Faith, Fruit, and "Do you actually believe your religion?"

Fruit tree. Image source.

In my post The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology, I had a little parenthetical aside that said:

And, to clarify, I'm not saying being religious is better than being non-religious. There's a wide range of different ways that people map their religious beliefs [or lack thereof] onto questions of morality/purpose/how we should live our lives, and I would not say that religious people's mappings are better than non-religious people's.

In other words, we should look at the way that a religious [or atheistic] belief affects people's views on "morality/purpose/how we should live our lives", and that's how we say if the belief is good or bad. We have some sort of "common sense" feel for what good morality is, and that is the yardstick we use to measure and judge religious beliefs.

Here's the thing, though: Yes, that's how I see it now. But when I was evangelical, I would have disagreed with this. I would have said, we can't judge our religious beliefs based on the effects we observe in the real world; the whole point of religion is that we're claiming there is something bigger than the physical world. In view of this bigger spiritual "reality", our behaviors and morality are good and right, though they might appear to be harmful and wrong if you're only looking at the physical world we can see. And if you judge the religious beliefs only by their observable effects in the physical world, you're already assuming an atheistic worldview, where none of the religion's claims are true.

One could argue, if progressive Christians want to live according to the reality of the physical world, and never do anything that seems like a bad idea (but is actually a good idea if the religion's claims about the spiritual world are true), why not just go all the way and be atheists? If you never side with your religion, when assessing a concrete truth claim that people outside your religion would disagree with, which has practical effects on the choices you make in the real world, do you even believe your religion?

If heaven is so great, why did God even make this world?

Typical pop-culture depiction of heaven, with sunlight streaming through clouds. Image source.

[content note: stats about child death, discussion of hypothetical suicide and murder]

Let's suppose we believe that the world we live in now is flawed, and heaven is a perfect world where there is no suffering and all the wrongs are made right. (And yes I do believe this.)

Here is my big question: Why do we even have this world, then? Why didn't God just put us in heaven to start with? 

The idea of heaven seems like the kind of thing that people would come up with when they're having problems in this world. Longing for another world, which doesn't have any problems at all. 

But how about taking a step back and asking, if there really is a God who created a heaven, would this world we live in even exist? If we just start with the idea that there really is a God who wants people to live fulfilling lives- what kind of world would that God create? Would They create a world where the strong can take advantage of the weak, where some people are just born with fewer resources and fewer opportunities and that's just the way it is, and then make a second world which is perfect, which people go to after they die? Why even bother with the flawed world?

Christians have a few different ways of answering this, and I find them all weak:

1. Evangelicals (and many other groups of Christians) believe that only people who are "saved" go to heaven. Everyone deserves to go to hell because we're all sinners, but people who believe the correct things about Jesus are "saved" and can escape their deserved fate and go to heaven. So, people need to live on this earth because this is where they will choose if they're going to believe in Jesus or not, which is what determines if they go to heaven or hell. God can't just "skip" this life and put us all in heaven, because God only wants people who would freely choose that.

This argument doesn't mean anything to me because I don't believe in that kind of hell. Yeah, I used to be evangelical, and constantly worried about my non-Christian friends who were in danger of going to hell- I'm so glad I don't believe that any more. I sometimes say "I don't believe in hell" but I just mean it as a shorthand for "I don't believe that everyone deserves to go to hell, and I don't believe that one's religious beliefs are the determining factor in whether one goes to heaven or hell"- because I do believe there will be a judgment, and "the wages you failed to pay your workers are crying out against you." And "whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me."

(This argument also gets more complicated when someone asks "what about people who never heard about Jesus, and never had a chance to believe in him- it's not fair for God to automatically send them to hell" and then someone answers "God will judge them based on whether they *would have* believed in Jesus, if they had had the opportunity." So... so suddenly God is letting people into heaven based on what they would have done in a hypothetical alternate universe? Okay, then why not just judge all of us that way? No need to actually live out our whole lives on earth- God can just send us straight to heaven or hell based on what we "would have" chosen if we had in fact lived on earth. ... Honestly I've always felt this "God will judge based on what they knew" idea is just shoddily tacked on because we feel bad about people going to hell if they happened to live in a time or place where they never heard the name Jesus. "God will judge them based on what they knew" is not at all consistent with the rest of conservative Christians' beliefs about heaven/ hell/ God/ salvation/ sin/ evangelism/ missions/ etc.)

So the evangelical idea that the reason we have to live in this world is to see who chooses Jesus and who defaults to going to hell just doesn't mean anything to me.

2. In this life, because we have the choice to sin, because the world is not perfect, that's what gives us the opportunity for personal growth. To learn how to become better people, we need to be free to choose good or evil. And suffering helps us become stronger.

I don't think this argument is any good, and here's why: child mortality. Nowadays we have very good medical care and vaccines, so this is not something that most people in developed countries have experience with now, but for the vast majority of human history, it was normal for little children to die. For babies to die. For very rough ballpark numbers, I found this page from the CDC which compares current infant mortality rates to the rates from the year 1900. In the year 1900, ballpark numbers are around 10%-30% of infants dying before reaching age 1. (And if you're considering older children and not just infants, Our World in Data estimates something like 50% of children died before age 15 in the time period before 1700-ish.)

So how does it make any sense to say that it's important for us to live in this world first, before going to heaven, so that we can learn morality and make choices that shape who we are, when a significant percentage of people didn't live long enough for that to happen? And if we say heaven rights all the wrongs of this world, including infant mortality... then that means it's okay that those babies didn't live long enough to grow into people who could make good or bad decisions... if that's okay for them- and they're a significant fraction of the human population, like 10-30%- why isn't it okay for everyone? Why is it so necessary for the rest of us to live in this world, then?

If heaven is so great, why doesn't God just put us all there to start with? People have various answers to that, but the fact is, for a significant fraction of the human population, God basically *did* just "put them there to start with", ie, they died as babies. So if you say "oh but we have to live our lives on earth, to learn morality" well why didn't those babies then have to live their lives on earth, to learn morality? This is not some kind of rare statistical outlier- this is something like 30% of all people. Not *now*, thank goodness, because we have good medicine and vaccines, but if you look at all of human history.

3. There are good things we can do in this world that we can't do in heaven, like fight against injustice. And help people.

Uh... yeah it's good to fight against injustice, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to...? 

And hey maybe we can still help people when we're in heaven. Help each other with mundane low-stakes problems. That sounds nice.

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There's a weird paradox about heaven: we claim it's so good, and if you feel sad about someone dying, you can encourage yourself by saying "they're in a better place"- that in some sense it's good that they're no longer in this world, but they are in heaven instead.

But this needs to be just a nice thing to say to help people feel better, not something we actually literally believe. If we really did believe it's better to be in heaven than on earth, we should kill ourselves. "Ah," someone will answer, "God closed that loophole by automatically sending you to hell if you commit suicide." Okay, well then don't kill yourself- kill other people. You're helping them get to heaven, right? Maybe you feel like, if God sends you to hell to punish you for murder, that's an acceptable cost, you're okay with going to hell yourself because you know you've done so much good for other people.

This logic is especially monstrous when people believe in some kind of "age of accountability"- ie, children are innocent, and if they die they will automatically go to heaven, but adults will be judged for their sins and possibly sent to hell. So, it follows that it's better for children to die rather than grow up and be at risk of going to hell. (And there really have been people who murdered children because of this belief.)

And there have been politicians/leaders who didn't care about the large-scale effects of what they were doing, didn't care whether their policies would lead to more children dying or not, because eh it's all okay, it's God's plan.

If we truly believe we're going to heaven... well, then why do we see it as a good thing that infant mortality is no longer common? This weird paradox where we try to believe "they're in a better place"- but that has to be nothing more than a way to try to make yourself feel better about something you can't change. Not a belief that would then inform actual choices you make, which could have real effects in terms of people living and dying. It can't be that. It's just horrible to even begin to reason through the conclusions that follow from that belief.

