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| Image text: "A personal relationship with God", with a hand reaching down from the top of the frame, and another hand reaching up from the bottom. Image source. |
"He must become greater; I must become less."
- John 3:30
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In romantic/intimate relationships, it can be a red flag when there's a big power difference between the 2 people. A relationship between a boss and an employee, between a professor and student, etc- these are recognized as totally unethical because of the power difference. It's a situation where one person can be coerced into things they don't want in the relationship, because the other person holds such power over their life.
But what if it was a relationship between a person and God?
I'm talking about this in the framework of romantic/intimate relationships, because the evangelical concept of the "personal relationship with God" is supposed to be that intimate. Actually, more intimate than that, I would say. God knows you completely. God knows every thought in your mind. God knows all your motivations for all the choices you will ever make. And you are supposed to dedicate yourself completely to God. Sacrifice whatever things in your life God doesn't like. Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Pray more- however much you are praying now, it would be better if you were praying more. Pursue God all the time, with all you have. No matter the cost.
It's hard to imagine a more one-sided relationship than that. God is perfect, we are the ones who are imperfect, so anything that goes wrong in the relationship must be our fault. We are sinful. We didn't pray enough. We didn't love God enough. We are weak, and we are flawed, trying to reach through the haze to access the power of God and the goodness and joy of God, if only we would get our act together.
Oh, and in this ideology, God is all you need. Anything else in your life, if you lose it, it will be okay because you still have God. Rely on God to be your everything.
When I had a "personal relationship with God"... it was... I loved him. I was obsessed with him. I wanted to do whatever he wanted me to do, and I was willing to give up anything. I wanted God to speak to me, I wanted to feel his power, I wanted to see the amazing things he was doing in the world, I wanted to be part of it.
If only I could know what God was telling me, what God wanted me to do- but it was so hard to hear him. It was so hard to know what I was supposed to do. I worried about making the wrong choice- I was supposed to do what God wanted, but what if I really didn't know what that was? Why couldn't he just choose for me? Why couldn't he just take away all my choices- wouldn't that make it easier for everyone? We're working with a belief system that says there *is* one specific absolute right thing to do, and God knows what it is, and I don't know what it is but I'm the one who has to do it. And I tried so hard to sit and pray and listen to God, this distant and noisy communication channel- doesn't this seem inefficient? Why doesn't God just take over my life and make all my choices for me- wouldn't that be the ideal?
And the way I had to police my feelings because of him. If I was in a situation where I felt "God wants me to forgive this person" then that was it, I had to forgive them. I had to. God wants it, and God is absolutely always right. I couldn't think it through, couldn't process my feelings on it, because we already know the right answer. To seriously think it through would be to entertain the possibility of not obeying God. My obedience must be absolute- how can there be any hesitation, when we already know God is right? If I question it, if I have feelings of not wanting to do it, that would be a sin.
Many many times, I had feelings about something, and I had to stomp them down immediately because they weren't what God would want. To linger on those emotions would be a sin- and every little sin is "an infinite offense against a holy God." I deserve to go to hell for that.
When you're in a relationship with a person, and you disagree about something, there's some give and take. You both are right about some things and wrong about some things; you both should listen to each other and learn from each other. Even if it turns out one person was pretty obviously right and the other was wrong, you still talk it through and work to empathize with each other and understand each other. I don't even know if it's possible to have a healthy relationship with Someone who is always right. Like, you already know it's pointless to try to tell them why you disagree with them on something. You're automatically wrong. To continue to talk about your wrong feelings and wrong opinions, as if they matter, wouldn't that be a sin?
And I believed that, if anything bad happened in my life, it was okay because it was God's plan. He could do anything to me, and it would be right- somehow, from God's absolutely correct point of view, it would actually be a good thing, even if it seemed bad to me.
Maybe God would take away the things- or people- that I loved, in order to teach me to trust him more. Yes, plenty of evangelicals have anecdotes along those lines- something bad happened to them, and they eventually came to believe that God had deliberately caused it, in order to teach them something. Or, perhaps God destroyed something because you sinfully loved it too much, and it was distracting you from loving God. Yeah, the God I believed in back then would totally do that kind of thing. He was a jealous God, and we believed that was a good thing.
OH AND I almost forgot to mention, this God believed I was disgusting and dirty and never deserved anything good. All humans deserve to go to hell right now, but luckily God has a bit of a weakness and loves us, so we're able to get a sort of temporary delay in getting the punishment we deserve- we're living our lives here on earth instead of going to hell right now. And for those of us who believe the correct things about Jesus, Jesus covers up our sin well enough that God can finally bear to look at us. So basically, my natural self is really bad, but fortunately Jesus is changing me into someone that can maybe kinda sorta please God. I just have to pray all the time and pursue God with everything I have. Any deviation from this, and I'm a dirty sinner that God can't even look at.
(And I won't even get into this other goal that the "personal relationship with God" is supposed to accomplish: We believe there is a spiritual world, which we can't see but it's more real than the physical world that we can see. And the closer your "personal relationship with God" is, the more in-tune with God you are, the more you will be able to sense the actual real reality of the spiritual world. Sure, we believe it exists, but it doesn't feel real- but if you have a really really good personal relationship with God, you can get to the point that the spiritual world does feel real- and that's what we should be trying to do. You want to get yourself to where it's intuitive to interpret things that happen to you in terms of what's going on in the spiritual world, and ignore the common-sense physical-world understanding of what's happening.)
