When Prayer Inspires You To Do It Yourself

Praying hands. Image source.

So I want to talk about how Christians connect the concepts of "praying for something" and "doing the thing yourself."

Back when I was evangelical, I had this belief about prayer: Prayer is so important. If we are doing some big thing for God, or if we really really need something, we absolutely have to pray about it. Of all the things we could potentially do to ensure the success of the venture in question, prayer is the most important. 

We would always say that- prayer is the most important part. If you're working on something that you feel like God wants you to do, and you work hard but you don't pray about it, well you're shooting yourself in the foot. What are you even doing, trying to do things without prayer, as if you don't need God?

When I was a college student, I was getting ready to go on a summer mission trip, and I had to send out my fundraising letters. Yeah this is a thing in evangelical culture- young people go on mission trips that cost several thousand dollars, and they write letters to adults in their church, to ask for money for the trip. The basic structure of the letter has to be like this:

I'm going on a mission trip to [some place] because [big lofty ideas about God]. Here's how you can help: First of all, pray for us. Prayer is the most important thing! Second, give me money. [but maybe word this a bit more politely]

And then I kept a list of all the people who had donated to my trip, and the amounts, to see how close I was to the target amount. I did *not* reach the target amount, and had to add a few hundred dollars of my own money. (I wrote about this here: A Little Story About a Mission Trip and Money.)

Anyway, the reason I'm telling this story is, we all had to say "prayer is the most important thing." We all had to say that if someone prays for me to raise the money, that's more effective than actually *giving* me money. We all had to say that, but nobody kept track of "I have 15 people who agreed to pray for me, wow that's great." What we kept track of was, how much money have we collected so far, and how much more do we need? When it was time to pay up, those of us who hadn't raised the whole amount had to pay for part of it ourselves. There was no part of the process where we were asked how many people prayed for us, and were judged on whether or not it was enough.

We claimed prayer was the most important thing. If someone prayed for me to be able to raise the money, if they prayed really really hard, then God would prompt various people to give me the money I needed. And, it might happen that someone is praying really hard- "God, please help Perfect Number raise the money"- spending a lot of time, a lot of emotion, really really begging- because we believed prayer was most effective if you prayed over and over, and if you "really meant it"- and then God would cause a thought to occur to this person, in the middle of their praying- "hey, what if *I* gave her some money?"

Yes, it can happen that you're praying for something, and the way God answers your prayer is by making you realize that *you* should do it. Indeed, God will only answer your prayer if you "really mean it"- and if you truly do want me to get the money for the mission trip, then you will certainly be willing to put in some of your own money. Otherwise, I guess you don't "really mean it" when you're praying, and God won't listen to your prayer.

So in this ideology, we kind of viewed prayer like this: You pray really hard for God to do something, you put a lot of emotion into it, and this hands the task over to God, who has various strategies available to accomplish what you asked, if God decides that's what should happen. Sometimes this means that God will then prompt the very same person who was praying, to make them realize that *they* have the ability to do something about it.

So I'm writing about this because I want to compare it with what I believe now. In my post The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray, I talked about conceptualizing prayer like this: We're *not* asking God to do these things; we're making a statement about how we think things should be, and this gives us clarity about what actions *we* should take to make it happen. 

In both cases, you pray for something and then you do the work yourself- but they're so different. In the ideology I used to have, God was in charge of doing the things- we just needed to pray really really really sincerely and persistently, and then God would do it. And sometimes this "God doing it" would involve, somewhat surprisingly, making you realize that *you* should do it. Kind of an unexpected and indirect thing, but sure, that's a valid strategy God can use.

But now I don't believe God acts in response to prayer. It's on us. I don't think you can pray really hard, and then sit back, assured that you've done your part to put the wheels in motion to get this done. 

You could think about the difference between these 2 ideologies as cutting out the middleman. Pray to give the task to God, and then God gives it back by giving you the realization that you should do it. I find this really ineffective and error-prone- there are several failure points where someone/Someone might bungle the handover.

And here's another example: There have been times where I saw somebody unhappy, and I wanted to help them, but I didn't know what to say. What if I said the wrong thing, and made it worse? So I prayed about it a lot. I asked God to help them feel better. And I felt good about that, because God is always perfect- if I attempted to help them, I might do it wrong, but if I pray and then God is the one who takes on the task of helping them, well, God will surely not screw it up like I would. I remember being glad that I could pray, and not take any action myself- it was a way to help, without any of the risk. 

Maybe that's bad? That you can pray, and feel like you did something, and so you no longer have the burden of being obligated to do something. Remember how we always said prayer was the most important thing? That it's more effective to pray and ask God to do something, rather than to do something yourself. Maybe this belief is not good.

The apostle James wrote, 

Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?

Is prayer the same way? If you see someone in need, and you pray for them, and do nothing else, would James say, "what good is it"? I never would have interpreted this verse that way, when I was evangelical- because I did think prayer counted as "doing something."

But also, when I was evangelical, I believed that an important part of prayer was listening to God. You pray for something, and you also sit quietly and see if God tells you anything. It very well could happen that you pray for something, and then when you sit there and listen to God, God answers by saying that *you* should do the thing. I did believe that was very important. You don't just pray and that's all- you pray and then listen for whatever God has to say about your prayers.

I saw a poll on the internet one time- a Christian was asking other Christians how they understood prayer, and the 2 choices were:

1. Prayer changes God
2. Prayer changes me

Christians say all sorts of things about prayer, but in this case, it was boiled down to these 2 views- which I agree is a helpful way of looking at it. Do you believe you pray, and then God goes and does something about it? Or do you believe you pray, and it helps you to become a better person? (Possibly by inspiring you to do the thing yourself.)

Personally I don't believe in either of those- but I think this helps clarify the differences in how Christians view prayer.

So my point is, I now believe that praying should go right along with doing the thing yourself. But in a very different way than I did back then.

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Related:

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

Praying Non-Literally

The Parable of the Talents: Risk and Return in Building the Kingdom of Heaven

Praying Non-Literally

The tortoise and the hare. Image source.

In my post The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray, I said that instead of viewing prayer as talking to God, "What if prayer is a ritualized way to express our hopes and our understanding of our place in the world?" And I want to flesh that out a little more.

Maybe "ritualized" isn't the right word- but what I want to say is, a mode of communication where we format the words into a certain structure/genre, but the actual meaning of it isn't the surface-level statements of that structure. The actual meaning is something more abstract and deeper, and the structure is just a vehicle for communicating those deeper ideas.

Some examples:

1. Satire

Satire is a style of writing where you take some bit of truth and then present it in an exaggerated way in order to show how ridiculous it is. So at the surface level, the statements in the satire are not true. But their purpose is to make a point.

For example, The Onion is a satire news site. The articles say things that are not true- but there's a purpose to it, and sometimes they make really insightful points. Here's an Onion link:

Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away - This one's from 2014, and it says that medical experts have publicly discussed a timeline for an ebola vaccine in terms of how many white people are affected. Okay, that's not true, no one said that. But the point it is making is that ebola is a deadly disease which the world should take seriously- but the world is not taking it seriously because mostly it's African people who are being affected by it. The point of the article is to call out the implicit racism in what kinds of issues get treated as important.