My approach for dealing with this problem is to believe in heaven, but not with much confidence. I hope it's real, but I don't know. Don't bank on it. Don't go around murdering people (and/or deprioritizing investment in public health) if you don't even know if heaven is real or not, my god.

It's better to have less faith, it seems.

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So back to the main question I want to ask: Why didn't God just put us all in heaven to begin with? Why do we even have this world? And any answer you give has to take into account that God *did* put a nonnegligible percentage of people "in heaven to begin with" (ie, infant mortality rates have been very high throughout history). Apparently it's fine that, whatever lessons we were supposed to learn by living full lives on earth, a significant proportion of people just totally missed out on. And your answer should also take into account that we view it as an extremely good thing that in modern times, infant/child mortality is very rare. 

Advances in medical technology have very much changed the distribution of ages at which people enter heaven. Changed the demographics of heaven. Is that a good thing? Did God intend for it to be that way?

I don't have a good answer for this. I hope heaven is real, I believe in it, but this is an aspect of it that doesn't make sense.

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Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

xkcd comic where a biologist says "The heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse." Image source.

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

Maybe I had more faith when I was complementarian, and that's a bad thing

A rock with the word "Faith" on it. Image source.

Faith. What is faith? Way back when, I understood faith in this way: God tells us to do something, and we can't understand it and it doesn't make any sense to us, but we trust that God must have a reason, and it must be right somehow, even though we have no idea how, and so we obey.

And also, I believed in complementarianism: the belief that God made men and women with different talents and roles that "complement" each other, which in practice means that women are restricted from certain leadership roles in the church, and a man must be the "spiritual leader" of his wife and children. This is something that doesn't make sense. Never really did make any sense to me, as a women. But supposedly the bible says it, so surely God has a good reason, and so we have to obey.

And then I started reading Christian feminist blogs, which pointed out all the ways that complementarianism does actual harm to real people in the real world. These blogs also looked more closely at the bible verses that are used to restrict women from leadership, and showed that, no, it doesn't make sense to interpret them that way, and that actually the bible supports equality.

The Christian feminist blogs made a good case! But here's what I was stuck on: what about faith?

You can make the case that complementarianism makes no sense and is actually harmful, and that the alternative, egalitarianism, does make sense. Okay, sure. But doesn't "faith" mean "God commanded us to do something that doesn't make sense- something that seems to us to be a really bad idea- and we cannot possibly understand the reasons why, but God does have good reasons on some level, and so we have to do it"? Sure, it's always been obvious to me that complementarianism doesn't make sense, but that's what we should expect, right? We should expect that God commands us to do things that make no sense, like banning qualified women from church leadership. Otherwise, what is the role of faith?

I remember discussing this with other bloggers on the internet back then- how mystified I was at the idea that we can and should use our own brains to look at the real-world effects of our religion's rules, and not follow the rules which were obviously bad. What even is faith, then? Aren't we expecting that God will give us rules that don't make sense to us, with our fallible human thinking, but make sense to God?

The answer I got from Christian feminists on the internet back then was, when we say faith means "God tells us to do things that don't make sense", it means things like, being kind to someone that you feel doesn't deserve it. They gave some examples like that- all of which felt really weak to me. These weren't actually examples of God telling us to do things that made no sense. They were examples of actions which you could understand the reasons behind them, but you personally didn't want to do them because of your own feelings. That didn't feel like "faith" as I had always understood it.

(And also, please note that they meant "be kind to someone that you feel doesn't deserve it" only in a common-sense way. If you take this idea too far, and say that abuse victims should stay with their abusers in the name of being kind of them, well, these same Christian feminists would take a stand and say this is wrong. As they should. So yeah, my point stands. They were not *actually* advocating doing things that *actually* don't make sense.)

I finally came to the conclusion that no, this idea that "faith means doing something that makes no sense" is just not a thing. I just straight-up do not believe in that any more. Every command that God supposedly gives you can be analyzed and fact-checked.

If the church continues to believe that there are some roles that women just can't have, if we continue to discriminate even when we see how women in the church are suffering because of it, even when we see that it enables abuse, that it makes it harder for abuse victims because someone is going to say "well you still need to submit to your husband", even when everyone outside the church is shocked and horrified by the sexism- if the church continues to have these sexist policies, doesn't that show their faith is very strong? They believe God said this, so they just plow ahead, not caring what the consequences are. Isn't that what faith is? And the stronger your faith, the more you will ignore the real-world effects that you can see with your own eyes. The real-world effects that you literally are experiencing, if you are a woman.

That kind of faith is indeed very strong. And that's a bad thing. We shouldn't have faith like that.

When I changed my beliefs from complementarian to feminist, it wasn't simply a matter of "well these bible verses make more sense under a framework where God wants equality between men and women." I had to completely change what I thought "faith" was. I now believe in a Christianity which doesn't leave any room for this "faith" of forging ahead with something that clearly seems like a bad idea. Like Jesus said, a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. Use your own mind and fact-check your God.

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Related:

Men have no idea what it's like for women in complementarian churches 

"Women shouldn't preach" MUST mean "women can't preach"

This 93% Stat About Dads is Totally Made-Up 

"Faith" means "doing something that is a bad idea"

How long will you wait for your experience to match up with the bible? 

Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales "Josh and the Big Wall" (1997)

What is the purpose of apologetics?

Clip art image of people having a debate. Image source.

I recently published my review of the book "The Case for a Creator". Here's the follow-up post, which asks, what is the purpose of apologetics?

First of all, let's be real here, apologetics isn't about defending Christianity in general- it's about the debate between Christianity and naturalistic atheism. I don't think I've seen any apologetics books specifically dedicated to answering claims from other religions, something along the lines of "okay suppose we assume God exists- here's why it's the Christian God instead of the Muslim God." The assumption is, if you're not a Christian, then you're an atheist.

That's a bit, uh, odd, but let's just accept this framing, and consider the effect of apologetics on people at various points along the "how confident are you about your belief in Christianity and/or atheism" spectrum:

Atheists who get into debates with Christians

The atheists who know what's what and are out there actually participating in these kinds of debates, they are quite unimpressed with apologetics. They say apologetics arguments are really weak and pretty much amount to nothing.

That's interesting, because the way apologetics sells itself, one of the main purposes is to be used in these kinds of debates. So here we see that there's a mismatch between what apologetics claims to be, and what it actually is. It sells itself as "here are some answers you can use to tell those strong outspoken atheists why they're wrong" but it very much does not work on that group.

Non-religious people who are "seeking"/ open to religion

There may be people who aren't religious, but are open to believing in a religion, and are curious and want to see what's out there. Yeah, I think apologetics can be convincing for this group. Author Lee Strobel himself seems to have been in this group (maybe he would disagree with my classifying him that way though?)- his story is that he was an atheist trying to disprove Christianity, but as he investigated and learned more, he actually became convinced that Christianity was true. 

So yes, I would say this makes sense, as a valid use of apologetics. There is evidence for Christianity- it's nowhere near as airtight as apologetics claims, but still... So it makes sense that telling people about this, if they are people who already think maybe they are interested in believing in some kind of religion, might convince them. I think this can be a good thing.

However, I think it kind of misses the point, when apologetics advocates talk about it this way. For the vast majority of people who convert to Christianity, it's not because of apologetics. Nobody is like "I became a Christian because Josephus's writings corroborate what the bible says." Nope, nobody.

Ex-Christians

Apologetics is very much NOT going to be of any use for this group. They already were Christian, they already went through the whole big struggle of doubting their faith, they likely already thought through the supposed "answers" and found them unconvincing, and eventually came to the decision to abandon the whole thing. 

And then the ex-Christian tells a Christian authority figure (parents, pastor, etc) that they no longer believe, and the Christian tries to convince them with apologetics arguments. Uh, don't do this. It's like, instead of actually listening to them, the Christian treats the ex-Christian's feelings and experiences as just annoying doubts to be argued away as fast as possible. The Christian acts like the ex-Christian needs their permission to no longer believe. The Christian buys an apologetics book and gives it to the ex-Christian. Like they're not allowed to say they're not Christian unless they read the whole book and put together a response and present it to the Christian authority figure.

Sometimes the ex-Christian then buys an atheist book and gives it to the Christian, so they can both understand each other. Then the ex-Christian reads their book and the Christian does not read theirs, but still acts like the ex-Christian has not given good enough reasons for leaving their faith.

Anyway, yeah, don't do this. This use of apologetics- as a way to try to make rules about what ex-Christians are allowed to believe or not believe, rather than listening to them- is unloving and it doesn't even "work." Don't do this.

I know that, in this kind of situation, the Christian is genuinely motivated by compassion and concern for their ex-Christian friend. They fear that if they can't convince the ex-Christian to become Christian again, the ex-Christian will go to hell. This mix of love for their friend, and fear of what their God is going to do to their friend... and how it plays out in ways that are really heartless in reality... I mean, I know that very well. I used to be evangelical.

Christians who are doubting

If you're a Christian who is having doubts about your faith, maybe you decide to read some apologetics.

In some cases, this can be reassuring. If your doubts are along the lines of "where did the bible even come from, is it just totally made up or is there some kind of evidence about its history?" Along the lines of, you fear that maybe somebody just made this stuff up for no reason, and nobody ever spent any time caring about whether it was actually true or made sense. If that's what you're concerned about, then yes, it will help you to read about the history behind various Christian beliefs. Yeah, don't worry, it's not like "nobody knows where these beliefs came from, but people at church told me they're true, so I guess they are." People have thought about these things!

But in other cases, apologetics resources act like they have good answers, but they really don't. Things like, the problem of evil- ie, why does God allow evil and suffering in the world? Or, the problem of hell- Christians teach that everyone deserves to go to hell, and the only way you can get out of it is by believing in Jesus the correct way, but doesn't that seem unfair? Yeah, if your misgivings about Christianity are about something that Christians are promoting, or that God is doing, which seems extremely unethical- apologetics resources aren't going to be any help. These resources will try to reassure you that whatever you are concerned about doesn't really matter. And that kind of reassurance will be fine for Christians who are just playing games in debates with atheists, but if you are seriously thinking about these things, taking them so seriously that it's threatening the whole foundation of your faith, well, the apologetics answers aren't going to do you any good.

For Christians who go to apologetics to try to get rid of their doubts, I think there's a lot of fear. The idea that we might be wrong about everything is just too scary- we hope that we're right and Christianity is true- we want to convince ourselves that it is. Following truth wherever it goes is very scary, if you're coming from this kind of Christian background.

For me, I don't really feel scared about that any more. I'm not so incredibly dependent on this needing to be true. If it turns out Christianity is not true, I don't think I would regret anything... "Love your neighbor as yourself" would still be the principle by which we should live our lives. Maybe the other details are more about the way the human mind sets up a narrative to make sense of the world. 

But yeah, one's feelings and one's level of fear are very much dependent on what variety of religion you follow. If you follow a religion that pushes you to do weird things that only make sense if the religion's claims are true (ya know like me when I was evangelical), well, then you'll have a lot more at stake in needing them to be true.

Christians who are confident and not doubting

Honestly, these Christians are the biggest market for apologetics books. Yeah, apologetics is talked about like its purpose is to convince people who are non-Christians or who are on the fence, but I would say it rarely "works" for those groups. The people who actually buy these books are mainly people who are already sure about their Christian beliefs. 

(At this point, my brain was like, hey I'm a Christian and not doubting and I bought "The Case for a Creator." I feel personally attacked.)

Why does this group of people buy apologetics books? Well, when I was evangelical, I read a lot of apologetics stuff because I'm just that kind of nerd. Curious about everything, wanting to know the reasons behind everything. But now I no longer think that apologetics is about that kind of honest curiosity. I *don't* think apologetics is motivated by a desire to follow truth wherever it takes us. It's more about, here are the beliefs that Christians are required to hold, let's try to come up with some arguments to convince ourselves that they're intellectually reasonable.

To a large extent, apologetics is about "we're winning, we're right and those atheists are wrong." It's about making yourself feel better about your beliefs- not about actually seeking to believe things that are true. And a lot of it is about learning some clever arguments that you can use when you meet non-Christians. Get yourself prepared, so you'll know what to say and you might be able to convince them. (I would say this also does not really "work.")

---

So what does this all add up to?

I have a really negative view of apologetics now. A lot of it feels very dishonest to me. Arguments about how God did something bad, but you have to kill your conscience and convince yourself it's not actually bad. Arguments that atheists have given good responses to, long ago, but the same talking points get endlessly repeated in churches because nobody is allowed to actually listen to atheists. Arguments that completely misrepresent science/ quotes from famous evolutionary biologists/ the beliefs of people who disagree with us/ etc.

There's always that fear, that people are going to hell if we can't convince them, so whenever you talk about your faith, it has to be a sales pitch, rather than being honest.

So I want to be like "ugh this is all bad" but I can't do that, because I actually believe a bunch of these arguments. If you asked me what evidence there is for this or that Christian belief that I hold, I would probably give an answer that you could also find in an apologetics book. Because I really do think in those terms.

I think, if you believe in God, there is value in learning about the arguments that people have used, historically, to support that belief. I'm not saying they're all good arguments, lol, they are not, but it's good to at least think through them. I *have* benefitted from reading apologetics and learning about stuff like that.

You know what I really want? If we could separate these 2 ideas:

1. How are one's views on big topics about God/ morality/ science/ etc informed by one's beliefs or lack thereof
2. Trying to convince people that we're right and they're wrong

Yeah, what I want is to read something written by a Christian who has thought about how their Christian beliefs interact with other ideas or scientific facts or whatever- someone who has thought about it a lot and has developed a view that makes sense of it. And the purpose is not to convince anyone to change their religion- the purpose is just to give an example of what a consistent, thoughtful belief system might look like. 

Hey, I don't just want to read a Christian take on that. Let me read the atheist take too. Or any religion. There's a lot of value in listening to other people and learning about how people think. I don't want it to be about debating who's right and who's wrong.

If someone asked me "why are you a Christian"... sure, there are a lot of apologetics arguments that come to mind, but if you want my real honest answer, it's because I just really believe in Jesus. That's not an argument that's meant to convince anyone. It's just a fact about myself. That is the real reason though, if anyone wants to know.

---

What is apologetics for? Who is apologetics for? It claims to be about "defending the faith," about giving evidence to convince people of the truth of Christianity, about debating atheists. I don't think it actually does those things effectively- and yet I can't be entirely negative on it, because I actually do agree with some of the ideas. I just hate how they're framed in this dishonest us-vs-them fashion. What I want instead is thoughtful reflection on what our faith has to say on these topics, just for the sake of thinking through one's beliefs and putting them into words. Not for the sake of persuading anyone to become Christian.

---

Related:

Just reading an apologetics book and asking "why are we doing this?" 

Sure Of What We Hope For

"Faith" means "doing something that is a bad idea"

Image with the word "Faith" on a black background. Image source.

I saw this article, from Hemant Mehta on the Friendly Atheist blog, An Alabama church secretly sent kids to evangelize in a homeless encampment, and I want to talk about it.

Basically what happened is, there was a kids' church camp run by an Alabama church, which at one point took the kids into a homeless encampment to evangelize there- even though the homeless encampment was very much NOT part of the trip that these kids had signed up for. These church leaders just kinda sent the kids to talk to people, without much adult supervision or awareness of safety concerns.

