On demons and what really matters

Palm branch. Image source.

Here's a post from Tripp Fuller: I Am Undefeated Against Demons. 1 and 0. (via) It's about this one time where someone came to Fuller's church seeking an exorcism, claiming to be possessed by a demon. I love the part where the church secretary says to Fuller, "Since you’re the only one here from the South and you used to be an evangelical, we figured, you could handle this."

Fuller doesn't believe in demons. But here's someone coming to him, in need of help. He needs to help him, and the way to do that is just go along with the "it's a demon" framework, even though it's not.

He started talking. And while he was talking, his face would do a thing, and the voice would change, and the demon would pop out to say hi like an uninvited co-host on a podcast. Then he was back. Then the demon was back. Then he was back.

As I listened, here is what I was actually hearing. This guy was a horrible boss. He was making piles of money off people he treated badly. He was a workaholic. He had an addiction problem. He was taking all of it out on his family.

Now, friend. If anything is going to count as demonic, that will do.

Really fascinating that Fuller is witnessing this odd behavior and still totally doesn't believe it's a demon. The *actual* problem is that this guy is mistreating the people around him. 

Fuller tells this guy that the way to get rid of demons is to let the love of God in. Accept God's love for you, and stop hurting the people around you. And Fuller prays over this guy, while hitting water with a palm branch- not that he believes the palm branch is doing anything, but because this "demon-possessed" guy is looking for some kind of ritual to get rid of the demon.

I'm really interested in this post because it's a perspective on demons that I've totally never heard before. Basically, the idea is that when people talk about demons, there aren't *actually* demons, but if people want to use spiritual concepts like that to describe their experiences, fine, whatever- BUT the important thing is about how people treat each other, about relationships, about emotional health. And these spiritual concepts like "demons" are maybe acceptable to believe in, but only in service to what actually matters (love, community, emotional health, etc).

(Here's a question: so apparently Fuller doesn't believe this "demon" is really a demon- but he tells this guy to "let the love of God in"- does he believe "the love of God" is a real thing, or is that also just an imaginary concept that we can believe in if it's helpful for us, sort of a metaphorical way to think about accepting yourself and caring for the people around you?)

Let's contrast this with the mindset where these spiritual things- heaven, hell, God, the devil, angels, demons- are real, and they are more real than the physical world we can perceive. The gospel I was taught said that what really matters is whether you go to heaven or hell for all eternity. Our lives on earth are just the blink of an eye; it doesn't really matter what we do here. The only important thing we can do in our earthly lives is to correctly believe in Jesus and "get saved" so we go to heaven instead of hell.

And so, in this mindset where the spiritual world is more real than the physical world, ideas like morality, human connection, and emotional health are kind of... orthogonal to what really matters and what's really real. Yeah sure, God wants you to be a good person, love others, etc, but that's just some arbitrary rules that God made up- we just have to do them because God said to, not because they are central to the things that really matter.

And there's a tension... The more you believe in hell, the more you believe that your friends are in danger of going to hell, the more you will harass them, lie to them, coerce them- anything you can possibly do to push them toward "getting saved." Belief in the realness of the spiritual world is at odds with common-sense morality.

At the church where I grew up, people didn't talk about demons lurking in the world around us, possibly affecting our lives. (With one exception: I heard warnings about Harry Potter. Specifically, the concern that Christians had was that the spells in Harry Potter are real, so if kids read the books and then try those things out, it really will summon demons.) I know there some churches where people talk about demons all the time, but that wasn't my experience. Then when I was in college, some of my Christian friends would describe things that happened to them as "spiritual warfare"- like "I had a really good conversation with a non-Christian friend, I told her about Jesus- but then after that, I felt really discouraged and just kept thinking about all the things I should have said differently- maybe it's spiritual warfare." Ie, maybe the devil is planting these thoughts of discouragement in your head, because you did a *good* thing by talking to your friend about Jesus, and the devil is trying to stop you. I kind of believed that, but also I felt like, "really? We really believe that the devil himself is influencing our emotions? Isn't that kind of, uh, crazy?" I always thought it was suspicious that people would call it "spiritual warfare" like a vague and abstract euphemism, comes across as less bonkers than "the devil is doing this to me."

I have 1 anecdote about demons. So, when I was a college student, I went to a Christian conference. At one point, there was a group of us just hanging out and talking, maybe 5 students, and one of the other students there (let's call her Claire) told this story about when she personally had cast out a demon. So this is something I heard secondhand; I have no way to tell you how true any of it is. But anyway, Claire said there was a girl, let's call her Hannah, who was acting weird one night, and putting her legs in weird positions, and Claire and her friends were sure it was because Hannah was possessed by a demon. (I think there was more to it than that, like Hannah had a history of weird/"sinful" behavior, so she was thought to be more likely to be demon-possessed than the average person, but I don't remember the details.) So Claire and her friends stayed there with Hannah all night, commanding the demon to leave "in the name of Jesus." Claire told us, if you say "in the name of Jesus," the demon has to leave, it has to. Apparently they sat there with Hannah for quite a long time telling the demon to come out "in the name of Jesus," and eventually, by the time it was morning, Hannah seemed to be back to normal. 

When I heard this story, the main angle I viewed it from was "if this is true, this is PROOF that the spiritual world is real, and our Christian beliefs are true." That's what I wanted back then: proof. To get the enticement of atheism out of my head. Sure, there are plenty of people out there claiming some kind of miracle happened to them, but how do we know they're not making it up? Is there photo/video evidence? Do we have statements written down, by the people who witnessed it, immediately after it happened? Can we ask these witnesses a bunch of questions to get a clear picture of what happened, and make sure they're not mistaken about it?

So I viewed it through the lens of wanting proof, wanting to know if my beliefs were true or false. I noticed that my friends didn't seem to view this kind of story in that way- I had this urge to collect and preserve evidence, but other Christians didn't seem to have that. I guess they weren't viewing it in terms of "I need to prove this to myself and to other people." I guess they don't have something inside them that's always telling them to be an atheist.

It's very interesting to me, reading Fuller's blog post, about how he sees this guy right in front of him, exhibiting such odd behavior, and it doesn't affect his non-belief in demons at all. He just ignores all that, and says the real problem is the way this "demon-possessed" guy has broken his relationships with his family and co-workers, and the solution is to get this guy to accept the love of God, and then to treat people better. Like the question of whether the spiritual world exists- whether demons are real- doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is how we treat each other.

It's a perspective that views religion not as the realest thing, but as a tool that is useful only to the extent that it helps with the things we feel are most important to our lives in this physical world. Human connection, community, emotional health, that kind of thing. It's the opposite of "our earthly lives are just the blink of an eye, and all that matters is eternity in heaven or hell."

It feels like it's basically the same thing as "none of these religious claims are true at all, but they are good because they are useful for encouraging people to live in a moral way and love each other." (One could also make the argument that religion encourages people to do bad things, though. So maybe if all this is not true anyway, we'd be better off with no religion at all.)

So it's not "we believe our religion is true, now let's live according to the implications of that, no matter how strange they may seem- that's what faith is supposed to be." It's more like, we have our own experiences, real experiences and feelings in the physical world, and we're very rooted in that- that's real. And if religion can kind of give us a framework for viewing those experiences, great- but if religion ever tells us something too weird or not matching what we see in the real world, well then religion has reached the end of its usefulness, and we don't take it that seriously. Have common sense instead of having faith.