But if you just take it at face value, as if it's describing something that really happened, you will think that health experts really did say that ebola only really matters if it affects white people, and that everyone just nodded along and this is fine. No- the point of it is not to read it and accept that it's true; the point is to expose the racism in how the world was reacting to ebola.

2. Fables

A fable is a little story which is supposed to teach some kind of life lesson. Sometimes they have talking animals or magic- things that are not real. 

For example, "The Tortoise and the Hare" is an old fable where the tortoise and hare are having a race, and the hare runs fast initially but then gets distracted and doesn't finish, while the tortoise keeps plugging along and eventually crosses the finish line. And we are supposed to learn that "slow and steady wins the race."

This is not a true story, and if you think it's a true story, you'll get bogged down in all kinds of details. How did the tortoise and hare communicate with each other in order to agree on the rules for the race? Do animals understand the concept of a race? Do animals understand the concept of a finish line? If you ask all these questions, you're missing the point, because it's not a true story. But the point is to teach a lesson which is useful and true, in some sense.

3. Job interviews

On the surface, a job interview consists of an interviewer asking questions, and a candidate answering the questions. But the point is not "here is a question, now I will correctly answer the question." That's not the point at all. As a candidate, the important thing is not to answer the questions correctly; the important thing is to communicate a deeper message that says "I am the kind of person you would want to hire for this job." (And a secondary purpose is to find out information about the job, so you can decide for yourself if you would even want to work there or not.)

So for example, the interviewer asks, "What's your biggest strength?" You're not supposed to say what your actual biggest strength is, by some absolute objective measure. Maybe you're really good at making animal sounds, or pouring milk into cereal in exactly the right proportions, or making babies laugh... perhaps you're in the top 1% of people in some weird little niche ability, such that it would make sense to say that's your biggest strength. No! Don't tell the interviewer that!

The answer you actually need to give to this question is not "what's your biggest strength" but "talk about a strength you have, that is related to this job, that will make the interviewer believe that you are a person they should hire."

Or, maybe the interviewer says, "Tell me about a problem you had in your previous job, and how you solved it." You don't have to take this super literally. Maybe you can't think of an example from your previous job, but you have a good example from the job you worked at before that. That's fine! Talk about that! It's not about the literal words of the interviewers' questions; it's about communicating a deeper message about what kind of person you are, and that you are a competent person they would want to hire.

Don't *lie* in a job interview, obviously, but it's okay to not directly answer the question but instead talk about something along the lines of the general idea of the question, with the primary goal being presenting yourself as a good job candidate, rather than literally answering the question.

The surface-level statements all need to be true, but the actual *meaning* of the job interview is not in the surface-level statements.

4. Sharing links to news stories

Let's say you have a website, and you post links to news articles. And a lot of these links are about some topic, like, immigrants committing crimes, or something. Each individual story is true on its own- statistically, there must be immigrants who commit crimes; any large population will inevitably have some members who commit crimes. It's certainly possible to collect the facts about specific cases where this happens, and write true news articles.

So, each individual story is true, but the effect of sharing so many of them is that it creates the impression that this is really common. That's the "deeper meaning" being communicated. And this might be unintentional in a lot of cases- maybe you consume a lot of content related to some certain topic, and it makes you subconsciously believe that whatever you're reading about is more common and normal than it is in reality.

You can even get cases where something happens, and we feel like we shouldn't talk about it because it plays into some harmful political narrative. I really hate this, this tendency to want to cover up true facts about specific real events just because we know that people will not take those facts as simply describing the literal events that happened, but will draw sweeping conclusions. 

5. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

People are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. I recently realized, when kids answer this question, it's not about what job they're actually going to have when they grow up. It's a way of expressing their interests and their sense of identity. So it's not literally true, but it's still communicating something meaningful.

When I was a kid, I had this book where every page was one of the grades from kindergarten to 12th grade, and every year you were supposed to glue a picture of yourself onto the corresponding page, and write some stuff about what your life was like that year- and each page had the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" along with some checkboxes with potential jobs. For the earlier pages, like for kindergarten kids, the choices were like, "doctor", "firefighter", "policeman", and then you flip ahead to the high school pages and they're like "engineer", "salesperson." Middle-school-Perfect-Number was like, wow this really exposes how fake the whole "what do you want to be when you grow up" thing is. 5-year-old kid checks the box that says "firefighter" but then they grow up a little bit and we don't even offer that checkbox any more, nobody actually believes you when you're 5 years old and you say you're going to be a firefighter.

But! It turns out, it *was* useful and meaningful, even though it has no actual connection to the job the kid will have, decades into the future. It's not actually about that. It's about how the kid understands their own identity, and what they imagine their ideal life to be.

6. Prayer

So now we come back to prayer. Full disclosure, I don't pray, because of all the, uh, unfortunate implications when you really take seriously the belief that God takes action in response to prayer. God's gonna help me with whatever first-world problem is bothering me, while not taking action to help other people with much bigger problems? God's going to choose to take action to answer prayers of people who believe the correct things and pray with the correct attitude... and therefore if some horrible tragedy happens to you, it must be your own fault for not praying correctly?

I just don't want to be a part of that at all. It makes sense that *I* prioritize myself, and I put in more effort to solve my "first-world problems" than I do to help victims of human-rights violations on the other side of the world, but God is supposed to be objective and love everyone equally- it is quite ****ed up if They are actively intervening to help me, when there are wars and atrocities happening to other people.

But here's an idea I'm starting to explore: Prayer isn't *literally* talking to God. God does not hear our prayers and then take action in response to them. Instead, prayer is about using the literary structure of "here's a message we want to tell God" in order to communicate deeper ideas about how we view ourselves and what kind of world we want.

For example: In my 2016 post, Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, I looked up statistics about the leading causes of death in the US- the top causes are heart disease and cancer. But people aren't constantly praying "God, protect us from heart disease." Instead, people pray for safety from violence, plane crashes, terrorism, etc- things that statistically have a very small chance of affecting you personally. I pointed out that people pray about the things that they are worried about, rather than the things that truly pose a danger to them. And that if Christians truly believe that God acts powerfully in response to our prayers, we should harness that power by identifying the biggest actual threats- using statistics, not whatever fearful thoughts pass through our heads after reading the news- and targeting our prayers toward those threats.

But in that post, I also said this is a terrible idea because then we would have to think about heart disease and cancer constantly, and stress ourselves out, in order to pray most effectively. That's a terrible way to live, and I just cannot believe in a God who chooses to give protection to people according to the amount of worrying they do over heart disease and car accidents which are most likely to occur within 10 miles of their home.

But get this: What if prayer *isn't* a process by which we convince God to intervene in our lives and help us? What if it's *not* true that by naming a specific scenario in your prayers, you tweak the probability of that specific scenario occurring in real life? What if it's not about affecting God at all, but it's about our own feelings and how we view ourselves? If viewed that way, it does make sense that the things people pray about are the things they're worried about, and it doesn't make sense to come up with additional worries to pray about in order to get additional protection from God.

Okay, here's a question: Maybe Christians already *do* view prayer non-literally, and it's just me who misunderstood it and thought God was really gonna do something? Well, no. Christians talk about how they went through medical troubles or financial troubles, and God helped them through it *because* they prayed. "Prayer works!" So people really do believe that God acts in response to prayer.

Still, though, Christians don't actually act in accordance with that belief. They don't treat prayer as something so urgent and powerful, with the Almighty God of the universe standing by to listen to whatever thoughts and requests we have. In practice it's more like... kinda boring and feels like it's not accomplishing anything.