Afterward, one of the leaders, Mike Webb, had this to say:

… When we went to Tent City, I'm not gonna lie, when we first pulled up, we went to the food bank. When we left, I knew that we needed to go serve the homeless, not just in the food bank where it was safe. We needed to get out of our comfort zone and go… As we were leaving, I Googled "Where can I find the homeless population in Houston?" First thing pops up? Tent City. So that's where we're going.

We drive over there in the vans. We pull in.

Ain't no way I'm getting these kids out of this van. I will be fired. Mamas will be beatin’ down my door. We're not getting out.

We pulled to the end. We circled the cul-de-sac. We're pulling back out.

Guys…?

I even… I even tried to justify it.

Guys, I just want you to see what's here. I want you to see how people live. I need you to understand how fortunate you are. This is what it is, guys. All right, let's head back to the ranch…

…

[After decided to return]

But let me just tell you: We get out, we walk through, and we didn't have anything, because we didn't know what we were doing. That was another piece of it: I didn't want to walk in there with 75 people, into a homeless village, and we ain't got anything to give. Like, we're just invading your space, you know what I mean?

But we had that older couple that walked with us, and we began talking, and I said, "Guys, we're coming back tomorrow. We're going to put together some food. We're going to put together some sandwiches. We're going to come back. We're going to feed, and we're going to open doors."

And everybody was, you know, hearing this message, and we started promoting it amongst the people. We started telling them that was kind of our… our initial welcome.

Hey, we're going to be back here tomorrow…

Oh... this is so real. I know this way of thinking.

This is so common, for Christians to talk this way, to think this way. As if "faith" means God is telling you to do something wild and ill-advised, and you know a lot of people are going to tell you it's a bad idea, but the right thing to do is jump right in, trust God, say yes to the amazing terrifying adventure that God is calling you on.

I feel like the way Webb tells the story is a little hard to follow if you're not familiar with this ideology- he's describing the conflict within himself as he tries to decide whether to take the kids into the homeless camp or not. He feels like God wants him to, but he also knows a whole lot of reasons why it's a bad idea. ("I even tried to justify it" means "I felt like God wanted us to let the kids get out of the van there, but I didn't want to do that, so I tried to tell myself that it was good enough to just drive through and let the kids look at it without letting them get out- but that wasn't full obedience to God.") He struggles and then eventually decides to do it.

He *knew* that the kids' parents wouldn't be happy. He *knew* that none of them really had any training about how to help homeless people. All of that just makes for a more exciting story. What an amazing Christian role model, having faith so big it overcame these concerns that a reasonable person would have had.

The way he tells the story, the point is that it's thrilling because God wanted him to take the kids there, even though it seemed like a bad idea, but you need to trust God and do it anyway, even when you're scared. That's what faith is. Supposedly. The more it seems like a bad idea, the more it shows just how committed you are to God. God wants you to get out of your comfort zone!

I don't believe in this anymore, this religion that glamorizes reckless, one-off gestures, where it's more important that you personally had a wild adventure with God, than that you helped people in the real world. The way to actually make a difference is to do the really boring stuff. Do the work of listening to people, learning, caring about people. If you show up with nothing- no resources, no experience, no idea what you're doing- with nothing but the belief that God is sending you there, well, that doesn't help. That doesn't make you a hero of faith.

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Related:

Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.

Evangelism and Deception 

This is so normal. We just don't usually say it in front of other people.

Modifying My Faith Because of Doubt

A house of cards falling down. Image source.

Back when I was a "good Christian", on fire for God, I was really into apologetics. Apologetics means arguing about why Christianity is true. I read lots of apologetics books which presented questions like "are there contradictions in the bible?" and "how can a loving God send people to hell?" and "what if Jesus didn't actually die on the cross, he was just pretending to be dead?" These apologetics books presented arguments for why the Christian answer to these questions was the right answer.

Initially I just read the Christian side of it, but eventually I started reading the atheist side too. (The apologetics resources don't really pay attention to any other religions- it's just Christianity vs atheism.) Instead of just reading a Christian book that said "here's what atheists say, and here's why they're wrong" I would also go to the atheist resources directly and see what I thought about their arguments. (Christians are warned against doing this, because you may be "led astray" if you directly hear what the atheists are saying, without a Christian authority figure there to immediately tell you why it's wrong. ... Yeah honestly very shady that they don't want you to listen to anyone else except approved authorities...)

And sometimes the atheist side raised some good points! The problem of evil, for example. Why doesn't God intervene in the world to stop evil and suffering? Is it because They can't? Then God is not all-powerful. Is it because They don't want to? Then God is not all-loving. Either way, this God doesn't sound that good. 

Of course, Christians have all sorts of answers to it, like God valuing free will and wanting people to have a choice to do right or wrong- but I feel like most of these arguments aren't that great.

So I recognized that there were some points where the Christian apologetics side didn't really have a good answer- but I viewed it as very all-or-nothing. I thought, I have all these other reasons to believe in Jesus, so I will continue to believe even though there are a few weak points.

Yes, very all-or-nothing. I felt my options were:

1. Christianity- specifically evangelical Christianity- and the whole package of beliefs that came with it: you have to have a personal relationship with God; you have to spend time reading the bible and praying every day- if you don't, it means you don't love God enough and you should feel bad about that; the bible is inerrant; the bible doesn't have contradictions; God created the world; all the miracles in the bible really happened; literal virgin birth; literal resurrection; evolution is not true; Jesus was fully God and fully man; every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God; everyone deserves to go to hell because we are all sinners; Jesus died as part of God's plan to pay for our sin and get us into heaven; God sees you as totally worthless and ugly because of your sin, but when you get covered by Jesus, God is able to accept you; only people who believe in Jesus get into heaven; if you are a good person but you're not a Christian then you go to hell; if you do terrible things like murder people and then repent on your deathbed, you go to heaven; also everyone secretly knows that God exists and the gospel is true but they deny it because they love to sin; everyone has a "God-shaped hole" in their heart; everyone worships something; God wants women to dress modesty; the husband has to be the "spiritual leader" in marriage; premarital sex is a sin; everyone who has sex before marriage regrets it; God is extremely interested in what everyone is doing with their genitals; masturbation is a sin; and the ideal is you shouldn't even have any physical contact at all with your spouse before marriage- that's the ideal because it's the most pure, though realistically it's not likely to actually happen; God answers prayer; if we have more faith and pray for things that are in "God's will" then God will answer those prayers; you have to sit quietly and listen to God because God really does plant thoughts in people's heads about what they're supposed to do, or you could even open the bible and point to a random verse and perhaps that will be a message from God for you; also, be ready for the possibility that God will "call" you, meaning you have to give up your whole lifestyle and your plans and change to what God tells you to do, like moving to a foreign country as a missionary; the bible is God's love letter to you; we need to always "put God first"- if you like something, that could be bad because what if you love it more than God; we need to put others' needs before our own, always sacrificing in order to help other people; it's good to "submit" instead of standing up for our own rights; suffering can be a good thing because it helps you get closer to God; God has a plan for your life; if something bad happens to you, it's fine because it's part of God's plan; God will never give you more than you can handle; God has picked 1 specific opposite-sex partner that you are supposed to marry; we need to do evangelism to get people saved; all the other religions are about people trying to earn their way to heaven, but Christianity is different because Jesus already did the work and we just have to believe; it's really not possible to have morality if you don't believe in God; the most loving thing we can do is warn people about hell; and also we need to warn gay people about their sin; being trans isn't a real thing; hate the sin, love the sinner; the reason for most of society's problems is the breakdown of the family- casual sex, divorce, acceptance of queer people, abortion, etc; everyone who gets an abortion regrets it; life begins at conception, and abortion is murder; and so Christians all need to vote Republican; if you're obeying God and other people don't like it (perhaps because you are telling them about their sin), that's a sign that you're doing the right thing, because Jesus said the world will hate us, hey it could even be "spiritual warfare" which means the devil is attacking you; Christians are persecuted in the US; the US was founded as a Christian nation and it's terrible that it's becoming more and more secular; there are lots of people who claim to be Christians but they're not real Christians, probably most Catholics are fake Christians; you have to go to church every week; people have all sorts of excuses for not going to church, but they are wrong, they should be going to church
2. Atheism

When I say "all-or-nothing", I mean that because overall, I believed the Christian side of the apologetics arguments, that meant I had to believe this whole package of quirky beliefs. That's what Christianity is, right? Perhaps I had heard of some Christians who didn't believe a few of these things, but surely they were fake Christians and we didn't need to listen to them. We know that the bible is true [citation needed], and the bible says all of these things [citation needed] and so they were all true.

