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| Praying hands. Image source. |
Recently I wrote a post called Believing in the God You Want, where I mentioned that I don't think it's good to have a "personal relationship with God" because then you start to think "God agrees with me" and you won't be open to finding out when you're wrong about things. I want to elaborate on that here.
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"Hey God, you and I both know..."
Okay let me explain the "Hey God, you and I both know..." thing. When you pray for some event xyz to happen, it's because you think xyz would be a good thing, and you think that God thinks xyz would be a good thing. So when you pray for it, and you listen to God and you don't hear any pushback from Them saying They disagree with it, it increases your confidence that God agrees with you about xyz.
This is not really a big deal if you're praying for something fairly uncontroversial, like "God, help my friend who is sick to get better." But what about these other common prayer requests:
- "God, help so-and-so to see that you exist, and become a Christian."
- "God, so-and-so shouldn't be dating their partner such-and-such because [they are gay/ one of them is Christian and one is not/ insert additional judgy reasons], help them realize that and break up."
- "God, our culture has turned away from you by [being woke/ letting gay people be on tv/ allowing no-fault divorce/ allowing children to not say the 'under God' part of the Pledge of Allegiance/ any other culture war issue], please make people stop doing that and come back to you."
Basically, prayers that say "I'm right, and other people are wrong- and obviously God is on my side on this issue." When you pray like that, and you do it day after day, and you feel emotionally connected to God and don't have any sense of something being a bit off when you pray like that- it reinforces the idea that God does indeed agree with you about what other people's correct behavior should be on these issues.
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I should mention that sometimes God does push back
Now, in my experience in evangelical Christianity, it's NOT true that every time you set out to pray for xyz to happen, you end up even more convinced that God agrees with you on xyz. Sometimes God does "push back." (I mean, I no longer believe in that kind of "personal relationship with God" so in general I don't think it's actually *God* who is "pushing back"- but I mean the person who is praying experiences it that way.)
For example, one time I was praying about something, and I realized that my feelings about it were kinda racist, and that obviously God loves people of all races equally, so I was in the wrong. Praying made me realize that I was wrong, that God did not agree with me on whatever I initially was going to pray about.
I remember another time, one of my Christian friends was telling me about struggling with low self-esteem, and praying about it, and feeling like God was telling her she was the one being selfish for making such a big deal about her self and her self-esteem. Thinking about it now, this kind of seems uh not helpful, and she probably should have gone to therapy. But the point is, she went to pray about something, and the process of praying changed her mind.
Yes, I had experiences like that too- praying in a way that you're totally open to whatever God has to say- sometimes you feel that God is saying you're viewing the situation all wrong.
But, importantly, that's not likely to happen on any of the big culture-war issues, because evangelicals are just so confident that God agrees with them on those. You can see the examples I gave here are along the lines of "I am so thoroughly sinful that my sin has biased me to thinking about these things in the wrong way." Rather than "Maybe the things that I hear in church all the time, which we all take for granted, actually aren't true."
Here's another way God might "push back"- suppose you are worried about losing your job, so you pray that God won't let it happen, but then you lose your job anyway, but then months later you're in a much better situation, and you conclude that actually it was good that you lost your job. So you decide that when you prayed about it back then, God didn't agree with you on it. You pray for something to happen, but then much later realize it wasn't the right thing.
When that kind of thing happens though, people describe it like this: "I prayed for abc to happen, but on some level I didn't really feel peace about it when I prayed. Now I understand why I felt that way- it's because God knew that abc wasn't right for me." I am extremely curious about whether this is an accurate representation of what happened, or just a justification they came up with after-the-fact. Maybe sometimes you "don't feel peace" about something, but then everything goes fine and you forget that you had those feelings.
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Mormons
In college, I had a bunch of Mormon friends, and they were always going on about how non-Mormons should read the Book of Mormon and pray to ask God about whether it's true, and everyone who has done this has concluded that it's true. I guess this is one of the common Mormon talking points, because they were ALWAYS advising people to do this "experiment."
(I'm very skeptical about this statistic "everyone who has done this has concluded it's true." When I was evangelical, we also threw around supposed "facts" like that. Very skeptical about whether anyone actually did any kind of study to measure this- or is it just like, if you said you tried it and you're not convinced about being Mormon, well you must have done it wrong.)
My Mormon friends said, why not try it? What's the harm? You want to find the truth, right?
And yes, I did want to be open to whatever God wanted to tell me, to finding the truth no matter what it was, even if it meant I had been wrong and needed to change.
