I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it's not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.
This famous quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi was not properly sourced. I looked and looked and finally arrived at this site: (The closest source so far but I have not verified it myself)
A 1926 review [1] by the Reverend W.P. King (then pastor of the First Methodist Church of Gainesville, Georgia) of E. Stanley Jones's The Christ of the Indian Road (published in 1925 by The Abington Press, New York City) includes the following,
Quote:
Dr. Jones says that the greatest hindrance to the Christian gospel in India is a dislike for western domination, western snobbery, the western theological system, western militarism and western race prejudice. Gandhi, the great prophet of India, said, "I love your Christ, but I dislike your Christianity." The embarrassing fact is that India judges us by our own professed standard. In reply to a question of Dr. Jones as to how it would be possible to bring India to Christ, Gandhi replied: First, I would suggest that all of you Christians live more like Jesus Christ. Second, I would suggest that you practice your Christianity without adulterating it. The anomalous situation is that most of us would be equally shocked to see Christianity doubted or put into practice. Third, I would suggest that you put more emphasis on love, for love is the soul and center of Christianity. Fourth, I would suggest that you study the non-Christian religions more sympathetically in order to find the good that is in them, so that you might have a more sympathetic approach to the people.
I'm not so sure that Jones actually attributed to Gandhi the line "I love your Christ, but I dislike your Christianity" in The Christ of the Indian Road (it doesn't appear, for example, in the snippet view of Jones's work that's available on Google Books), but it's possible that Jones or his work somehow, perhaps unintentionally, served as the origin for the belief that Gandhi had said as much. The line itself may have been a pithy distillation, offered by someone else, of a thought attributed to Gandhi. In any event, the phrase, with its attribution to Gandhi, is at least as old as February, 1926. And it seems to have been quite a hit amongst various American theologians in the decades that followed. (Tough to know whether Jones, during his lectures in the United States, ever attributed that precise sentiment to Gandhi.) In any event, it would probably be helpful to check The Christ of the Indian Road to see how accurately King offered up text from the book.
I got nothing on the rest of the alleged quote (because I really didn't look for it), except the thought that it likely evolved in a similar fashion, as a perhaps uninformed rephrasing of text that had appeared in one of Jones's books (perhaps the text that King presents, above). (It seems to me that a line attributed to Gandhi that contains "your Christ" would be older than the remainder of what you shared with us.)
-- Bonnie
[1] The Atlanta Constitution, 7 February 1926, p. F14.