When God Says It's Your Choice

Image text: "Choice." Image source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Related

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

God, Soul Mates, and International Marriage

The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God"

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

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

Good Christians Know My Problem is I was Doing it Wrong

A woman praying. Image source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Related:

When Christians Say "We're Sorry" 

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

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

Yep, I Totally Did This Creepy Evangelism Strategy

Evangelism and Blabbing About People's Personal Lives

My Parasocial Relationship With God

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

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

So instead, I have a parasocial relationship with God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Related:

The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God"

I Deserve God's Love 

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

God and the Overton Window

The Power Dynamics of the "Personal Relationship With God"

Image text: "A personal relationship with God", with a hand reaching down from the top of the frame, and another hand reaching up from the bottom. Image source.

"He must become greater; I must become less." 

- John 3:30

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In romantic/intimate relationships, it can be a red flag when there's a big power difference between the 2 people. A relationship between a boss and an employee, between a professor and student, etc- these are recognized as totally unethical because of the power difference. It's a situation where one person can be coerced into things they don't want in the relationship, because the other person holds such power over their life. 

But what if it was a relationship between a person and God?

I'm talking about this in the framework of romantic/intimate relationships, because the evangelical concept of the "personal relationship with God" is supposed to be that intimate. Actually, more intimate than that, I would say. God knows you completely. God knows every thought in your mind. God knows all your motivations for all the choices you will ever make. And you are supposed to dedicate yourself completely to God. Sacrifice whatever things in your life God doesn't like. Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Pray more- however much you are praying now, it would be better if you were praying more. Pursue God all the time, with all you have. No matter the cost. 

It's hard to imagine a more one-sided relationship than that. God is perfect, we are the ones who are imperfect, so anything that goes wrong in the relationship must be our fault. We are sinful. We didn't pray enough. We didn't love God enough. We are weak, and we are flawed, trying to reach through the haze to access the power of God and the goodness and joy of God, if only we would get our act together.

Oh, and in this ideology, God is all you need. Anything else in your life, if you lose it, it will be okay because you still have God. Rely on God to be your everything.

When I had a "personal relationship with God"... it was... I loved him. I was obsessed with him. I wanted to do whatever he wanted me to do, and I was willing to give up anything. I wanted God to speak to me, I wanted to feel his power, I wanted to see the amazing things he was doing in the world, I wanted to be part of it. 

If only I could know what God was telling me, what God wanted me to do- but it was so hard to hear him. It was so hard to know what I was supposed to do. I worried about making the wrong choice- I was supposed to do what God wanted, but what if I really didn't know what that was? Why couldn't he just choose for me? Why couldn't he just take away all my choices- wouldn't that make it easier for everyone? We're working with a belief system that says there *is* one specific absolute right thing to do, and God knows what it is, and I don't know what it is but I'm the one who has to do it. And I tried so hard to sit and pray and listen to God, this distant and noisy communication channel- doesn't this seem inefficient? Why doesn't God just take over my life and make all my choices for me- wouldn't that be the ideal?

And the way I had to police my feelings because of him. If I was in a situation where I felt "God wants me to forgive this person" then that was it, I had to forgive them. I had to. God wants it, and God is absolutely always right. I couldn't think it through, couldn't process my feelings on it, because we already know the right answer. To seriously think it through would be to entertain the possibility of not obeying God. My obedience must be absolute- how can there be any hesitation, when we already know God is right? If I question it, if I have feelings of not wanting to do it, that would be a sin.

Many many times, I had feelings about something, and I had to stomp them down immediately because they weren't what God would want. To linger on those emotions would be a sin- and every little sin is "an infinite offense against a holy God." I deserve to go to hell for that.

When you're in a relationship with a person, and you disagree about something, there's some give and take. You both are right about some things and wrong about some things; you both should listen to each other and learn from each other. Even if it turns out one person was pretty obviously right and the other was wrong, you still talk it through and work to empathize with each other and understand each other. I don't even know if it's possible to have a healthy relationship with Someone who is always right. Like, you already know it's pointless to try to tell them why you disagree with them on something. You're automatically wrong. To continue to talk about your wrong feelings and wrong opinions, as if they matter, wouldn't that be a sin?

And I believed that, if anything bad happened in my life, it was okay because it was God's plan. He could do anything to me, and it would be right- somehow, from God's absolutely correct point of view, it would actually be a good thing, even if it seemed bad to me. 

Maybe God would take away the things- or people- that I loved, in order to teach me to trust him more. Yes, plenty of evangelicals have anecdotes along those lines- something bad happened to them, and they eventually came to believe that God had deliberately caused it, in order to teach them something. Or, perhaps God destroyed something because you sinfully loved it too much, and it was distracting you from loving God. Yeah, the God I believed in back then would totally do that kind of thing. He was a jealous God, and we believed that was a good thing.

OH AND I almost forgot to mention, this God believed I was disgusting and dirty and never deserved anything good. All humans deserve to go to hell right now, but luckily God has a bit of a weakness and loves us, so we're able to get a sort of temporary delay in getting the punishment we deserve- we're living our lives here on earth instead of going to hell right now. And for those of us who believe the correct things about Jesus, Jesus covers up our sin well enough that God can finally bear to look at us. So basically, my natural self is really bad, but fortunately Jesus is changing me into someone that can maybe kinda sorta please God. I just have to pray all the time and pursue God with everything I have. Any deviation from this, and I'm a dirty sinner that God can't even look at.

(And I won't even get into this other goal that the "personal relationship with God" is supposed to accomplish: We believe there is a spiritual world, which we can't see but it's more real than the physical world that we can see. And the closer your "personal relationship with God" is, the more in-tune with God you are, the more you will be able to sense the actual real reality of the spiritual world. Sure, we believe it exists, but it doesn't feel real- but if you have a really really good personal relationship with God, you can get to the point that the spiritual world does feel real- and that's what we should be trying to do. You want to get yourself to where it's intuitive to interpret things that happen to you in terms of what's going on in the spiritual world, and ignore the common-sense physical-world understanding of what's happening.)

