The Real Reason Christians Are Weird
And discover what kind of weird are you
Historian Tom Holland has a provocative message for the Church today:
“Christians need to keep being weird.”
He isn’t talking about eccentric behaviour, tribal subcultures, or religious quirks. This is no call to ‘fire tunnels’, ‘grave soaking’, or ‘snake handling’. There is just the plain weird, ie bizarre stuff Christians do, then there are the really weird things that stand in contrast to the world and reveal Jesus.
Holland means the deep, civilisation-shaping strangeness that made Christianity explode into the ancient world with moral and spiritual force. And it is the Christianity our world has been losing, and itself in the process.
Christianity was “weird” because it claimed that:
God became human, and the crucified One rules the world.
The poor and powerless bear divine dignity.
Enemies are to be loved, not eliminated.
Forgiveness outranks revenge.
Reality is sacramental, not secular.
Every human—from womb to grave—is precious to God.
Resurrection is the true horizon of human hope.
This is the strangeness that reshaped the moral imagination of the West. This is the weirdness that rewired the ancient world’s moral operating system. But in our moment, this weirdness is being replaced by something else.
Christians—progressive, conservative, nationalist, and therapeutic—are often absorbing the ontologies of the surrounding culture, and not the strange world of the Gospel.
Yes ontologies. Let’s do some theology together. I’ll walk you through it.
Ontology = Your mental Lego instruction booklet for reality. It tells you what pieces exist, which ones fit together, and what counts as an actual piece vs. an imaginary one.
Ontology is what lets you answer the question: What’s really real here? Even when everyone else is arguing about something completely different. BTW, this means that Christian weirdness is not primarily political or moral.
It is ontological.
Because it begins with the collapse of our understanding of what is real. To explain how this is the case, I’ve found Richard Beck’s framework invaluable (and written about it before):
Ontology → Existential → Moral.
In other words, who God is (ontology) shapes who we become (existential formation), which shapes how we live (moral vision).
If ontology is about what’s real, and the existential is about what that reality feels like when you’re actually living it, then the moral is about what you should do in response.
And I can guarantee you this: look at what anyone believes and how they behave, and you can use this framework to map and discover the “why” of who they really are.
And the clearest diagnostic tool of all for this is worship. Worship reveals the ontology we actually inhabit. Let’s do a worship walk-through together to see what I mean.
Ontology: The Source of True Weirdness
The deepest weirdness of Christianity is ontological: the world is shaped and sustained by the Triune God.
True Christian ontology affirms:
God is real and active, Christ is the centre of reality, the Spirit fills and animates the Church, Creation is sacramental, Salvation is participation and not self-construction.
Sacramental worship is the embodiment of this ontology.
Some more theology here. Sacramental worship simply means, we do not create meaning, but rather that:
We enter into God’s reality, and he creates ours
Perhaps one of the weirdest things to believe in a postmodern, secular, therapeutic, consumerist world is that I am not free to decide who I want to be. My identity is not self-made. God created me, and He keeps giving me my identity as I surrender myself to Him (Gal. 2:20). Christians are God-made. Or they are not Christian. Full stop.
Progressive distortions: Masquerades
Progressive Christianity often retains Christian moral intuitions but embraces an ontology shaped by expressive individualism, i.e being true to yourself by expressing your inner feelings, desires, and identity, and letting nothing outside you define who you are. It’s the belief that the real you is found inside, and your main job in life is to express it openly and freely.
They may stand among “Christians,” but what they worship is little more than a secular anthropology masquerading as faith — a hollowed out ontology of the self, thinly lacquered with the moralistic clichés of justice and moral virtue. And if you think that harsh, please read on.
Conservative nationalist distortions: Idolatries
When Christian ontology is replaced with civil religion:
The nation becomes sacred, history becomes destiny, political identity becomes the covenant people, and worship becomes a patriotic liturgy.
This is idolatry disguised as Christianity. Their worship reveals it, and where the flag displaces the altar, and the story of the national identity and destiny eclipses the story of salvation.
Therapeutic-consumer distortions: Lifestyles
This is the most pervasive collapse in the Western Church, infecting all kinds of faith. God becomes:
Distant (Deism: God made the world… then ghosted it)
Non-Trinitarian (Modalism: God isn’t three distinct persons — He just changes outfits of father, son and spirit), therapeutic (here to help me cope)
A lifestyle genie, summoned for personal benefit and provision
Sacraments and Worship become inspirational metaphors for mood regulation, spiritual upselling and self-help coaching, symbolic reminders and spiritual entertainment.
God becomes a consumer vending machine
This is also a total ontological collapse and not Christian.
Existential Weirdness
Remember, the existential is about what that reality feels like when you’re actually living it. Christianity forms a radically new kind of existential person:
Humble, repentant, beloved, surrendered, hopeful, re-ordered toward God, shaped by death and resurrection.
This weirdness appears nowhere more clearly than in worship, where the self is de-centred and re-centred in Christ. Let’s run this again against progressives, nationalists, and consumerists.
