Salvation Isn’t About What You Believe — It’s About What You Become

Why modern Christianity obsesses over conversion — and forgets transformation

“Many forms of Christianity in the U.S. today seem to revolve around a single question: Are you saved?”

Not How are you changing? Not What kind of person are you becoming? Not even How is your life actually different because of this faith? Just: did you say the right words, believe the right things, cross the right invisible line?

I’ve spent a lot of time in churches — progressive ones, evangelical ones, military ones, church plants, women’s groups, Bible studies, and the whole ecosystem in between. And what I’ve noticed, again and again, is a strange inversion at the heart of modern Christianity: the intense focus on conversion, and the near-total lack of interest in transformation.

We’ve built an entire religious culture around getting people in, but almost no serious culture around helping people actually grow. And the result is a version of Christianity that is loud, busy, and endlessly self-replicating — but spiritually thin.

The stories that follow are small, ordinary encounters. But together, they point to a much bigger problem: a salvation culture that seems more concerned with numbers, slogans, and spiritual conquest than with the slow, difficult work of becoming fully human.

When my son was younger, we took him to a Royal Rangers meeting. A friend of ours was one of the leaders, and we were duty-bound to give it a try. Out in the woods at the edge of town, with well-kept camp buildings for, I guess, winter-time meetings. I honestly can't remember a lot of what went on but I DO remember being approached and mansplained to by an 8-year-old about how Jesus died for my sins. This kid was very earnest, but it was clear he had only recently learned his lines.

When I asked him some gentle questions to find out more of what he believed, he returned to his thesis and asked if I was saved. Knowing me as I do, I imagine I told him that religion in general and Christianity in specific was a very complicated topic – one that he needed to devote a lot of time to learning, himself, before teaching others. Trust me, I went easy on the kid, but I did make myself understood.

It's not his fault. Here's the first thing you see on the Royal Rangers website, after the Header:

Royal Rangers is an activity-based, small-group church ministry for boys and young men in grades K-12 with a mission to evangelize, equip and empower the next generation of Christlike men and lifelong servant leaders.

So, "evangelize" is number one on their list. From my experience, I'd say it was working. "Servant leaders" for what, I'd ask? "Equip and empower" for what? Moving out into the world and evangelizing it, I guess. When evangelization is top of the list, however, one ends up with people who are "spreading the message of
Christ" without having internalized it themselves. It devolves into an empty, self-indulgent exercise.

The "church plant" model often works the same way. Scan over a few church plant websites and the casual reader will quickly see that the whole point is to move into an area, evangelize, and then spread into more new areas. This virus-like modus operandi is light on the personal growth of individual human beings, but heavy on the empire-building.

Okay, I hear the voices now, asking, so what's wrong with that? Getting more people to accept Christ is the goal of Christianity.

But is it? Sure, "spreading the word" is the easy answer, given to us in Sunday school, (those of us who were in Sunday school.) Yet it's facile. Wouldn't "spreading Jesus' love" be more fulfilling for everyone, and more in keeping with the mission?

Here's another anecdote out of my endless supply.

When I was in the Army, I ended up going to church with my squad leader – his church...the one he invited his entire squad to attend. He was an amiable, simple man, and we all more or less liked him, so we went.

Here's where I could talk about Pete Hegseth's Christian services in the Pentagon, but that will have to wait for another time.

What I remember from those services is this: bouncy young women my own age putting their faces close to mine and gasping, "Have you been born again?" "Have you been saved?"

"Yes!" I said, because I was raised a good Methodist girl. United Methodists didn't talk about being born again – that was more in the Southern Baptist vocabulary – but I'd been an earnest Bible-reading church-goer my entire life and I'd be damned before letting these gals treat me like an infidel.

When I said, "Yes, I have," their faces fell. They evaporated away, finding no other reason to talk to me. I was not longer an object of excitement – of potential conquest. They'd been robbed of the joy of claiming to have brought me" to Jesus."

What kind of belief system is this – that once you're "saved," that's it? I wondered. Nothing that's worth anything is that easy. Yet so many churches teach just that: instant salvation. Remember this?: "It doesn't matter if you accept Jesus on your deathbed, you'll get into heaven." When we've held out our hands, hungry for real connection, real power, how many times have church people handed us that dusty chestnut?

How could it be meaningful if one, close to death and having nothing else to lose, mumbled a few words? Wouldn't it have been a more meaningful conversion if that lead to a transformed life – one dedicated to understanding, self-discipline, self-understanding, understanding of others, compassion, and a real desire to end the suffering of all living things in any ways possible?

Yet, all we are given is: "I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior." Okay. Now what?

The question, "Now what?" is in large part why people are turning away from churches today. Why give up a lazy Sunday morning to get dressed, drive across town, and sit up straight for an hour to get nothing but platitudes (plus a sound and lights show from a Christian rock band)? There's got to be something more, we think. There's got to be.

But where do we find it?

A Christianity oriented toward transformation would look very different from what we see now. It would care less about counting converts and more about cultivating attention, self-knowledge, ethical maturity, emotional honesty, compassion, and the ability to remain present to suffering — in ourselves and in others. It would treat spiritual life not as a single decision, but as a lifelong discipline of becoming more conscious, more responsible, and more capable of love.

We used to have this – in fact, what passes for faith today isn’t even close to how Christianity began.

Long before it became a belief system obsessed with correct answers and instant salvation, it functioned as a school of transformation — a path, a practice, a way of reshaping perception, character, and consciousness itself. Jesus was not primarily understood as a divine transaction manager. He was understood as a guide: someone who led people through inner change, through death and rebirth of the self, through a reorientation of desire, attention, and identity.

In other words, Christianity once had a psychology, not just a theology. A method, not just a message.

That deeper Christianity is still there, buried under centuries of simplification, institutional habits, and spiritual shortcuts. It shows up in the early mystical traditions — in figures like Origen and the Desert Mothers and Fathers, in alternative gospels, in forgotten practices of attention and self-knowledge — in a version of the faith that cared far more about who you were becoming than what you claimed to believe.

This piece is just the threshold.

What follows — in future essays — is a return to that older question:

Not “Are you saved?”
But: What is this path actually doing to your soul?