I'm describing it this way, and it probably sounds pretty bad, the way God treated me, the way I sacrificed my feelings and independence and personality for him. But at the time, I was happy. I was so happy, and I loved God so much. I was happy because I 100% believed in this ideology that says God is right about everything. It was so hard, all the things I had to do to obey him, but I genuinely believed that those were the right things that I should do, and that any alternative would by definition be worse. And all that stuff about me being a dirty sinner, it didn't bother me because I believed it was true. If someone calls you a dirty sinner, why would you take offense to that, if you know that you really are a dirty sinner?

(Years later in therapy it turned out it DID bother me!)

I loved this quote from John the Baptist, talking about Jesus: "He must become greater; I must become less." I worked so hard, trying to be that perfect pure conduit that God's power could flow through, trying to get rid of my own weakness and sinfulness. I've heard evangelicals say- and I believed this back then- it's not that God is getting rid of your personality and uniqueness; instead, the personal relationship with God is the ideal environment where your natural personality can blossom, and you really become the person God made you to be, when you're following God rather than being weighed down by sin. And yeah, to some extent that was true. I did devote my life to God in a way that was uniquely mine. But living that way, I wasn't allowed to have any real choices. That really cuts off a lot of one's personality and identity- not being able to think about what you want, and choose to do something just because you want to, not because you're "supposed" to.

And this whole time, I chased God and wanted God and listened for God, and also I believed all the evangelical ideology. All the culture war issues, I had the "correct" evangelical view, and I was sure that God did too- of course he did. All this time that I wanted to know him, and I believed he knew me completely, I was totally sure I had the right beliefs about all these things, and I talked to him with the assumption that he believed those things too. It all fit together seamlessly- my personal relationship with God, and my taking evangelical talking points as if they were just self-evidently true.

My "personal relationship with God" fell to pieces as I gradually realized that so many evangelical beliefs were wrong- but God cannot change- God still believed those things, and I couldn't any more. He was revealed to be a heartless bigot who bought into misinformation.

It was so bad, going through that. My whole identity had been in this God, and he turned out to be a monster and I needed to separate from him. Everything I had thought was certain, everything I had thought I didn't need to worry about because evangelical ideology had a pat little answer, suddenly all these questions sprang up like a whirlwind, all these reasons that showed God is not worthy of worship. And my whole life I had believed I deserved to go to hell but I wasn't worried about that because Jesus covered me so it was fine- but now that I was leaving this God, the full burden of my sinfulness in God's eyes fell on me... I couldn't stop thinking about how I was so bad, I was so dirty- because I had always believed that was everyone's default state if they didn't have a "personal relationship with God."

And here I was, no longer even *trying* to have a personal relationship with God. Hard to imagine anything more dirty and sinful than that.

Yes, evangelicals very explicitly believe that if you do not have a personal relationship with God, you are not a Christian. You are going to hell.

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It may come across as strange that I'm talking about the personal relationship with God in the language we use to talk about abusive relationships. The idea that the partner with more power can coerce the other into things they don't want- well, that's totally different when it's God we're talking about. God is always good and right, so if God coerces you into something, that's actually a good thing. The control that is a bad thing in a human relationship is a good thing in the relationship with God. ... Right?

(And yes, it is very common for evangelicals to talk about God coercing them into things. Giving testimonies along the lines of "God wanted me to do [something] but I didn't want to. Silly me, I'm so sinful and selfish, haha, you guys know how it is, lol. And then God caused bad/annoying/inconvenient things to happen to me, until I finally gave up, and agreed to do the thing that God told me to do. God always gets us in the end, haha. [audience laughs]")

I don't think that any more, because I don't have a God I can trust. The God I used to worship, I don't believe in him any more, but he was very real to me back then, and he controlled my life. There are many gods that people believe in- how can you give up control of your life to a God if you don't even know if it's the right one?

I believe in a God now, and I love Them, but I don't want to talk to Them. The power dynamics are too... I just can't, I just can't deal with anything that hints in the direction of an absolute "this is what God wants me to do"- it feels coercive. I can't deal with "here's God's opinion on this or that topic"- because if I agree with it, I can arrogantly feel like I'm automatically right, and if I disagree with it, I should be forced to change immediately. The absoluteness of it is just incompatible with thinking with my own mind and feeling my own feelings. 

I need some space away from God, to think my own thoughts and feel my own feelings. Let me be wrong, let me figure things out on my own, let me change and grow. I don't want to talk to Them.

Any time I say something like "God wants us to [whatever]", that's my own opinion, based on a bunch of reasons that I've thought about. It's not "these words were handed down to us from heaven and are automatically right"- I don't want that in my religion.

The power difference between a person and God is so huge, and we are told me must give ourselves fully to him, give up everything for him, obey him even when it hurts. And I used to do that. But I can't any more. I'm never going to be in a personal relationship with a God again. It's not safe to have a relationship that intimate with that big of a power difference.

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Follow-up posts: 

My Parasocial Relationship With God 

Good Christians Know My Problem is I was Doing it Wrong

Related

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

"Moon Knight" and Boundaries With God

Used By God 

My Identity was in Christ

This is what a "personal relationship with God" looks like. Be very afraid. 

I Deserve God's Love 

God and the Overton Window

God and the Overton Window

Diagram showing the Overton window. Image source.

One key thing that Christians believe about God is that God is not tied down to any time or place. God is not limited or restricted in that way. God is everywhere, outside of time, all-knowing. God is objective, God is the Truth.

But what does that mean? And is it even possible for humans to connect with Someone who is truly objective in this way?

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We can imagine many situations where one person, let's call them Person A, and another person, let's call them Person B, might be trying to communicate, but they are unable to understand each other. Perhaps they don't speak the same language. Or, perhaps Person A has studied and now can speak Person B's language, but the concept that Person A is communicating is something that Person B has never encountered in their own language/culture. For example, me in the grocery store in China, trying to buy cheese, because I was pregnant and sometimes when you're pregnant you suddenly need a very specific food, reading the Chinese characters on the packaging of various cheese-looking products, trying to determine what kind of cheese each of them was. And I can't figure it out! It just says the Chinese word for cheese! WHAT AM I MISSING HERE? WHAT KIND OF CHEESE IS IT? And I asked my husband, who is Chinese, help me figure out what kind of cheese this is, and he didn't really seem to grasp the monumental importance of the question "what kind of cheese is it" and he was just like "I don't know." 

