You don’t need God to be good; in fact He might make you worse.
I saw the news how most people do these days, on social media. It was five words that made my heart sink in a way it hasn’t since 9/11.
They have breached the Capitol.
Hordes of angry people, many of them carrying Christian religious symbols, had broken into the Capitol building to halt the lawful counting of electoral votes. Some of them have even confessed to wanting to capture or kill members of Congress in order to get their chosen leader back into office. Many vowed to return armed.
Thankfully the physical damage that day was minimal and the loss of life was small but the event itself was just the beginning. Immediately the apologists came out. It couldn’t be Trump’s supporters they proclaimed, it must be Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Each excuse was more laughable than the next. Each lie was easily disproven and yet too many of my Christian friends joined in the crowd chanting that it wasn’t a big deal, it was justified, and that “they” were trying to steal the country from “us”.
It’s insane; yet here we are.
Most of the people who stormed the Capitol and the majority of their defenders are Christians. They go to church regularly and would say they have been “born again.” They would also say that they are sinners saved by grace and that God alone empowers them to do good deeds.
I am not going to dispute if they are “real” Christians but that last claim, the one about God being the sole source of goodness, I want to unpack for a moment.
People who didn’t grow up in church might find this idea to be a little strange but if you grew up evangelical you probably heard it at least once a week. I never went very long without being reminded that God is the only source of goodness and that without him (it is always a him) I am nothing good at all. I believed it so fully that I more than once compared myself to a festering bowl of dog snot. (If you get that reference you are a huge nerd)
This idea extends to every virtue. In just the last month I have seen people (some of them supporters of the Capitol riot by the way) say that you cannot be truly loving, humble, honest, or compassionate without Jesus in your life. The meaning is clear, unless you are a Christian there is no path to virtue and no hope for you to be anything but counted as wicked.
I don’t think this is true anymore.
For one it is not difficult to find genuinely good people who don’t believe in God at all. They can be found in every community if you actually go out looking. You can also find the opposite. There are plenty of genuinely terrible people who fervently believe in God. In normal times you can find them in every church on any given Sunday. These days they are probably attending super spreader events for Jesus. If belief in God was the secret sauce for genuine goodness I think we would experience different results.
Additionally believing you aren’t innately valuable can damage a person’s sense of self. Personally speaking my 35 years of “depending on Jesus” actually made me worse off in significant ways. It made me passive in my responsibility to mature, hopelessly codependent on the approval of religious leaders, and arrogant about my own spiritual superiority. Believing in God wasn’t always a positive force in my life. I have seen first hand how believing in God can actually hold a person back.
It is also interesting that the people who say you have to have God to be good are always the ones who “have God.” That part is rarely in question. They are always a part of the group that is right with God and believes the right things about God.
Funny how that works isn’t it?
When you add all these claims together what many Christians are actually saying is that their group is the only truly good one and every other way of being is incapable of goodness. This often extends to other Christians too. It has been my experience that this level of exclusivity doesn’t create good in humans it only supercharges the ego. It makes wonderfully loyal soldiers but in the process it empowers the worst kind of pride.
Jesus directly addresses this human tendency when he tells the story of the good Samaritan. For those of you have might be a little rusty on your biblical parables it is a story about a Jewish man who is beaten up and left for dead on the side of the road. Religious leaders and other “very fine people” pass him by and he is only helped by a Samaritan. At the time Samaritans were a hated ethnic minority. They were believed to be incapable of good and yet they end up being the only good ones in the bunch.
If we were to share the same story today and empower it with the same kind of shock value we would change the central character to that of an illegal immigrant, an Antifa member, or perhaps just a black boy wearing a hoodie.
In this modern retelling the Christian theologian and the evangelical pastor would pass by the wounded person because they were an inconvenience, or deserved it because they were breaking the law, or perhaps they should have just been more self reliant. After they pass the hated minority steps in and helps the wounded person and pays for their healthcare without complaint.
I believe this is because the outcast’s innate human capacity to care isn’t blunted by religious dogma.
Far too many people get so caught up in their “correct” beliefs about God that they actually shut down their empathy. American Christians see the suffering of the poor, the foreigner, the Muslim, the queer, or the person of color and walk past them on the way to worship their own self-defined goodness. The same trap Jesus sought to correct and it is the same trap his followers are perpetually falling into.