On the one hand, I like this, because it's something that actually makes sense (we should treat each other right) rather than something that depends on arguing about if demons exist/ if God exists/ etc. On the other hand, isn't this the same thing as saying my religion is not true? I don't like that; I want it to be true. I'm not just here for metaphors and inspiration; I really believe He lived and died and His tomb is empty.

But I'm stuck in a weird place where I feel that religion only matters if it leads you to do counter-intuitive things, things that look like a bad idea to people outside the religion; but also, don't ever do that- history is full of the wreckage of things that people did because their religion told them to, which everyone outside the religion could quite obviously see were bad ideas.

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Related

Don't know why I never realized this about Old Testament prophets

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

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)

Being Right vs Doing Good

So. Demons.

Katy Perry's God-Given Freedom

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How Emojis Have Become a Language Within a Language in China (June 9) Ah, yes, many layers of memes in Chinese internet culture.

My husband knows all about this, and told me another example: In comment sections, people will say they are 盖楼 [gài lóu] (adding to a building), because a long thread of comments is like a tall building, and the OP is 楼主 [lóu zhǔ] (owner of the building). If people don't like OP, they will write 楼主傻逼 [lóu zhǔ shǎ bī], "OP is a dumbass", but a lot of internet platforms will censor 傻逼 [shǎ bī], so people will just write lzsb instead (write the first letters instead of the characters themselves). But then, some people have a keyboard which will autocorrect lzsb to 兰州烧饼 [lán zhōu shāo bǐng], which sounds like the name of some kind of flatbread from the city of Lanzhou. My husband tells me that he has met people who think there really is a special traditional food in Lanzhou called 兰州烧饼 [lán zhōu shāo bǐng], and he has to tell them it's not a real thing.

"But," he says, "this meme is from 20 years ago."

2. Meet Splash, a furry detective solving underwater mysteries (May 29) Wow, this otter is trained to search for human remains in the water.

3. Elephant Bananza || Donkey Kong Bananza (Original Soundtrack) (2025) My kids have been watching my husband play this Donkey Kong game, and they are all so into it. And now we also listen to the soundtrack all the time- apparently in the game, Donkey Kong can turn into different animals, like an elephant or a zebra, and there's a different song for each. My toddler is getting really good at hearing a song and identifying what animal Donkey Kong would turn into at that part of the game.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. All Americans Need Pride Now (June 8) "At the moment, the focus of MAGA’s sexual oppression is on trans people. But what happens after they have been suppressed, and America still has problems? If you draw the conclusion that we’re still not pure enough, who do we go after next? Gays and lesbians, I suppose, and then women who have gotten abortions. And promiscuous women. And then straight men and women who don’t act masculine or feminine enough."

2. Jesus loves me, this I know, for Pete Hegseth tells me so (June 8) 

3. "Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist (June 9) "If finalized, the rule would reach every hospital, university, school district, state government, nonprofit, and homeless shelter that receives federal funding, effectively requiring much of American institutional life to discriminate against transgender people as a condition of receiving federal money."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Mamdani's New Trans Direct Clinic Will Deny Care To Those Under 19 (June 9) "When Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor, he promised to fight back—showing up to protests outside NYU Langone, pledging $65 million for gender-affirming care, and vowing to use every lever of city power to protect trans New Yorkers from federal intimidation. Since taking office, those promises have largely gone unfulfilled: no enforcement action against the hospitals that shuttered their programs, no fines from the Commission on Human Rights despite complaints open for over a year, and no public accounting of the promised funding."

Cleveland Clinic Establishes Second “Detransition” Center in the Country After DOJ Settlement (June 10) "'Detransition services were always a part of gender affirming care,' Adkison continued. 'There continues to be no increased need, and it is a bigoted, sad performative farce the Clinic is choosing to promote.'"

Yes, exactly. If people want to detransition, for whatever reason, they should have access to medical care related to that. But, wouldn't that just be a normal part of a hospital's gender-affirming care/ hormones/ gender-related therapy? Making it into a separate thing only makes sense in the political fiction where trans-affirming doctors are out to get you and want to make you trans against your wishes, and the MAGAs who have common sense are heroically coming to save those victims and establish the opposite kind of clinic, where we help them get back to their correct gender. That's not how it works at all.

4. Judge blocks Trump’s sweeping freeze on immigration benefits for 39 countries (June 5) "The 135-page ruling, from U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island, opens the door for hundreds of thousands of people with pending immigration-related applications to have these benefits unpaused. These immigrants were following the rules, McConnell wrote, but were nonetheless unlawfully targeted by the government because of where they came from."

5. Federal judge blocks Trump admin's effort to move 14 trans women to men's prisons (June 9) "Ultimately, Lamberth found that the mandatory transfer to men’s prisons 'was not a reasonable response' because 'it is fundamentally unreasonable for prison officials to respond to serious risks such as mental health deterioration, self-harm, and suicidality by intentionally creating those risks and offering to treat them after they predictably occur.'"

6. Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ‘60 Minutes’ (June 7, via) " So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer."

7. White House response to hantavirus and Ebola contrasts with COVID criticisms (June 11) "'The administration is trying to look tough,' Gostin says. 'And that's just no way to deal with an infectious disease that really doesn't know borders. We need to use science and public health rather than political theater and overkill.'"

8. Trump’s Name Is Removed From Kennedy Center Facade (June 14, 1-minute video) Hooray!

9. A plan to get lifesaving food to hungry kids was working well — until it wasn't (June 13) "'This place used to be full,' he says, able to store about 4,000 boxes — enough to feed over 4,000 kids for several weeks of treatment. 'But since USAID left, since the start of the problem with Trump, UNICEF has become weaker,' he says, gesturing at the empty space."

10. Ms. Rachel meets children with parents in ICE custody (June 10, 1-minute video)

Ms. Rachel brings children’s letters from ICE custody to Capitol Hill, including those from Colorado Springs family (June 11) "Mothers of some of the over 3,500 children cycled through the facility told investigative publication ProPublica that children were so distraught they cut themselves or talked about suicide."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. George Washington praying for the return of his slaves (May 28) "She boarded a ship to New Hampshire and never looked back. George Washington sent slavecatchers and government officials after her to recapture his “stolen property,” but her neighbors in the free state of New Hampshire helped her elude those kidnappers. Bounties and rewards were offered for her capture and re-enslavement for years afterwards."

Also from the Slacktivist: A first person, extremely possessive pronoun (June 1) "The subject of this song is, rather, a smallish neighborhood God. This is a puny God who is not the God of Haitian refugees, not the God of second-generation immigrants — not the God of LGBT people, not the God of women, not the God of widows and orphans and the poor, not the God of the sick and the immunocompromised, not the God of any of the billions of people living in any of the other 194 countries of this world, let alone the God of any of the billions of other stars in our universe."

And: Flattening and collapsing, egad! (June 2) "'Love your neighbor' is both necessary and sufficient." Preach!

2. What will it take to get a vaccine for the Ebola strain driving the current outbreak? (June 4) The good news is there's already a lot of scientific research and some vaccines that are likely to be effective. It's just a matter of actually having the money and resources to make it happen.

3. Interesting Pitch: ICR Says NO to Plain Reading of Noah's Ark (June 1, 16-minute video) Young-earth creationism says that the whole fossil record was formed during the year of Noah's flood, when all the animals and plants were buried, rather than being formed by millions of years of slow normal processes. And, therefore, all of the world's oil deposits come from the organic material buried during the flood. 

But, here's a problem: In Genesis 6:14, when God instructs Noah to build an ark, he says to coat it with pitch. !!!! Pitch! Oh no! Pitch comes from oil! There was oil before the flood? How can this be?

