20] will say that they admire or love Jesus.
[0:22] They like his teachings and they like the idea of him.
[0:24] They think he was wise or compassionate or revolutionary
[0:27] in some way. But the second that the
[0:29] conversation shifts to the church, the tone changes
[0:32] immediately. So all of a sudden people are
[0:35] getting skeptical. They'll say religion is corrupt
[0:37] and man made or institutions can't be trusted or that faith
[0:41] shouldn't be something personal and private.
[0:43] And I can see maybe a little why people feel that way, you know,
[0:48] because there have been real failures and scandals and
[0:51] hypocrisy and almost all religious institutions.
[0:54] And I'm not denying that, and I don't think anybody is denying
[0:57] that. But it's still interesting to me
[0:59] how normal it's become to separate Jesus from the church,
[1:02] almost like those two things have nothing to do with each
[1:04] other. Historically, that would have
[1:06] sounded very strange to Christians.
[1:08] The idea that you could take Jesus but leave the church
[1:11] behind is a pretty modern way of thinking about the faith.
[1:15] And the the more that I see people say it, the more that I
[1:17] think it's worth slowing down and asking why that split has
[1:20] become so common in the 1st place.
[1:22] I think part of what's happening is that a lot of people today,
[1:25] they like a version of Jesus that exists more in the culture
[1:29] than in the actual gospels. You'll hear people talk about
[1:32] Jesus as this kind of universally affirming figure,
[1:36] someone who just tells people to be kind and accept everyone and
[1:40] never judge anything and basically just follow our
[1:43] hearts. And of course Jesus is loving
[1:45] and mercy is central to the whole story of Christianity.
[1:49] But if you sit down, if you actually sit down and read the
[1:52] gospels straight through, the real Jesus isn't nearly as soft
[1:56] or vague as the cultural version that people are comfortable
[1:59] with. He says things that are
[2:01] incredibly beautiful and comforting, and then 5 minutes
[2:04] later he's saying something that completely disrupts people's
[2:07] lives. He tells people to repent.
[2:09] He tells people to leave things behind.
[2:11] He talks about sin in a way that makes people feel very
[2:13] uncomfortable. At one point he he even tells
[2:15] his followers that if they want to follow him, they have to take
[2:18] up their cross. And these things aren't casual.
[2:21] This isn't like a little lol moment.
[2:23] That's the kind of language that asks something serious from you.
[2:27] So what tends to happen is that people keep the parts of Jesus
[2:30] that feel inspiring and then quietly ignore the parts that
[2:33] challenge them. And once you do that, it becomes
[2:36] very easy to separate Jesus from the church, because the church
[2:39] is the place where those harder parts of his teachings are still
[2:43] taken seriously. And if you to move that
[2:45] structure, you can basically shape Jesus into whatever
[2:48] version feels most comfortable to you.
[2:51] The church enters the conversation and people start
[2:54] pulling back because the church does something that our own
[2:57] culture is not very comfortable doing anymore.
[3:00] It actually defines things. It makes claims about reality.
[3:04] It says that certain things are true and certain things are not.
[3:07] It says that some actions lead people toward flourishing and
[3:11] wonderful lives, and then other actions lead people away from
[3:14] it. And once you you have that kind
[3:16] of framework, faith stops being something that you can
[3:18] constantly reshape around your preferences.
[3:22] You don't just approach Christianity as a collection of
[3:25] inspirational sayings that you interpret however you want that
[3:28] day. You're stepping into something
[3:30] that already has a structure and a history and a body of
[3:33] teaching, and you conform yourself to that.
[3:36] You don't conform that to you. For a lot of people, that feels
[3:40] restrictive, especially in a culture where autonomy is
[3:43] basically treated like the highest value.
[3:46] And our society, we're used to the idea that we should define
[3:49] our own beliefs and our own identity, our own morality.
[3:52] So when an institution says, hey, this is what Christians
[3:55] have believed about these things for centuries, it can feel like
[3:58] someone's taking the control away from you.
[4:00] But what's interesting is that rejecting the church doesn't
[4:04] actually remove authority from the equation, it just relocates
[4:07] it. So instead of authority existing
[4:09] in something shared like a tradition or a community of
[4:12] believers, and now moves entirely into the individual,
[4:16] now each person becomes the final interpreter of what Jesus
[4:19] means, what his teachings are, and which parts of them actually
[4:22] matter. And once that happens, everybody
[4:25] ends up with a slightly different version of
[4:27] Christianity that mostly reflects their own preferences.
[4:30] There's another piece of this that people usually don't stop
[4:33] to think about. When someone says that they
[4:35] believe in Jesus but reject the church entirely, they're still
[4:39] relying on the church for almost everything that they know about
[4:41] Jesus. The gospels didn't just appear
[4:44] out of nowhere. The early Christian communities
[4:46] preserved those texts and copied them and passed them down and
[4:50] eventually recognized which writings belonged in the New
[4:53] Testament. The same church people are
[4:55] skeptical of is the reason we even have a historical record of
[4:58] Jesus in the 1st place. That part of the story tends to
[5:01] disappear in modern conversations.