"Hallow" and self-centered Christianity

Logo for the Hallow app. Image source.

Apparently there's a prayer app called "Hallow." Amanda Marcotte writes about it here: An atheist's unnerving descent into Hallow, the prayer app beloved by MAGA celebrities. I want to highlight this part of her article, because it's very insightful:

Most of this material doesn't seem political, but it does encourage a form of small-minded narcissism, with the relentless focus on the self. The Jesus of the Hallow app isn't much concerned about social justice or caring for the downtrodden, but about being your good buddy who strokes your hair after a bad day at work. The "demonic" forces the believer is called upon to resist aren't grave evils like human rights abuses. Satan seems more interested in frustrating you with traffic than, say, installing a fascist leader in the White House to destroy democracy. It doesn't seem political, but the project of lulling users into not caring about anything outside their immediate self-interest suits the goals of the MAGA movement. And it's probably more persuasive to ordinary people than overt right-wing propaganda. This isn't the Christianity of the liberal Christians I know, who volunteer, donate money, and care very much about electing better leaders. This is a "don't worry your pretty head about all that stuff" kind of Christianity. 

Wow. This is really a spot-on description of the evangelicalism I was raised in. ("Hallow" was made by Catholics, actually. But this description feels familiar to me, as an ex-evangelical.)

The way this article describes the Hallow app- about how it offers encouragement for little mundane issues like disagreements with one's coworkers, etc- how it's just about you and your own little world and God's place in it- all of this feels very normal and expected, to me. It's honestly a bit jarring how Marcotte seems to have expected a Christian prayer app to be about "social justice or caring for the downtrodden." Yeah sure, in my experience evangelicals kinda care about those things, but they are way far down the list- the most important thing is your own heart, your own attitude towards God, your own personal devotion to God, your habits around praying and reading the bible. 

"don't worry your pretty head about all that stuff" is absolutely right. I really have heard evangelicals say the real-world results of our attempts to do good don't matter. The only thing that matters is that God sees that your heart is in the right place. Seriously. Evangelicals really say that the whole world belongs to God, and if God wants a thing to happen, it's going to happen- nothing we can do to change that- so the only thing we really have control over is our own attitude, and that's what God will judge us for.

Evangelicals *do* take action to help the world. Sure, yes, they do. There are evangelical charities. Plenty of churches have food pantries to help local people in need. But as I said, it's way far down the list. That's not what comes to mind, when evangelicals consider questions like "what does it mean to be a Christian?" or "what does God want us to do?" The answers to those are, read the bible more, pray more, work on your personal relationship with God.

I find I am 0% surprised that when conservative Christians made a "prayer app," it ended up being about nothing more than the little world inside your own head. The little God who closely tracks your feelings as indicators of how devoted you are, but does nothing about human rights abuses in the world.

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See also, this post from the Slacktivist: Toddlers on a treadmill: Why evangelicals can’t even take baby steps toward justice

Related:

On believing that "prayer works"

"Hey God, you and I both know..." 

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

"Hey God, you and I both know..."

Praying hands. Image source.

Recently I wrote a post called Believing in the God You Want, where I mentioned that I don't think it's good to have a "personal relationship with God" because then you start to think "God agrees with me" and you won't be open to finding out when you're wrong about things. I want to elaborate on that here.

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"Hey God, you and I both know..."

Okay let me explain the "Hey God, you and I both know..." thing. When you pray for some event xyz to happen, it's because you think xyz would be a good thing, and you think that God thinks xyz would be a good thing. So when you pray for it, and you listen to God and you don't hear any pushback from Them saying They disagree with it, it increases your confidence that God agrees with you about xyz.

This is not really a big deal if you're praying for something fairly uncontroversial, like "God, help my friend who is sick to get better." But what about these other common prayer requests:

• "God, help so-and-so to see that you exist, and become a Christian."
• "God, so-and-so shouldn't be dating their partner such-and-such because [they are gay/ one of them is Christian and one is not/ insert additional judgy reasons], help them realize that and break up."
• "God, our culture has turned away from you by [being woke/ letting gay people be on tv/ allowing no-fault divorce/ allowing children to not say the 'under God' part of the Pledge of Allegiance/ any other culture war issue], please make people stop doing that and come back to you."

Basically, prayers that say "I'm right, and other people are wrong- and obviously God is on my side on this issue." When you pray like that, and you do it day after day, and you feel emotionally connected to God and don't have any sense of something being a bit off when you pray like that- it reinforces the idea that God does indeed agree with you about what other people's correct behavior should be on these issues.

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I should mention that sometimes God does push back

Now, in my experience in evangelical Christianity, it's NOT true that every time you set out to pray for xyz to happen, you end up even more convinced that God agrees with you on xyz. Sometimes God does "push back." (I mean, I no longer believe in that kind of "personal relationship with God" so in general I don't think it's actually *God* who is "pushing back"- but I mean the person who is praying experiences it that way.)

For example, one time I was praying about something, and I realized that my feelings about it were kinda racist, and that obviously God loves people of all races equally, so I was in the wrong. Praying made me realize that I was wrong, that God did not agree with me on whatever I initially was going to pray about.

I remember another time, one of my Christian friends was telling me about struggling with low self-esteem, and praying about it, and feeling like God was telling her she was the one being selfish for making such a big deal about her self and her self-esteem. Thinking about it now, this kind of seems uh not helpful, and she probably should have gone to therapy. But the point is, she went to pray about something, and the process of praying changed her mind. 

Yes, I had experiences like that too- praying in a way that you're totally open to whatever God has to say- sometimes you feel that God is saying you're viewing the situation all wrong.

But, importantly, that's not likely to happen on any of the big culture-war issues, because evangelicals are just so confident that God agrees with them on those. You can see the examples I gave here are along the lines of "I am so thoroughly sinful that my sin has biased me to thinking about these things in the wrong way." Rather than "Maybe the things that I hear in church all the time, which we all take for granted, actually aren't true."

Here's another way God might "push back"- suppose you are worried about losing your job, so you pray that God won't let it happen, but then you lose your job anyway, but then months later you're in a much better situation, and you conclude that actually it was good that you lost your job. So you decide that when you prayed about it back then, God didn't agree with you on it. You pray for something to happen, but then much later realize it wasn't the right thing.