Please note that the bible does *not* say that all of the world's oil was formed by the flood. That's a young-earth creationist fan theory. And some young-earth creationists have realized that their fan theory contradicts the bible verse that says Noah used pitch to waterproof the ark, so now they have to come up with another fan theory about how it didn't really mean pitch, it meant pine sap or something.

Anyway, this is a video from Joel Duff which takes these young-earth creationist fan theories very seriously and explains why they don't make sense.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Todd Blanche says DOJ ‘not moving forward’ with ‘anti-weaponization’ fund (June 3) Hooray! But also, I don't think this is the end of it- they're probably going to do a lot of other shockingly-corrupt things.

2. Musk Attacks Nyong’o For The Same Reason Hitler Attacked Jewish Art (May 26) "Musk is not just some asshole complaining about Hollywood casting choices. He is one of the most horrific mass murderers in history."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Fascists Lie (Even When They Seem To Be Confessing) (June 3) This quote from Vivian Wilson: "Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me. That’s insane."

3. Republicans' sweeping election overhaul fails in the Senate (June 4) "The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies' top priority, has officially failed in the Senate." This is good news for overseas voters like me.

4. House passes war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran (June 4) This is good, but it would still need to pass the Senate and also the antichrist would have to sign it, in order to become a real law, so that is unlikely.

5. You Can’t Raise Children to Obey and Expect Them to Defend Democracy (June 4, via) "It begins when a child learns that the person with power does not have to be truthful. Or when a child learns that obedience matters more than conscience. Or when a child learns that being hurt by someone who claims to love you is normal."

6. Screwworm In Texas Cattle Could Drive Up Beef Prices—After DOGE Axed Prevention Efforts (June 4)

7. The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought (June 3, via) "Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard."

8. When U.S. foreign aid changed, AIDS workers in Africa felt it (June 7) "The program is often cited as the most effective public health campaign ever, and is estimated by the State Department to have saved roughly 26 million lives since its inception."

9. Pete Hegseth shrinks military's recognized religions list, erasing atheists and Humanists (June 5) "The Department of Defense/War, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, has just pared down the list of recognized religious labels in the military to a mere 31, making it harder for service members to use the proper identification. A decade ago, as part of a larger mission to be more welcoming to people outside traditional faiths, the list of labels had expanded to well over 200."

10. After D.C.'s Reflecting Pool gets repainted, visitors ask: What changed? (June 5)

11. Deported Filipino sailors say they were falsely linked to child sexual abuse material (June 6) "Soriano Versoza's organization, which helps Filipino sailors with paperwork and other support, documented hundreds of deportations of Filipino seafarers and all follow the same playbook: CBP agents board the ships in the morning at the dock, they round up a handful of Filipino mariners, take them off the cruise ship, and interrogate them."

The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play

A set of toys that teaches kids about the parable of the sower. Image source.

I've been reading "The Kingdom of Children" by R. L. Stollar. In this post I want to talk about the way the book portrays it as a good thing for children to develop their own theology.

I want to know, *why* is it a good thing for children to develop their own theology? Like, my *feeling* when I read this is that I agree it's a good thing, but I want to think through the reasons why. If they're making up their own beliefs about God, aren't most of those beliefs going to be wrong? As an ex-evangelical I can tell you that evangelicals would be very concerned about the idea of children coming up with their own beliefs about God- no, we need to teach them the *correct* beliefs! It's very important! If people don't believe the correct things about God, they will go to hell! They will sin- and every sin hurts God infinitely, this isn't something you can just play around with like it doesn't matter. And if people have incorrect beliefs about God in some areas, even if it's just some minor little error that doesn't seem significant, WELL IT IS- those will lead to even worse incorrect beliefs about God, and worse sins. We have to make sure everyone believes all the correct things!

Yes, it's a very big deal in evangelicalism, that people have to believe the "correct" beliefs, and it would be terrible to just let everyone develop their own theology from their own thoughts and experiences. By contrast, liberation theology is based on the idea that people should make their own theology. It seems like a very key foundational aspect of liberation theology, a point where liberation theology is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what I was taught in evangelicalism. I feel like, I agree with it, but I still want an explanation, because coming from an evangelical background, it's not obvious why it would be a good thing to let people figure out their own religious beliefs.

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

Fruit tree. Image source.

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

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

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

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

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

The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology

Image text: "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low. Isaiah 40:4A" Image source.

I've been reading "The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology" by R. L. Stollar. Here's a section about "eschatology."

From pages 113-114:

In this chapter, we will look at what theologians call eschatology. This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives. In liberation theology, eschatology is the focus on how powers around us-- our churches, our government, our economic order-- need to be redeemed. They need to be redeemed because they are set up in a way that makes it harder for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. They need to be redeemed because they do not place the first last and the last first. Liberation theologians want us to think about how the kingdom of God should disrupt these powers around us. "Hope in the future seeks roots in the present."

Child liberation theology raises the same issues, but with regard to children. Child liberation theology also engages eschatology by asking how we can better realize the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now for children. The path to doing this involves taking Jesus seriously when he said in Mark 9:37, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me." What I am going to argue might seem too audacious or maybe even sacrilegious. Part of realizing the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now is seeing children as God-to-us. Children are not simply representatives or servants or mouthpieces of God. They are, in a profound and real sense, God's chosen and royal substitutes. They serve as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now.

Now before you discard this book, let me tell you what I am not saying: I am not saying that children are gods. I am not saying that we should worship children. And I am not saying that children are substitutes for God in the sense that we no longer need God. What I am saying is that Jesus called us to see children as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now. They are the neighbors who we are supposed to love as ourselves. And just as the commandment to love our neighbors is rooted in the greatest commandment to love God (Matt. 22:36-40), loving children is similarly rooted in loving God. This makes loving children an act of worship.

Eschatology? As far as I know, eschatology is about heaven and hell and the end of the world- the complete opposite of the "right-here and right-now" Stollar is talking about. He says, "This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives." The grammar of the sentence suggests that those are 2 different ways of saying the same thing, but, what on earth, "the future" is totally different from "how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now." Right?

Even so, I'm like, really into this. I'm very excited about the idea that our beliefs about heaven and hell and the end of the world should have a profound effect on the way we live now- in particular, that it means the kingdom of God breaks into our world now, and we fight for liberation for everyone.

When I was evangelical, I believed that people go to heaven or hell based on whether they are "saved"- ie, whether they believed in Jesus and "prayed the prayer" to commit their lives to him, with the appropriate amount of emotional sincerity. Heaven and hell last for eternity; everything we do here on earth is meaningless in comparison. Our actions in this life only matter to the extent that they nudge people closer to "getting saved," to falling on the correct side of that binary.

In evangelical land, it's easy to have the attitude "well, I'm saved, so there's nothing else I need to be doing now. Just waiting till I go to heaven." Or, "why should we give food to hungry people? If we're not also telling them about Jesus, it's pointless."

In evangelical land, it always felt like there was this big divide between the eternity of heaven and hell, and the normal lives we're living right now. Like getting people saved to get to heaven is the most important thing, and the time we spend just living our normal lives outside of that is just busywork. 

But now my beliefs are completely different. Now I believe that we are supposed to bring the kingdom of heaven to the earth, as Jesus taught us to pray. Heaven is not some faraway unreachable thing; heaven is going to come to this earth, and we should do the work to make it happen. As Martin Luther King Jr said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." That's heaven- and it ain't gonna bend itself. We have to do it.

So we look forward to heaven by doing the work to fight for justice on this earth. It's so profoundly and viscerally connected- not like the "pie in the sky when you die" and "fire insurance" of evangelicalism. I love it.

