Red Pill Christians

"You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

This quote from Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) comes at a decisive moment in the movie The Matrix. Neo (Keanu Reeves) has just been told that he has been living in a fantasy, a digital world created by machines who have taken over and enslaved humanity, farming their bodies for energy while filling their brains with made-up images and experiences. Now, Neo has a choice: go back into the comfortable but false world of the Matrix or permanently exit the delusion and suffer the consequences of knowing the truth.

Spoiler alert: he takes the red pill.

My ethics professor and sister in Christ, Amy Laura Hall, has used this image to talk about a kind of Christianity that refuses to use religion as an opiate. My friend and classmate Lindsey refers to herself as a "red pill Christian." Red pill Christians know just how bad things can get both in the world and in the church. They've taken off the rose-colored glasses.

Here's the thing: although the first instinct after taking the red pill, so to speak, may be to reject the institutional church, my calling seems to be to a difficult tension. I consider myself a red pill Christian, but I still feel called to serve within and through the church. If you're anti-institutional, I sympathize and probably agree with you on a lot of your concerns about organized religion, but I am still committed to the institution because, frankly, it's all we've got.

The church has done a lot of awful things over the centuries and continues to fail to represent Christ to the world, and admitting this is part of being a red pill Christian; but there are still times and places in the life of the church in which God's love shines through in a way that it simply cannot elsewhere. I do not believe that the church is the hope of the world, because only Christ is that; but as broken as the church is, she is still the body of Christ.

What might it look like to be a red pill church? It does not mean to abandon hope; if you think about it, the kinds of people and groups who most faithfully embody Christian hope are those who truly understand just how bad things can get. It means to see how deep the rabbit-hole goes and emerge on the other side determined to be faithful even in the face of what we've seen, because God is there even in the darkness of the rabbit-hole.