It was because of Rachel Held Evans, that I learned it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.

The things she wrote on her blog were unlike anything I had ever read. She knew how to speak evangelical, and yet, she frequently said things that good evangelicals weren't allowed to say. I was so confused; I couldn't figure out if she was a Christian or not. (Yes, she was.) She knew all the apologetics answers, but said those answers weren't good enough. She knew all the logical reasons why, for example, God needs to send all non-Christians to hell, but she also knew that her God-given conscience said that's terrible, no matter what kind of logic you can find to prop it up.

She had all the evangelical cred- she loved God, loved the bible, knew the bible so well, she was doing her best to follow Jesus. And she did NOT believe in some of those things that I thought all Christians had to believe- God sending people to hell, women not being allowed to be leaders, things like that. And yet she was still a real Christian.

That's how I learned it didn't have to be all-or-nothing.

For my whole life, I had been on the Christian side, in opposition to the atheist side. It was binary- I'm either a Christian or an atheist- and since I'm a Christian, I need to listen to the Christian leaders and find out the correct Christian view on all of these topics, and I need to believe that.

So, for example, why should I pray and ask God to do something, if God has already decided what They're going to do? Well, I couldn't answer that, but I believed in Jesus for a bunch of other reasons, so I could ignore this bit of confusion and keep believing it anyway. And keep praying to ask God for things anyway. The alternative would be to give up on Christianity entirely, right?

The other thing that happened was, in 2012 I had some health problems that totally derailed my life, for about 1 year. Before that, I had a very strong belief in the concept of "trusting God"- no matter what happens, it must be good, because it's God's plan! Even if it seems bad, you can trust that somehow it's actually good! But... my gall bladder just decided to try and ruin my life one day, for no reason- if that can happen, then what does it even mean to "trust God"? I can't trust God to not let some random health problem totally screw up my life. If I can't trust Them for that, then the whole concept of "trusting God" is pretty meaningless. (At the time, I blogged about it here and here.)

So I started to view my Christianity like this: If there's some belief I have that doesn't logically make sense, then I modify my beliefs to no longer include that bit of nonsense. Here's an example: Because of the problem of evil, I don't believe God intervenes in our lives, and I don't pray to ask God to do things. Because no, it doesn't make sense that there's a God who is always working in the little personal details of my life, and also allows suffering to happen on a large scale in this world. It doesn't make sense to attribute my success to God, when part of it was because of white privilege, and people with black-sounding names get called for job interviews less- maybe God should be working on that problem, instead of helping me. It doesn't make sense to believe I can pray and God will respond by helping me, when there are many people in this world in worse situations than me, and God hasn't stopped them from getting into those situations. It doesn't even make sense to postulate that the reason bad things happen to other people is that they don't pray- what a horrific God that would be, choosing to let bad things happen to people who don't have the correct beliefs and/or don't pray correctly.

So whereas before, my perspective was "I don't have a good answer for the problem of evil, but I do have other reasons for believing in Christianity, so just plow ahead and try to ignore the problem of evil," now I see it as "I don't have a good answer for the problem of evil, so I let that inform my Christianity, and I discard common Christian beliefs which are inconsistent with an honest awareness of the problem of evil."

I don't really believe in "I believe, help my unbelief"- the idea that faith and doubt kinda coexist in a person, and the overall belief system is totally true, so you *should* have 100% faith and 0% doubt, but we are flawed human beings and have doubts anyway, and that's okay, we don't have to be perfect, we just do our best to keep pushing ahead in the "faith" part and try to ignore the "doubt" part. No, I don't see it that way. Maybe you have some beliefs that are not actually true, and doubt is a useful indicator that you should examine them and maybe change them.

Doubt is not something to fight against. If you have "doubt", ie, you realize you believe something that doesn't really make sense, then you can consider what would happen to your overall belief system if you changed that one specific belief to something more logical. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. (Or, maybe you have some beliefs that you don't really have a good reason for, but you're okay with that. I do... That's fine, but you have to know you're not going to win any arguments with those.)

And some Christians will disagree with me, saying that this path basically leads to atheism. Someone starts out evangelical, and then they change it, one little belief at a time, and then eventually they become an atheist. Uh, okay, this argument is kinda lost on me, because I don't think there's anything wrong with being an atheist. But if that's your concern, then let me tell you, the house-of-cards religion where one weird little belief is overturned, and then the ENTIRE THING falls- that kind of ideology makes more atheists than what I'm advocating here.

Believe in something that you can actually believe. Not something that people say you need to believe, as part of a whole ideology. Doubt is not an attack; doubt is an indication that you should think about the reasons for your beliefs, and maybe change to something that makes more sense.

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The Slacktivist has a very good post on this: Hold on to the good 

Siggy has a post which makes some similar points: Christian Doubt

Related:

She was the first (Thank you, Rachel) 

On believing that "prayer works" 

Gotta Love That Full-Blown Atheism 

Taking My Kid To Church: "The Belief That Baffled the Best of the Buddhists"

Christian Nationalism / Faith Without Works Is Dead

Image text: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth." Image source.

Here's a post from Hemant Mehta about Christian Nationalism: Doug Wilson has ludicrous ideas for how the U.S. could become a Christian Nation. I'm writing about this because there's one line in it that's just so completely bonkers I can't get it out of my head. 

So, it's a post about Doug Wilson. If you don't know who Doug Wilson is, first of all, I'm happy for you. But anyway, I recommend this 2018 post from Libby Anne: It Is Long Past Time For Evangelical Leaders To Condemn Doug Wilson’s Views On Slavery And The South. Wilson says that slavery was a good thing, and he has a bunch of other terrible opinions too. (Gross, how will I explain Doug Wilson to my children?) 

Mehta's post is about how Wilson is advocating Christian Nationalism. Wilson has a bunch of suggestions for what the US government should do, and one of them, the one that's so bonkers I need to blog about it, is this: 

Or, Wilson suggested, “the Apostles’ Creed could be incorporated into the Constitution.”

... The Apostles' Creed? Uh, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth..." You know that's how the Apostles' Creed goes, right? Like it starts with "I believe" and lists out the basic things that Christians believe, mostly about what Jesus did. How on earth would that go into the Constitution? I'm objecting to this from a grammatical perspective- if you plop this into the Constitution somewhere, what would the pronoun "I" even be referring to? And how does it relate to anything else at all in the Constitution? It's a bunch of belief statements. That's not what the Constitution is.

(Obviously I also object to it because the government should not have a religion.)

I *guess* what Wilson means is that the Constitution should say that government officials are required to recite the Apostles' Creed, or something like that. (Ugh how am I gonna explain that to my children?) But when I read that in Mehta's blog post, the first thing that came to mind was some bizarro universe where you're reading the Constitution and it's talking about the responsibilities of Congress or whatever, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." ???

And actually, now I'm realizing that everything about Christian Nationalism feels like this. Wanting to take symbols of Christianity and paste them onto the US government, without caring about what they actually mean. Making a big deal about how it's so important to be a Christian, without talking about what it actually means to be a Christian, what Christians are supposed to do, what it means to follow Jesus. You ever notice how Christian Nationalists talk a lot about Christianity and not about Jesus? 