And that's what Stollar is talking about here. Eschatology is not this faraway future thing- it's about how the kingdom of God comes into our world right now. It's about the systems and powers in this world, and how they need to be redeemed and transformed, every valley raised up and mountain made low.

(Suggested background music for this post is Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth.")

So... it strikes me as strange that Stollar uses the word "eschatology" for this, but also, I love it. I think this a good way to think about heaven and hell. (And maybe this *is* how "eschatology" is used in liberation theology?) Let's do the work right now on this earth. That's heaven and hell.

And it makes me think, maybe religious beliefs should be understood as projections that inform our thinking about what we should do right now. Just like a complex 3-dimensional object projects a 2D shadow- religious beliefs are that shadow, and we live our lives in the shape of a 3D object that could make that shadow. Maybe heaven and hell are not real, but whatever you believe about them makes a real difference in how you live. Maybe religion is not actually true, but it's about the power of a story. Sure, you could make a list of behaviors that people should do or not do, but people respond better to stories. A big grand story about what the world is, and how God wants us to live, and the way that filters down into our very concrete actions in the here-and-now.

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

I wouldn't regret it, if I lived my life in an effort to bring heaven to this earth, and then it turned out heaven didn't exist. Even if heaven is not real, there's something about this that *is* real. Something about... helping people is the right thing to do, even if there's no God rewarding you for it. That's real. It's a religious belief- because how can you prove it? what would it even mean to prove it? It's a religious belief that feels even deeper than my religion, somehow. 

My religion is "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people."

The kingdom of heaven is not far away. As Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

---

Follow-up post: Faith, Fruit, and "Do you actually believe your religion?"

Posts about "The Kingdom of Children":

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)
The Kingdom of Children: Comparing Religions
The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology
The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play
The Kingdom of Children: Communion and Baptism

Related 

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

I don't believe in a literal "Jesus coming back." But, be ready.

"Muppet Christmas Carol" Is My Religion

On Christianity and Waiting

The Kingdom of Children: Comparing Religions

Symbols of different religions. Image source.

Chapter 6 of "The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology," by R. L. Stollar, starts out with this quote:

Unquestionably, the central Christian assertion about the identity of Jesus Christ has been that he is both fully human and fully divine. This characterization is unique among world religions.

- Kristin Johnston Largen

I involuntarily rolled my eyes.

It's not that I think this statement is false. I wasn't even thinking about that. The reason I cringed away from this statement is that I have lots of experience listening to Christians' descriptions of other religions and why those other religions are all nonsensical and bad and shallow, not like our faith which is super meaningful and reasonable and powerful.

So any time I come across a Christian saying "here's why our religion is different from all the others, and is better", ugh. Most of the time, it's a total misrepresentation of what other religions teach. It's spreading misinformation. It's a caricature, meant to show how silly those people are who believe differently than us, haha, how silly and misguided they are, believing things that are so obviously wrong. It's just mindlessly repeating talking points that we heard from other Christians, rather than actually listening to people from other religions, to genuinely understand what they believe.

Okay, but, turns out Stollar actually shares my feelings on this. From pages 98-99:

Growing up, I was always interested in other religions. I accepted Jesus into my heart as a young child, yet I was nonetheless fascinated by faiths not my own. Some of my favorite books were the D'Aulaires' books for children on Greek and Norse mythology. I loved the fantastical stories they contained. The images of gods and goddesses fighting and playing filled my imagination with wonder and inspiration.

But the conservative evangelical world I grew up in did not encourage me to pursue my interest in other religions. As I grew older, the only context in which I studied them was to learn how to attack them-- allegedly for the sake of Jesus. When I attended summer worldview camps as a teenager, for example, I was taught flimsy, cardboard caricatures of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. And even then, I was only taught those caricatures of other faiths in order to memorize catchphrases with which I could supposedly refute them.

Now that I am an adult, I have a greater appreciation for world religions. Part of my journey toward this appreciation was getting a master's in Eastern Classics at St. John's College, where I studied religions from China, India, and Japan. For the first time in my life, I appreciated freely religions other than my own. No one was telling me what was "wrong" with them. No one was interrupting my train of thought by insisting, "But Jesus!" I simply learned what other people and cultures think about the world.

I encourage you to give the children in your family, faith community, or religious organization the opportunity to learn about other religions. As I have argued throughout this chapter, learning about other religions is essential to teasing out both the very real differences and similarities between them. This pursuit helps us understand and embody our own faith that much more deeply.

This is so real. "Learning" about other religions, in a conservative Christian context, just to memorize arguments about why those other religions are obviously wrong.

So Stollar understands that, and that's not what he's doing in this chapter. What is he doing in this chapter, then? Well, it's about child gods- ie, religions that have a god character who is a child. Comparing these stories to the Christian story of Jesus being fully god and being born into this world as a human child- and pointing out aspects of these where the Jesus story is "better" than the stories from other religions. (For example, the Jesus story is "better" than the stories where the god had the appearance of a child but still had the mind and powers of a god- Jesus was an actual child, really, going through all the developmental stages. And the Jesus story is "better" than the stories where it is prophesied that the child will *someday* be the savior- Jesus was *already* the savior, even as a child.) I don't think the book actually uses the word "better" but that's how I'm summing this up.

It seems like we *should* be able to talk about this, right? I'm just really skittish here, as an ex-evangelical, ex-apologetics-nerd. But it seems like there should be a way to talk about, hey, I'm a Christian, so logically that means I believe there are aspects of Christianity which are "better" than other religions, there are things about Christianity which are true while other religions are false... ugh... I'm just... I just cringe so hard at this line of thinking. This sounds like an apologetics argument, and I don't do apologetics arguments any more.

I enjoyed reading this chapter of "The Kingdom of Children"- it does seem to be coming from a place of thoughtfully and respectfully seeking to understand the beliefs of other religions. And the parts where it talks about why the Jesus story is "better"- I guess we should read that as "well, this author is a Christian, so of course he believes the Jesus story is better than the other religions' stories, and these are his opinions about why" rather than reading it like... like he's saying you're not allowed to believe in these other religions because it's so obvious that Christianity is better.

Maybe I could try to write something like that. Maybe there is some way I could frame it which doesn't feel like a dishonest apologetics argument. Make it about why I'm a Christian, without making it about why you should be a Christian.

---

Posts about "The Kingdom of Children":

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)
The Kingdom of Children: Comparing Religions
The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology
The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play
The Kingdom of Children: Communion and Baptism

Related:

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

What is the purpose of apologetics?

No, I'm not harboring some kind of wish that my husband will become a Christian

Clip-art image of a bride and groom. Image source.

So JD Vance said that he hopes his wife Usha (who is Hindu) will become a Christian. Here's a link, from Hemant Mehta: JD Vance wants his Hindu wife to convert. It’s Christian Nationalism: Home Edition. 

When asked about this, Vance said a lot of things that sound nice, like how he loves his wife, they talk about this together and work out something that works for their family, he respects that people have free will and can believe what they believe. He's good at saying things that sound nice and reasonable but then when you look at the overall picture of what he's doing, the things he is actively supporting, it's the opposite of that. (JD Vance creeps me out for this reason.)

Anyway, he says they are raising their children as Christians, and that he hopes his wife will become a Christian eventually.

First of all, I want to say I don't find this surprising at all. In my experience with evangelicalism, of course we believed everyone is supposed to become a Christian. Vance is Catholic so there might be some differences between his view and the evangelical view, but yeah overall I get it. We believed that non-Christians are all going to hell. And that knowing Jesus makes our day-to-day lives so much better, and everybody else must be suffering so much, living without Jesus.