[5:03] People imagine Jesus as this stand alone figure who can be
[5:07] separated from everything that came after him.
[5:10] But historically that is not how things unfolded.
[5:12] The people who first believed in him formed communities.
[5:15] They worshipped together, they shared teachings.
[5:18] They handed those teachings down from generation to generation.
[5:21] So when someone says that they love Jesus but reject the
[5:25] church, they are still standing on a foundation that the church
[5:28] helped preserve. The picture they have of Jesus
[5:31] came through history, and once you start thinking about it in
[5:34] that way, the separation between Jesus and the church becomes a
[5:37] lot harder to maintain. Another thing that gets
[5:41] overlooked a lot is how Jesus actually set things up while he
[5:44] was here on earth. He didn't just walk around
[5:46] giving these inspiring speeches and then leave everyone to
[5:50] figure it out or figure out what it all meant on their own.
[5:53] If you read the Gospels, he's constantly forming a group of
[5:56] people around him. He's choosing the apostles.
[5:59] He spends years teaching them. He gives them authority to
[6:02] continue teaching after he's gone.
[6:04] There's actually this moment in the Gospel Matthew where he
[6:07] tells Peter that he's going to build his church and that the
[6:09] gates of hell won't prevail against it.
[6:11] Why would he say that if he's just expecting every individual
[6:14] to just create their own private interpretation of his message?
[6:17] From the beginning, Christianity had structure and leadership and
[6:20] community of believers who were responsible for preserving and
[6:25] and teaching what Jesus actually said and taught.
[6:28] And that's important because human beings do not interpret
[6:30] things in a vacuum. Left completely on our own, we
[6:34] tend to shape ideas around our own preferences.
[6:37] We soften things up that make us feel uncomfortable.
[6:39] And what makes me uncomfortable might not make you
[6:41] uncomfortable. So you see where the issue lies.
[6:44] We emphasize the parts that we already agree with.
[6:46] And having a community and a tradition around the teachings
[6:49] of Jesus was done to be able to protect them from slowly
[6:53] drifting into whatever version each generation finds easiest to
[6:56] accept. I honestly think that the deeper
[6:58] issue underneath all of this isn't really about Jesus at all.
[7:02] Most people, even people who aren't Christian, have a pretty
[7:05] positive impression of him. They see him as compassionate
[7:09] and wise and someone who stood up for the marginalized.
[7:12] And admiring Jesus doesn't cost that much socially.
[7:15] It doesn't cost you anything at all, actually.
[7:17] But what people struggle with is authority.
[7:20] The buzzword authority. Modern culture is built around
[7:24] this idea that the individual should be the final decision
[7:27] maker about everything. Literally everything.
[7:29] Your beliefs, your identity, your moral framework.
[7:33] The assumption is that each person should be free to
[7:36] construct those things for themselves.
[7:37] Once you are operating with that mindset, any institution that
[7:42] claims to carry truth across generations starts to feel
[7:46] suspicious. People assume that there has to
[7:48] be a power struggle or power involved, or control, or an
[7:52] attempt to limit personal freedom.
[7:54] So when Christianity shows up and says that truth ultimately
[7:58] comes from God and that human beings receive it rather than
[8:01] invent it, well, that clashes with the cultural instinct
[8:05] toward total autonomy. And the church represents that
[8:08] tension in a very visible way. It's not just a collection of
[8:11] individuals who all interpret Jesus differently.
[8:14] It's a historical body that says there is a shared understanding
[8:18] of the faith that has been handed down and protected over
[8:21] time. For a culture that prioritizes
[8:23] personal authority above everything else, that will feel
[8:26] uncomfortable. But the discomfort isn't about
[8:29] Jesus himself. It's about the idea that
[8:31] following him might require submitting to something outside
[8:35] of ourselves. And when you remove the church
[8:37] from the picture, something subtle starts to happen to
[8:40] Christianity itself. We can see it happening now.
[8:43] Jesus slowly becomes more of a symbol than a person with
[8:47] specific teachings. People start quoting him in
[8:49] their BIOS or in ways that fit whatever point they're trying to
[8:52] make. You know, one person says that
[8:54] Jesus would affirm this. Another person says Jesus would
[8:57] affirm the exact opposite. And since there's no shared
[8:59] reference over the point anymore, the conversation never
[9:03] really lands anywhere. You see this online all of the
[9:05] time. Jesus gets used almost like a
[9:08] cultural mascot. And I saw it a lot, especially
[9:10] with the immigration conversation.