I'm describing it this way, and it probably sounds pretty bad, the way God treated me, the way I sacrificed my feelings and independence and personality for him. But at the time, I was happy. I was so happy, and I loved God so much. I was happy because I 100% believed in this ideology that says God is right about everything. It was so hard, all the things I had to do to obey him, but I genuinely believed that those were the right things that I should do, and that any alternative would by definition be worse. And all that stuff about me being a dirty sinner, it didn't bother me because I believed it was true. If someone calls you a dirty sinner, why would you take offense to that, if you know that you really are a dirty sinner?
(Years later in therapy it turned out it DID bother me!)
I loved this quote from John the Baptist, talking about Jesus: "He must become greater; I must become less." I worked so hard, trying to be that perfect pure conduit that God's power could flow through, trying to get rid of my own weakness and sinfulness. I've heard evangelicals say- and I believed this back then- it's not that God is getting rid of your personality and uniqueness; instead, the personal relationship with God is the ideal environment where your natural personality can blossom, and you really become the person God made you to be, when you're following God rather than being weighed down by sin. And yeah, to some extent that was true. I did devote my life to God in a way that was uniquely mine. But living that way, I wasn't allowed to have any real choices. That really cuts off a lot of one's personality and identity- not being able to think about what you want, and choose to do something just because you want to, not because you're "supposed" to.
And this whole time, I chased God and wanted God and listened for God, and also I believed all the evangelical ideology. All the culture war issues, I had the "correct" evangelical view, and I was sure that God did too- of course he did. All this time that I wanted to know him, and I believed he knew me completely, I was totally sure I had the right beliefs about all these things, and I talked to him with the assumption that he believed those things too. It all fit together seamlessly- my personal relationship with God, and my taking evangelical talking points as if they were just self-evidently true.
My "personal relationship with God" fell to pieces as I gradually realized that so many evangelical beliefs were wrong- but God cannot change- God still believed those things, and I couldn't any more. He was revealed to be a heartless bigot who bought into misinformation.
It was so bad, going through that. My whole identity had been in this God, and he turned out to be a monster and I needed to separate from him. Everything I had thought was certain, everything I had thought I didn't need to worry about because evangelical ideology had a pat little answer, suddenly all these questions sprang up like a whirlwind, all these reasons that showed God is not worthy of worship. And my whole life I had believed I deserved to go to hell but I wasn't worried about that because Jesus covered me so it was fine- but now that I was leaving this God, the full burden of my sinfulness in God's eyes fell on me... I couldn't stop thinking about how I was so bad, I was so dirty- because I had always believed that was everyone's default state if they didn't have a "personal relationship with God."
And here I was, no longer even *trying* to have a personal relationship with God. Hard to imagine anything more dirty and sinful than that.
Yes, evangelicals very explicitly believe that if you do not have a personal relationship with God, you are not a Christian. You are going to hell.
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It may come across as strange that I'm talking about the personal relationship with God in the language we use to talk about abusive relationships. The idea that the partner with more power can coerce the other into things they don't want- well, that's totally different when it's God we're talking about. God is always good and right, so if God coerces you into something, that's actually a good thing. The control that is a bad thing in a human relationship is a good thing in the relationship with God. ... Right?
(And yes, it is very common for evangelicals to talk about God coercing them into things. Giving testimonies along the lines of "God wanted me to do [something] but I didn't want to. Silly me, I'm so sinful and selfish, haha, you guys know how it is, lol. And then God caused bad/annoying/inconvenient things to happen to me, until I finally gave up, and agreed to do the thing that God told me to do. God always gets us in the end, haha. [audience laughs]")
I don't think that any more, because I don't have a God I can trust. The God I used to worship, I don't believe in him any more, but he was very real to me back then, and he controlled my life. There are many gods that people believe in- how can you give up control of your life to a God if you don't even know if it's the right one?
I believe in a God now, and I love Them, but I don't want to talk to Them. The power dynamics are too... I just can't, I just can't deal with anything that hints in the direction of an absolute "this is what God wants me to do"- it feels coercive. I can't deal with "here's God's opinion on this or that topic"- because if I agree with it, I can arrogantly feel like I'm automatically right, and if I disagree with it, I should be forced to change immediately. The absoluteness of it is just incompatible with thinking with my own mind and feeling my own feelings.
I need some space away from God, to think my own thoughts and feel my own feelings. Let me be wrong, let me figure things out on my own, let me change and grow. I don't want to talk to Them.
Any time I say something like "God wants us to [whatever]", that's my own opinion, based on a bunch of reasons that I've thought about. It's not "these words were handed down to us from heaven and are automatically right"- I don't want that in my religion.
The power difference between a person and God is so huge, and we are told me must give ourselves fully to him, give up everything for him, obey him even when it hurts. And I used to do that. But I can't any more. I'm never going to be in a personal relationship with a God again. It's not safe to have a relationship that intimate with that big of a power difference.
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Related
They Prayed About It (a post about the #NashvilleStatement)
"Moon Knight" and Boundaries With God
This is what a "personal relationship with God" looks like. Be very afraid.
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