The essence of Christianity should be obvious. Love as its foundation isn’t some obscure theological discovery requiring centuries of scholarly debate—it’s there in Scripture, clear as day. The early Christians understood this. Yet somehow, between then and now, we’ve managed to obscure something that should be self-evident.

Gandhi captured this disconnect perfectly: “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.” Here was a man who, despite having no obligation to study the faith, recognized something profound and beautiful in Jesus—something he evidently couldn’t find in Jesus’ followers. Gandhi wasn’t a Christian theologian, yet he could distinguish between the teacher and those claiming to follow him.

This creates a fork in the road for anyone examining Christianity. You can focus on Jesus and what he actually taught, or you can focus on Christians—on two thousand years of theological disputes, doctrinal declarations, institutional failures, and the gap between what believers profess and how they live. Most critics, understandably, choose the latter path. It’s far easier to debate biblical accuracy, point to Christians’ hypocrisy, or dissect philosophical problems than to wrestle with Jesus’ actual message: that we can step into a radically different way of living, a new kingdom based on self-giving love.

Why do we avoid the heart of the matter? Because our beliefs aren’t formed through careful, dispassionate analysis. They’re shaped by where we grew up, what happened to us emotionally, who we surrounded ourselves with, and what we convinced ourselves was “rational thinking.” True open-mindedness—the ability to separate ourselves from these influences—is extraordinarily difficult.

The real danger is self-deception. Richard Feynman put it bluntly: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” If a Nobel Prize-winning physicist recognizes how readily we deceive ourselves, shouldn’t we be far more cautious about our certainties? We must deliberately test our beliefs and actively hunt for the biases that lead us astray.

We naturally gravitate toward information that confirms what we already want to believe. Consider someone who decides to learn about early Christianity exclusively by watching videos from a prominent atheist critic. Would we accept this methodology in any other area of life? When businesses evaluate vendors, they demand multiple proposals, conduct independent research, and speak with various parties. Relying solely on one vendor’s characterization of their competitors would be considered incompetent. Yet we routinely apply this shoddy approach to questions infinitely more important than vendor selection.

The solution requires intellectual humility and intentional effort. We must learn to recognize our own cognitive biases and use that knowledge to guard our conclusions. We must expose ourselves to both sides of every argument—listening to actual debates between experts, deliberately reading material that challenges our positions, seeking out the strongest version of views we disagree with.

Through this rigorous process, something becomes clear: ultimate ambiguity exists about these deepest questions, and we are making a choice whether we admit it or not. Everyone’s choice is influenced by biases. That’s inescapable. But we can still make rational choices, even if multiple rational positions exist.

The tragedy is that Christianity’s critics and defenders alike often miss what matters most. We get lost in secondary questions while Jesus’ radical invitation remains largely unexamined: to live as if love were the organizing principle of reality, to act as citizens of a kingdom that transcends earthly power, to embody mercy in a world bent on retribution.

Gandhi saw it. The early Christians lived it. The question is whether we’re willing to look past the religion about Jesus to discover the way of Jesus—and whether we’re brave enough to let it challenge the comfortable conclusions we’ve already reached.