My theory is that 99.9% of us are mainstream when it comes to certain things. With Novocain injections, for instance, we’re probably more than happy to go mainstream, or in deciding which side of the road to drive on or which calendar to follow (I’m using the Gregorian one this year). And heretical as this may sound, I think part of *being a good Christian* is going mainstream when we’re meant to go mainstream. After all, Jesus practiced radical identification with the masses.

Jesus prayed that God would not take his followers “out of the world,” but that God would keep them from the evils of the world because, “They are not of the world.” Or, in the memorable phrase I grew up hearing, Christians are to be in the world, but not of the world. It’s a great phrase, but unfortunately it’s all too easy for me to reverse it and be of the world, but not in it. In other words, I chase the same shallow goals everyone chases–reputation, status, money, comfort–but I don’t enter the brokenness of people’s lives. I’m like the purity-obsessed Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan: I actively cross over to the other side of the road and avoid the beautiful yet broken and messy people I could encounter day by day.

As with so many things, we Christians tend to go for quick formulas (formulae, if I were feeling more pretentious) on this issue. If we stay separate from the world–i.e., we homeschool our kids, attend church every Sunday, have an abiding mistrust of the medical sytem–then surely we aren’t of the world. If only it were that simple.

But as Christians, the world is where it all happens. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Jaques say that, “All the world is a stage.” There’s an excellent video from the Bible Project in which they teach that “All the world is a temple.” Every human face, every human interaction, every human invention–it’s all sacred. Why? Because God chose to scandalously and irrevocably unleash the divine image into inhabitants on this particular planet (and maybe several of the other billions of planets, but as of yet nobody can prove that). Ultimately, any split between the sacred and the secular is artificial. It may be useful and even necessary for a time, but it is nonetheless artificial. The whole experience of life on our planet is wildly remarkable. As Rabbi Heschel said, our top priority is to cultivate radical amazement.

None of this means that we disregard the ancient practices and sacraments that come down through the church, even the most ascetic ones. Ascetic shares its etymology with exercise. We strip away all the noise and distractions so that we can live in greater wonder and worship, yet we must always make sure we have the right motives in practicing asceticism and separation from mainstream society: we withdraw so we can return to participate with more zest, not to judge it with our holier-than-thou purity codes.

I take it as an axiom that world is used in two different ways in Scripture. In John’s epistles we’re told not to love the world, but in John’s Gospel we learn that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to redeem it. Additionally, in Psalm 24, we find that the entire earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells us to go into all the world.

A final passage, Romans 12, instructs us not to conform ourselves to the world, which might contradict my earlier assertion that it’s all sacred. But I don’t think it has to be seen as contradictory. In fact, if you keep reading in Romans 12, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can prove what is pleasing and good. Where else can we do this proving except among the thoroughfare of everyday life in the real world? It’s true that our base impulses are not all that sacred, but even those can lead us to good places if we allow our redemptive God to bring it to pass.

The best I can say it for now is that we are to reject not the world, but certain spirits and mindsets present in the world. I remember some friends taking us to the Philadelphia airport once, and because of a faulty battery, the car broke down before we got there. It was a highly religious area of the US, but as the time for our flight’s departure drew steadily nearer, hundreds of Levite cars streamed past us. (If you were driving one of them, don’t worry, I would almost certainly have done the same.) Finally, a man covered in tattoos and with questionable bumper stickers on his Prius stopped and charged our car battery.

I know it’s almost cliche to lift up irreligious folk with tattoos, but on that hot, still afternoon in Pennsylvania, he really did remind me of someone who was in the world but not of it, and it doesn’t hurt that we caught our flight because of his actions.