There’s a subtext in evangelicalism that declares that unwavering faith should be maintained no matter the circumstances.
In its softer variations, there’s an evangelical allowance for grief: you can get mad at God, you can scream and cry, you can lament. In a wonderful church that will always have a piece of my heart, there’s more than allowance; there’s encouragement to grieve and lament, to be authentic with God about the things that hurt — “Why God!? This isn’t fair.” “You feel far away.” “Do you even care about this? About me?” “I’m pissed off and you’re gonna hear about it.” “HOW LONG, God?”
I will always appreciate that. If we cannot be genuine in our interactions with God, then how much of a “relationship” is that, really?
And yet, despite the encouragement to lament in evangelicalism’s best churches, I’ve sensed an invisible edict that while grief is welcomed, changing beliefs are not.
- It’s assumed that no matter how many people die that you dearly loved, you will still feel the same about God.
- It’s expected that no matter how many unbelievers die that you dearly loved, you will maintain the belief that they are all in Hell.
- It’s understood that no matter how many children die; or how many young mothers die; or how many families are ripped apart by war, genocide, mass incarceration, police brutality, gun violence, terrorism, domestic violence, child abuse, ICE raids, rape — and the white supremacy and corrupt power structures that baptize all of it — you’ll continue calling God wholly good and wholly sovereign over everything.
You’re supposed to go on theologically unchanged. Because, resurrection someday. Because, God’s ways are higher than our ways. Because…please stop asking us these questions.
Well, I’m not the robot that evangelicalism says I should be. The devastating losses of my doula client and her infant gutted me. When my aunt who was my second mother and Christian role model just died out of the blue, 30 years too soon, I fell apart. When my own tiny seed of a child died inside my womb and rushed out of me in a torrent of blood, I was nonfunctional; my soul was ripped open and it bled far longer than my uterus did. When my not-evangelical grandmother was nearing her final breath, I pleaded with God to save her because I was taught that he was inclined to do otherwise. When SIDS claimed the life of my dear friend’s newborn, so randomly, so inexplicably, I couldn’t make my theology work. Trying to sing How Great is Our God was like starting a car with no gas in the tank.
When church leadership got rid of my pastor husband and cooked up a lie to tell the congregation in order to cover their sins and skirt the presbytery rules — and dangled the money we needed to survive in order to force our secrecy — yeah, that had a bit of an effect on me. To put it mildly.
There was a me before and a me after each of those defining events. They changed me forever, and that includes my theology. Everything in the path of a tornado will be affected, if not destroyed, by that tornado.
On Christ the Solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand…that worked great, until solid rock felt just like sinking sand.
The pain is too much. It has cut me too deep. And my heart has been broken too much to continue believing psychologically-crushing doctrine.
If that means I have a weak faith, so be it. I’d rather have a weak faith than a dead heart.
That’s the ultimate subtext — kill your heart. You have feelings? So what? (Or, better, but insufficient: you have feelings? Feel all your feelings. But don’t let those feelings change what you believe — as if a person could control that).
This Is The Absolute Truth.
Well, it’s absolutely true that I could not kill my heart, and that I’m done trying. Tornadoes have passed through, and my absolute truth is a pile of debris on the floor.
Photo credits in order:
- Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash
- Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash
- Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash
