What is a Christian?

The word Christian has been stretched to cover so many different things — a family background, a nationality, a voting bloc, a moral scorecard, a subculture with its own music and merchandise — that a lot of people who type this question into a search bar are trying to figure out what the word actually means underneath all of that. Fair question. This page is going to lay it out in plain language.

You do not have to be religious to read what follows. Where a term comes up, it gets introduced.

A few terms first

For readers without the background:

• Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine. The Christian claim is that he was also God in human form. He was executed by the Roman government around 30 AD by a method called crucifixion.
• The cross is the Christian shorthand for that execution — the public Roman killing of Jesus around 30 AD.
• The resurrection is the Christian claim that Jesus, after his execution, was seen alive three days later by multiple named witnesses.
• Christ (Greek Christos) is a title, not a last name. It is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Mashiach (Messiah) — meaning the anointed one, the long-promised figure in the Jewish tradition. The earliest Christians used it as the standard way of referring to Jesus.
• The Bible is the collection of Jewish and Christian sacred texts. The New Testament is the first-century AD portion, written about Jesus and his earliest followers.

A short, honest answer

A Christian, in the word's original and most exact sense, is a person who trusts Jesus — who takes him at his word about who he is, what his execution accomplished, and what being seen alive again means, and who is trying to live in that direction. Everything else the word has come to mean is either a downstream effect of that or a cultural add-on that does not belong to the definition.

Where the word came from

The word first appears in one of the earliest histories of the Christian movement — the book of Acts, written by a physician named Luke around 62 AD. Luke's line, describing a city in modern-day Turkey called Antioch: "The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch." The word was probably not a compliment. It was a label pinned on the followers of Jesus by outsiders — Christ-people, the ones who kept talking about that executed teacher as if he were still alive. The label stuck because the people it described did not deny it.

That original sense is worth holding onto. A Christian, at the start, was not someone born into a religious tradition, or someone with the right politics, or someone with a certain moral record. A Christian was someone whose life had been reoriented around a specific person and a specific claim: that Jesus was who he said he was, that his death did what he said it did, and that his being seen alive afterward meant history had turned.

What Christianity's own writers say a Christian is

The earliest Christian writers — the ones who wrote the New Testament — are more direct about this than most modern readers expect. A few examples.

Paul (one of the earliest Christian writers), in a letter to Christians in Rome, describes the moment a person becomes a Christian in surprisingly compact terms: "If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Lord here is a confessional title, meaning the rightful authority over a person's life, not a casual address. Saved is Paul's shorthand for being made right with God — forgiven, restored, brought into the kind of life humans were made for.) The definition is startlingly simple: trust the claim, name it out loud, mean it.

One of the gospel accounts of Jesus' life (the gospel of John) puts it a different way: "To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God." A Christian, on that reading, is someone who has received Jesus rather than kept him at arm's length — someone who has moved from spectator to participant.

Paul again, in a letter to Christians in a region called Galatia: "You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus... There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Notice what he is stripping away: the ethnicity you were born into, the legal status you had, the gender you were assigned. None of those makes you a Christian. None of them disqualifies you from being one either.

What a Christian is NOT

It helps to be clear about what the word does not mean, because a lot of the confusion around it comes from misidentification.

A Christian is not the same thing as a moral overachiever. Christianity's own writers are unusually blunt about this. Paul, describing himself late in life, called himself "the worst of sinners." (Sinners here means people out of alignment with how things were meant to be — a category, in Paul's vocabulary, that included everyone.) Christianity does not claim its followers are morally superior to non-Christians. It claims they are people who have been forgiven, not people who never needed to be.

A Christian is not a member of a nation, an ethnicity, or a political party. The word has been drafted, at various points in history, into all three. Every time, it has been misused. The New Testament writers explicitly refuse to attach the label to a nationality — the earliest Christian communities were made up of Jews, Romans, Greeks, Africans, and people from what is now Iran, in the same rooms. If someone uses Christian as a synonym for a nation or a political tribe, they are using the word wrong.

A Christian is not primarily a person who follows a set of rules. Christianity does have ethical content, but its own writers are emphatic that the rules are a downstream effect of the underlying reorientation, not the definition of it. According to one of the gospel accounts, Jesus told a crowd: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." (The kingdom of heaven is Christian shorthand for God's good rule taking effect in the world. The Father is how Jesus is recorded as referring to God.) The point is that verbal identification without lived reorientation is not what Christianity means by the word.

A Christian is not necessarily someone raised in a Christian family or country. Cultural Christianity — inheriting the label from your parents, or your neighborhood, or your passport — is not the same thing as being a Christian in the New Testament sense. Some of the most self-identifying "Christian" cultures produce large numbers of people who, on the word's original definition, are not Christians. And some of the least "Christian" cultures produce people who very much are.

What Christians have in common across denominations

There are Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants; there are hundreds of Protestant subgroups. The differences between them are real, sometimes bitter. But there is a core they share — historically summarized in an ancient statement called the Nicene Creed, written in the 300s AD — and that shared core is what makes them, collectively, the thing the word Christian names.

Roughly, the shared core is:

• There is one God who made everything.
• This God exists as three persons — the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit — a doctrine Christians call the Trinity.
• Jesus is fully God and fully human. He was born, lived a real human life, was executed by the Roman government, was seen alive three days later, and will return.
• Trusting him — not moral performance, not religious background — is what makes a person right with God.

If you take that core and set it beside a Catholic, an Orthodox believer, a Baptist, a Pentecostal, and a Presbyterian, all five will affirm it. That is what makes them all Christians.

Christian is not the same as religious

This one is worth naming directly. A lot of Christianity's own writers are surprisingly hard on religion as a category — meaning the human project of climbing toward God through effort, ritual, and moral achievement. Christianity's claim is that this project cannot work, because the gap between God and people is not the kind of gap effort can close. Its claim is instead that God has come the other direction: that in Jesus, God has closed the gap himself, and that the only response required is trust.

That is why a person can be deeply religious — devoted, disciplined, ritually observant — without being a Christian in the New Testament sense. And it is why a person with almost no religious background can, in a moment of honest trust, become one.

What about right now

If you are trying to figure out whether you are one, or whether you want to be one, or what any of this means for something specific going on in your life, our chat is free, private, and in your language. You start it; you end it whenever you want.

Where this comes from in the Bible

• Acts 11:26 — the word Christian first used
• John 1:12 — "to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God"
• Romans 10:9–10 — Paul's compact definition
• Galatians 3:26–28 — no ethnic, legal, or gender qualifier
• 1 John 4:15 — "if anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God"
• Matthew 7:21–23 — words without lived reorientation are not the mark