Progressive distortion: Self-made
When the self is self-created:
Repentance is oppressive, confession is replaced with affirmation, surrender is replaced with authenticity, liturgy/worship becomes self-expression, the cross becomes a symbol rather than a call
Worship again reveals the shift here to a mode of self-creation:
What we call “God” is only our own self-made image reflected at us
Conservative distortions: Defended self
When fear and tribal identity dominate:
Worship becomes performance, holiness becomes boundary policing, certainty becomes the liturgical/worship centre, and repentance feels unsafe, grace feels threatening
The existential core becomes:
Belonging to the tribe rather than belonging to Christ
Therapeutic-consumer distortion: Curated self
The Moralistic Therapeutic Deism self is:
Comfort-oriented, self-optimised, preference-driven, emotionally protected, allergic to sacrifice.
So worship becomes:
Inspirational pick-me-up, spiritual retail therapy, personal enrichment session, an experience to be rated: “Did it help me?”
The cross is not denied….
It is just ignored
Moral Weirdness
And lastly, Morality. Christian moral weirdness only emerges from a Christian ontology and a cruciform self. Remember the moral is about what you should do in response to what is really real (our ontology).
Before Christians were strange, Israel was strange. In an ancient Near East shaped by child sacrifice, fear, scarcity, and vengeance, Israel alone worshipped a God who forbade killing children, protected the vulnerable, cancelled debts, and insisted that abundance came from faithfulness, not fear. Even in exile, they were commanded to seek the welfare of their captors—a posture incomprehensible to surrounding cultures.
Christians inherited—and intensified—that strangeness. To Romans, rescuing abandoned infants looked irrational; caring for plague victims at the cost of one’s own life looked reckless; dying rather than renouncing Christ looked absurd, as did refusing abortion and infanticide. They lived as though the cross had remade reality: every child mattered, every body bore dignity, and death no longer held the final word.
So today, when Christians resist irreversible medical interventions on children or refuse to treat bodies as raw material for self-creation, we appear strange again. Christian ontology recognises that bodies are gifts—not canvases for ideology or material for cultural experimentation.
But this is simply the ancient strangeness of a sacramental vision in which life is a gift, children are entrusted, enemies become neighbours, and the vulnerable reveal God’s presence.
This was not sentiment. It was ontology becoming moral action. Their behaviour flowed out of who they were in Christ, not out of moral striving. This same holy strangeness is needed today.
Same Moral Vision, Different Ontologies, Very Different Destinations
At this point, someone/you may ask:
But don’t many Christians with different ontologies share similar moral visions?
Yes.
Christians often hold similar moral aspirations—including care for the environment, solidarity with the vulnerable, peace-making, and compassion.
But what I’ve been insisting on in this article is that sharing a moral vision does not mean sharing an ontology.
And it is the ontology—not the ethics—that ultimately determines:
How we sustain the moral vision, where we believe history is going, what kind of people we become, how we respond when moral ideals cost us something, and the long-term direction of our lives, churches, communities, and societies.
Two moral visions may look similar on the surface, but if one is grounded in expressive individualism, another in nationalist civil religion, and another in therapeutic self-care, the long-term consequences are drastically different.
The telos—the ultimate horizon of meaning—shifts. Telos is the purpose God made something for — the “why” behind its existence, the direction God is guiding it toward.
And over time, communities that start in what looks like a similar place end up in entirely different worlds because the ontologies beneath their ethics lead them there.
This is why the ancient Church could share certain moral concerns with Stoics, Jews, or philosophers, yet be completely alien in its understanding of reality, worship, body, dignity, death, and hope.
Ontology shapes destiny.
It really does. And all this begs the question, what is Christian ontology? Well, that requires a longer answer another time. But for now, I’ll note that different traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Pentecostal, etc.) express this in diverse ways, but the best of them all orbit the same centre:
Christ is the ground of being and the One in whom all things hold together.
Recovering Christian “weirdness” means recovering and maintaining this ontological centre.
When a Christian community’s ontology drifts from this centre—toward the sovereign self, the sovereign nation, therapeutic self-making, ideological capture, unchurched solo faith —its faith ceases to be recognisably Christian, no matter how similar the moral language.
Worship as the MRI of the Church’s Soul
You can tell exactly what a Christian community, or an individual Christian, believes by looking at their worship. Ask:
Who—or what—is at the centre? What kind of self is being formed? What moral universe is being imagined? What loves are being trained? Where is the cross? What do the sacraments and worship mean? When, how, where and with whom do they worship?
And remember:
Worship reveals your ontology.
Ontology forms your ‘self’
Your ‘self’ generates your morality
Lose a true Christian ontology, and everything else collapses into activism, tribalism, ideology or self-help and formation towards something that is not Christian, in this life and the one to come.
The Weirdness We Must Recover
Tom Holland’s plea is right. If Christianity stops being weird, it stops being Christian. This weirdness once transformed the ancient world.
It can do so again.
But only if we resist the gravitational pull of our age and return to worship the God who makes us strange in all the right ways.