Another thing: Back when I was evangelical and I prayed a lot, I used to wonder why we're supposed to pray over and over for the same thing. I would spend lots of time begging and begging God, over and over, the same things over and over. But, why isn't it enough to just tell God 1 time? Why do They need to be reminded over and over? Are They just really bad at staying on task, and They'll forget to do it if you don't keep reminding Them? Do They need some kind of to-do list app? Jesus said, "your Father knows what you need before you ask him", so why do we even need to pray at all, let alone praying multiple times for the same thing?

(I would say that part of the answer, from an evangelical perspective, is that God only answers prayers if we truly mean it and we ask with the right attitude. If you just pray 1 time and assume God will do it, then you're not taking it seriously enough, and you're acting like you're entitled to God doing things for you. You have to pray over and over to show God you're really serious and humble. Yeah- in this blog post, I'm specifically focusing on the "asking God to do things" aspect of prayer, but evangelicals would tell you that prayer is much more than that.)

Also, I'm not saying "If you look at how prayer is talked about in the bible, and how Christians talk about it, it makes sense in this 'non-literal' interpretation rather than viewing it as 'talking to God.'" No, it's not that simple- I think there are some *aspects* that line up more with the non-literal interpretation, but at the same time, there are plenty of bible verses that definitely talk about prayer like it's literally going to affect God's actions and cause things to happen in the real world.

And I'm not saying, "Well, Christians say prayer is 'talking to God' but that's not literal, it's just a symbol that points to a deeper meaning, so it's fine that people are describing it as 'talking to God'" - no, the implications of "talking to God" are very different from this "it's about how we understand ourselves and what kind of world we want to live in" that I'm describing. If you really go all in on "I'm talking to God" and try to live according to the implications of that, it's bad. So let's not say it's "talking to God" if it's not.

Anyway, this is just an idea I'm exploring. Not sure if I really believe it or not. For a long time, I've been very firm about "I don't pray" because of these issues when it's understood as "talking to God" but maybe I would be interested in it if we viewed it a different way.

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Related

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

On believing that "prayer works"

What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?

I Figured Out What The 1-10 Pain Scale Is Actually About

Excluding People In Case God Wants Us To

At the moment of Jesus' death, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Matthew 27:51) Image source. 

In some churches, women aren't allowed to volunteer as ushers, or to serve communion, or to read Scripture to the congregation. Because, the bible says women should not speak in church, and a woman must not have authority over a man.

There are also churches that believe men and women are fully equal, and women can have all the same leadership positions that men can. They interpret those bible verses as only applicable to the first-century churches they were written to, and not absolute rules for all time.

Suppose you don't know which side of this debate to believe. It certainly seems sexist and wrong to put restrictions on women, but at the same time, it's right there in the bible, so maybe God really does want us to do it?

Maybe it would be wise to err on the side of caution, and not allow women to do things. It's difficult- it's difficult to obey God in this way- everyone will call you a sexist, and also if you exclude all the women volunteers, maybe you don't even have enough men volunteers to run your church service. One could argue that obedience to God is in fact supposed to be difficult like this. It's so hard, it's a sacrifice, look how we are sacrificing so much for God. Much more righteous than taking the easy way out and just letting women have all the same roles that men can have, right?

The problem with this framework is, it has God above us, and we are down here trying to please him, trying to follow the rules correctly, for him. God has high standards, and we have to work really hard, exclude people just in case God wants them excluded, the narrower the better, no sacrifice is too great if we are doing it for God.

But God is not up there, waiting for us to present our carefully-screened representatives to perform worship in our best attempt to follow Their rules. God is here. God is in us. All humans bear the image of God. If your church excludes women from volunteer/leadership roles, you are excluding God.

If you restrict women, you're not "erring on the side of caution." You're cutting off part of the body of Christ. You're cutting off God.

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Gay Christians face a similar debate. The traditional interpretation of the bible says only hetero relationships are allowed, and sex is only for one-man-one-woman marriage. On the other side, you have gay Christians making the argument that those bible verses were written for the people in the ancient Near East, and they don't apply to us now.

But if you're not sure who to believe, what do you do? Maybe don't ever date a same-sex partner, just in case it's a sin. Maybe a church should not do same-sex weddings, or have queer people in leadership. High standards, for God.

But again, you're cutting off God. God is in queer people, queer joy, the way that we thrive when we're able to accept ourselves for who we are. Don't ask people to repress themselves for God- you're repressing God. All the diversity and beauty of the image of God, living in so many different people with so many different experiences and perspectives, and we're trying to cut it down, fit it in a box, make it fit the straight and narrow "rules."

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Another example is that time in college that we brought a friend to church, and he said he was a Christian, but we "knew" he wasn't a "real" Christian. I wrote about this in my post The Worst Bible Story:

On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”

So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.

I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. ...

I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.

Excluding Christians from communion because we think they're not "really" Christians. Because we believed God was above us, judging whether we stayed in the lines or not, and God was offended by anyone who came forward and ate a little wafer but didn't meet the standards of how to believe in Jesus the "correct" way.

We thought that if someone felt hurt by being blocked from taking communion, well, that was a small price to pay to keep up the highest standards of respect for God. Making sure that only people who were definitely the right kind of Christian were allowed to participate.

We were actually excluding God.

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Matthew 1 contains [one version of] Jesus' genealogy. It traces his ancestry from father to son, through Abraham, down through David and the kings of ancient Judah, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. I've often heard Christians point out how interesting it is that this genealogy mentions some women. I mean, it's a typical patriarchal genealogy in that it's all about "so-and-so was the father of so-and-so," but at a few points in the list of fathers and sons, it also mentions who someone's mother was.

Specifically, the women included in the Matthew 1 genealogy are: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

Tamar, whose first husband Er was wicked, so the Lord put him to death. Then she was required to marry his brother, Onan, who was also wicked and the Lord put him to death. Then she was supposed to marry the remaining brother, but her father-in-law Judah didn't let her, so she disguised herself as a prostitute to get Judah to have sex with her, and she became pregnant that way. 

Rahab, a prostitute and foreigner, a resident of Jericho, whose city was attacked and the people killed by Joshua and his army.

Ruth, a widow and foreigner from Moab, which was one of Israel's enemies.

Bathsheba, who was raped by King David. She became pregnant, so David murdered her husband Uriah, and married her.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was a virgin but probably had people judging her for being unmarried and pregnant.

This is not exactly the dream team that you would assemble if you wanted good, respectable, uncomplicated role models. So why did Matthew go out of his way to point out that these women were part of Jesus' family line? 

One way I've heard this explained is, this is great because it shows that even if we're not perfect, we can still be part of God's work. God can still use us to do amazing things, despite our flaws.

I want to spin it a little bit differently, though: God lives in the women that society rejects. The widows, the immigrants, the sex workers, the women in bad marriages, the rape victims. To exclude them, to say Jesus needs a perfect pure genealogy... you're excluding God.

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Christian missionaries go to different parts of the world, encounter diverse and interesting cultures, where God is already there and alive, and tell the people to stop doing all that and follow the missionaries' religion instead.

God was already there, before any Christians came. The people have the image of God, and they have their own culture and religion, which is important and meaningful to them. The missionaries tell them to cut it off, to repress it, that it's *bad* because it's worshipping the wrong gods- you're cutting off God.