It's about selling "God Bless the USA" bibles just because the bible is a symbol in a culture war, not because you actually care about reading the bible and following what it says. (I agree with all the comedians who made jokes about "I'm surprised that bible didn't burst into flames when Trump touched it.")

It's about using your Christian identity to create an "us vs them"- like Christians are better than non-Christians, and Christians should control the government. (And there's also racism mixed in with this- like only white people count as real Christians.) Is that how Jesus lived? Is that what he told us to do? Do Christian Nationalists even care about what Jesus said?

The apostle James said, "Faith without works is dead." If you identify as a Christian, but you don't do any of the good things that Jesus said we should do, then what does it matter? Your Christianity is meaningless. 

If we really want to make political policies consistent with what Jesus said, I have a few suggestions. Immigration: The bible says we should help immigrants. Health care: The bible says we should help sick people. And yet, strangely, the Christian Nationalist position on those issues is the opposite of that. Like they just think "Christian" is a cool thing to be, and makes you better than other people, but they never think about how to actually follow Jesus.

Faith without works is dead.

The apostle James also said, "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder." If you believe in God, if you recite the Apostles' Creed, well, whatever, I'm not impressed with that. Even demons believe in God. Who cares? Jesus certainly doesn't care. What matters is what you do.

And Christian Nationalists take the Lord's name in vain when they say this is what Christianity is about, with no mention of the things that Jesus actually taught. No mention of "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Taking Christian things and sticking them onto the government, using them as symbols for why we're better than other people, without understanding what those symbols actually mean. Putting the Apostles' Creed into the Constitution because it sounds like a very Christian thing to do, even though it makes no sense. Faith without works is dead.

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Related:

In Some Alternate Universe, I'm Writing a Post About Masks and "Causing to Stumble"

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

A comic showing a man in a devil outfit at the gates of heaven. He says, "Sorry about this - I died at a costume party." Image source.

Anyone remember the whole "heavenly tourism" fad?

A few years ago, some "heavenly tourism" stories started popping up. Books like "Heaven Is For Real" and "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven," which were (supposedly true) accounts of people who had near-death experiences, and supposedly went to heaven and then came back. It was a whole thing in Christian culture, back then. (Later, Alex Malarkey, the boy from "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" said that whole book was not true.)

These stories were, basically, about proving how right our religious beliefs are. Scoring points against people from other religions and/or atheists. Doesn't that seem... extremely weird? If you really got to go see what heaven was like, shouldn't it be about learning incredible new otherworldly information, rather than confirming that you already were right about everything?

The "heavenly tourism" stories included elements like this: A child goes to heaven and sees Jesus, who looks basically like what Christians expect Jesus to look like. The child sees angels, who are basically what Christians expect angels to look like. The child meets some of his relatives who died a long time ago- and is able to later describe what these relatives looked like, which shouldn't be possible because the child had never met them on earth- and this matches Christians' beliefs about who is in heaven and what kind of existence they would have. And so on.

And there's usually an aspect of the story that's just there to score points for "pro-life" ideology: The child meets another child in heaven, who explains that she's the sister who died in their mom's belly, or something along those lines. And when the child comes back from heaven and tells his mom, the mom is so surprised, because she never told him that she had a miscarriage/abortion. (I say this "scores points" for the "pro-life" side because "pro-life" people wrongly believe that pro-choice people view a fetus as having no value/soul/life/etc at any point of development up until birth. So, if a dead fetus goes to heaven, that means abortion should always be illegal, or something. Uh, okay.)

And there may be a few elements of the story which at first don't seem to match what Christians believe- the child says he saw something in heaven, and the good Christian adults who are listening to this story can't figure out what he's talking about. But, they dig a little deeper and they find that it TOTALLY DOES match something the bible said, or whatever, just in a way they didn't expect. So, see, we were right about everything.

Really? Someone goes to heaven and comes back, and all we get is more confidence that we were already right about everything? We don't, like, learn anything new? Really?

I gotta say, I believe in heaven, but I definitely think I'm wrong about a lot of aspects of it. If heaven is real, probably the first thing that happens to everyone who goes there is they find out it's completely different from what they expected. It must be; we have no mechanism to actually get reliable information on what heaven is like- most of our beliefs are basically folklore that has gradually built up over hundreds or thousands of years, with no way to actually fact-check any of it. A lot of it has got to be just plain wrong. And wouldn't it be awesome, to get a glimpse of what heaven really is, and find out how wrong you are?

Personally, my beliefs about heaven and resurrection come from two main sources:

1. The world is not just. I want to believe that somehow, someday, all the wrongs will be made right. I want to believe that justice is real. And so I hope that there is resurrection, that heaven is real, and I imagine what heaven would have to be like, to truly create justice.
   But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Just because I want it, doesn't mean it's actually real. Which brings me to point number 2...
2. There is a long tradition of people believing in various religions because we want there to be more than just this world. (And, in particular, I'm a Christian, so I'm influenced by Christian beliefs about resurrection and heaven.) Thousands of years of people saying the world is not just and we hope for a better world. Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking too, and there's nothing real to it. But since it's so common, I kind of believe there's something there. I hope there is.

That's, uh, that's pretty much it. That's all the "evidence" we have that heaven exists. (I put "evidence" in scare quotes because honestly neither of those things really adds up to any evidence at all.) That's all we have to go on, as we speculate about what heaven is like. Point 1 is just our opinions on what perfect justice should look like, and point 2 is claims from religions about how maybe a few hundred years ago, God spoke to someone and gave some clues about what heaven is like. That's it. So, okay, that's the broad outlines of what heaven is, but we seriously know nothing about the details. Like, you could say "I believe God will make everything right, but I don't have any idea how that will work" and that's basically it. Beyond that, any details you believe about heaven are just fan theories.

So, wow, how cool would it be to actually go to heaven and see what it's like, and then come back? And likely the main thing that would happen is you would find out how totally wrong you are about pretty much all of it. Very cool to learn new information and find out which things we were wrong about.

Right?

But, apparently not. Because that's not the angle that those "heavenly tourism" stories take at all. They're not about learning something new; they're used as evidence that Christians are already right about everything. They're evidence for the beliefs we already have, something you can bring up in an argument with non-Christians (though honestly I don't think these kinds of stories are at all convincing to non-Christians, so good luck with that!), rather than an incredibly useful tool for examining our own beliefs and getting rid of the ones which are just wrong.

Isn't that a little... strange?

And really it's about the whole concept of certainty, about how when I was an evangelical I thought I was right about everything, because the bible gives us all the answers and that's that. But now I'm like, I don't know, I hope resurrection is real, I believe in it, but I don't know, I could be wrong. I see the ways that my beliefs are based on ... like... what I *want* to be true, rather than things I actually have evidence for. And... I do believe people have a conscience that comes from God, and so it does mean something that we understand this world is not the way it should be, and we want there to be a better world- so, perhaps that means there *is* a better world- so, there's that, but that's not really evidence either. (It's a fan theory.)

Winning arguments. Scoring points. Telling other people why you're right and they're wrong. Imagine you get to go to heaven- YOU GET TO GO TO HEAVEN- and that's all you get out of it.

---

Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For 

Someday Dave Ramsey will have to stand before God and explain why he fired a pregnant woman

And this song, "Heaven is a place on earth." Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We'll make heaven a place on earth. That's my religion.

Men have no idea what it's like for women in complementarian churches

Cartoon by Naked Pastor (David Hayward) which shows 3 women and a large group of men. The men say, "So ladies, thanks for being the first to witness and report the Resurrection. And we'll take it from here." Image source.