There's something kind of ... weird... about being in a marriage and believing that there's something fundamentally wrong with your spouse and they need to change. I'm not sure how to describe it. Disrespectful?

I was taught that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians- then you will be "unequally yoked" and the non-Christian will be a bad influence, causing the Christian to "water down" their faith. This is an extremely normal thing for evangelicals to say, but I find it really offensive. They use the analogy "what if you were standing on a chair, and you were trying to pull someone up- wouldn't it be much more likely that they would pull you down?" WTF, why are we framing this like Christians are higher, better, more moral than non-Christians. Like a non-Christian can only be a bad influence on you. 

I'm a Christian and my husband is not, and we've been together for a really long time and it just really isn't an issue? Because I don't believe he needs to change. Why would he need to change? What reason is there to think that it would be beneficial to him to convert to Christianity?

(A key part of this is that I don't believe in hell. Or, rather, the evangelical version of hell, where the criteria are one's beliefs about Jesus. But surely there has to be some kind of judgment for people who, for example, go around making up dehumanizing lies about immigrants.)

Sure, if someone is interested in becoming a Christian, then yeah it would be a good thing for them to do so. But if they have no interest in it, then ... why try to convince them? How would that help anything? Even if you make the argument "well it's true, and it's better for people to believe true things than false things"- okay, so if it's true that Jesus was raised from the dead, what are the implications of that? Christians have all sorts of different opinions on what it means for us, what it teaches us about the nature of the world, morality, etc- and some of these interpretations are harmful. It's not clear that the truth of the Resurrection is enough to say that it would be a good thing for people to convert to Christianity- what if they convert to one of the anti-human varieties of Christianity? (Like, for example, one that teaches that non-Christians are lower than us and are only going to pull you down.)

For our kids, my thinking is, I want them to be able to make an informed decision for themselves. I want to teach them enough about the bible and Jesus and Christianity that they can understand why I'm so excited about it, why I find it so amazing and life-giving, why I think about incarnation all the time. To know what I love about it, so then they can decide for themselves.

Sometimes I'm reading a book about Christianity with our son, and my husband walks by and makes some kind of snarky comment about the bible. I appreciate that; we need people who make snarky comments about the bible.

I also want to tell our kids about other religions, and atheism, and that people have all sorts of different beliefs about God, and we can't ever know for sure, BUT the important thing is, we should do good and help people. We can be sure about that.

So no, I'm not sitting here in my marriage, thinking about how I've waited so long and I just hope my husband will become a Christian- no, I don't think like that at all. If he doesn't want to, then why would I want that for him? It's not a matter of "well I want him to, but I'm polite enough to not say it out loud"- no, I genuinely don't believe it's true that everyone would be better off if they became Christians.

---

Related:

My Marriage Is So Good, I Forgot "Unequally Yoked" Was Supposed To Be A Problem

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

My Ex-Evangelical Take on "The Year of Living Biblically"

Book cover for "The Year of Living Biblically"

I read the book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs, and here are my thoughts on it. I wasn't planning to blog about this- I don't blog about every single book I read- and I thought the premise of this book was kinda silly and wasn't going to cause me to have any profound insights to post on the blog. But now that I've read it, it turns out that I do have things to say. 

(Judging whether these are "profound insights" is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.)

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Overview

Jacobs sets out on this weird experiment/ performance art, where he decides he is going to extract every single command from the bible and try to follow them all literally, for 1 year. He also interviews a lot of Jews and Christians who claim to be following the bible- to some extent, he participates in the ways that they follow the bible, but overall he wants to be true to the literal text itself rather than later interpretations of it.

Jacobs is Jewish but wasn't religious before this. He felt this experiment would also help him connect with his heritage.

This book was published in 2008. I remember I saw this in a bookstore, years and years ago, when I was evangelical, and I kind of scoffed at it. I thought, "Here's a book where someone tries to 'follow the bible literally' to prove how ridiculous the bible is. This is NOT how you're supposed to follow the bible. Some rules apply to us now and some only applied to the original audience, and we have logical, reliable ways of knowing which is which. We're supposed to use this framework and only follow the ones that still apply to us now, not take every single command literally. He's totally missing the point."

Please note, Jacobs's goal was NOT "to prove how ridiculous the bible is." His initial thinking was, yeah some of the commands are silly and he's not going to get anything out of following them, but a lot of the commands really are meaningful, and it could be good for him to become more religious, and maybe he'll learn something.

I've heard that this book was part of the inspiration for Rachel Held Evans's book "A Year of Biblical Womanhood," (2012) where she spent a year literally following the bible's commands to women. (I have not read it, and I really want to. It's on my list.) Her goal was different from Jacobs's- she was coming from an evangelical background, where she constantly had to deal with other Christians claiming that women need to do certain things and be restricted in certain ways, because that's "biblical womanhood," that's "what the bible says." And she was making the point that no, these modern American Christian "biblical womanhood" people very much are NOT "just following what the bible says."

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The main thing I want to say is, Christians should learn from Jewish people

The bible is divided into 2 sections: the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. (Christians call the Hebrew Bible the "Old Testament" but here I am going to call it the Hebrew Bible because it belonged to Jewish people first.) Jacobs spends the first 9 months of the year focusing on the Hebrew Bible, and the remaining 3 months on the New Testament. The New Testament is the part about Jesus and the early Christians.

This makes sense, proportionally. The Hebrew Bible is much longer than the New Testament. But, reading this as a Christian, it surprised me. Jacobs wants to follow the bible literally, and then he spends 9 months seeking out Jewish people who are extremely dedicated to their faith, and he listens to them and follows their advice.

Why on earth did this surprise me? Isn't it OBVIOUS, if you think about it for a second or two, that if you want to take the bible very seriously and learn from it, you should talk to Jewish people? They were taking the bible very seriously for thousands of years before Christians came along.

In the section of the book focused on the Hebrew Bible, most of the experts that Jacobs talks to are Jewish, and there are only a few Christians. He interviews young-earth creationist Ken Ham (a Christian) in an early part of the book about the creation of the world. He talks about modern Christians who are obsessed with the "end times" and prophecies about a red heifer- and there are also Orthodox Jews obsessed with this, and they are working together with the Christians, even though they have very different beliefs about whether it will be good or bad for the Jews when they finally get that red heifer. And maybe a few other Christians here and there, but overall, in the section about the Hebrew Bible (which is the majority of this book), he's learning from Jewish people.

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The evangelical take on why Jewish people are wrong about the bible

In all my years growing up in the church, I don't think I ever came across the suggestion that we should learn about the bible from Jewish people. Obviously, Christianity is the right religion, and all the other religions are wrong- why on earth would we listen to other people's wrong religious beliefs?

(I thought it was so cool, when I was reading the book "Womanist Midrash," how author Wilda Gafney brought in Jewish and Muslim sources, in addition to Christian ones. Other religions have useful things to say about the bible, and we can learn from them! I don't think I had ever seen anything like that in a Christian book.)

In general, Christians believe that the laws in the Hebrew Bible don't apply to us anymore, because Jesus changed all that and set up a whole new system. Christians have various schemes for how to define which laws from the Hebrew Bible still apply- basically if it's a "moral law" (rather than a "ceremonial law"), and if it's reaffirmed in the New Testament, then it still applies. I always got the impression that this categorization scheme was uncomplicated and self-evident and totally made sense, and therefore the people who are trying to score points on the internet by pointing out weird laws in the bible are just uninformed and missing the point. But NOPE, turns out that stuff about "moral law"/"ceremonial law" is just somebody's fan theory. 