[9:12] Pro or anti ICE people quoted Jesus from the same chapters,
[9:17] just different verses in different ways interpreting
[9:20] different things. How's that possible?
[9:22] At that point it's not really about discovering what he
[9:24] actually taught, it's about borrowing his authority for
[9:27] ideas that you already agree with or that already feel
[9:30] comfortable to you. Over time, the figure of Jesus
[9:33] becomes softer and more abstract, easier to adapt to
[9:37] whatever the moment demands of us, and the parts of his message
[9:41] that confront human behavior or ask for real change tend to fade
[9:45] into the background pretty quickly.
[9:47] And what remains is a version of Jesus that functions more like a
[9:51] Pinterest inspiration board than like a teacher whose words carry
[9:55] weight. The church, for all its flaws
[9:57] and failures, which it has, I'll be the first to say it, the
[10:00] church still has historically acted as a kind of guardrail
[10:04] against that drift. It keeps the teachings connected
[10:08] to the actual tradition that they came from.
[10:10] It preserves the continuity between the Jesus of the Gospels
[10:14] and the faith that Christians continue to practice today.
[10:16] Without that continuity, Christianity starts to fragment
[10:20] into 1000 individual interpretations that barely
[10:24] resemble each other. And that's what's happened.
[10:26] Just look around. So why does the church actually
[10:29] matter? This is where the church starts
[10:31] to look a little different once you think about it a little more
[10:33] carefully. A lot of people imagine the
[10:35] church as this later invention that kind of gets inserted
[10:39] between people and Jesus. Like it's this unnecessary
[10:43] middle layer that just complicates something that
[10:45] should be very simple. But the church has always been
[10:48] the environment where the teachings of Jesus actually
[10:51] continue to live. It's where scriptures were read
[10:54] and explained. It's where people gathered for
[10:57] worship. It's where sacraments were
[10:58] celebrated. It's where believers were taught
[11:01] how to live out the things that Jesus said.
[11:03] Christianity was never meant to be this like set of ideas that
[11:07] just float around in someone's head.
[11:10] It was always embodied in a community, in a living body of
[11:14] Christ. People praying together and
[11:16] learning together, correcting each other, growing in holiness
[11:19] together. And that's why the Church
[11:22] exists, not to compete with Jesus, but to remain connected
[11:27] to him in a very real, in a very visible way.
[11:30] And the sacraments are a huge part of that.
[11:33] Baptism, confession, the Eucharist, those are not
[11:36] symbolic gestures. They are concrete ways that
[11:39] Christians encounter God in their actual lives in the day.
[11:42] Today without the Church those things completely disappear and
[11:47] Christianity slowly becomes something more like this
[11:50] personal philosophy instead of a lived faith.
[11:54] That is the difference that people don't always acknowledge
[11:57] or want to see or submit to. The church isn't an institution
[12:01] that makes up ruled, it's the place where the life of faith is
[12:05] actually practiced and passed on.
[12:07] So when people say they love Jesus but they don't want the
[12:11] church, when I break it down I can understand where the
[12:14] instinct comes from but I can't condone it.
[12:17] A lot of people have experienced hypocrisy and religious spaces
[12:21] and church hurt is very real. Some have been hurt by people in
[12:25] positions of authority within that church.
[12:27] Others grew up in an environment where religion felt rigid or
[12:31] lifeless. And those experiences are real
[12:34] and they shape how people approach faith.
[12:36] But we are in 2026. All of this information is true.
[12:39] You need to go and search for that information yourself.
[12:42] Stop using the external things that have happened to you that
[12:46] are unfair and unjust, but stop using them as excuses to reject
[12:50] the truth. Separate reading Jesus from the
[12:53] church ends up changing what Christianity actually does,
[12:56] because the same Jesus that people admire in the Gospels
[12:59] didn't just leave behind a set of inspirational sayings for
[13:03] individuals to interpret privately.
[13:05] He formed a community. He entrusted his teachings to
[13:09] people who would carry them forward.
[13:11] Christianity has always been something lived together, not
[13:15] something each person reinvent alone.
[13:17] And once you start looking at it that way, the church stops
[13:21] looking like an obstacle between people and Jesus, and it starts
[13:25] looking more like the place where his teachings have been
[13:28] preserved and practiced and handed down across generations.
[13:33] Following Jesus has never been just about liking his ideas.
[13:37] It's about entering into the life that grew from his
[13:40] teachings, even when that life asks something of us.
[13:44] And the church, imperfect as it can be, is where that life
[13:48] continues to unfold. So don't reject it.
[13:51] Lean into it, and accept the invite to join the church that
[13:54] Jesus founded, that has preserved his teachings, and
[13:57] that keeps Jesus alive in his body of believers.
[13:59] Because once you do, you'll never look back, and you
[14:03] certainly won't regret it. That's all I have for today.
[14:06] I will see you guys next time.

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