I read this post, Life under Patriarchy: Death by a Thousand Cuts, which has a bunch of anecdotes about what it's like to be a woman in a conservative/complementarian church. This one in particular stuck out to me:

When I was alone as a woman in a meeting with the all-male eldership of my church, I explained how difficult it was as a woman to discern how to have both a gentle and quiet spirit and also have a voice in the church. One of the male elders, the NT greek “expert”, interrupted me to soften the meaning of 1 Timothy 2:12. I was referencing 1 Peter 3:4. His interruption (mansplaining) and my confusion about his confusion began the whole meeting badly. Afterwards, as I contemplated his mistake, I realized he had no idea of the burden women carry from these verses. No woman who takes her bible seriously in the conservative church world would confuse these two passages with one another. I’ve been processing the realization that men in the church don’t sit with the call to a “gentle and quiet spirit” the way women do ever since that terrible meeting when I tried to use my voice in a room full of aggressive men.

This struck me because it shows how Christian women who believe in complementarianism have to struggle with it because it just makes no sense. And Christian men who believe in complementarianism aren't experiencing that struggle. Maybe they aren't even aware of it at all! 

This has inspired me to write a few of my own anecdotes, here in this post. (Important background information: I'm a woman.) But first, let me define "complementarianism": So, "complementarian" Christians believe that God created men and women to be equal in worth, but to have different roles. In marriage, the wife has to submit to the husband, and the husband has to love the wife as Christ loves the church. Also, women are restricted in what leadership roles they can have in the church. This plays out differently in different churches, but basically, the senior pastor of the church has to be a man. Maybe a woman can be an "associate pastor" or a "children's director" or "women's pastor" or some other jargon. And in some churches, women can't teach adult men- they can only teach women or children. The details of this differ- is a woman allowed to read a bible passage out loud in front of the church? Does that count as "teaching"? Is a woman allowed to sing in front of the church? Sometimes when a woman talks from the pulpit, these churches have to call it "sharing" instead of "teaching." And some churches don't allow women to speak in front of the church at all.

(Trying to understand how this is "equal in worth" is always left as an exercise to the reader.)

---

When I was growing up, I believed in complementarian because I was taught that's what all Christians have to believe. That's what the bible said, supposedly. I was told that there were some Christians who didn't believe in complementarianism, but that's because they were rejecting the bible, they are bad Christians, they've been influenced by the evils of feminism, they think they know better than God, who made this perfect plan about gender.

So yes, I believed in complementarianism because I didn't know there were other options.

But, the thing is, complementarianism simply makes no sense. Why wouldn't a woman be allowed to do everything a man can do in the church? That sounds sexist and wrong. And what does it mean that a wife has to "submit" to her husband? So like, the husband can control her and tell her what to do? What? That sounds so wrong. Or, when they can't agree on something, the tiebreaker is gender? What? What on earth, that makes no sense.

So, the issue is, I believed I was required to believe in this. But, it makes no sense. So I needed to convince myself that it made sense.

And really, that's what all of Christian apologetics is. That's the problem with apologetics. It's not about following logic and changing your beliefs accordingly, as you search for the truth. It's about "I know I am supposed to believe this, please help me force myself to believe it." 

And yes, there are loads of ways that Christians try to argue that complementarianism isn't as sexist and wrong as it sounds. The wife has to submit to the husband, but they husband has to love the wife, even to the point of laying down his life for her, so actually the husband has the more difficult role. And, it's a lot of responsibility for the husband, to be the leader and have to make the decisions for the family, so the wife should be glad she doesn't have to worry her pretty little head about any of that. Also, she knows he loves her, and she trusts that he will make decisions that are best for their family, because he's such a great guy, so actually it's easy for her to submit to him.

And, they said, this doesn't apply to abusive situations. Some people hate these "wives submit to your husbands" passages because they've been used to justify abuse- but that's wrong! The husband should NOT abuse the wife! And if he is, she has the right to get away from him.

And, they said, normally the husband and wife should discuss things as equals, and agree on their decision together! It's only when they really really can't agree, that's the only time that "submit to your husband" comes into play. If they really really really can't agree, then the husband can make the final decision. But that would happen very rarely- in some people's marriages it never even happens at all!!!

Yeah, I don't buy any of this.

I used to. Because I believed this is what Christians had to believe.

But really, all it adds up to is, trying to make "wives submit to your husbands" mean something different than "wives submit to your husbands." Like... Don't worry! It's not what it sounds like!

How about instead, we just reject the entire thing, rather than concocting these elaborate rationalizations where we basically treat women and men as equals while claiming we totally believe that the women are "submitting" to the men?

Sheila Wray Gregoire has pointed out, the majority of Christians who say they believe in complementarianism don't actually practice it. In their actual, practical, day-to-day lives, they DON'T have situations where the husband and wife simply can't agree, so the husband pulls rank. In actual reality, they live like they are equals. 

They claim they are complementarian, but in practice they are egalitarian. Egalitarian is the alternative, the ideology which I was told Christians are not allowed to believe in. Egalitarian means equality between men and woman, and you don't make rules to restrict people based on their gender. (Please note, though, that many egalitarians don't support queer rights unfortunately. It's equality between straight cis men and straight cis women, and doesn't necessarily go any farther than that.)

And it's a good thing that most complementarians don't actually put it into practice. When people actually live that way, it is sexist, and harmful to women, and abusive.

So how about we just reject the whole thing, instead of pretending we're following it?

---

One time, at church, when I was in high school, I heard someone mention an organization called CBE- Christians for Biblical Equality. This is an egalitarian organization, whose mission is to promote the idea that women shouldn't be restricted from being leaders in the church, etc. Equality.

I was very surprised to hear about this, and my reaction was "... is that... legit?" And somebody at church told me, yes.

I couldn't make sense of it at the time. I guess I thought, surely if that's a legitimate interpretation of the bible, then of course that's what we should all believe. If Christians are truly allowed to be egalitarian, then why on earth would anybody be complementarian? Complementarianism just makes no sense at all, just so clearly makes no sense at all. Surely we believe in complementarianism because there aren't any other options, right? If this CBE stuff really is an option, well... of course I would believe it. Of course all of us would immediately believe it. ...Right?

I guess at the time, I knew very little about it, and didn't really believe it was legit. Because, surely if it was legit, if Christians were allowed to believe in it, well then how do you explain all the complementarian pastors I had met?

---

I used to have such faith that this was right, that when the bible said wives must submit to their husbands, or that women are more easily deceived, or women can't speak in church, I believed somehow it was right and good. I didn't understand how it was right, because obviously it sounds so wrong, but I had complete faith that if we just understood the bible correctly, and followed it, there would be no problems.

I remember one time, when I was in college, and I was with a group of friends driving home from a Christian conference. And we were discussing the bible passages that restrict women. I think there were a few boys and a few girls in this discussion. And, the way we were talking about it was very direct and blunt and not necessarily the sorts of things we would say in front of other people, because they would take it the wrong way because it sounded sexist.

And one of my friends, let's call him Edward, said, "I'm glad I can talk about this with you all, because I know that you're not going to think the bible is sexist. We know the apostle Paul wasn't sexist, and we are just trying to understand how."

Wow, I had so much faith.

---

The big change for me came when I found Rachel Held Evans's blog. That was where I first learned that Christians don't have to believe in complementarianism. Like I said, I had heard there are Christians who don't believe in complementarianism, but they are bad Christians, they are obviously wrong. Well, I read Rachel's blog, and she wasn't a bad Christian. She was the same as me. She was a bible nerd. She was asking all the questions I had always wanted to ask but couldn't put into words.

That's where I learned that we can just reject the whole thing. We don't have to tie ourselves in knots trying to explain how we believe wives have to submit to their husbands, but not like, in a sexist way. Rachel wrote about academic research about ancient Roman society, and how there were reasons that the writers of the bible wrote things that way, in that culture. But in our culture, it's completely different, so we don't have to believe in complementarianism.

Before, I thought I had to believe that there was at least something to it. When the bible says women shouldn't speak in church, in some sense that is true and right, it's just a matter of understanding how. Well, no. We don't have to believe there's anything to it. We can reject it entirely. It's an interesting historical exercise, to research the reasons why the biblical writers wrote that, and what it meant in their culture, but for our own situation now, it means nothing.