When that kind of thing happens though, people describe it like this: "I prayed for abc to happen, but on some level I didn't really feel peace about it when I prayed. Now I understand why I felt that way- it's because God knew that abc wasn't right for me." I am extremely curious about whether this is an accurate representation of what happened, or just a justification they came up with after-the-fact. Maybe sometimes you "don't feel peace" about something, but then everything goes fine and you forget that you had those feelings. 

---

Mormons

In college, I had a bunch of Mormon friends, and they were always going on about how non-Mormons should read the Book of Mormon and pray to ask God about whether it's true, and everyone who has done this has concluded that it's true. I guess this is one of the common Mormon talking points, because they were ALWAYS advising people to do this "experiment."

(I'm very skeptical about this statistic "everyone who has done this has concluded it's true." When I was evangelical, we also threw around supposed "facts" like that. Very skeptical about whether anyone actually did any kind of study to measure this- or is it just like, if you said you tried it and you're not convinced about being Mormon, well you must have done it wrong.)

My Mormon friends said, why not try it? What's the harm? You want to find the truth, right? 

And yes, I did want to be open to whatever God wanted to tell me, to finding the truth no matter what it was, even if it meant I had been wrong and needed to change.

But I never tried this "experiment." I never prayed and asked God, "Is the Book of Mormon true?" Because every time I imagined myself going into the presence of my God and asking him "Is the Book of Mormon true?" it just felt so ridiculous, so embarrassing. Like if I genuinely prayed that with an open mind, my God would answer, "What are you talking about? Of course not."

It's like, if you have a friend that you've known for a long time, and you've talked to them a lot about their opinions on some certain topic, and then one day out of the blue you come up to them and say "Is it true that [something that people who disagree with them on that topic would say]?" Of course they would be completely shocked, and respond, "What? What on earth? Where is this coming from?" and you would feel ridiculous for even asking the question.

That's why I never asked God about if Mormonism was true. Evangelicals believe Mormonism is a cult, and so of course my God believed that. Of course my God would be flabbergasted if I came up to him with an open mind and asked if it was true.

So my point is, if you feel like you really know God, you'll be so confident that God believes you are right and other people are wrong.

---

I changed, but God can't change

When I was evangelical, I had a lot of anti-queer opinions, because that's a key part of what it means to be evangelical. I believed that God intended everyone to be straight. I believed that it wasn't necessarily bad to have feelings of same-sex attraction, but it would be a sin to ever "act on" them- for example, by being in a same-sex relationship. Gay and bi people should just repress themselves, and then in the long run, they'll see that that's what's best for them. Living a "homosexual lifestyle" may seem like a good thing, but it's actually harmful to those who do it. Oh and also, gay people are pushing a "homosexual agenda" to destroy marriage or something.

On the internet, I found blogs written by gay Christians. They talked about their own feelings and experiences. As it turns out, they were not trying to destroy marriage. They were just trying to obey God, like I was. They talked about how they had tried conversion therapy, tried so hard to repress themselves, tried to follow "God's rules," and the result was so bad. And then when they accepted themselves, accepted their queer identity, everything was so much better. They talked about how good and healing it was to finally be in a same-sex relationship.

So basically, I found out that all those evangelical talking points about how gay people are so bad and they hate God, and if they just tried harder, they could become straight- I found out that was all lies. So I changed my beliefs on that.

But what about God?

I changed my beliefs because I came across information I didn't have before. But what about God? God knows everything. There were 3 possible explanations:

1. God really does buy into all the anti-gay bullshit propaganda.
2. God has known all along that it was all lies, and that actually we should accept queer people.
3. God discovered this information at the same time I did, and changed his views.

I felt option 3 wasn't possible because God knows everything. 

For option 2, I felt it wasn't possible because of how real it had felt, back then when I prayed for God to stop same-sex marriage from being legal, back when I had prayed that God would help gay people see the error of their ways... I remember one time, there was a facebook thread I was replying to, and I really spent a long time thinking about what exactly to say, and praying about it, writing a draft and then deleting parts I wasn't totally sure about, and in the end I was very confident that I was saying what God wanted me to say... This was an important part of my "personal relationship with God" back then, asking God for help with navigating "hate the sin, love the sinner." And it all felt very real- there was never any feeling that God was hinting "maybe you're wrong about this."

If God knew all along that I was wrong, why didn't he ever say anything about it?

I was talking about this to someone, years ago, and their explanation was that God *did* "say something about it"- that God led me to find the information that helped me change my beliefs. I know there are ex-evangelical Christians who conceptualize it this way, and continue to have a "personal relationship with God." That's fine for them, but I feel it doesn't match what I experienced. For me, it was so real, the way I connected with God while promoting things which turned out to be harmful. I just can't believe that God was sitting there the whole time thinking "she's wrong about this" and didn't say anything to me about it at all. (Maybe this could be explained as "God knew I wasn't yet ready to listen and change my beliefs" but I mean he could have at least said *something*.)

When I changed my beliefs on queer acceptance, it felt like rebelling against God. It did NOT feel like I was following where God was leading me.

So I was left with option 1- that my God really did believe gay people were sinning and should just try harder to be straight, and were pushing a "homosexual agenda" to destroy America or whatever.

And so I had to abandon that God. I believe in a totally different God now. And I'm not willing to have a "personal relationship" with any God again.

(A similar thing happened when I found out about white privilege and systemic racism- why didn't God ever mention those things to me before???)

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Conclusion

One of the biggest reasons that I don't pray is that I'm very uncomfortable with assuming that God agrees with me. If I pray for xyz to happen, there's the assumption that God also should believe xyz is a good thing. I can't get into that again- that's something that was really bad for me, when I was evangelical. I can't have a "personal relationship with God" again.

---

Related:

Believing in the God You Want 

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

We did a dirty thing. We prayed at her wedding.

My Racist Personal Relationship with God 

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God

This is what a "personal relationship with God" looks like. Be very afraid. 

Believing in the God You Want

xkcd comic where one person says to the other, "...But wouldn't a God who could find a flaw in the ontological argument be even greater?" Image source.

