Good Christians Know My Problem is I was Doing it Wrong

A woman praying. Image source.

I recently wrote a post called The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God", and... here's the thing: When I write something like this, it's difficult because I know that the response from good evangelicals will be to say that I was just doing it wrong. That I must have been in the wrong church, or I understood Christianity wrong, or I believed a slightly incorrect version of the "personal relationship with God" ideology that got me totally off-track, and so on.

(I like when people share different interpretations about how to think about God, prayer, etc! Keep 'em coming! I don't like when they do so with the subtext that my experiences are not valid and I need to change and believe the same thing as them.)

I have only experienced this a handful of times- some nice Christian who doesn't know me but very confidently butts into my life and tells me I understood Christianity wrong. My feelings about this don't really come from actually experiencing it myself, but from being on the other side of it when I was evangelical. Oh, we judged people so much. All the time. We were so totally sure that "so-and-so had a bad experience with Christianity, because it was the wrong kind of Christianity, and what so-and-so really needs is to get over it and believe in our version of Christianity instead." Yeah. When we did evangelism, this was a really common thing. Really really common to meet people who had bad experiences with Christianity, and then we schemed about how to get them to just get over that and get in line with the "right" version of Christianity. We didn't know many details about their lives, but we were totally sure we knew what they were supposed to do.

It's an ideology which isn't able to actually care about the religious trauma that people have experienced. Whatever bad thing happened to you in a Christian environment, it's just an annoyance that we have to get past as fast as possible, to get you to where you're supposed to be, which is believing in Jesus in the "right" way.

If you believe in hell, and if you believe in a God whose criteria about who goes to hell is whether or not you have a "personal relationship with God", then yeah, this is what it leads to. You can't care about someone's religious trauma, you can't care about someone's very legitimate reasons to refuse to go to church ever again. You can't care about all the reasons I said I'll never be in a personal relationship with a God again, and I'll never give my life to Jesus- I am in charge of myself. "I'll never give my life to Jesus" comes across like, them's fightin' words, rather than a suggestion that maybe I actually have good reasons for making that decision.

(When I say "I'll never give my life to Jesus," I mean I want to be like the first son in the parable of the two sons. I refuse to swear loyalty, but I'll do the work.)

You believe in a God who doesn't care, so you can't care either. Just rush past all that and funnel people into the "correct" beliefs, otherwise they're in danger of going to hell.

As I said in my 2015 post, When Christians Say "We're Sorry":

If Christians want to really apologize, it has to come with the acknowledgement that because Christianity has hurt this person, Christians never again have the right to tell them what to do.

Let me say that again: If Christians really are sorry, then it means recognizing that the victim's pain and anger are legitimate. It's not something you just "get over." It's something that actually matters.

If Christians really are sorry, they know that people need to heal on their own terms.

But of course, like I said earlier, believing in hell screws this all up. Because how sorry can you really be, and how much freedom can you really allow a victim to have, when you believe in a God who won't care about that on judgment day? When you believe in a God who doesn't care that church people hurt this person, and for their own mental and emotional health, they never went to church again... when you believe in a God who says you're out if you don't believe these specific doctrines about Jesus- no excuses.

How sorry can you really be when you worship a God who puts "the gospel" above caring for victims?

How sorry can you really be if you still believe you have all the right answers and everybody better listen to you?

Maybe try believing in a God who does care. Maybe consider the possibility that people know their own life and their own needs, and your religious answers fall flat.

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Related:

When Christians Say "We're Sorry" 

Cut Out the Middleman (or, why I am the master and commander of my own life) 

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" 

Yep, I Totally Did This Creepy Evangelism Strategy

Evangelism and Blabbing About People's Personal Lives