---

And that's also when I started reading ex-evangelical blogs, and there were so many stories about how complementarianism and patriarchy lead to abuse. Before, I had heard that there were some bad Christians who used this ideology to justify abuse, but I thought it happens very rarely, and those bad Christians are obviously wrong, so no need to really think about that too much. Well. No. In patriarchal churches, women are constantly mistreated. From small ways like assuming the women will do all the cooking and childcare for church events, to big ways like making a rape victim stand up in front of the church and "confess" her "sin."

Before, I had faith that good Christian leaders- whether they were men or women- were just trying to follow the bible to the best of their ability. I never thought about leaders who are protecting their own power. I never thought about who benefits from this ideology. I never thought about how the debate is different depending on whether you have skin in the game. I trusted that we all just wanted to obey what the bible said, even if it's hard.

Well. Not anymore.

---

I remember there were a few times, back when I was "on fire for God", when I prayed alone in my room, and I covered my head with a towel. Because the bible says women need to cover their heads when they pray. And I had never given it a thought before- I had never met any Christians who actually took that seriously. I think maybe 1 time in my life, I've heard of or met a Christian woman who wears a head covering to church because of those verses, but she said it was just her personal belief and she wasn't trying to tell other women what to do. (Some really conservative churches do require it, though, I have heard.) I was taught it was just a cultural thing and didn't apply to us in modern times.

But, sometimes, when I prayed, I was so desperate, trying to figure out how to get God to do what I wanted him to do. (The God I believed in back then was a he/him.) Like, I wanted my friends to "get saved" (ie, to convert to Christianity), and I wanted it SO MUCH, I was SO WORRIED about how terrible their lives must be without Jesus, I just wanted God to get them to change their beliefs, and I prayed so hard, why wasn't it working? Was there some cheat code I needed to figure out, in order to get my prayers to actually work? The bible says women need to cover their heads when they pray, maybe I should try that. Maybe that's what will get God to finally do it. Sounds ridiculous and sexist, but, worth a shot.

I never told any other Christians about this, because how would I even begin to explain it? The idea that we should actually believe that women are required to cover their heads when they pray- it just sounds absurd. All of my Christian friends would surely think it was absurd and sexist, right? But there it is, in the bible.

(And, if you're wondering, no, my friends still didn't "get saved" after that.)

---

In church, there was a discussion about "wives submit to your husbands," and I started asking for examples.

Because, when I said I just totally don't believe in "wives submit to your husbands," tons of women jumped up with the familiar talking points- "I know my husband loves me, and I trust him, so it's easy to submit to a man like that", etc. Yeah, I've heard it all before. I started asking for examples.

Examples. Asking these women, have there been any situations in your marriage, where you and your husband weren't able to agree, so in the end he just made the decision and you had to submit to him?

I only remember getting an actual answer from 1 woman. I think it was something about, they couldn't agree on what school to send their kid to, and in the end she just went with what her husband wanted. And, when she told me about it, I felt bad for asking. Because it seemed really emotional for her, really difficult for her to talk about. That was probably a bad time in her marriage, they probably argued about it, and there were strong emotions on both sides, and eventually she just reasoned that God wanted her to give up and let her husband do what he wanted, so she forced herself to submit.

That's what we're actually talking about here, when Christians say the husband has the "tiebreaker" vote. We're talking about something that was actually important to her, important enough to fight, to make a case, lay out the reasons to support her point of view, and in the end her god made her just give all that up, like it didn't matter. Because she's a woman and her husband is a man.

F all of that.

---

I posted a link on social media, and I described it as a blog post about "the equality of women in the church."

And one of my friends, let's call him Marvin, replied and said, "Women aren't equal! Some are short, some are tall, [and so on, a bunch of different adjectives describing different subgroups of women]"

And I thought, what on earth? Why is he pretending he doesn't understand what I'm talking about? He's acting like he thinks I said "all women are exactly the same" when actually what I meant was "equality between men and woman."

This anecdote is the first thing that came to mind, when I read that blog post I linked to at the top. Oh my goodness, what if he actually didn't understand what I meant? I thought he was acting clueless on purpose, but what if he wasn't? What if he hadn't spent a lifetime trying to make it make sense, when the bible says women can't do all the things men can do? What if he never really thought about it? What if he had no sense of the amazing freedom I experienced, when I found out I really can be a Christian and not be complementarian- that I can just believe men and women are equal, and not do this whole dance about how the bible says this or that?

Men have no idea.

---

But maybe I shouldn't judge the Christian men for having no idea, because I have committed a similar sin.

I'm straight, and back then, when I read the anti-gay passages in the bible, I just nodded along like there was no problem. If a man lies with a man, it is an abomination. Homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. Same-sex relationships are unnatural, sinful, shameful, driven by lust. And I just nodded along, like, ah yes, disgusting.

Years later, I started reading blogs written by gay Christians. They wrote about how hard they struggled, trying to be good enough to be accepted by God, trying to repress themselves, reading the anti-gay passages of the bible and trying to make it make sense. They wrote about how much time they spent, tracking down ancient Greek words, trying to figure out what exactly these passages meant.

And of course, when I first started reading these blogs, I didn't agree with them if their conclusion was accepting themselves as gay. I cared about their struggles, but I couldn't believe that it was okay to accept yourself and go ahead and date people of the same gender. I thought Christians weren't allowed to believe that- only bad Christians who rejected the bible would say that same-sex relationships were okay. Rejecting God's perfect plan for gender, as if you know better than God.

But the more I read, the more I saw that they weren't bad Christians. They were bible nerds like me. They were trying their best to follow God.

And I changed my position, and now I support all queer rights. My God is genderqueer, They/Them. (And I'm asexual.)

It's funny, when someone on the internet talks about being queer and Christian, and then some rando posts a bible verse in reply, as if the queer Christian has never heard of Romans 1. Bro, queer Christians know those passages so much better than you do. Queer Christians have spent so much time, way too much time, parsing the minutiae of ancient Roman perspectives on sexuality.

Straight people have no idea.

And isn't it terrible, how Christians are expected to read bible passages which dehumanize entire demographics of people, and just accept that- because the bible says it, so it must be true? Best-case scenario for a good Christian, I suppose, is you read a bible passage that dehumanizes an entire demographic of people, and you just nod along and don't notice anything wrong. But what if you have personal experience that tells you something's wrong with what you just read in the bible? What if you yourself are a member of that demographic, or you have close friends who are? Then, as a good Christian who believes the bible, you have to force yourself to believe it, even when it sounds so wrong. You struggle to make it make sense, because you believe there are no other options.

How about we just reject the whole thing? 

If your God wants you to discriminate against other people, maybe find a new God. Every day you continue to believe in that kind of God, that's on you. What does it say about you, that you choose to worship a God like that?

---

There's one more thing I need to talk about: What does "faith" mean?

Because I read one blog post after another after another about how complementarianism is harmful, how it makes no sense, how it is used to cover up and perpetuate abuse. 

But... did that mean it was actually wrong? What if God commanded this for a reason? What if there's some really amazing reason why women shouldn't have the same rights as men, and as humans we just can't understand what it is? We're not God, what do we know?

Complementarianism obviously makes no sense- but I was taught that faith is doing things that appear to be ridiculous and foolish, because God commands us to, and somehow to God it makes sense. I was taught that's an important component of being a Christian: sometimes God will tell you to do something completely absurd, and you have to do it.

I don't believe that any more. Instead, I believe what Jesus said: A good tree cannot bear bad fruit. You can look at the results of following a certain ideology, and if those results are bad, you know the ideology itself is bad.

Reject the entire thing.

---

Related:

She was the first (Thank you, Rachel) 

It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce

They Prayed About It (a post about the #NashvilleStatement) 

I'm a woman, and God created me to do math and build robots