The ontological argument for God's existence never really made any sense to me. As I understand it, it goes like this: Imagine the greatest thing ever, the greatest thing you can imagine. That thing must be God, because we define "God" to be the greatest thing ever. Now, suppose that that thing didn't exist. Ah, but then it's not the greatest thing we can imagine, because we can imagine a version of it that really did exist, and obviously that would be even better than the one that doesn't exist. Therefore, it really does exist. Therefore, God exists.

(Maybe I've missed something and this isn't actually how the ontological argument goes? At any rate, I'm not going to be convinced it's a good argument.)

I first heard about the ontological argument years and years ago, when I was a college student. I felt like it didn't really make sense- it was like, we're doing this thought experiment about "the greatest thing you can imagine" and then there's some clever wordplay and suddenly the thought experiment breaks out and becomes a real thing. 

What? 

It's about as convincing as saying God has to exist because "wouldn't that be cool?"

---

Fast-forward to when I was leaving evangelicalism and changing a lot of my beliefs about God. For example, I used to believe that God was going to send most people to hell, to suffer forever, and that it was right for him to do that, and that the criteria he used was whether or not someone was "saved"- ie, did they believe in Jesus in the specific correct way, with the correct facts and correct attitude. (Maybe there's an exception for people who haven't heard about Jesus- maybe they can get into heaven if God determines that they "would have" believed, if they had known. Maybe. Don't bank on it though.) That's the God that evangelicals believe in.

But, I decided, that isn't right. That isn't just. It's horrible for God to send the majority of people to hell. So, no, I don't believe in that. I believe in a God who judges in a way which is actually just. ... Or, maybe what I mean is, I believe in a God who judges in a way that *in my opinion* is just.

(Many people change their religious beliefs because of evidence or lack thereof, but for me it was about morality. I knew all the logical apologetics answers, but eventually I came to the point where I couldn't believe it anymore, because it was so heartless.)

So, there's kind of a weird thing going on with my beliefs. It's like I've never had any separation between the concepts of "the God who actually exists (if any)" and "a God who is good and moral- the God that we would want to exist."

Piecing my beliefs together as an ex-evangelical, imagining the God that I would want to exist, the God I feel would be the best version of God, and then believing that surely this must be the God who actually exists.

It was like... examining my evangelical beliefs, thinking, that can't be what God is like, because God is good, and I can no longer force myself to believe that sending the majority of people to hell is good. Changing my beliefs about what "good" means- but I never considered the possibility that God might not be good.

I was never impressed with the ontological argument, but isn't this kind of the same thing?

---

There's another possibility, but it's one I have never seriously considered: What if there is a God who exists, but They are a bad god, an immoral god, a god we should NOT obey. This God sends people to hell for all the wrong reasons, this God causes good things or bad things to happen to people in a manipulative and petty way, etc. 

What then?

Well, I never seriously considered that possibility, because it just seems like such a bad situation to be in- what would we even do? We want to help others, we want to do the right thing, but God is against us, and this God is all-powerful and we don't have a chance. I don't want to believe that's really the reality we live in. (Is this the "just world fallacy"?)

I will note, though, that when I was evangelical, there were things I believed about God that I wasn't happy about- for example, how much I had to plead and beg in my constant attempts to get God to answer my prayers- evangelicals believe that God is so powerful and active and totally answers prayers, and if it doesn't seem to be working, there must be some little technicality on my end, like maybe God is refusing because I don't have the right attitude or beliefs when I pray. I wasn't happy about this trait that I believed God had, but I thought that meant I was wrong. That in some way that I couldn't understand, it was actually good for God to be like this, and my opinion was wrong. "God's ways are higher than our ways."

So I believed "if I don't agree with something God is doing, I'm the one in the wrong- I need to force myself to believe this thing God does is good." Rather than "if I don't agree with something God is doing, I will fight this God."

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For evangelicals, there's sort of something similar going on with the bible- though as an ex-evangelical, I don't view the bible that way any more.

The evangelical view is, if the bible says something, that means it's true. If the bible says God said something, or God did something, or God approved of something, well then it must have been right for God to do that. If it's something that strikes us as horrific, like God commanding the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, including children- well, we're the ones in the wrong, for being horrified by that. We need to read an apologetics book to convince ourselves that genocide is sometimes right.

(I will note, though, that in this view, if the bible says a person did something which we feel is terrible, we don't have to believe it was right. The human characters in the bible [except for Jesus] can do things which are wrong. They can serve as examples of what NOT to do. Not so for God.)

But now I no longer believe the bible is inerrant. I believe the bible is wrong about things. A lot of things. They wrote down "God told us to do this or that" and I can say "well, they were wrong." God didn't tell them to do that. Or, in the universe of the story, that God is a bad god- it's not the god I believe in though, so whatever.

So I now have a separation in my beliefs, between "what the bible really means" and "what is right and good." And I think that's great- I love how it gives me the freedom to study the bible for what it really is. Learning about what the bible says is no longer tangled up with being required to believe what the bible says. I'm allowed to learn the bible in an honest way, rather than subconsciously refusing to believe that it says things I can't bring myself to believe are good.

But I don't have the same perspective on God. I don't have a separation between "what God is like" and "what is right and good." Hmm. Is this a problem?

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This is why I don't have a "personal relationship with God," actually. 

I know I must have some incorrect beliefs about God, because everyone has at least a few incorrect beliefs about various things. And since my view of God is "here's *my opinion* on what is right and good and moral, that must also be *God's opinion* because I believe God is good- how would it even work, to believe in intricate detail that God is good, if you didn't also believe 'God agrees with me on every aspect of morality'?" ... I don't have the confidence to act like I really know God, to go up to God and say "hey, you and me both know that [whatever belief I have about right and wrong]." No one should do that. We should all recognize that we are wrong about some things. And therefore, you can't really "know" God.

I see it more like, I'm over here doing my own thing, trying to do the best I can, and God is also here existing, and there must be some mismatch between my opinions and God's opinions, but it's impossible to know exactly what that mismatch is- so there's a haze between us, and I can't really know Them, and I shouldn't try- that can only lead to the arrogance of "God agrees with me."