So my point is, Christians believe we don't have to worry about all those bizarre laws. Just the obvious things, like pray, and love your neighbor, and don't be gay. Just the simple obvious things. (sarcasm)

More important than following the laws, though, is to believe the right things about Jesus. I thought it was very interesting when Jacobs discussed this in the book. When he got to the last 3 months and started to work on following the New Testament, he wondered if it was enough to just follow the laws, or if he would also have to believe in Jesus. He got different answers about this from the different Christians he asked- on the more evangelical end, people told him that the most important thing was to believe in Jesus, and if you're not doing that, the rest is meaningless. On the moderate/mainline side of Christianity, people told him that following Jesus' teachings is a good thing and can help us be better people, even if you don't believe in Jesus. For his part, Jacobs didn't want to believe in Jesus, because it felt like abandoning his heritage as a Jewish person. (In contrast, when he followed the rules in the Hebrew Bible, he felt like he was connecting to his family heritage.)

And in my experience, Christians have nothing but eye-rolling and mockery and pity when we see Orthodox Jewish people following strict religious rules. Rules about what to wear, what to eat, not doing any work on the Sabbath. We always looked at it like, they're spending so much effort keeping all these meaningless rules that are just silly and don't matter, and they're missing the whole point of what God wants us to do.

I had a Jewish friend in college that I used to discuss the bible with, let's call him Isaac. He told me that he had gone through phases in his life where he tried to be really serious about keeping the Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and also phases where he didn't do all of that. Thinking about it now, I would love to ask him what motivated him to sometimes choose to follow those rules, and does he think he benefitted from it? But at the time I didn't ask him anything like that; I was evangelical, and evangelicals don't want to actually understand people, they want to talk them into converting.

He told me about some of the rules for kosher foods. Exodus 23:19 says, "Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk." Whenever I had read that in the bible, I thought to myself, well I'm never cooking any young goats at all, so I don't have to worry about if I'm breaking this rule or not. But, Isaac explained, the principle behind this rule should apply not just to goat meat but other meat too. And, it doesn't just mean don't literally boil the meat in milk- it means don't eat the meat of an animal together with dairy products made from its mother's milk. And really we should just never eat any meat and dairy together, because you never know. Like, what if by some coincidence, the cow your burger came from is the offspring of the cow that produced the milk used to make the cheese on your cheeseburger? You never know! So that's why you can't eat meat and dairy together.

And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous and overly-literal and misses the point, and is like the Pharisees. Ah, yes, Christians have this stereotype about the Pharisees (whom Jesus interacted with in the bible), that they were working so hard to keep all these meaningless religious rules, and they were missing the point of how God actually wants us to live. I believe this is an anti-Semitic stereotype- yeah, I know it's in the bible, but it's still an anti-Semitic stereotype.

Evangelical Christians believe that, when people follow religious rules which are more strict than the ones we follow, they are being legalistic and missing the point, and that's bad. And when they are less strict than we are, they are being wishy-washy and watering down the gospel and being led astray by our sinful culture. *Our* rules were the exact right level of rules. *Our* rules had actual good reasons, unlike those legalistic people who were just following rules for the sake of following rules.

Here, a sampling of some of the evangelical rules: You shouldn't say "oh my god." Girls shouldn't wear a 2-piece bathing suit. Girls shouldn't wear tank tops that don't cover up the bra straps. Probably you shouldn't lay on a bed near your boyfriend because what if "one thing leads to another"? Also, every day you need to read your bible. And there was a whole culture war about the Harry Potter books and how they PROMOTE WITCHCRAFT and so you SHOULDN'T READ THEM. 

Well, those things aren't "legalism"! When *we* make weird little rules, they have good reasons behind them! When *other people* make weird little rules, it's for no reason and it's legalism.

Here, I'm gonna blow your mind: What if other people's weird little rules also have deep reasons behind them? What if they are the same as us- they are doing their best to follow the bible, out of a genuine desire to obey God, like us?

Even if we think they're wrong, we should still learn from them. They are the same as us. If they're wrong, maybe we're wrong in the same ways.

The Jewish experts that Jacobs talked to in this book, who walked him through the nuances of how they understand and obey obscure biblical rules- I think if I had read this as an evangelical, I would have been really dismissive of this. Like, the whole thing is pointless. All the effort they are putting into following these literal rules, which God doesn't require us to follow. But now I feel like... I can recognize their motivations, their feelings. I know what it is to feel like "I would do anything for God" and "God must have a good reason for this rule, so it truly is in our best interest to obey it." To feel connected to God as I put in the work to obey Their rules.

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The literal words vs the traditions

Jacobs's main goal was to literally follow the bible. In pursuit of this goal, he felt it would be useful to interview Jews and Christians who also claim to be following the bible, so he could get insight on how to interpret and obey the biblical rules. 

There were many cases where Jewish people told him about traditional interpretations of bible passages, which don't follow the literal meaning but soften it or apply it to totally different situations. (Seriously, Jewish people have been discussing this for thousands of years. They have a lot of insights!) Sometimes he ended up following his own understanding of what the literal words said, and sometimes, if that was impractical, or if a later tradition seemed interesting or meaningful, he followed the later interpretations.

Evangelicals make a big deal about how we're simply following the bible, NOT imperfect human traditions. We're Protestants. Those Catholics are all wrong, the way they treat their church history as important and meaningful, rather than only following the bible. Sola scriptura.

What this means in reality, though, is evangelicals *do* follow our own traditional interpretations, built up over generations, very much influenced by our own culture, rather than just "following the bible"- but we can't be honest about it. We don't even realize we're doing it- we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're just following the bible, that our modern American [white] way of reading the bible is the obvious one and there aren't other interpretations.

I want to share a quote from the book here. This is the part where Jacobs was hosting a Passover dinner with his relatives. He made sure to follow the rules that Moses gave for the first Passover- eat with your sandals on and your staff in your hand, paint blood over your door, etc. (Turns out it is illegal to sell lamb's blood, so Jacobs used the drippings from the meat instead.) But he also learned about his own family's memories of Passover dinners over the years, and found that was more meaningful than just following the literal commands himself. This is from pages 235-236:

I close my Bible and let the story sink in. "Does anyone else have anything they want to say?" I ask.

My dad does. He has brought a packet of photocopied handwritten pages. They are a collection of childhood memories that his mother-- my grandmother-- had written before she died. My dad reads the section about her memories of family sedars in the 1920s.

Before the sedars, my mother would buy a very large live carp and bring it home (how, I don't know). She put it into the bathtub to swim until it was time to prepare the gefilte fish we all relished so much. We kids loved watching it swim, but it was so big it could barely (and sometimes not at all) negotiate a turn at the end of the tub. We all took our showers downstairs until after the fish was removed.

She wrote about how the kids would file up and down the stairs carrying kosher-for-Passover dishes, "all of us like ants, trip after trip, one after the other." And about how Uncle Oscar once ate a dozen hard-boiled eggs on a dare. About how, when the sedar dragged on, the prayers went "express, no local stops."

Her writing is vivid, fresh. The references to the customs are no longer confusing or foreign. The whole thing felt familiar. My Biblical rituals-- the door painting and sandal wearing-- were interesting on an intellectual level, but, frankly, I wasn't as moved as I hoped I might be. I didn't feel like I had been swept back to the time of the Pharaohs.