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Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord."

Hundreds of years later, an Ethiopian eunuch met Philip, one of the early Christians. Philip told him about Jesus, and he believed, and said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" Is this legit? Can he be baptized? Can he be welcomed and included?

Philip didn't think it was an issue at all. Philip baptized him.

Throughout the bible, there are some passages about excluding people who have some kind of imperfection and therefore don't meet the standards and can't enter God's presence. And then there are other passages about God's radical inclusiveness, about marginalized people who were accepted and approved of by God. Slaves, people from the wrong nations, people from the wrong religions. 

I don't think this is a simple Old Testament/ New Testament split- it's common for Christians to claim that the Old Testament was about rules and the New Testament is about God's love- but the verse that says women can't speak in church is from the New Testament. And the Old Testament has stories about welcoming immigrants, which stand in contrast to its laws about killing everyone in every city you conquer. 

The bible has all of these threads running through it; we use our own beliefs about the nature of God to decide which bible passages to emphasize and which to disagree with.

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1 Corinthians 12 says that we are the body of Christ.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

This passage is about diversity. About how we need diversity, or else we are actually excluding parts of Christ.

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The Christians who want to exclude people... well, God is in them too. We can't cut them off either. 

In practice, that means thinking about how to get people who disagree to coexist in a church. You can't just say we all accept each other even if we disagree, because these issues are about one group's basic rights on one side, vs another group's bigoted opinions on the other side. 

So you need to make sure you set up a system where people who want to exclude and restrict others are not given the power to do that. And okay that sounds complicated- but really, you have to do that anyway. All the groups of people I've mentioned in this post, as examples of people who bear the image of God and shouldn't be excluded- well, they are all imperfect people who have conflicts sometimes. We all are.

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Is God above us, waiting to see if we are good enough to meet Their standards, requiring us to restrict and ban people who aren't good enough to participate in worshipping Them? More restrictions, higher standards, the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you."

No, God is with us, in us, and when we exclude people, we are excluding God.

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Related:

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

Don't Protect God

"The Only Moral Virgin Birth Is My Virgin Birth"

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

Church nativity scene depicting baby Jesus zip-tied by ICE. Image source.

What kind of God will judge us for how we treat immigrants?

Will it be the God who said, "Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt"?

Will it be the God who said, "When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God."

Is it the God who "defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing," and instructs the people to also love foreigners?

Will it be the God of Moses, who said, "Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow"?

Is it the God of Ruth, a Moabite widow who came to live among the Israelites, married an Israelite man, and became the great-grandmother of King David?

Is it the God of Isaiah, who had HAD ENOUGH of religious rituals and just wanted people to help the poor and oppressed instead?

Is it the God of Jeremiah, who promised blessings to the people "if you do not oppress the foreigner"?

Is it the God of Ezekiel, who said that foreigners should be allotted land in Israel, the same as native-born citizens?

Will it be the God of the Magi, who studied astrology and came from far away, following the star to find the baby Jesus?

Is it Jesus, who escaped a massacre as an infant? His family fled to Egypt and lived there as refugees.

Is it Jesus, who asked, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" He was angry at the way people hid behind the letter of the law, ignoring a person in need right in front of them.

Is it Jesus, who talked to the Samaritan woman at the well, even though it was weird for a man to talk to a woman, or a Jew to talk to a Samaritan, in that setting? He revealed to her that he was the Messiah, and she went to share the good news, and many Samaritans believed in him.

Is it Jesus, who bent down to scribble in the dirt when the religious leaders brought a "sinful" woman to him? Jesus, who ignored the literal words of the law and said, "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone"? After all of them had awkwardly left, he told the woman, "Neither do I condemn you."

Is it Jesus, who pointed out that the prophet Elisha did not heal lepers among the Israelites, but instead healed Naaman the Syrian?

Will it be Jesus, who was asked "who is my neighbor?" and didn't directly answer that question- didn't give a precise definition of who we are supposed to care for and who we can ignore. Instead, he told a story about a man beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, who was saved by a Samaritan, an ethnic minority. The answer to "who is my neighbor?" is "go and do likewise." Go and help people, across lines of race and nationality.

Is it Jesus, who told a parable of a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus? The rich man went to hell, because he lived a life of luxury and totally ignored Lazarus.

Is it the King who separated the sheep from the goats, and told the sheep they would enter heaven because "I was a stranger and you invited me in"? He said, "Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me."

Is it God the Spirit, poured out on the day of Pentecost, where people from many different nations had gathered, and miraculously heard the apostles speaking in different languages?

Will it be the God of Stephen, one of the leaders in the early church who was appointed to make sure that widows from a Hellenistic background were given equal benefits with the Hebraic widows?

Is it the God of Peter, who saw a vision of animals on a sheet lowered from heaven, and said, "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right"?

Will it be the God of the apostle Paul, who preached to the Athenians, affirming their religion's desire to seek God, and told them that God intends for people of every nation to seek and find God?

Will it be the God of the apostle Paul, who wrote to Gentile readers and said that, even though the first Christians were Jewish, "you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household"?

Is it the God who showed John of Patmos a vision of worshippers "from every nation, tribe, people and language" in heaven?

Or...

Will it be the God who brought a plague against the Israelites when they were "seduced" by the women of Moab, and only stopped the plague after Phinehas the priest murdered a cross-cultural couple?

Is it the God of Moses, who led the army into victory over the Midianites, and instructed the people to kill all the Midianite men, women, and boys, and take the virgin girls as sex slaves?

Is it the God who said you can buy slaves from the nations around you, but you must not enslave your fellow Israelites?

Is it the God who sent fire to kill the priests Nadab and Abihu because they "offered unauthorized fire"? God's laws are very important, and they broke God's laws. Don't feel bad for them.

Is it the God who declared that a man should be stoned to death because he gathered sticks on the Sabbath day? Rules are rules. He deserved that.

Is it the God who said you must totally destroy "the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"? Do not intermarry with them, and do not follow their gods.

Is it the God who said that when you go to attack a city, first you should make them an offer to surrender and be your slaves? Unless it's a city in the promised land, in which case you don't even offer that, you just go in and kill all of them, all of them, men, women, and children.

Is it the God of Joshua, who attacked the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Debir, and many other cities, and left no survivors?

Is it the God of Joshua, who warned the people not to intermarry with other nations?

Will it be the God who struck Uzzah dead when he touched the ark of the covenant to stop it from falling? The rules are that nobody can touch it. Uzzah broke the rules, so he deserves whatever happens to him.

Is it the God of Nehemiah, who led them people in making a promise not to marry people from other nations?

Will it be the God of Ezra, who wept when he found out that the Israelites had intermarried with foreign women, and organized a mass divorce and abandonment of these foreign wives and children?

Will it be Jesus, who ignored the Canaanite women begging him to heal her daughter, until she convinced him that he was in the wrong?

Is it Jesus, who taught that if someone wrongs you, you should try to reconcile with them, but if they refuse to listen, "treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector"?

Is it Jesus, who said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me," excluding people based on the technicality of whether or not they know the name of Jesus?

Will it be the God of the apostle Paul, who wrote, "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God."

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A God who is love, who cares about everyone, especially people who are in need, and expects us to do the same? 