---

The God I believe in is the God I want to believe in. I come up with beliefs about Them based on my own understanding of goodness and morality, without allowing for the possibility of "maybe God is not good, in some ways." 

I recognize there's something illogical about this, but I'm not sure there's an alternative that's better. Should I believe there is a God, but sometimes that God does bad things, so I should fight Them [how?], and/or by sheer coincidence, all the things I think God does wrong are also the things where I have incorrect beliefs about right and wrong, so actually it's fine and what was the point of believing God does some things wrong? 

(I mean, also there's the alternative to just not believe in any god at all- I really am a Christian though, so that's out...)

So I just believe God fits my definition of "good", but I don't believe it with enough confidence to try to use it as a foundation for actually communicating with this God and having a "personal relationship" with Them.

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Follow-up post: "Hey God, you and I both know..."

Related:

Modifying My Faith Because of Doubt 

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

Noah's Evangelism 

When it comes to God, I believed Might Makes Right 

Does God believe in Meta-God?

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

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" (book review)

Book cover for "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," 1995 edition.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll, is a book that was published in 1995. (There's also a 2022 version which includes some updates about Trumpism.) I've seen this book mentioned by ex-evangelical blogs many times over the years, and I finally read it. Here is my review of it.

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The overall thesis of the book

I had heard that this book was about anti-intellectual pressures in evangelical Christian culture. I had heard the quote, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." 

And, growing up evangelical, I had experienced some of this anti-intellectualism. There are questions you're not allowed to ask in church. There is an attitude that "we know better than scientists and scholars because we have the bible." I was guessing that was the sort of thing this book would talk about.

But it mostly didn't. It was not about what it's like "on the ground" in evangelical culture. Noll is a historian, and the book traces the history of evangelical attitudes toward intellectual thought, over the past several hundred years, showing the movements that came and went, and how that led to where we are today. (Or rather, in 1995.) That's really useful to know about, but it wasn't what I was expecting, so at first I couldn't really understand what Noll's point was.

Here's his point: Evangelicals have not done the work of applying evangelical beliefs to high-level academic study. Catholics have universities which were founded out of the Catholic tradition and do good quality research in many many different fields, but evangelicals don't really have anything like that. Yes, there are evangelical seminaries and bible colleges, of course, but these aren't really known for their high-level research. We should be applying evangelical ideas to all fields of academic research- philosophy, art, politics, and so on, but evangelicals aren't doing that.

And, because of that, evangelicals are not obeying the command to "love God with your mind." They are not interested in learning about the world that God created. And because evangelical thinking is so shallow, they are not prepared to face new ideas or societal developments and respond to them in a way that's reasonable and consistent with evangelical Christian beliefs.

The first thing that came to mind for me was, well, what about creationism, that's an example of evangelicals applying their ideology to science and going really deep with it and inventing a whole field of """science""" that's completely different from "secular" science. But, then Noll mentioned creationism as an example of evangelical anti-intellectualism. So, no, that's not what he thinks evangelicals should be doing.

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I have to admit I don't really get it

I'm having a really hard time grasping what it would mean for evangelicals to deeply apply evangelical thinking to big academic questions or societal problems.

The book talks about how Catholics have historically valued tradition and study, and major universities were started because of a Catholic drive to learn about the world and do excellent academic work. It's very hard for me to imagine evangelicals doing something similar, because, to be honest, when I was evangelical, that was one of the reasons we viewed Catholics as "fake." Yes, we were highly suspicious that Catholics were "fake Christians" because being Christian is about having a "personal relationship with God" (this is how evangelicals define "Christian"), and Catholics were not so big on that. Catholics were more into tradition and church hierarchy. Evangelicalism is about reading the bible yourself, experiencing God yourself, having spiritual experiences that mean a lot to you personally but are hard to explain to other people. We felt that Catholics had kind of missed the point- they followed their traditions and their church leaders and the pope, rather than going directly to the bible or directly to God. They were all caught up in listening to what other people said about God, rather than having a "personal relationship" with God. So, they were highly likely to be "fake Christians."

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" talks a lot about this aspect of evangelicalism. Experiencing God and the bible in an "intuitive" and personal way, which is accessible to everyone- and how that causes evangelicals to not value advanced academic study.

Academia is all about building on the work that other people have done. Spending years learning about some very very niche problem and then advancing humanity's knowledge on it- and only people who have spent years studying in your same field can even understand what you're working on. To me, it feels very incompatible with the evangelical focus on how God is always right there with us and God knows everything, and we already have all the answers we need because we have the bible.

Yes, there are evangelicals in academia. Of course there are. I went to grad school, for engineering, and I was evangelical back then. What I'm saying is, I don't understand what it would even look like to meaningfully bring one's evangelical beliefs into one's academic work, unless you were studying theology or something very obviously religious like that. The evangelicals who study engineering, for example, keep their engineering work separate from their religious beliefs. Yes, sometimes there's an element of "I'm really stuck on this problem, I'm going to pray for God to help me figure it out" or "I can't take credit for figuring this out on my own- God gave me the ability to do it." But beyond that, I don't see how they can mix.

Okay, maybe because I'm thinking about my experience in STEM, that's why it doesn't make sense to bring religious beliefs into it. Maybe for fields about philosophy and morality, and art and meaning, and how we should live and how we should structure society, maybe in those areas it makes sense that evangelicals should bring their evangelical beliefs into their academic work. And Noll says there are evangelicals who do a good job of this, but mostly they work for secular or Catholic universities. There aren't evangelical institutions where people do this kind of work.

But I'm still having trouble understanding what Noll wants evangelicals to do, exactly. The examples in the book, of evangelicals doing this well, come across as not evangelical, to me.

I'm not sure how to explain how exactly this feels "not evangelical." It's something about... for evangelicals, being a Christian is about having an active, dynamic, emotional "personal relationship with God." It's a little wild, a little risky, full of big dramatic gestures about "laying down your life", and God suddenly "calling" you to go do some ridiculous thing. This is the polar opposite of good academic work, which is about spending years studying the minute details about what other researchers have done in your field, very careful, getting the citations right, making sure every claim you make is backed up by something that your readers could look up. Just years of normal and boring human work- no "you have to believe me because God randomly told me this."