But this writing from my grandmother-- that did sweep me back. Perhaps to make a ritual resonate, I can't skip directly from my stain-resistant dinner table in New York to a desert three thousand years ago. I need some links in between. I need my grandmother and her memories of the leviathan-sized carp of Hinsdale Street in Brooklyn.

Maybe religious rituals are meaningful because they connect us to other people, to history, to our ancestors, to our culture. Maybe the point isn't that God said to do this, so you as 1 individual have to do it, following the exact instructions found in the bible.

It's not "just you and God" (as evangelicals like to say). You live in the context of your culture, and that matters, and you connect to God through that culture. Through your family, your history, your traditions. Through people, and the things that have been emotional and meaningful to people for many generations.

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A few weird commands I want to mention

Leviticus 19:23-25 says that when you plant a tree, you shouldn't eat the fruit from it until the 5th year. I've never spent any time thinking about how to follow this command because I don't plant fruit trees, I just buy fruit from the store, so surely it doesn't apply to me. But Jacobs wanted to follow it, so he contacted fruit companies to ask them about how old their trees were. He received replies that said they aren't able to tell him the ages of the specific trees that specific pieces of fruit came from.

He did more research into the life cycles of fruit trees, and found that some kinds of trees will bear fruit after just 2-3 years- he then avoided those fruits. But cherry trees take over 5 years to mature and bear fruit, so he would be safe if he only ate cherries.

Another weird one: Deuteronomy 22:6-7 says, "If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life." In this book, Jacobs says this is generally interpreted to be about kindness to animals. *But* some Jewish people have a ritual related to this, explained in this quote from page 186:

But the actual wording of Deuteronomy 22:6 is solely about birds and nests, and it is this formulation that Mr. Berkowitz-- along with others in his community-- has taken to the literal limit. He has set up two pigeon nests on his third-floor windowsill in his northern Manhattan apartment. Whenever there's a newly laid egg, he allows a faithful seeker to come over, pay one hundred dollars to charity, shoo the mother pigeon away, pick up the egg, hold it aloft, say a prayer, place it back in the nest (or, in some cases, eat it), and thereby check off this commandment as officially "fulfilled."

Jacobs goes and actually does this. It's so strange and I love it.

And one more thing I want to mention: In researching some of the biblical commands, Jacobs found that the intention behind them was to help the poor. For example, locusts are kosher. You can eat them. The bible says you can eat them. In this book, Jacobs buys chocolate-covered crickets and eats one. 

He says, even though the bible says people are allowed to eat locusts, that doesn't mean it was actually a common thing back then. He came across one interpretation that says maybe the purpose of this bible passage is to provide for people if their crops have been eaten by locusts. Instead of starving, you are allowed to eat the locusts. So, commands which seem extremely weird might actually be based in a desire to help people.

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Conclusion

The reason I wanted to blog about this book is because Jacobs got a lot of good input from Jewish sources, which felt surprising to me, but then I realized, well, OBVIOUSLY. You want to talk about how to take the bible extremely seriously, you need to talk to Jewish people. When I was evangelical I never did that, though, because only Christians had the "truth" and all other religions were wrong, so why would we listen to them.

Also, I was interested in how this book explores religious traditions and rituals as a way to connect to a tradition, a culture, a history, a family. Maybe the point is not just doing it so you as an individual can be a person who obeys God correctly. Maybe it's about human connection and knowing our history.

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Related:

"Ceremonial Law/ Civil Law/ Moral Law" is Just a Fan Theory 

Maybe Jesus Was A Pharisee

Sheep and Goats

Nativity scene showing Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in separate cages. This was displayed by a church in 2019 to protest the US policy of jailing immigrants and separating families. Image source.

Hi readers, anyone remember when I was doing a blog series on the gospel of Matthew? Which I started in 2012? And I haven't updated since 2022? Yeah believe it or not, I still want to keep doing this blog series, so here we are. Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and the goats. This is one of my FAVORITE bible passages.

Seriously, love the parable of the sheep and the goats. Go read the whole thing. 

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The big point: We should help people

The point of this parable- and the point of Christianity, in my opinion- is that we should help people. You see people in need- you should help them. That's it. 

When you help people, you are helping Jesus. When you ignore people in need, you are ignoring Jesus. I believe that very literally. 

This is the whole point. This is what we should learn from this passage. I mean, it doesn't matter if you know anything else about the bible or religion or whatever- you just need to help people.

The "sheep" were confused when Jesus told them they had helped him- they said "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?" See, they had no idea about the connection between Jesus and helping people. They didn't have all the correct religious beliefs locked down. But that doesn't matter. Jesus doesn't care. 

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Heaven and hell

In this story, Jesus tells us that the criteria for who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is simply this: Did you help people who were in need?

That's it. That's the criteria, according to this bible passage.

Of course, evangelicals don't believe that. Evangelicals believe that whether you go to heaven or hell is about being "saved"- ie, did you believe the correct set of religious doctrines, and have an attitude of genuine repentance for your sins, and ask Jesus to come and rule your life? Only Christians go to heaven- but actually, a lot of Christians don't even make the cut.

In evangelical ideology, getting into heaven is very much NOT about what you do. No, that would be works-based salvation, and we are the proud descendants of Martin Luther, who told those Catholics what was what. Works-based salvation, oh the horror. People think they earn their way to heaven by doing good things- as if you, a person, have the ability to earn your way to heaven, come on, stop being so full of yourself, you can do nothing, it's the grace of God that does everything, and we just have to believe, that's it. Watch out for those so-called Christians who want to tell you that getting into heaven is in any way related to what you do rather than what you believe. That's works-based!!!!!

Yeah, that's one of the very key tenets of evangelicalism. Saved through faith alone. If anyone dares to suggest that there's any connection between salvation and doing good things, we eye them extremely suspiciously.

Okay but here in Matthew 25, Jesus is literally saying you get into heaven based on whether you help people.

What did I think about this passage back when I was evangelical? Well, this was one of the "unclear passages." You know, in the bible there are "clear" passages and "unclear" passages- the bible is [supposedly] totally consistent, no contradictions, no errors, but some parts are kinda confusing, right? We have to "use the clear passages to interpret the unclear passages." So, for example, we know that we are saved through faith alone and not works- we got that from the "clear" passages of the bible- and then we come to the parable of the sheep and the goats, which seems to maybe suggest that people are saved based on whether they help others? What? That can't be right. Thus this is an "unclear" passage, and needs to be interpreted in light of what we know from the "clear" passages.

So when I was an evangelical, I understood the parable of the sheep and the goats like this: We are saved through faith alone, obviously. The criteria for getting into heaven is whether you're the correct type of Christian. When Jesus is talking about separating the sheep from the goats, he must be taking the pool of people who claim to be Christians, and separating them into the ones that are real Christians and the ones that aren't. If you're a real Christian, you'll have the right attitude in your heart, and so when you meet people in need, you'll help them- but that's a downstream consequence of being the correct type of Christian.

Back when I was evangelical, if you had suggested to me that this parable is saying that people of all religions can get to heaven if they feed the hungry, no way I would have believed you. No way it says that. People who were the wrong religions must have been already screened out, before Jesus comes and separates the sheep from the goats, right?

(Yeah so my point is, if evangelicals tell you they just simply believe the bible- they don't. Particularly the ones who take strong political stands against feeding the hungry, making sure everyone has health care, welcoming immigrants, etc.)

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Prison?

Interesting that one of the good deeds Jesus lists is "I was in prison and you came to visit me." We don't typically think of prisoners as people in need, whom we should help. I wonder what was going on in their society when Jesus said this- did a lot of people get imprisoned unjustly? In the US, mass incarceration is a big problem- we should help people whose lives are affected by this. (Ah, I thought I was gonna write about the sheep and the goats without getting political, but it turns out I can't.)

