Saving God from Religion
Let’s face it—the bad news just keeps on coming. An impeachment trial as divided as the country; wars and rumors of wars; rising nationalism around the world; an ever-growing gap between rich and poor; and our species headed for extinction as we destroy the planet. It would be easy to blame all this on greed and hubris, world without end. But what we often overlook is how deeply connected to our self-destruction is our image of God. It may also explain why 81% of Christian evangelicals support the president. He looks, and acts a lot like the heavenly patriarch they have been peddling for years.
If we were honest we would have to admit that nobody has any idea what God is, or even whether God is. But there is a default image in the public mind, and it’s dangerous. Take a look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That iconic image of a bearded and buff white male— impetuous, jealous, and perpetually disappointed with his unoriginal sinners below—was created in a world that no longer exists. We’ve gone from the three-story universe of the Bible to the Hubble telescope, black holes, and M-theory, but theology has a reputation to maintain: go slow and punish people (like Galileo) for being right.
There is a connection between what we project on the heavens and our view of power and privilege on earth. Despite how often believers profess their loyalty to truth, beauty, and compassion, what human beings really love is power. The recently popular question among evangelicals is WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?). Now it seems to have given way to a slightly different query, thanks to the vulgarity and narcissism of the president: WWJND (What Would Jesus Not Do?). So what happened? How did the same pious Christians who once preached to us about the supreme importance of character and virtue become the rabid base for a man without either one?
Many things of course. The underemployed and forgotten American worker. Resentment over legalized same-sex marriage. Women emboldened by the Me-Too Movement. And, of course, the newly uncorked but always simmering Original Sin of America—racism and white privilege. This was a recipe for backlash. But there is something else going on that no one talks about, especially from the pulpit. We love to talk about being “made in the image of God,” but the truth is we have mostly made God in the image of humans. As Ann Lamott put it, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Now self-appointed gods are the real problem. Or as we say in Oklahoma, “A man whose fondest wish is to die in his own arms.” Men who think they are “chosen” from above to mirror a white, male, impetuous daddy above the clouds who is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Let’s face it. A sizeable segment of the voting population in this country is convinced that liberals have emasculated America. What we need, they tell us, is the return of toxic masculinity to counter politically correct feminism. Boys will be boys, of course, and that means they often misbehave—grabbing certain female body parts and then bragging about it, but isn’t that better than not knowing if a boy is really a boy or a girl is really a girl?
Take another look at Michelangelo’s God in his most famous fresco, The Creation of Adam. He is an older white male with a surprising youthful body, and has the face of a European Elder. Is that Eve under his arm? Is she a present about to be “given” to Adam? Regardless, there is no mistaking his gender as he reaches out surrounded by angels, extending his hand to a reclining Adam who is noticeably not working very hard at making contact. Their fingers do not quite touch, and in that cosmic gap, western theology pitched its tent.
Although many people would not describe God as an old white guy in the sky, research has shown that an archetypal image will remain in the mind until some other image comes along to displace it. Until then we are stuck with Blake’s “nobodaddy.” Western theology is thus profoundly hierarchical. A place for everything and everything in its place. If the Almighty is white, then white is almighty. If God is surrounded by females who are angels, then angels are female (Victoria’s Secret), and they are either gifts or supplicants, but either way they are property. This might help to explain why we elected a president who also surrounds himself with angelic supermodels. Never mind that he is thrice married, a builder of casinos, and made rich by his father’s money. It can be all forgiven now that Roe vs. Wade is on the precipice.
What’s more, Michelangelo’s heterosexual God, (created ironically by a homosexual artist) has the right, so our scriptures tell us (Genesis 6:1-4), to take for themselves (sexually assault) the “daughters of the earth.” This is the Harvey Weinstein of heaven. God’s famous “reach” is not in this case to a daughter of the earth, or a person of color, or even an animal, but to another white male. The gesture appears to be almost like a cosmic “bromance”. “Come home bubba. Your room is ready.”
This reality TV God “fires” the first disobedient humans, kicking us all out of the garden (draining the swamp). Meanwhile, the political incarnation of this jealous and short-tempered God in the White House sends out thunderbolts in a new way, (tweeting others as they would not like to be tweeted). He keeps the brown gentiles at bay (building a beautiful wall) to help make America White Again. He is obsessed with being a savior, in all ways superior to the black one who came before him.
The time has come for Michelangelo’s God to fall off the ceiling, and for science and religion to remember that they are siblings in search of awe and wonder. Lately it is science, not religion, that has opened our eyes to the fantastic interconnectedness of a quantum universe. But it is not the job of science to open our hearts. That is the work of the spirit. So, if religion is to have a future at all, we should stop trying to ride a dead horse and consider that God does not “exist” separate from creation, or from anything at all. Rather, God is the field itself, what Einstein called “the only reality.” We are in God; God is in us; there is no separation. There is only the illusion of separation, manufactured by entitled humans whose white privilege seeks a kind of dispensation from consequentialism.
Dr. King called it, “a single garment of destiny.” Mystics call it illumination and union. It’s time for the church to call it a theology of consequence, instead of a theology of obedience. Millions are leaving the church because we ask them to believe things they know are not true in order to get rewards they doubt are available. Perhaps, and don’t be shocked by this: God doesn’t do anything, but without God nothing gets done. Or to put it another way, we like to say that God is pulling strings. What if God is the string?
Since a theology of consequence restores the idea that we are all responsible for the moral choices we make, even though we cannot know their final outcomes, it restores the idea of faith as trust instead of doctrinal certainty. Remember, when you are absolutely certain, you need no faith whatsoever. Just go ahead and hold the door open for someone; spend more time with your kids; imagine that you are the stranger, alone and frightened—because either all of us matter or none of us do.
Trust that no act of love is ever lost. That prayer is access to the mystery, not a petition for special favors. That when there is hope there is holiness. That finding God means we stop looking up, and start looking around. It all gives new meaning to an old maxim, often attributed to Augustine: Without God we cannot; without us God will not.
Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search For Faith In A Skeptical Age by Robin Meyers
In this groundbreaking, inspiring book, Robin R. Meyers, the senior minister of Oklahoma City’s Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ, shows how readers can move from a theology of obedience to one of consequence. He argues that we need to stop seeing our actions as a means for pleasing a distant God and rediscover how God has empowered us to care for ourselves and the world. Drawing on stories from his decades of active ministry, Meyers captures how the struggles of ordinary people hint at how we can approach faith as a radical act of trust in a God who is all around us, even in our doubts and the moments of life we fear the most.
“A revelatory manifesto on how we can reclaim faith from abstract doctrines and rigid morals to find God in the joys and ambiguities of everyday life, from the acclaimed author of Saving Jesus from the Church. “In this book of stories from four decades of ministry, Meyers powerfully captures what it means to believe in a God who’s revealed not in creeds or morals but in the struggles and beauty of our ordinary lives.”—Richard Rohr, bestselling author of The Universal Christ
Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is retired senior minister, Mayflower UCC Church, Oklahoma City, distinguished professor of social justice emeritus, Oklahoma City University, and the author of “Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith is a Skeptical Age”, now available from Penguin/Random House.