A cure for religious myopia
In my former church there’s a common phrase used for people who have left the church. Regardless of whether they maintain a belief in God and a love for the Jesus story, leaving the church invariably gets you characterized as having “lost your vision.” I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve actually swung around to thinking the phrase is sort of accurate.
The term myopia describes nearsightedness — the ability to only see things close up. It’s a bit like when someone blurs out their background on a Zoom call: you can see them clearly, but everything past them is blurry and foggy. In my former church, the prevailing vision condition is a textbook version of myopia. People committed to the church and its Ministers (Priests) have clear and sharp focus on the people and the stuff close to them. But the view and understanding of people or things outside the church is blurry and fuzzy. I’d go so far as saying this sort of myopia is encouraged in the church. Something along the lines of . . . “there’s nothing to see out there folks.” The messaging is clearly meant to keep it all foggy and blurry, and therefore not at all seen, understood, and certainly not loved.
Myopia isn’t blindness. It’s just a really small field of vision. Religious exclusivity is like myopia. You’re not blind, but you can only bring into focus the things and people close to you. All the rest of the world becomes a nonsensical blur of shapes and letters and sounds. So the idea of stepping out of that tiny field of vision into the blurry fog would definitely feel like losing your vision. But for people who have made this leap, there’s a discovery of something that’s the furthest thing from a loss of vision. Change in vision, YES. But loss of vision, NO. It’s like changing your Zoom settings and all of a sudden what and who were once blurry blobs of motion in the background become real people and real things. The whole world brought into crisp focus, in full technicolour and beauty.
Christianity has this phrase “the light of Christ.” And there are also phrases like “I saw the light.” This whole thing about leaving the church and being labelled as having lost my vision, while feeling my vision has profoundly changed for the better, puts this whole “light of Christ” thing into a, well . . . a whole new light, if you will. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t strongly credit Richard Rohr’s writings, especially in “The Universal Christ,” as having helped me in this.
Instead of thinking of the light of Christ as just something we stare at, or worship, what if it’s actually the light by which we see all things and especially see people. Like, not just a light that’s a thing of beauty in and of itself, but a light that truly illuminates where, and what, and who we’re looking at.
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all people… The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:4-9). That’s an expanded vision, better light, and quite simply more clarity. That’s not blindness. Among other things, that’s sounding like a cure for religious myopia. It lets us see people, all people, in as clear a focus as we see the person right beside us. A vision that lets us see people the way Jesus saw people. And once they’re seen, it gets a lot easier to love them. Just like how we feel when we’re “seen,” and somehow still loved.
Let’s face it, Jesus saw people in a pretty radical way. He saw and loved and drew near to the very people that religiously exclusive people of his day ignored and “othered.” Jesus sought out people because he saw them, really saw them and saw their humanity. People who had existed as categories and outsiders in the religious field of vision came sharply into focus. He saw the widow, the leper, the blind man, the bleeding woman, and women in general. He saw the tax collector, the child, the Samaritan, the Gentile, the Roman soldier, and even the religious leader. He saw the sinner, the doubter, the betrayer, the enemy, the stranger, and ultimately the whole world, all in a radically loving and inclusive way. This is how people are seen in the light of Christ. This is the opposite of the shortsightedness of religious myopia.
And here’s where this gets even more real for me, and maybe even a bit of colouring outside the lines of how I used to think and see. I have some friends who might identify as atheist, and by almost any measure I can think of, they see people and “the world” in the way we’re talking about. They see the marginalized, the lonely, the person who doesn’t look or believe or live like them, and they typically respond with compassion, generosity, and love. In the context of this little essay, and in my brain and heart, this is seeing by the light of Christ. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t describe it that way. And I certainly don’t need them to. I feel no need to smuggle them into Christianity through some theological back door or insist that my language for what I see has to become their language too. But I recognize something familiar and profound and beautiful in that way of seeing, regardless of what we call it.
And maybe Jesus gave us a story for exactly this situation. The priest who saw a wounded man beside the road and passed by. The Levite who saw him and did the same. Then the Samaritan, clearly the religious outsider in the story, “saw him” and was moved with compassion. All three had some level of vision, but only one of them really saw him. And importantly, in this discussion, Jesus doesn’t make the Samaritan religiously correct before making him the hero of the story. So in this parable, the person outside the religious boundary sees more clearly than the people inside it.
And then there’s Peter. One of the most significant revelations in the early Jesus movement was essentially a correction of Peter’s religious myopia. Peter knew who was clean and who was unclean, who was inside and who was outside. And then those categories got turned inside out. After his vision in Acts 10 and his encounter with the Gentile Cornelius, Peter says, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean” (Acts 10:28). That’s not a small change. The person who had been blurry, in the category of “unclean Gentile,” came into focus as Peter’s field of vision was greatly enlarged.
Revelation 21:23–24 describes the renewed creation as “The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light.” And I’m pretty sure that if the nations are walking by it, it’s not a spotlight projecting a narrow beam down inside the walls of a tiny exclusive religion. We’re talking about stadium lighting, resulting in a vision as sharply in focus on the person on the other side of the world who doesn’t look or talk or church like us, as it is on the person right beside us at our own table.
And there’s one more thing that is important, at least it’s important to me on a very personal level. A wider field of vision, this so-called light of Christ, can’t just mean bringing new people into focus while allowing the people we disagree with, the people who used to be the only ones we saw clearly (the people in our old church), to now become the blurry unseen ones. That would just be a slightly different version of this religious myopia. The light of Christ illuminates broadly, period. The religious insider is still there beside the Samaritan, the atheist, the Gentile, the stranger, and the enemy. Seeing someone clearly doesn’t require that they see me clearly in return. Loving someone doesn’t require that they understand or approve of me, or even love me back. If this so-called light of Christ really illuminates everyone, then nobody gets pushed back into the shadows just because we feel like we’ve finally stepped out of them.
Religious exclusivity isn’t blindness, it’s just a really small field of vision. Leaving an exclusive religion isn’t losing one’s vision, it’s being cured of myopic vision, being cured of nearsightedness. It’s stepping into the light of Christ and seeing the world the way Jesus saw the world, the way God sees the world. It is bright.
By Tim Borys
September 7, 2026
Posted on:
CCF: https://connected-and-concerned-friends.mn.co/posts/maybe-we-just-need-better-lighting?utm_source=manual
Substack: https://thenonprophet.substack.com/p/maybe-we-just-need-better-lighting