Can You Hate Religion and Still Love Jesus?

Chances are you've seen this video floating around Facebook within the past couple of days. As some one who considers himself a "spiritual-but-not-religious Christian," I was one of the thousands of Christians who thought this video was brilliant. Others, on the other hand, didn't share my enthusiasm.

The American Jesus has probably the lengthiest critique of the video. Here's an excerpt:

My issue with this video is that it panders to a false, but widely accepted Protestant Evangelical narrative; one which has come to supplant Christianity itself as the “true gospel.”

Here’s the narrative in brief:

Jesus came to abolish religion. Then the church came along and re-instituted it, telling people there was a particular to live in order to be a Christian. Now, we need once more to be liberated from the shackles of religion in order to be able to “freely” worship Jesus.

It sounds nice. And if you were to survey most people walking out of Protestant churches this Sunday morning, I feel pretty confident is saying that most of them would agree it’s the gospel, or at least pretty close to it.

But it’s not. In fact, there’s very little in either that narrative or the narrative presented in the video above that are actually true.

Most critics say that the biggest problem with this video is that it creates a false dichotomy between the Gospel and religion. After all, according to the dictionary, the actual definition of religion is "the service and worship of God or the supernatural." Jesus was against legalism, not religion itself.

That may be true, but I sometimes have a hard time spotting the difference.

If you read this blog on a regular basis, you know that I have a love/hate relationship with religion and the institutionalized church. There are good things about religion, but there are a lot of bad things, too. Maybe it's just me, but when I think of "religion," I automatically think about petty church politics, legalists, right-winged nut job fundamentalists, and Mark Driscoll. I think of a preacher who says "Saved by grace alone" one minute, and then gives you a list of dogmas you have to believe in literally in order to be a "real Christian." So when some one says, "I love Jesus, but I hate religion," my knee-jerk reaction is to shout, "Amen!"

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all of the stuff I mentioned above has nothing to do with religion at all. Maybe I'm just upset about all of the religious hypocrisy I see in Christianity.

So let me ask you: Do you think it's possible to hate religion and still love Jesus? Are the two terms polar opposites?