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Am I doing enough?

Sometimes I worry that Jesus is gonna think I'm not doing enough. I give money to charities which are helping people, but I could give more. Is Jesus going to judge me for that?

But I don't think we should get caught up in those kinds of worries. Feels kinda self-centered. The point is that I should help people, not that I should calculate what level of helping people is required so I meet the criteria of being a good enough person. Kinda like when white people are more worried about being called a racist, than about the actual effect of racism on black people's lives.

Maybe Jesus' point wasn't "here's what you need to do so that you can go to heaven." Maybe the "heaven vs hell" part of the story isn't literally true, but just a storytelling device. And the actual point is, we should help people.

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Conclusion

I love the parable of the sheep and the goats. It's great. It says the most important thing is to help people- and by doing so, we are helping Jesus. It says that Jesus doesn't care what religion you are, only about whether you help people. It portrays heaven and hell's entrance criteria completely opposite to what evangelicals say it is. And it's political.

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This post is part of a series on the gospel of Matthew.

Previous post: The Parable of the Talents: Risk and Return in Building the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 25:14-30)

Next post: One Of You Will Betray Me (a bible fanfic) (Matthew 26)

Click here to go to the beginning of the series.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ‘There’s only one rule that I know of, babies’ (March 6) "It trips me up because I’m still infected with all the White Jesus nonsense I was steeped in growing up, and because I live in a culture shaped by that same White Jesus nonsense, which insists that it is possible to 'be kind' without love and justice."

2. NASA Interns' 'All About That Space' Parody Pimps Orion | Music Video (2014) Parody of "All About That Bass"

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Update: Trump administration rescinds stop-work order that halted legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children (February 21) A bit of good news, I guess. This is an update to the link I posted a few weeks ago.

2. Trump Issues Legally Shaky Order Asserting English as Official Language of US (March 3) "In addition to that action, the order rescinds a previous executive action issued by former President Bill Clinton, which required federal agencies to accommodate people who don’t speak English by offering them interpreters or documents in their primary language." 

Ugh, what? What does it even mean that English is the official language of the US- people are still going to speak other languages, this isn't going to turn the US into the utopia that racists dream about, where they never have to encounter anything that reminds them entire other languages exist.

But federal agencies will no longer have to provide translation services. So, this is just making the government worse at serving people.

3. Venezuelan men allege mistreatment while in detention in Guantánamo Bay (February 25) "Durán Arapé alleges he was beaten by guards. He said the mistreatment by detention officers got so bad, he tried to harm himself twice in the two weeks he was in Guantánamo."

4. We can still stop the GOP from destroying Medicaid (February 26, via)

5. Birthright Citizenship Is a Sacred Guarantee (January 27, via) "The attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is an attempt to reverse history, to push our nation back, way back, before the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the secession crisis that soon delivered the nation into the Civil War. Calling this action “unconstitutional” is utterly inadequate; the maneuver is the soiling of sacred text with profane lies."

6. New Texas Bill Outright Criminalizes Being Trans As Felony Fraud (March 6) This bill is very unlikely to pass, but it's a sign of the direction that anti-trans attacks are moving in.

This has always been part of evangelicals' anti-trans belief system: being trans is not a real thing, and if a man says he's a woman, that's just not true, and we must not participate in this falsehood. It would be wrong, in the eyes of God, to refer to a trans woman as "she." This is a very common line of reasoning that I've seen in articles from The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, etc.

For those of us who support trans people, we might think "Even if you don't think people can 'really' change their gender, why not just let them pretend? Why not just go along with whatever pronouns trans people want to be called by, and keep your opinions on it to yourself?" Well, there are conservative Christians who really think God will hold them accountable for perpetuating the "lie" by using someone's correct pronouns.

Anyway, we all need to support trans people, and fight back against possible legislation like this.

7. And If You Look This Way, You’ll See The Dead Body Of The Separation Of Church And State (February 7, via) "What does the anti-Christian violence and vandalism he’s talking about even look like? Did it look like Dylann Roof shooting up a Black church and putting out his White pride manifesto before the cops took him to get Burger King? Or a Black church in Texas getting slurs spray painted and summarily burned down? Or are those examples too “DEI” for God to come into the picture?"

8. When Headlines Fail: Trump's Empty IVF Promise and the Woman Who Believed It (March 1) I don't really know what to make of this. First of all, Parker Molloy is right that the media has consistently failed at writing headlines that make it clear that whatever that felon says should be understood in light of the fact that he's a liar, and he just says whatever thought happens to flitter across his mind, and it has no relation to actual truth or his actual intentions or his actual beliefs.

Molloy's post discusses a Washington Post article (which is paywalled so I can't read it) about a woman who voted for that felon because he said IVF treatments would be free. But now she has lost her job because of DOGE laying off thousands of government workers.

My first reaction here was complete shock- the felon said IVF would be free, and someone actually believed that? Someone actually believed that, and then voted for him, like it was a straightforward vote of support for that proposed policy?

???????

What's actually going on here? I'm so boggled at the potential existence of American voters who don't know the felon is a liar. Really? There really exist people who don't know that?????? HOW?????

But maybe let's take it farther than just asking it like it's a rhetorical question. There must be actual reasons people thought it was a good idea to vote for him.

Molloy brings up studies which say something like 60% of people only read headlines, not the actual articles. We could judge them on that, but actually... so much is happening, and social media bombards us with new stuff all the time- it's not actually possible to spend enough time reading to have a solid informed opinion on every recent societal issue. There are things going on that I've heard about from headlines but I haven't taken the time to read up and find out what the actual situation is. (And when I used to be on twitter, this was a lot worse- I would see people's half-baked one-liner opinions on some news story, and I wouldn't read the actual original article.) What's the standard for how "informed" American voters should be?

Another thing I thought of, in regard to this voter who apparently believed the felon was really going to make IVF free (??????) - maybe this is a case where you *want* to believe something, and you're vaguely aware of indicators that it might not be true, but you ignore them. I certainly have that kind of bias sometimes. Everyone does. But then later, when faced with the reality I was trying to ignore, I feel like "you know, there *were* signs that I should have seen earlier, but I didn't want to believe them." But the articles I've seen about regretful voters portray them as like, totally shocked, like they had no idea that his bad policies were going to negatively affect them. 

(At the same time, though, I'm highly skeptical of claims on the internet about his regretful voters- because that's the kind of thing where people on "our side" might take 1 thing that 1 such voter said and blow it out of proportion, talk about it like there's a huge movement of such regretful voters- I won't believe that until I see actual statistics on it. Let's not do this, okay? When we talk about it like it's some big movement, we are spreading misinformation.)

What's actually going on here? There must be reasons people voted for him. Is it worth taking the time to dig out what those reasons were, and understand how they're just extreme versions of the general human tendency to sometimes make bad decisions, which we can all relate to to some extent? I mean, I think that's worth doing if your goal is to convince them to change their minds. But I don't think that *in general* we all need to do that. But at least we shouldn't talk about republican voters like they're one-dimensional caricatures, like they just went into the voting booth and said "I'm really racist." It's more likely to be something like, their racism biased them to not think too deeply about the actual reality of his proposed policies.

I'm not letting them off the hook. Far from it! It was wrong for people to vote for him, regardless of how relatably-human their reasons might have been. I'm just saying, there must be actual reasons there- not good reasons, of course, but reasons that we can understand.