And it feels really "not evangelical" to me, when considering the question "what does our Christian faith have to say about this or that issue?", to answer by citing sources built on years of human effort doing the necessary academic work. No, that's exactly what we're NOT supposed to do, right? We should address the question "what does our Christian faith have to say about this or that issue?" by praying about it and considering whether any thoughts which subsequently pop into your head may or may not be from God. And reading the bible and simplistically applying 1 bible verse to whatever the issue is.

The bible says "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding." And "leaning on your own understanding" sounds a lot like valuing a legacy of work done by academics over many years, right? "Trusting in the Lord with all your heart" would be believing whatever random thing "God told you" just now, right?

So, I mean, I understand that evangelicals can be in academia and do good work there, but the work itself does not read as "evangelical" to me. It's a separate thing from their religion. So I couldn't really understand what Noll would want this to look like, in an ideal world. 

Keep in mind, this book was written in 1995, so things may be much different between then and when I was "on fire for God" sometime around 2010-ish. Also, my experience is as an average church member, who also read a lot of bible-study books because I'm a nerd. Whereas, Noll is a historian who studies evangelical culture in the US. He is an evangelical with much more of an academic background than I have. I've heard (mostly from the Slacktivist) that there is a disconnect between what pastors learn in seminary and what the average churchgoer believes. For example, scholars who have actually studied the story of the Exodus know that it didn't really happen. But even if the pastor knows this, no way they can say it out loud in church- to the average evangelical, it's very much NOT acceptable to believe the Exodus didn't really happen- that's an attack on the bible! So there's a disconnect between the anti-intellectualism of the average churchgoer, and the higher-level leaders who have more awareness that these commonly-required evangelical beliefs just aren't true.

So my point is, it's very likely there's a difference between my opinion and Noll's on what "feels evangelical."

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Creationism and pre-millennial dispensationalism

The two main examples of anti-intellectualism that this book gives are young-earth creationism and pre-millennial dispensationalism [PMD]. Here, let me define them: Young-earth creationism is the belief that God created the whole universe in 6 days, like Genesis 1 says, and therefore the earth is only about 6000 years old. Pre-millennial dispensationalism is the belief that the world is going to end "soon", and Jesus will come and "rapture" all the Christians away, and then the anti-christ will come, etc, and therefore we should obsess over news stories about things happening in the Middle East, to look for clues that match up with the prophecies in the bible.

I used to believe in young-earth creationism. And as for pre-millennial dispensationalism, and the other popular Christian ideas about how the world will end "soon", I never got into that at all. I guess I believed it was true that the bible gave prophecies about when the world would end, and that Christians who paid attention would be able to pick up on the "signs" when it happened, as the PMDs claimed. But I felt there was a very low probability that any of it would happen in my lifetime, so I didn't see any point to doing that kind of obsessed analysis and "being ready" for when Jesus comes. I thought, we've had 2000 years of Christians believing Jesus would come back "soon", and all of them were wrong. Probably it won't happen in my lifetime either! So I very much refused to be part of any of the "Jesus is coming back SOON, we have to be READY" hype.

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" points out that creationism is about refusing to learn about this amazing world that God made, if that knowledge might contradict your view of what "the bible says." And PMD ideology responds to news events in the Middle East (and/or the question of whether bar codes are "the mark of the beast") in an extremely shallow way- simply trying to match them up with bible verses, making claims about "here's what the bible says about this." Rather than actually learning about the history of the real-life groups involved, what they actually want, the reasons for conflict, etc.

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Inerrancy

The book talks about the evangelical belief in biblical inerrancy. Noll describes this modern approach as taking a "scientific" view of the bible; in other words, viewing the bible as a list of ironclad true statements, and building on top of that. Developing ideas about biology/geology, as in young-earth creationism, or piecing bible verses together like a challenging puzzle, to find connections to modern news events, as in pre-millennial dispensationalism. Simply taking each verse as a true statement which can be 100% believed, and making logical deductions accordingly. 

This is a very new view of the bible. (Noll says that Christians who argue for this reading of the bible aren't "defending the bible"; they're defending an interpretation that's less than 100 years old.) In contrast, one could read the bible with an awareness of ancient literary genres and the reasons that writers would have spun the stories in certain ways. The things they wrote to make sense of the world, not because they actually happened.

This is also a bit confusing to me- is Noll saying biblical inerrancy is an example of evangelical anti-intellectual sentiment, and therefore evangelicals should abandon it? This makes no sense to me. How can you BE evangelical and not believe in biblical inerrancy? Like, yes, I agree that evangelicals should abandon their belief in inerrancy, but by doing so, they would cease to be evangelical- yes, I believe they should abandon evangelicalism, actually. But obviously that's not what Noll is trying to say.

I don't recall if the book says inerrancy is a problem, or if it says this approach of "reading the bible scientifically" is a problem. From my point of view, those are the same thing. As I define it, inerrancy is this insistence that every single thing in the bible is true, actually true. Does Noll define inerrancy differently? Does Noll think you can believe "the bible is inerrant" and also believe that the creation story in Genesis 1 didn't actually happen at all, under any interpretation of the word "happen", but was just something they wrote back then to illustrate how they viewed the relationship between God, people, and the earth? That's not inerrancy- or at least, I would not call it inerrancy.

Again, this book was published in 1995. Surely things have changed since then. And Noll is coming from an academic background, whereas I just went to church A LOT. So... that's why I'm not quite understanding some of his points.

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Some examples of my experiences of anti-intellectualism in church

In my experience in church, yes there were comments about how we already know the answers because we have the bible, and scientists don't know what they're talking about. I remember hearing a story that went something like this:

My 6-year old son was at school, and his teacher was telling the students that the Exodus didn't really happen the way the bible said. Moses didn't really part the Red Sea. The Israelites just walked across on a sand bridge where the water wasn't as deep. Just a few inches of water. Then my son raised his hand and said, "Wow, it's so amazing that the whole Egyptian army drowned in just a few inches of water!"

