Angels and Demons, the movie inspired by Dan Brown’s novel by the same title, has raked in nearly $190 million worldwide (with approximately $90 million in the U.S.) in only its second week of release. Dan Brown’s books, spurred by the Da Vinci Code, have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

According to a recent opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Dan Brown’s America,” Ross Douthat says that “if you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love Dan Brown.” Douthat points out that Brown’s message is “perfectly tailored for 21^st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized ‘religiousness’ detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.” He goes on to state that recent polls do not show a dramatic increase in atheism, but rather “they reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away.”

Interest in Dan Brown’s “theology” perhaps reveals the American people’s fascination with religious conspiracy theories. Or maybe it elucidates a current rising religious trend in the United States of a more privatized “Christian” spirituality devoid of obligation to Jesus’ message of social responsibility. This stems from a faulty understanding of the person central to Christianity, Jesus.

Dan Brown portrays Jesus, according to Douthat, as a modern day messiah who is “sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshipping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.” In other words, Brown’s Jesus is similar to a modern day mega church preacher who constantly praises the gospel of prosperity. This, no doubt, is a far cry from Jesus as the revolutionary rebel who died for his interrelated political and religious movement known as the kingdom of God, which as scholar John Dominic Crossan asserts,

… did not mean for Jesus, as it could for others, the imminent apocalyptic intervention of God to set right a world taken over by evil and injustice. It meant the presence of God’s kingdom here and now in the reciprocity of open eating and open healing, in lives, that is, of radical egalitarianism on both the socioeconomic (eating) and the religio-poltical (healing) levels.

Of course, it is easier to believe in a friendly divine Jesus who constantly heeds our pleas by offering us solace in our moments of intense despair and agony. Harder, but ultimately more rewarding, is following today the teachings of a first century Jewish peasant who violated social norms by inviting outcasts to the table, who “cleansed the Temple” from the economic corruption of the Sanhedrin, and who preached liberation from all oppressive contexts. Yet this latter understanding of Jesus has been replaced by a domesticated Christ who seems more concerned with personal piety and holiness rather than social change.

A visible example of this metamorphosis in the understanding of Jesus is the Eucharist. Christians believe that at the Last Supper Jesus entrusted his disciples – tax collectors and women – with the continuation of the kingdom of God movement that called all to the table of fellowship. Many of today’s Eucharistic celebrations, however, come accompanied with pre-requisites, such as “make sure you confess your sins before receiving Jesus,” or “come pure [whatever this means] to consume the Lord,” or “if you are not dressed appropriately for the Lord, do not come up to receive communion.” Denying anyone of what Christians believe to be the body of Jesus is antithetical to Jesus’ radical inclusive call.

Again, it would seem safer to accept as Lord a man who we can approach with our latest troubles, in hope that he can resolve them. It is riskier to follow a man who many of his contemporaries envisioned as an idealistic lunatic bent on reforming the unjust political and religious structures of his day through nonviolent means. In his provocative book Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshipping Christ and Start Following Jesus, Robin R. Meyers argues that “In every age, religious ideas have been considered safe if they are private and personal, but dangerous if they are public and political.”

It is time to recover the Jesus that challenges us all to shift our focus from ourselves to others. Only through cultivating this need for radical denunciation of the self can Christianity become truly viable in the 21^st century. Personal responsibility alone cannot change the world. But personal responsibility coupled with solidarity with society’s outcasts can. Many of the early images of Jesus (before Constantine merged Empire and Christianity in the 4^th century)  depict him with others at the table feasting or as an iterant healer. He is never alone. After Christianity became the official religion of the state, the cross became the dominant symbol of Jesus. Now he is alone suffering his death – an ideal symbol for an individualized spirituality.

Following in Jesus’ footsteps should never make us comfortable. On the contrary, we should constantly be far from our comfort zone, just as Jesus was.

César J. Baldelomar is the executive director of Pax Romana Center for International Study of Catholic Social Teaching and blogs at www.holisticthoughts.com. He is editor of the Notebook Magazine (http://pax-romana-cmica-usa.org/notebook.aspx), and he will begin graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School in the fall.