But I never tried this "experiment." I never prayed and asked God, "Is the Book of Mormon true?" Because every time I imagined myself going into the presence of my God and asking him "Is the Book of Mormon true?" it just felt so ridiculous, so embarrassing. Like if I genuinely prayed that with an open mind, my God would answer, "What are you talking about? Of course not."
It's like, if you have a friend that you've known for a long time, and you've talked to them a lot about their opinions on some certain topic, and then one day out of the blue you come up to them and say "Is it true that [something that people who disagree with them on that topic would say]?" Of course they would be completely shocked, and respond, "What? What on earth? Where is this coming from?" and you would feel ridiculous for even asking the question.
That's why I never asked God about if Mormonism was true. Evangelicals believe Mormonism is a cult, and so of course my God believed that. Of course my God would be flabbergasted if I came up to him with an open mind and asked if it was true.
So my point is, if you feel like you really know God, you'll be so confident that God believes you are right and other people are wrong.
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I changed, but God can't change
When I was evangelical, I had a lot of anti-queer opinions, because that's a key part of what it means to be evangelical. I believed that God intended everyone to be straight. I believed that it wasn't necessarily bad to have feelings of same-sex attraction, but it would be a sin to ever "act on" them- for example, by being in a same-sex relationship. Gay and bi people should just repress themselves, and then in the long run, they'll see that that's what's best for them. Living a "homosexual lifestyle" may seem like a good thing, but it's actually harmful to those who do it. Oh and also, gay people are pushing a "homosexual agenda" to destroy marriage or something.
On the internet, I found blogs written by gay Christians. They talked about their own feelings and experiences. As it turns out, they were not trying to destroy marriage. They were just trying to obey God, like I was. They talked about how they had tried conversion therapy, tried so hard to repress themselves, tried to follow "God's rules," and the result was so bad. And then when they accepted themselves, accepted their queer identity, everything was so much better. They talked about how good and healing it was to finally be in a same-sex relationship.
So basically, I found out that all those evangelical talking points about how gay people are so bad and they hate God, and if they just tried harder, they could become straight- I found out that was all lies. So I changed my beliefs on that.
But what about God?
I changed my beliefs because I came across information I didn't have before. But what about God? God knows everything. There were 3 possible explanations:
- God really does buy into all the anti-gay bullshit propaganda.
- God has known all along that it was all lies, and that actually we should accept queer people.
- God discovered this information at the same time I did, and changed his views.
I felt option 3 wasn't possible because God knows everything.
For option 2, I felt it wasn't possible because of how real it had felt, back then when I prayed for God to stop same-sex marriage from being legal, back when I had prayed that God would help gay people see the error of their ways... I remember one time, there was a facebook thread I was replying to, and I really spent a long time thinking about what exactly to say, and praying about it, writing a draft and then deleting parts I wasn't totally sure about, and in the end I was very confident that I was saying what God wanted me to say... This was an important part of my "personal relationship with God" back then, asking God for help with navigating "hate the sin, love the sinner." And it all felt very real- there was never any feeling that God was hinting "maybe you're wrong about this."
If God knew all along that I was wrong, why didn't he ever say anything about it?
I was talking about this to someone, years ago, and their explanation was that God *did* "say something about it"- that God led me to find the information that helped me change my beliefs. I know there are ex-evangelical Christians who conceptualize it this way, and continue to have a "personal relationship with God." That's fine for them, but I feel it doesn't match what I experienced. For me, it was so real, the way I connected with God while promoting things which turned out to be harmful. I just can't believe that God was sitting there the whole time thinking "she's wrong about this" and didn't say anything to me about it at all. (Maybe this could be explained as "God knew I wasn't yet ready to listen and change my beliefs" but I mean he could have at least said *something*.)
When I changed my beliefs on queer acceptance, it felt like rebelling against God. It did NOT feel like I was following where God was leading me.
So I was left with option 1- that my God really did believe gay people were sinning and should just try harder to be straight, and were pushing a "homosexual agenda" to destroy America or whatever.
And so I had to abandon that God. I believe in a totally different God now. And I'm not willing to have a "personal relationship" with any God again.
(A similar thing happened when I found out about white privilege and systemic racism- why didn't God ever mention those things to me before???)
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Conclusion
One of the biggest reasons that I don't pray is that I'm very uncomfortable with assuming that God agrees with me. If I pray for xyz to happen, there's the assumption that God also should believe xyz is a good thing. I can't get into that again- that's something that was really bad for me, when I was evangelical. I can't have a "personal relationship with God" again.
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Related:
They Prayed About It (a post about the #NashvilleStatement)
We did a dirty thing. We prayed at her wedding.
My Racist Personal Relationship with God
An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God
This is what a "personal relationship with God" looks like. Be very afraid.