Author: Jeffrey McMahon

One of the defining songs of my adolescence was Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Devotion.” Like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” it is suffused with the exuberance and spiritual energy of Black Gospel. Listening to these songs hints at the transcendence many people seek in church: the paradox of finding yourself by losing yourself in a purpose greater than your own appetites. This is devotion in its richest sense—not self-expression but self-transcendence.

That vision stands in stark contrast to the modern creed of radical individualism, which teaches that personal desire is its own moral authority. Under this doctrine, adulthood becomes an endless extension of adolescence, each new appetite demanding satisfaction, each boundary inviting transgression. We congratulate ourselves for “being authentic” while quietly cultivating our inner Gollum—small, ravenous, and consumed by the fantasy that the next indulgence will finally bring contentment. Instead, the result is often loneliness, nihilism, and despair.

How we resist that inner Gollum, and what it means to devote ourselves to something larger than ourselves, lies at the heart of the human condition. Religion has traditionally answered those questions by directing us toward a pure heart, integrity, reverence, gratitude, and love—love of our Creator, for those who believe, and love of our fellow human beings. Whether one accepts its theological claims or not, religion insists that character is formed not by indulging every desire but by disciplining desire in service of a higher good. The promise that feeding our inner Gollum will make us happy has always been one of civilization’s most seductive—and most enduring—lies.

The more difficult question concerns the source of that higher good. Does authentic devotion require submission to an orthodox religious tradition, or can spirituality detached from doctrine cultivate the same moral depth? Are we mistaking recreational spirituality for genuine devotion? Is morality grounded in divine command, or does it emerge through human evolution and social cooperation—what atheist philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “reciprocal claim making,” the process by which societies negotiate mutual obligations and gradually construct moral authority?

No figure looms larger over that debate than Jesus. Whatever one’s theological commitments, his rhetorical originality and moral imagination have made him one of history’s most enduring voices on the nature of goodness. Nearly two thousand years later, we remain captivated by his life, teachings, and identity. That continuing fascination lies at the center of Adam Gopnik’s essay “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,” which examines one of the great questions of biblical scholarship: Are the Gospels fundamentally historical memories of an extraordinary teacher, or are they literary creations shaped by the conventions and mythic imagination of the Greco-Roman world?

Adam Gopnik observes that the Gospels are not books written by someone so much as stories told to someone. In discussing Elaine Pagels’ Miracles and Wonder, he places her within the tradition of historical Jesus scholarship, which treats the Gospels not as straightforward biographies but as “palimpsests of lore, legend, and propaganda.” I encountered a similar sensibility in Emmanuel Carrère’s genre-defying The Kingdom, where history, memory, faith, and literary imagination continually overlap. From this perspective, narratives such as the Virgin Birth are understood less as eyewitness reports than as adaptations of familiar Greek and Hellenistic literary motifs.

Gopnik extends this argument to the Passion and Resurrection. He notes that visions of the risen Jesus resemble what psychologists today might describe as bereavement experiences. The disciples believed they had encountered their crucified teacher after his death, while Paul, who never met Jesus during his lifetime, grounded his apostleship in explicitly visionary encounters. For Gopnik, these experiences need not be dismissed as fraudulent; rather, they belong to recognizable patterns of religious experience that recur throughout history.

Nor, Gopnik argues, were the Gospel writers simple village storytellers faithfully recording local memories. Drawing on Robyn Faith Walsh’s The Origins of Early Christian Literature, he portrays them as educated authors who belonged to “a small, erudite upper crust.” Their writings reveal literary sophistication, weaving together a rich latticework of Greek rhetorical forms, biblical allusions, and inherited traditions. As Gopnik memorably puts it, “Their writings bear all the marks of that sharp-elbowed circle and none of the gentle gatherings of group memory.”

Within this literary world, Jesus emerges alongside familiar Hellenistic figures—magi, sages, miracle workers, and wise tricksters. Walsh observes that many of these protagonists defeat their opponents through clever repartee, aphorisms, and parables. Gopnik is not arguing that Jesus is simply another fictional hero. Rather, he suggests that the evangelists employed literary conventions already familiar to their audiences in order to elevate Jesus into a figure of universal significance.

To illustrate the point, Gopnik offers an unexpected comparison. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, he argues, mythologizes Malcolm in much the same way that the Gospel of Mark mythologizes Jesus. Both works transform historical figures into larger-than-life moral symbols by drawing upon established literary traditions. Mythmaking, in this sense, is not necessarily deception; it is one of humanity’s oldest methods of expressing truth.

Neither Gopnik nor Pagels reduces Christianity to a cynical fabrication dressed in Greek clothing. On the contrary, both regard it as one of civilization’s greatest imaginative syntheses. Christianity fused Jewish expectation, Greek literary culture, Roman history, and profound moral insight into a vision that continues to resist simple explanation.

At the heart of that synthesis lies a startling reversal of ordinary assumptions about power. Paul declares, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” The Christian ideal does not glorify domination but humility, sacrifice, service, and love. To embrace weakness voluntarily, to endure insults and suffering while loving one’s enemies, represented, as Gopnik observes, “a way of thinking about power and suffering with little precedent in the ancient world.”

That inversion has always appeared absurd. Indeed, its apparent absurdity became one of Christianity’s greatest philosophical attractions. Søren Kierkegaard famously argued that faith requires a leap beyond the limits of reason. Gopnik, however, remains skeptical of this move, joking that Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith comes perilously close to George Costanza’s comic principle that something cannot really be true unless it seems impossible to believe.

Where Gopnik expresses his deepest reservations is over the doctrine of substitutionary atonement—the claim that God’s justice required the sacrificial death of Christ before humanity could be reconciled to Him. He recalls literary critic William Empson’s horror at “a cosmos ruled by an irrational deity whose rage toward humanity can be placated only by his son’s torture and death.” In contemporary Christianity, Gopnik observes, many believers quietly emphasize Jesus’ teachings on compassion, forgiveness, and service while giving comparatively little attention to doctrines such as eternal damnation or substitutionary atonement.

More literal forms of Christianity, Gopnik suggests, often arise from a longing for certainty in a world defined by ambiguity and historical change. Humanism offers no final authority; it evolves, stumbles, corrects itself, and remains vulnerable to human weakness. Religion promises something different: an authoritative moral order anchored beyond history. Yet, Gopnik argues, every human authority eventually disappoints, producing an endless cycle of certainty, doubt, reform, and renewed certainty.

Even so, he concludes that Christianity cannot simply be dismissed. The human hunger for love, moral purpose, and certainty has ensured its enduring power. Those who reject its theological claims would do well to understand why millions continue to find within it a compelling account of what it means to be human.

Perhaps those who cannot embrace Christianity will seek devotion elsewhere—in another religious tradition, in Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning, or in Steven Pressfield’s conviction that disciplined artistic creation is itself an act of service to humanity.

Whatever path one chooses, one conclusion seems difficult to escape.

Living for your inner Gollum is not enough.

Human beings require devotion to something greater than themselves.