The God I Can’t Believe In

I guess you could say I’m sort of an atheist. 

I no longer believe in the god most of my Christian friends and family worship. You know the one I’m talking about. The god of American civil religion. The god who plays favorites. The god of convention and the status quo. The god who miraculously seems to hate all the same people our nation hates. The god who can’t wait to send most of us to hell. The god who has a special disgust for homosexuals, immigrants, Muslims, and liberals. The god who sits idly by as we suffer. The god who is more concerned with personal piety than social justice. The god of health, wealth, and prosperity. The patriarchal god who puts women in their place. The god of white supremacy. 

That god frankly isn’t worth believing in. 

Thankfully, I’m not alone in my unbelief. In fact, I’m in pretty good company. Thousands of Millennials have already left the Church, leading to #EmptyThePews floating around on social media for the last several months. New studies reveal Gen Z is the least religious generation in American history. Even better, the early followers of Jesus were often called atheists for their disbelief in the capricious gods of Roman civil religion. When Polycarp, a church leader in ancient Smyrna was martyred in the second century, the crowd shouted, “Away with the atheists.” Even today, when I read how the early Church or see how the next generation describes the god they don’t believe in or simply cannot morally bring themselves to believe in, I often nod in agreement. 

Like many of you, I grew up believing in versions of this god, but that all changed a few years ago when I finally met the historical Jesus. It was a chance encounter at a Starbucks in Dallas with an Episcopal priest who just happened to be sipping his latte, reading what looked like a provocative book. Being somewhat nosy and a little intrigued by the title, I asked, “Good book?” He shifted his gaze to me and, after sizing me up in my suit and tie answered, “Yes, but I don’t think you’d like it.” 

Sitting in my office at Milligan College a few weeks later, I happened to recall the name of the book, and on a whim walked over to the library to see if it was on the shelf. Sure enough, buried in the theology section was Ched Myers’ Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. I checked it out, went home, and started to read. 

The book became so much a part of me that I began taking it with me everywhere. One day on campus, a Bible professor saw me with it and incredulously asked, “Why are you reading that?” Not knowing how to answer, I kept reading. In fact, I read it cover to cover four times because something had happened, something was happening to my small, tribal, arrogant, ignorant, fundamentalist view of God. It was being torn asunder and replaced by someone else. And for me, that’s when my spirituality came to life. Like a naturalist reversing the toxic effects of environmental domestication, Myers’ book served to "rewild" my spirituality. 

So, unlike Frederick Neitzche or “The Four Horsemen” of the modern atheist movement (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitches, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett), I came to believe in God, but not the god of my fundamentalist youth. This God was different. This God was wild, revolutionary, kind, good, compassionate, vulnerable, and trustworthy. Simply put, this God looked like Jesus. And if the historical Jesus is the full revelation of God, then what kind of God does Jesus reveal? 

The Jesus we meet in Mark’s gospel, which so happens to be the earliest of all the gospel narratives, is incredibly human. In fact, he looks virtually nothing like the god of American civil religion. He was born and raised on the fringes of society, a brown, marginalized person living under the boot of the Roman Empire. From what we know, he was poor, and his family and friends even considered him a bastard. He was a man of no reputation. He admittedly did not have a home. At one point, his family even thought he was insane. He was a social liberator, feminist, and political troublemaker. From his immense capacity to care and join in solidarity with the hurting, it is apparent he knew great suffering. He “was a man of sorrows, and well acquainted with grief.” 

To the religious establishment, he was a threat and considered heretical. To his family, he was a scandal. To his friends, he was a mystery. But to the poor, the lame, the prostitutes, the blind, the racial outcasts, and drunks, he was love incarnate. Pure, embodied love. As Father Richard Rohr writes in his book Falling Upward, “The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.” 

So we must ask ourselves anew: What kind of God does Jesus reveal? Can the God who came to earth as a vulnerable baby, born to poor people, and who died a defenseless man at the hands of the State be a cruel and heartless megalomaniac? Can God in Christ who is so often portrayed as a comforting mother “gathering her chicks under her wing” be a monster? Of course not. 

Ultimately, here’s why this matters. You become the god you worship. How you understand God’s character shapes your sense of reality and therefore defines for you what the Christian life is all about. If your god is primarily a punitive lawgiver and judge, then you will spend your life trying to measure up to a list of  requirements in order to earn rewards. If your god has a giant set of scales up in the sky weighing your worth, you will live your life in judgment and condemnation of others. If your god is more concerned with personal sin than social injustice, you will turn a blind eye to systemic racism. If your god is capricious, vengeful, wrathful, and repressive, you will become capricious, vengeful, wrathful, and repressive. If your god is an old, rich white man with unlimited power, then guess who you and society at large will idealize? No wonder the Church is, in many respects, the leading cause of atheism in the modern world. As Mahatma Gandhi is attributed as saying, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.” 

On the other hand, if God is relational, if God is the very incarnation of love and justice—well, that will change your life. If God is radically inclusive, abounding in compassion, and quick to forgive, you will be as well. If God is a nurturing mother and strong father, you can live into the full divine image of the Creator. Seeing God from this lens will restore your faith to a more natural state, free from the toxic elements of domesticated Christianity. Like a botanist reintroducing native plants to desecrated landscapes, “rewilding” your faith is the long slow process of seeing God for who God really is. As theologian Marcus Borg writes in his book The Heart of Christianity, “The Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms us into more compassionate beings. The God of love and justice is the God of relationship and transformation.”  

Whether you are a spiritual seeker or bravely deconstructing toxic understandings of God, welcome to the faith-seeking journey. In an era when God has been co-opted to serve a particular political party, when the God of justice has been domesticated to prop up the powers that be, it’s incumbent upon us to declare the death of that god by embracing the God who looks just like Jesus.

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