The point of this story is: Oh those public schools, trying to tell our kids that the bible isn't true! It's horrible, it's an attack on Christianity! This teacher talking about the Israelites walking through a shallow section of the Red Sea- lololololol! So ridiculous! Taking the big dramatic story about Moses parting the Red Sea, and turning it into this silly thing about simply wading through the water- that's so funny! Lolololol! And it doesn't even make any sense, because then how would the Egyptian army drown in that water? Even a child can see right through it! LOLOLOLOL! [whole congregation laughs]

(And don't even get me started on the uninformed jokes people at church make about evolution!)

I remember one of my history teachers in high school, saying something like "Religious people believe [some bible story]. And historians believe [some modified version of the bible story which doesn't have miracles]." I really didn't like the way she said it, like saying "people who are more realistic know that the things in the bible didn't really happen." I wondered if there were any historical scholars who were "on our side", ie, who believed a very simplistic, naive, "the bible is inerrant" ideology.

Another thing: I sometimes read articles talking about "People say Christians don't value science, but that's not true! There are scientists who are Christians! For example, Francis Collins." I don't know why, but it seemed that Francis Collins was always the one they pointed to. I heard about him many times, but I don't actually know what his scientific contributions were. I think something about medical research? [Oh okay I just googled him- he worked on the Human Genome Project.] Wow, that's very interesting, isn't it- evangelicals mention Francis Collins just to score points in a debate against an atheist who says "Christians are anti-intellectual", but do we know or care about what scientific things Collins actually worked on? Lol, no. We mentioned him not because we actually cared about science, but because we wanted our debate opponents to stop saying we didn't care about science.

And another thing I remember from when I was evangelical was this: Sometimes I would read about scientists who were Christians, and it was presented like "hooray, our beliefs aren't illogical, see, here are some smart people who believe in this." But sometimes I would dig deeper, and find more information about these role models, and I would find out that they didn't actually believe all the things that "real Christians" should believe. Their faith was much more nuanced than that. For example, they weren't creationists. They didn't believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Etc. So... they didn't meet the evangelical criteria to be "real Christians" actually. And so they couldn't really be used as evidence for "see, smart people believe these things." I remember being kinda concerned about that, back then.

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Other writing which used "scandal" in the title

Because this is an important book related to the history of American evangelicalism, the title has inspired some other similar titles:

The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart, a 2013 post by Rachel Held Evans. It's about how she grew up always knowing all the apologetics answers- but the reason she began to question what she had been taught was because of her heart. This is very similar to my own reasons for leaving evangelicalism. 

The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, a 2005 book by Ron Sider. I have not read this, but I know that Ron Sider was an evangelical who advocated for evangelicals to seriously follow the bible's teachings regarding helping poor people and other social-justice causes.

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Conclusion

If you're always talking about evangelicalism, like I am, then you should read this book. Yes, definitely required reading if you are this specific type of person.

But, as I said, I feel like I didn't really *get* it. I don't even know what it would look like for evangelicals to seriously apply their beliefs in an academic sense. That would mean valuing tradition and history and the work that other people have done, long before us, and that comes across to me as not evangelical. Evangelicals are more about "I read this bible verse and here's how I felt about it" or "I was praying and a random thought popped into my head, maybe it's from God"- and treating these personal, emotional experiences as more real and truthful than whatever those stuffy arrogant scholars have to say. From that perspective, building on the academic work that people have been doing for hundreds of years is NOT a good thing- it means there have been hundreds of years during which that line of study could have gotten off-track, as sinful humans continue to develop it. Better to go directly to the source- directly to God, who is the Truth- ie, whatever random thoughts passed through your head while praying and/or reading the bible.

I honestly don't see any way you can be evangelical and believe that the way we advance our evangelical thinking is through work done by researchers rather than claims about "God told me this."

Well, I mean, I'm oversimplifying it a bit... In my experience, yes, evangelicals are interested in learning the meanings of ancient Greek and Hebrew words, to understand the bible better. Yes, evangelicals do believe that whatever the original Greek or Hebrew said is a better interpretation than whatever naive thought popped into your head when you read an English translation. Yes, we did believe we could get more insight into what the bible was saying if we learned about the culture it came from. And no, we didn't just believe that any thought that flittered across your mind while praying must be a message from God.

But... it wasn't like we were going to learn anything new from that kind of study. It was like, we already knew the answers, generally, and we looked up the meanings of ancient Greek words to kinda fill in some details.

And yes, we very much did believe that it was common for God to tell you something by just giving you some random thought out of the blue. A big source of evangelical anxiety is trying to figure out which random thoughts are from God and which aren't. (And some random thoughts might actually be from the devil! Watch out!)

I never realized how the "personal relationship with God" is so bound up with anti-intellectualism, so I'm glad I read this book. 

(When I think of anti-intellectualism in Christian spaces, I think of someone saying "I'm having doubts about the existence of God" and then people shaming them for even saying that out loud. People telling them the point is to "have faith" with no evidence. And yeah that kind of thinking definitely exists in evangelical spaces, but there are also a lot of evangelicals pushing back against it, saying, "God really is real, therefore our beliefs are strong enough to handle any questions you have. Ask any questions you want. It's normal to doubt." I was one of the evangelicals advocating for the right to question and doubt back then. But still, there was always a limit to it- you could ask any question you wanted, but at the end of the day you had to come back to what we already know are the "correct" beliefs.)

In the book, Noll doesn't really come right out and say "the concept of a 'personal relationship with God' is inherently anti-intellectual." He talks about historical movements which have placed emphasis on each person being able to easily understand the bible and having an "intuitive" experience of God, and how that came along with de-prioritizing advanced academic work based on evangelical beliefs. I'm having a hard time understanding what he would want evangelicals to do instead, because to me this is sounding like "the concept of a 'personal relationship with God' is inherently anti-intellectual" but I don't think it's possible to be evangelical and not believe that the most critical aspect of Christian faith is having a personal relationship with God.

So, in summary: This is an important book if you're interested in the history of American evangelicalism. Evangelicals have emphasized having an individual, "intuitive" experience of God, and have not applied their beliefs in more advanced, academic ways. The result is a shallow ideology which isn't able to meaningfully address new societal issues. But, I don't understand what the book wants evangelicals to do instead. Respect for history, tradition, and the work that scholars have done feels not evangelical to me.

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Related:

I used to be a young-earth creationist 

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