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“Jesus wants disciples; he doesn’t need a fan club.”

That line came from a Catholic priest, Father Greg Boyle, who has spent much of his life working with gang members in Los Angeles. Father Boyle was speaking to a packed auditorium at Newman University, where we had invited him to lecture on his book, Tattoos on the Heart. He said this in response to a question from the audience. The question was, “why don’t you teach these young men to be good Catholics?”

Father Boyle didn’t elaborate. He let us work out the implications ourselves, but they were pretty clear. It is the fan club member, not the disciple, who worries about who is (and who is not) a “good Catholic” (or a “good Christian,” or a “good Mormon”). These are not the sorts of questions that disciples ask because they are not the sorts of problems that disciples worry about.

That so many people do worry about these problems suggests that Jesus’s fans outnumber his disciples by a substantial number. No surprise there. Fan clubs are easy to start, and participation costs very little. To be a member in good standing, one need only express—as frequently and in as many media as possible—one’s undying love and devotion. Such clubs exist to provide a place for like-minded fans to meet together and like stuff. Members judge each other by the quantity and quality of their affection. Facebook is a must, and #hashtags help a lot. But Goneril and Regan only please; Cordelia need not apply.

It is the Jesus fan, not the disciple, who gets mad about things like “The War on Christmas™.” Fans become incensed if they can’t display their adoration in public, which is, after all, the whole point of fandom. The Decalogue on the court house lawn, the Nativity scene in the public park–the superfan choses to die on these hills, while the disciple barely notices them. Superfans find the object of their fandom so compelling that they can’t imagine a rational person not thinking as they do. Those who disagree must be deficient: crazy, stupid, or evil. Otherwise, they would be fans too.

Disciples don’t have time to concern themselves with the purity of anybody else’s affections; they have quite enough to do making sure that their own actions reflect their belief. And it is just not important for them to know who is in the club and who is not–or who best loves God and the prophets. Disciples have very clear instructions on how to treat other people, and these instructions read the same for everybody.

Christian discipleship means taking Christ at his word and believing that the Kingdom of God is real and obtainable–not something we can find, but something we can make. This is the essence of what Christ tells us so often in the Kingdom Parables: the Kingdom of God is beautiful, like a pearl of great price; valuable, like a treasure hidden in a field; fragile, like a mustard seed; and nourishing, like a banquet.

But we can only have the Kingdom of God if we are willing to sacrifice everything that is not the Kingdom of God to achieve it. This means giving our time and treasure, of course, but the main thing we are called upon to sacrifice is our natural humanity–our tribal instincts, our self-centeredness, our aggression, and our love of temporal things. The surest measure of discipleship is the willingness to put away natural humanity and seek to become saints through the Atonement of Christ.

This is where fandom and discipleship differ the most, and this is why the two approaches to the Gospel are ultimately incompatible. Being a fan does not require us to be more loving or less judgmental, and it never asks us to work hard at anything other than self-promotion. It revels in the basest and most spiritually destructive aspects of human nature, asking only that our tribal instincts and violent behavior be placed in the service of the club. Like all tribal units, fan clubs exist to create and enforce boundaries. Terms like “worthiness” (when talking about somebody other than oneself), “member in good standing,” and “apostasy,” all derive from the vocabulary of fandom, which has a strong interest in determining whose expressions of love are sufficiently pure.

In the end, of course, the cost of fandom is much greater than the cost of discipleship. We cannot have both, and when we give up the hard tasks of Christian discipleship and settle instead for the work of Team Jesus (or Team Mormon, or Team Prophet, or whatever) we make the critical mistake of giving up the Kingdom of God for something that it is not.