I was encouraged to think independently in school as well as by my parents. This is all good, within reason. But being too different will cause a person a lot of grief and personal problems, throughout their life.
This depends on the culture largely, for what the baseline is, for what is considered normal. You can tell if your ideas are very different by whether or not people readily adopt them, within your lifetime, especially without financial support.
For instance, in my experiences, in a certain kind of church, certain political views are expected and there is shock and worry, when they discover divergent political views. In many cultures, throughout the world today and even more throughout most recorded history, it is common and respected to be much more religious than the average American.
Combining religion and politics is not a good idea, but is basically unavoidable. The best strategy for the Church, to reach other subcultures in the society, is to have a parallel Church, otherwise known as a denomination, with different views on a wide variety of issues.
I believe, to bring the Gospel to the rest of society, is to take it to the new world culture based on the Internet. But I think the big platform for the Church is in meetings in person, not virtually. The last social institution, that still is a positive force in society, that still meets in one physical location is the Church.
But the idea of making a church desirable, to all subcultures, is not a good strategy. This is because you lose any interesting aspects of the culture and you are left with too little to base your church on. I think it very important, to bring the Church into different subcultures, as if you are going into a different culture, in a different country.
We, as Christians, need patience and accept God will work differently than we expect. Jesus Christ was entirely unexpected. He used defeat, humiliation, and suffering as a weapon, to defeat death and sin in His creation.
But we in America are not suffering at all, and definitely not for our faith. I believe that we are being too aggressive, with our proselytizing or evangelizing. We are likely to be put into mental institutions, because of how we live our faith and not on our personal beliefs.
Basically, many Christians in America today are so different than the baseline in American society, that we could be classified as mentally ill. I think the answer is to try to be more reasonable and find commonality with non believers. We don’t need to fight every issue, just because it is a form of change.
-- October 2025