Or an authoritarian God who judges, excludes, and punishes, and if you think this God's punishments are unfair, shut up, no you don't. You better stay on his good side, or else you'll be next.

Both of these gods can be found in the bible. Every Christian must choose which of them is worthy of your worship.

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Related

ICE and Hell 

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now 

The Second-Worst Bible Story 

Love Wins (an Ezra fanfic) 

That's What Radicalized Me (a post about immigration)

When God Says It's Your Choice

Image text: "Choice." Image source.

Long ago, I was at some Christian event, and a speaker was giving a talk about listening to God, and how to know what God wants you to do. One of the examples he gave went something like this: "I was thinking about asking my girlfriend to marry me, so I prayed about it, I prayed about it so much, asking God if I should do it, and finally I felt like God was saying 'it's your choice.'" (And then he did end up marrying her.)

This was really surprising to me at the time because the idea of God giving you a choice- rather than God "having a plan" regarding a big important decision in your life- was totally new to me. I think this speaker's talk also included other examples where he was trying to make a decision, and he determined that God wanted him to make some specific choice- but this is the example that I remember, because it was the exception to the rule. We had a very strong belief that "God has a plan for your life" and you have to pray about every important decision, to make sure you're following God's plan and not accidentally ruining your life (this is very stressful). The idea that sometimes there can be multiple good choices, and God is fine with you choosing any of them- well, that was new and surprising.

Okay, so here's a question: Let's imagine 2 different ideologies. In the first one, God has a plan for your life, and you have to do what God wants, but perhaps occasionally God is okay with you choosing for yourself based on your own preferences. In the second, you always make your own choices, without input from God. When God lets you make your own choice in the first ideology, is that the same situation as a choice you make in the second ideology? 

No, I don't think it's the same at all.

In this story where this guy prayed about marrying his girlfriend, and God said "it's your choice," what kind of circumstance would lead to God saying that? God must be looking at the available options, and reasoning that if this dude is allowed to choose for himself, he's not going to choose anything that's going to end up being catastrophic. I imagine it like, he really wants to marry her, but he's hesitating because he's not sure if God is okay with it, or if there might be something bad about the relationship that he's unaware of. God knows it will work out fine, really the only determining factor is this guy's own interest in marrying her, and so it's okay for God to let him make his own choice.

So God knows that no matter which way it goes, it will be okay. God knows there's not some unexpected terrible thing that's going to happen as a result of them getting married. When God lets you make your own choice in a situation like that, it's basically like God is giving you information- now you know that there's not going to be some horrible outcome that no one could have predicted.

(Or, alternatively, it means that if something does go wrong afterward, it's still okay because God believes this is an okay outcome for you.)

Another example might be, if you're thinking about moving to another country to become a missionary, and it's going to be difficult and maybe even dangerous- and you ask God if you should do it, and They say it's your choice. In this case, God lets you have a choice because you know the risks, and They are letting you decide for yourself if you're willing to take on those risks.

So I would say, in this "God has a plan for your life" ideology, in the cases where God lets you make your own choice, it's because all the options are basically fine and nothing terrible will happen, or it's because you clearly understand the risks and the benefits and it's a matter of your own feelings and opinions about taking an action that has those risks and benefits.

This is completely different from just living life without ever running any of your choices by God. In this kind of lifestyle, there are plenty of decisions you have to make where you don't know the outcome, you don't really have enough information to say one option is better than another, but you just have to do your best. What job to take, where to live, decisions about dating and marriage, having kids, buying a house, whether or not to go see a doctor when you might have a medical issue or it might just be nothing, or even situations where you're just living your normal life and then something bad comes out of nowhere (like you got in a car accident that could have been prevented if God had told you not to drive there that day), etc. We don't have anyone directing us toward the options that have everything working out okay. We just have to do our best, with the limited information we have. 

It's a totally different thing than believing that God has a plan but lets you make the decision if it's one of the more straightforward ones.

Honestly I'm glad I'm no longer living in the "God has a plan for your life" way, because it was so stressful, making decisions based on analyzing my feelings to try to figure out if any of them were planted there by God in order to tell me what the right choice was. In that ideology, you can't just look at the situation, look at the real-world facts- because the real-world facts will tell you that there is some probability it will go a certain way, and some probability it will go a different way, probability this probability that- but if you could get God's take on it, then you could have certainty. The path to certainty is overanalyzing all of your feelings and asking if they seem like the sort of feelings that God would give you if They wanted you to choose a certain option- and of course there's no actual standard to check that against. 

So much stress, trying to figure out what God was telling me, rather than just looking at the facts and doing my best and taking the responsibility myself.

When God says "it's your choice"... what would that mean, under the "God has a plan for your life" paradigm? It must mean God knows that whatever choice you make, it's okay- none of the available options would be horribly worse than the others. Or, it must mean that God knows you already have an accurate understanding of the good and bad aspects of each of the options. There are guardrails- God's not going to say "it's your choice" if one of the options would lead to something really bad, in a way that's impossible for you to have predicted. This is very different from a belief system where we're on our own and we don't try to suss out "God's will for your life" when making big decisions.

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Related

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth 

God, Soul Mates, and International Marriage

The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God"

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

"Mother God" (as a queer Christian, I am so into this book)

Book cover for "Mother God"

I got this book for my kids, Mother God, by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky. Here's my review of it.

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Summary

This book tells us that God is our mother, and every page gives examples of the actions She performs as a mother. For example:

Throughout day and night, God wakes
To nurse the infant at Her side.
She snuggles Her baby gently
Until he closes his sleepy eyes.

The inside cover of the book says it contains "a dozen images of God inspired by feminine descriptions from Scripture."

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I have ex-evangelical thoughts about this interpretation of the bible

Some of this imagery I recognized- I know the bible passages that they came from. For example, the page about God the mother hen, gathering Her chicks under Her wings, comes from the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:37, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing."

I wish the book included a list of bible references, because I feel some of these might be a bit of a stretch, and I want to check them. There is one page in this book that says God is a leopard taking care of Her cubs, and I'm trying to figure out where in the bible that is supposedly coming from. I did a search, and the word "leopard" only appears in the bible 8 times. The one that I think "Mother God" must be alluding to is Hosea 13:7-8, which says:

So I will be like a lion to them, 
like a leopard I will lurk by the path.
Like a bear robbed of her cubs, 
I will attack them and rip them open; 
like a lion I will devour them— 
a wild animal will tear them apart.

Not really the cheeriest of bible verses. 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the imagery of God as a mother leopard. I love that this book has that. I think it's fine to describe God that way, even though the bible doesn't quite do that, not exactly.

It's just that... if you're having an argument with a conservative Christian who believes we're only allowed to talk about God with he/him pronouns, and you want to pull out this book and say "see? The bible itself talks about God with feminine language, so we are so allowed to call God 'her'," well, you're kind of over-selling it. Yes, there are places in the bible where God is described with feminine language. It never goes so far as to use a 'her' pronoun, though. The bible's feminine descriptions of God are comparisons and metaphors, while the masculine ones are literally calling God "he", "Father", "Son", etc. Conservative Christians in arguments about God's pronouns are quick to point this out. They're not really wrong... it's just that... I want to believe in a better God than that, a God who is every gender.