The point of Jesus story is that a person doesn’t need to have their beliefs all lined up to care for another human. In fact the “unbeliever” might be more enabled to extend love to their fellow human because there are no beliefs to get in the way. This is true goodness and the most beneficial path to the divine.
When I bring these things up the push back I hear most often from evangelicals is that they don’t really believe that those outside can’t be good. Some say that all people can be good because God can use people without them even knowing it. This is slightly less harmful but if Christians actually believed this I would think they would be better at recognizing the good people do.
Those outside the faith do fundamentally good things daily and yet more often than not I have observed Christians question their motives, secretly scheme to convert them, or steal their ideas and repackage them as Christian. If they actually believed God was doing good in people outside the faith they would see those good deeds, praise God, and then move on.
Belief in God, or at least this exclusive interpretation of God, actually seems to make us worse. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard a Christian say something like the following:
“I would like to extend love to that person but I just can’t. It’s not me that is rejecting them it is God. Personally, I would love to accept them but my hands are tied because of what the Bible commands.”
They are essentially saying that they aren’t good to their fellow humans because Jesus or Paul made them do it. Speaking personally, a God that “makes” you unable to extend human decency to those outside your group isn’t a God worth hearing about.
This deflection of responsibility is called spiritual bypassing and we cannot be mature humans if we fall into this trap. Spiritual bypassing is defined by psychologist John Welwood as “the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” This type of thing is common in all religions but in my religion of origin we have made spiritual bypassing into an industry.
— Have unresolved fear about the pandemic? Project it onto scientists that make you feel uncomfortable and anyone who takes basic precautions.
— Have friends who voted differently than you did? Assume they have been deceived by demons and pray for their souls.
— Have unresolved issues with your parents? Find a surrogate parent/guardian in a spiritual or political leader.
— Overwhelmed by the moral complexity of the modern world? Narrow it down to the unborn, a population that requires nothing from you, and call it a day.
This kind of thinking pushes the hard work of maturing onto God and ends up causing harm to ourselves and others. Simply “letting go and letting God” is not the cure all that it has been marketed as. It is a way of getting out of the work.
If you believe God is real you also believe you cannot experience God with 100% clarity. Most Christians won’t dispute this but what often goes unacknowledged is the role the ego plays in filling the gaps. That particular tail wags the divine dog just as much as the other way around. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg explains it like this, “The personality you assign to God has distinct neural patterns that correlate with your own emotional styles of behavior.”
Whether you know it or not you have assigned a “face” to God and that influences almost everything you experience about the divine.
This is one reason I suspect some American Christians went so all in for former President Trump that they tried to assault the Capitol. To them he is “God’s man” because he perfectly represents the God they serve, or at least the one they want to serve. He never makes you feel bad about greed, gluttony, or racism and he is vindictive towards all the right people. He is the perfect expression of what white American evangelicalism has become.
Objectively Donald Trump is more like the worst kings in the Bible and nothing like Jesus but people aren’t really objective. For many he matches the personality they have projected onto God and because of this he must be good. Unfortunately history has shown that uncritically going along with the God in your head has disastrous results. People of all faiths, and no faith for that matter, have an ethical responsibility to learn how their projections distort their reality.
Our beliefs shape us and in turn change how we see the world. Andrew Newberg talks about this as well,
“You can use meditation, and prayer, and ritual to foster compassion, love, and inclusiveness, or you can use them to foster hatred, and exclusiveness, and anger. And it’s really just a matter of what concepts, ideas you decide to focus on.”
For me and for many others believing that we cannot be good without God actually fostered a great deal of arrogance and exclusivity. It also made us miserable and in turn created misery around us. This is not good and as far as I am concerned cannot be of God.
Since leaving American Christianity I am more connected with my fellow humans than ever before. In many ways I am forced to be more ethical because there isn’t a faith system blessing my biases. I have to confront my racism, sexism, and arrogance because there isn’t an interpretation of the Bible telling me those things are part of the natural order. Does this mean I am perfect for having left the church? Not at all, but by almost any measure I am certainly more like Jesus out of American Christianity than I ever was when I was in it.
Even more important, I am more myself and that is a good thing indeed.
