The work I do as a consultant takes me into beautiful northern Arizona. Sovereign land. Tribal country. The drives are long. About seven hours of windshield on a typical run. When I am moving between Phoenix and a reservation appointment, I am not idle. CarPlay on. Audiobooks turn the steering wheel into a study desk.
If you have not driven that landscape, you should. The ground itself validates the creation account. The cuts and strata and dry riverbeds bear the marks of a flood.
The last trip, the book was Greg McKeown's Essentialism. He named three concepts that have been with me since the drive home. Together, they explain more about why systemized Christianity stays in place than any sermon I have ever heard on the subject.
McKeown was unpacking, chapter after chapter, the reasons we do not deal with reality in a purposeful way. We avoid. We divert. We refuse to name the essential things in our lives. Somewhere on the second hour of the drive, it landed for me: the same principle applies to our walk with God.
Normative Conformity
The first is normative conformity. The simple form: when a thing feels normal, people adhere to it. The group's adherence is the validation. It does not have to be true to be normal. It just has to be widespread enough that doubting it feels like the strange position.
That is how systemized Christianity holds. It feels normal. The pew on Sunday. The stained-glass language. The tithe envelope. The denominational identity stitched to the family last name. Generations have adhered, so adherence is the default. The strange position is the one that asks whether any of it actually came from Yeshua.
You see the same dynamic clearly in adjacent systems, where it is easier for outsiders to spot. Mormonism is held in place by millions of adherents who normalize a founding story involving magic goggles and golden plates pulled from a hat. Jehovah's Witnesses are held in place by adherents who normalize the Watchtower's repeatedly failed end-time predictions and a doctrine about 144,000 elect that survives by group adherence rather than scriptural plausibility. Outsiders see the absurdity in those systems instantly. Insiders cannot, because everyone they know affirms it.
The same mechanism operates inside mainstream systemized Christianity. We just do not see it, because we are inside.
Sunk Cost
The second is sunk cost bias. The version that hits hardest reads something like this: if billions of people have invested in this system for seventeen hundred years, built cathedrals, written creeds, fought wars, raised children, buried parents, then the investment cannot have been wasted. The sunk cost is too vast. To question the system is to indict the labor of generations.
So you do not question.
This is an emotional defense, not a cognitive one. It does not engage with whether the doctrine is true, or whether the structure was ever in the New Testament, or whether the inherited language even maps to the Hebraic original. It only engages with the size of the investment. And the investment is genuinely vast. So the bias holds.
What's Mine
The third one is the endowment effect. The short form: people value what they own more than equivalent things they do not own, simply because they own it. Trade away your coffee mug for an identical one and you experience loss, even though nothing actually changed.
Modern Christianity runs on this. We do not just believe doctrines. We own them. My salvation story. My denomination. My translation of Scripture. My pastor. My theological tribe. When a more accurate reading of the text is presented, the believer experiences it as loss, not as discovery, because the old reading was theirs. They had it. To exchange it feels like a theft.
This is why those of us who privately recognize that something in our inherited doctrine does not survive scrutiny still cannot let it go. The doctrine is mine. Releasing it feels like letting someone else decide what was mine to keep.
A Side Note
For years I have not understood how the principles of sound logic, the principles of leadership, the principles of business, proven and true and applied everywhere else, somehow escape the conversation when we turn to Christianity. It is as if the logic we use in every other domain gets defiled, or put in a drawer, the moment we step into the church. I have not stopped puzzling over it.
Essentialism surfaced this for me again. McKeown writes about life being essential. About the things we do being essential. About the time we spend being essential. If those principles apply anywhere, they apply to the most essential thing of all: our relationship with our Maker. The principles need to cross over.
Come, Let Us Reason Together
What is missing, and McKeown's framework lands harder here than he intended, is cognitive thinking. Deductive reasoning. The willingness to step out of the system long enough to evaluate whether the system is what it claims to be.
YHWH actually invited this. Lekhu na v'nivakhechah, He said through Isaiah. Come now, and let us reason together. The verb root yakhakh is argumentative. It is the language of working a case, weighing evidence, reaching a verdict. The Father did not ask for adherence. He asked for reasoning.
Yeshua walked into temple courts at twelve and reasoned with the teachers. Paul reasoned in synagogues. The Bereans were commended specifically because they tested what they were told against Scripture. The whole Hebraic posture is a reasoning posture, not an adherence posture.
The reason systemized Christianity stays is that we have replaced reasoning with belonging, with the weight of the investment, and with the ownership of what we already believe. Three forces, all psychological, all powerful, none of them an argument from the text.
Step out for a long enough drive, with the right audiobook, and you start to see it. You pull into the driveway at the end of a sixteen-hour day with three ideas you cannot shake.
Selah.
What in your faith do you actually believe, and what do you adhere to because the people around you adhere?
If a more accurate reading of Scripture were placed in front of you tomorrow, would you experience it as discovery or as loss?
What do you do with culpability? Are you avoiding, or are you engaging with the essentials?
Shalom v'shalvah, your brother in the Way,
Sergio