Probably the closest the bible gets to non-metaphorically calling God a woman is 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, which refers to Jesus Christ as "the wisdom of God" - and this was originally written in Greek, and the Greek word for "wisdom" is "Sophia," which is a feminine name. Christ is the woman, Sophia Wisdom. (Okay, yeah, this is still pretty metaphorical.)

So yes, I love this book, I love every single thing about it, I love when people call God "Her," I love the bible passages which use feminine language or metaphors to describe God. But not every page in "Mother God" is rooted in such a straightforward reading of Scripture that you can use it to win arguments with Christians of the "God is a he/him" persuasion. I mean, personally I'm no longer interested in participating in such arguments, so this is fine for me. But I'm just a bit concerned that this book is misrepresenting itself... if you're coming at it from an evangelical biblical-inerrancy perspective, you expect this book to be "here are bible verses where God is described as/ compared to a woman." But actually, it's more like, "here are bible verses which allow for an interpretation where God is a woman." And I 100% support doing such interpretations. I am so on board with this. But you'll definitely get people responding with "no, that's not what that verse means." (I mean, I agree that in some cases it's not what the verse is supposed to mean. I'm just not so hung up on only being allowed to think about the bible as what it was originally "supposed to mean." It's living and active.)

Another example from "Mother God":

Granny, Baba, Halmeoni,
God is a woman with gray hair.
She passes down stories of old,
Rocking softly in a chair.

This is great, love this, but also, I have no idea what bible passage this is supposedly coming from. I don't even know what search terms to use- "bible verse where God is a grandma telling stories"?????

So yeah, some of these are a bit of a stretch. I'm sure there is some bible verse, perhaps where God is metaphorically compared to someone who tells stories from one's ancestors, and the author of "Mother God" envisions this person as an old, wise grandmother. Yeah, probably it's something along those lines. 

Like I said, I think this is great. *My* take on biblical interpretation is that you can use the bible as inspiration for whatever story about God is meaningful for you. Make sure when you do that, though, you don't claim "this is true" or "this is what the bible says." Your interpretation makes sense only to the extent that you can present coherent reasons why it makes sense- you can't claim it's just automatically right because it comes from the bible. This approach is very different from "biblical inerrancy" ideology, where we believed we were very seriously adhering to what God and/or the original writer really meant to say, and so our conclusions just simply were true. (We *believed* that, but in reality, "biblical inerrancy" ideology isn't as unbiased and faithful to the bible as it claims to be...)

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When we call God a woman, does it always have to be in the context of pushing back against patriarchal religion?

Obviously, the reason I love this book has a lot to do with my being a queer Christian with a lifetime of experience hearing people call God "he" but never "she." It just feels so refreshing, to hear people saying that God is a woman.

Also, in the previous section of this blog post, I talked about arguing with conservative Christians who say you're not allowed to call God "she", and the extent to which this book can be used to bolster our side in such arguments. 

Ugh, but does it always have to be that way? When we call God "she", does it always have to be about "wow this is great, because everyone always calls God 'he'" and "yes, we *are* allowed to talk about God in this way"? I wish it could just be... that it could just be what it is, rather than needing to be about Taking A Stand Against Patriarchy. 

"Mother God" actually starts out by saying, 

You know God the Father,
But God is your Mother too.
You are made in Her image--
She is making all things new.

So even this book isn't able to just be about "we are calling God a woman"; it has to be about "we are calling God a woman because everyone always calls God a man." It's unavoidable.

My beliefs about God are in many ways a reaction to the evangelical ideology I was raised in. I always wonder, what does that mean for how I teach my kids? I call God "They" when I talk to my son about what I believe, and the feel of it is like... I'm queer and I chose this. But for him it's never going to feel like that, if he hears someone calling God "They." Soon he'll be at that age where he thinks everything I do is extremely uncool, and that will be the lens he uses to think about the concept of calling God "They."

This isn't just about religion- so many societal trends are like, one generation is reacting to something they didn't like about the way they were raised, but the younger generation didn't have whatever negative experience they are reacting to. The older generation creates a new approach intended to be a healthy correction of the errors of the past, but the younger generation doesn't necessary experience this new approach in that way. Without that context, it will be understood by the younger generation as something else entirely.

So yeah, I bought this book for my kids, but I have no idea what it would be like to grow up with the idea that calling God "she" is just a normal, unremarkable thing. This book means something very different to me than it does to my kids. I don't really know how to understand that. I think it must be a *good* thing to expose them to this idea, and also *not* expose them to the idea that 'we're only allowed to call God he/him or else it's HERESY.' But I can never really *get* how my kids are thinking about this, because for me it always carries that context of rebelling against conservative, patriarchal religion.

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The actions God takes in this book

A lot of the imagery in "Mother God" is about real actions that real people do, and the book says that God is doing these actions. I'm not sure what to make of that. For example:

God is a skillful seamstress 
Who stitches and sews thread together.
She makes clothes for rain, snow, and sun,
Caring for you in all kinds of weather.

What does this mean? 

1. Does it mean that when we see actual real women making clothes, God is there? 
2. Does it mean that the clothes we wear come from God, in the indirect sense that God created the world and helped people learn the skills to make clothes? 
3. Does it mean that some of the spiritual things that God does are metaphorically similar to sewing clothes- for example, creating the earth, or perhaps this is a reference to Psalm 139:13, "you knit me together in my mother's womb," where fetal development is metaphorically compared to God knitting?
4. Does it mean that when we imagine God performing these feminine-coded actions, like making clothes, that opens up our understanding of God, to help us view God in powerful new ways? Maybe you always imagined God as looking like and acting like your male pastor- but what if you imagine God as a woman making clothes? Don't we believe that a male pastor bears the image of God to the exact same extent that a female seamstress does? Don't we? It brings our biases to the surface and challenges them.

I like interpretations 1 and 4. But I do feel like it's strange, to talk about God doing such concrete actions, and I'm really unclear on what this is intended to mean.

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Wil Gafney endorses this book

I'm such a huge fan of Wil Gafney. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about her book "Womanist Midrash." One of the endorsements on the back cover of "Mother God" was written by her. Obviously I'm going to love anything that Wil Gafney endorses.

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Conclusion

I am so into this book. I love it. I love it because I'm a queer Christian- and so I wonder about how my kids will take it, and what it would be like to grow up with the idea that it's just fine and normal to call God "she."

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Related

"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review)

Womanist Midrash 

Reviews of Christian Children's Books 

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Also please enjoy this song:

Groove Coverage - God is a Girl (Official Video) 

Trusting God, Predicting God, Controlling God

Aslan the lion and Lucy. Image source.

Recently I published Miracles and Exceptions, and here's another thing I want to say about that. 

So, in my experience in evangelical land, we very much believed that we should trust God. We are supposed to have a close "personal relationship with God", setting aside time to read the bible every day, praying about everything, etc. We are supposed to know God, and trust God.

But when you know someone really well, and you trust them, doesn't that also mean that in some cases, you can predict what they're going to do? For example, if I offer my son a choice between several things, and one of them is a picture of a big ugly bug, eww, I know he's going to pick that one. For another example, my husband and I have been together a really long time, and he does this thing where he predicts what I'm going to say. Like, if he tells me something gross that I don't want to hear about, he expects that I will say "that's nice" sarcastically. He often does my side of the conversation- like, he'll tell me something about our children's bathroom habits, and then he'll immediately say "that's nice" in a fake high voice, because he predicts that that's what I will say. And then I tell him, I guess you don't even need me, you are doing both sides of this conversation. In later iterations of this, he will also imitate that part. It's really meta.

There's sort of an element of ... playing around, sort of messing with each other and teasing each other out of love because you know each other so well. You can put them into a situation when you know they are going to react in a certain way- this is almost like controlling their behavior, isn't it?

When we're talking about people, this is really not a big deal, this is just joking around. Or, in the case of my son and his interest in weird bugs, it allows me to choose things for him (toys, books, interesting pictures I saw on the internet) and I know he will like them. This is all very good and normal in human relationships, but what would it mean in a relationship with God? 

Or, the examples I've given so far are just kind of silly joking-around things, but this kind of trust that allows you to predict someone's behavior also applies to more serious things- like knowing your partner well enough to know what they would do in an emergency, even though you haven't explicitly talked to them about it. It may even be the case that you're so certain about what you think they will do, that it then allows you to make a decision about what you should do in response, in order to help them. (For example, "if he got lost, he would have come back to this location to find me, so I need to stay here.") You predict their behavior, and rely on your prediction being correct- you can do that because you know and trust each other so well.

I'm realizing I never thought it was possible to do this kind of "predicting their behavior" with God. Why not? Well, several reasons:

It feels kind of arrogant, kind of wrong, to believe you can say what God is going to do. If it's the sort of thing where you have a role in setting up the situation, then you're *making* God do something, making Them respond in a certain way because you know Their character and Their behavior well enough. And what if your motives are that you want to prove something to yourself, or to other people- God is not willing to do parlor tricks for you to make some kind of point. (Whereas if my husband wants to "use" me like that, that's fine, we're just playing.) If your motivations contain even a trace of this kind of arrogance or desire to use God to make yourself believe something or prove a point to other people, to show off, well, God will just refuse. Or at least that's what I believed when I was evangelical. Evangelicals are all about overanalyzing our feelings and motivations and finding some small aspect which is "sinful" and therefore explains God's total refusal to answer your prayers and/or give you any evidence of his existence.

In a human relationship, you *could* view this as controlling or manipulating each other, but, come on, it's not really. You both know you're just playing. But with God, everything gets turned up to infinity, everything gets magnified, and suddenly we're calling it "arrogant" and "sinful" to expect God to play along.

But what does it even mean to "trust God", then, if we can never make concrete predictions about God's behavior? How on earth can this be a "personal relationship" if you can never actually make concrete predictions about what God will do?

One thought I had was, maybe it's like the feeling a baby has about their parents. The baby doesn't understand what's happening, they don't know what you're gong to do specifically, but they trust your character, they trust that you will make everything okay. Except, I don't think babies do trust their parents in that way. You want the baby to sleep in their own bed, and the baby cries like you've abandoned them forever. The baby isn't thinking "I don't understand what's happening, but I'm sure Mommy will make everything okay." They're thinking "I only feel safe when Mommy is holding me, this situation is intolerable, I need to cry desperately to get someone to fix it." I guess. I don't really know what they are thinking. They're very attached to their parents, but I don't necessarily think we can describe that as "trust." So I don't think this analogy is useful, for thinking about people's relationship with God.

Or, here's another type of relationship: Maybe you have an incredible amount of respect for someone you view as a leader, and you devote a lot of your time/energy/resources into following their mission- you're so dedicated that you could even say that you love them. This is how I feel about Jesus. But it's not a "personal relationship" and it's not really supposed to be a personal relationship. Yes, this kind of relation exists and can be a good thing, but it's not a "personal relationship."

Okay, let me walk us through some examples where Christians expect God to do some certain thing:

Suppose someone has some kind of problem, and they don't know how they will solve it, but they say "God will make it all work out." Like maybe you were planning to travel for a few days without your kids, and you had a babysitter lined up to watch the kids during that time, but then the babysitter had to cancel, and now you're all stressed trying to figure out what to do. In this situation, it's common to hear the advice "don't worry, just pray about it, trust God, God will work something out." So we are predicting God's behavior- that God is going to cause a solution to materialize.

And sure, usually you do come up with some way to solve the problem. I don't think this is because of God; I think it's just because generally people are able to come up with ways to solve their problems.

But my point is, Christians would view it as a positive thing to "trust God" in this case- to predict that God will make sure you find a solution to your problem. This expectation wouldn't be seen as sinful, or arrogantly trying to manipulate God, or anything like that. Well, but there's an exception: If you were so sure "God is going to work something out" that you believed you didn't have to do any work at all. Just sit there and do nothing and expect God to come solve your problems- no, that is the wrong attitude to have, that's sinful, and so God's not going to help you. *You* are supposed to do what you can to try to solve it, and God works with you on that.

Here's another example: Back when I had a "personal relationship with God," I would always feel really ... like ... emotionally intense when we sang worship songs at church. I felt like God was in my heart, like I could feel God, and I was really into that feeling. But then I went through a period of time when I didn't feel that. Participating in worship songs and not really getting any amazing feelings out of it. And I wanted to know, what's going wrong here? I expected God to give me those feelings, I relied on him for that, I assumed that he would, and then when it didn't happen, I felt like it was clearly a problem and I wanted to know how to fix it. Was the problem on my end or God's end? And I don't think that desire- to feel emotionally intense during worship songs- would be seen as sinful, or seen as arrogantly expecting God to perform tricks for me. I think it was very common for Christians to want and expect that.

But I can also see how one can overanalyze it and find ways to interpret it as something sinful. Like oh, it's not good enough that the bible says God is always with us, I need to also "feel" him, wow that's really arrogant. How dare I expect God to do this for me, as if he owes me something. Do I actually love God, or do I just love this feeling?

I can see how one could convince oneself that the problem is one's attitude, expecting God to do something, and God just will not tolerate that, and that's why God's not giving you those feelings you want.

As evangelicals say, "every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God"- so you find these very minor aspects of your thoughts and feelings, and blow them way out of proportion.

But what would it even mean, to know God, to trust God, if it doesn't mean we can expect certain behaviors out of Them? If we can't rely on Them to do specific things?

And I guess the answer is that a relationship with God is a completely different thing than a relationship between people. Okay, so, then I don't want it.

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Christians do sometimes get an idea in their head about a really specific thing they think God is going to do- like "I know that God will not let [some bad thing] happen, so I am going to structure my behavior around the assumption that [some other thing] is going to happen." And then sometimes the bad thing happens anyway. I've heard examples of this... really tragic things, like someone dying, when you've convinced yourself that it's not consistent with God's character to let them die, and so surely God won't let it happen. It's devastating not just because of the thing itself, but also because your God failed you.

And then the Christian either has a crisis of faith, or they convince themselves it was wrong for them to pin their hopes on a specific thing- they should have just "trusted God" in a vibes-based way, which doesn't really mean anything in concrete terms but I guess it's supposed to make them feel better.

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Well, let's back up... when I was evangelical and I talked about "trusting God," what did I mean by that? I meant that no matter what happens, God is going to make it okay. It's all according to God's plan. Literally any bad thing could happen, and I could reassure myself that somehow it was actually okay because it's "God's plan." So "trusting God" didn't mean feeling confident that some specific outcome would happen; it meant that there exists some "big picture" perspective where everything works out okay, and if that doesn't seem to be the case from *my* perspective, then that's because I'm focusing on the wrong things, and if I could just learn to view things from God's perspective, then I would see that actually everything is fine.

That all sounds very nice and logical when it's abstract... but then I had health problems, and felt sick all the time, and I had to leave grad school and go back to my parents' house and lay on the couch all the time. (This was around 2012 ish.) I never thought that could happen to me. I had plans for my life and everything. What did it even mean, to "trust God," if this "I can't do any work and I just have to lay on the couch all the time" is within the range of things that God can allow to happen?

The abstract idea that "literally anything could happen, and we can reassure ourselves that it's okay because God is in control"... and then something happened to me which falls under the category of "literally anything" and I found out that I *wasn't* okay with "literally anything" happening to me. I would like a better reassurance than that. If I can't even trust God to not let health problems derail my life for no reason, then the whole concept of "trusting God" is meaningless.

(That derailed my life for about a year or so but don't worry, I got better.)

This belief that "we can trust God, abstractly, but we can't trust Them to do any specific thing"... that doesn't seem to fit with the idea of having a "personal relationship with God", of "knowing" God. Are there any other situations where you know and love someone very deeply but you can never make any reliable predictions about what they will do?

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The thread that's running through this and tying this together is God's apparent policy against ever giving anyone ironclad evidence of Their existence.

Wait, God has a policy of never giving ironclad evidence of Their existence? Since when? Good question! In the bible, God doesn't seem to have any such policy. God/Jesus/prophets perform miracles openly, with no one ever saying "hey shouldn't we be, like, less obvious about these miracles? We don't want to get rid of the role of faith."

(Perhaps one example is when Thomas has not yet seen Jesus after the Resurrection, and so refuses to believe that Jesus really did come back from the dead, and then Jesus *does* appear and allow Thomas to see him, and then Thomas believes. Jesus then says, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." Is Jesus saying that belief due to an obvious miracle is less than ideal, and there's something *better* about having faith when you can't be totally certain? I don't really agree with that though.)

But modern Christians, as they argue with atheists, have made up this concept where faith is very important, and God doesn't want to make it so obvious They exist, because then there wouldn't be any room left for faith. God gives us enough evidence that you can kinda read between the lines if you're really motivated to do so, and figure out God exists. But if you don't want to believe in God, well God will let you go ahead and do that.

I don't buy this. It feels like something that we just made up because the atheists have raised a very good point about how God could have made it a lot more obvious that They exist.

So anyway, now we have this situation where supposedly we "trust" God, supposedly we "have a personal relationship" with God, but we can't ever count on God doing any specific thing. Because if you expect God to do any specific thing, well, no, you shouldn't want that, you should have faith that God exists anyway- you aren't supposed to, like, expect satisfactory evidence. That's sinful, and God won't play along.

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Or maybe it's like, there has to be a sense in which God is unpredictable, uncontrollable- dangerous, even- or else They wouldn't be God. As evangelicals say, "Aslan is not a tame lion."

They're so much bigger and more powerful than we can understand. They're unknowable. We can never understand Them well enough to make any concrete predictions of things that They will do. If we could, that would diminish Them; that would shrink Them down to fit within the limits of what we can reason about and predict. They wouldn't be God.

Yeah, I feel like, that makes sense. I believe that. And therefore I don't want to have a "personal relationship" with Them. I don't feel safe, and I can't trust Them.

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I don't have a personal relationship with God now- I don't want to- and it's because of questions like this.

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Related:

The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God" 

God and the Overton Window

My Parasocial Relationship With God

Photo of a large electric fan, with the text "I'm a big fan." Image source.

I recently wrote a post called The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God". It was about why the evangelical Christian concept of a "personal relationship with God" is not healthy for me and I'm not going to have that kind of relationship again. 

So instead, I have a parasocial relationship with God.

What is a "parasocial relationship"? It's a sort of one-sided thing where a fan follows a celebrity, and the fan knows all sorts of things about the celebrity's life, but the celebrity doesn't know the fan, and they don't have an actual relationship of any kind. They don't actually know each other.

And it doesn't even have to be a real celebrity- people have parasocial relationships with content creators on the internet all the time. Some youtuber or blogger posts a lot of things about their life, and people follow their content, and people feel like they know them, even getting emotionally invested into the details of their life.

Typically when people talk about parasocial relationships, they are seen as a negative thing. Like, you feel like you know this person because you watched all their youtube videos, but hold up, let's have a reality check: They do not know you. You are not friends. And it can be an extremely weird thing for the celebrity/ influencer/ internet person to have random strangers making references to the minor details of the celebrity/ influencer/ internet person's personal life. You posted it online, so all these people know about it, but you have no idea who they are.

I mean, I don't think a parasocial relationship is necessarily a negative thing. (And maybe I don't have the terminology right here- maybe "parasocial relationship" is specifically referring to the unhealthy version of this, where you incorrectly believe that you're friends with this celebrity, and there should be a different term for just being a normal fan? Not sure on that.) The key thing is, though, you have to keep it in perspective: You are not friends. And they are a person with a regular person life, not whatever larger-than-life image about them you have in your mind.

Anyway, so, that's how I think of God. (Well, except the part about the "regular person life" I guess.) I don't talk to Them, but I'm a big fan of Their work. Just spending my time following Their work, but I don't want any actual personal connection.

It's just like how I'm a fan of Taylor Swift but I don't think I really want to meet her. Like, what would I even say? It would be a cool experience to tell other people about, but ... not really meaningful beyond that.

And here's another thing: maybe God has a parasocial relationship with me. God knows all about my life. God loves all of us, individually.

Wait, can 2 people both have a parasocial relationship with each other? What does that even mean? Yeah, sure- what if they are both celebrities, and they both know who the other person is and maybe have some kind of opinion about them, but they've never interacted directly. Or what if someone follows my blog, and I also follow their blog, but we've never actually talked to each other? Like that.

Actually, I think there are Christian denominations that *do* believe people have this kind of parasocial relationship with God. (Not that they would use those words though.) They don't have the evangelical habit of praying and then listening to see if God speaks to them. They don't believe God gives them individualized commands that they're supposed to follow. 

I've been in churches where I judged them for the way that they prayed, like they were just sending the prayers off somewhere far away and weren't expecting a response. And I judged them for the way that they relied on their church's teaching about the bible to tell them what to do, rather than each individual asking God for the details on "God's plan for your life" and expecting God to tell you what specific choices you're supposed to make. And the way their church felt like just a tame ritual that you do, rather than the Creator of the universe coming down and grabbing you by the heart and overwhelming you, and it's wild and thrilling and emotional, and you feel that the only response that makes sense is to devote every part of your life to this God.

I'm not judging them any more. Maybe what they were doing was more healthy than telling everyone "you need to have a personal relationship with God." But also, I don't really know much about that variety of Christianity; it's so different from evangelicalism. I'm actually really curious about this but I shouldn't say too much here because I probably have a lot of misconceptions about it.

(I mean, obviously I know they're not standing in church saying "we have a parasocial relationship with God.")

It might seem weird and paradoxical, that I say I love God and I think about Them all the time and They are very important in my life, but also I don't want to talk to Them or have any kind of "personal relationship." But the way I think of it is, it's a parasocial relationship. I'm a fan.

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Related:

The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God"

I Deserve God's Love 

"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review) 

God and the Overton Window