Church Clothes.

 Falling in Love is a mystery.  It’s confusing and complex. Chemicals, hormones, circumstances, serendipity, evolution, culture, and spirituality can all play a role.  It can’t be explained and yet it can’t be denied.  It just keeps happening.  Falling in Love with God is all the more nebulous.  But I don’t want to talk about if or how we can fall in love with God.  I’m going to proceed as if it is a matter of fact.

When believers fall in love with God, it presents a fundamental shift in how they view themselves and how they view the world.  In a way, at least in my case, the big change comes from not only loving something magnificent, but also realizing the implications of being loved.  When this happens, we immediately want to share what has happened to us.  We want it to happen to everyone around us.  And that would all be marvelous (and at times it is), if we didn’t handle this newfound passion so poorly.  Within us and within our systems is an almost immediate desire to take a small, wonderful thing and force it on everyone around us.  You can find this phenomenon in young couples in love, who can be obnoxious and nearly impossible to endure, not unlike new believers.  We fall in love.  Because of that feeling, we are eager to tell our story so that others may love.  Within religion, we take these very human tendencies and organize it to amplify it.  The goal of religion is to grow.  It is also a very human tendency to achieve the goal at all costs.  Somewhere along the way we fall in love with the telling itself: the show, the production, the dogma.  We lose sight of object of our love in favor of the telling.  If we are really gifted in the telling, we get rewarded for it.  That opens us up to a whole bunch of potential compromises.  Maybe we elaborate on our “telling”.  Or maybe we say it louder than necessary.  We justify lights and music and programs all with the best of intentions.  We excuse bad behavior of the most gifted tellers.  And we all get wrapped up in the success of the “telling” organization.  And there are so many good things that come from these “telling” organizations, but with any level of success, the initial love that moved us becomes secondary to the life of the organization.  Things can really get ugly when our “telling” organization feels the need to defend the “telling.”  Religious organizations and religious folks, once entrenched, are always defending their “right to tell” about their love.  What gets lost in this is the message of the love itself.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have undergone a fundamental shift in how I view religious behavior.  In some ways, I am merely reverting to a feeling I had as a young man.  As an over-churched youth, I didn’t have the words or maturity to describe or even understand what my objections to religion were.  I could not discern if I was merely rebellious or if my distrust was legitimate.  Yet, I don’t regret any of my time in the Church.  I very much needed it.  When I came back to faith, when I fell in love with God, I went all in on church life.  And again, I was having experiences and feelings that I didn’t  have the words for and didn’t fully understand.  Because of my lack of awareness and my lack of maturity, even in my 30’s, I overlooked a whole field of red flags. 

Now that I have taken a step away from church life, I am gaining some understanding, seeing the threads of complexity, love, and compromise that are all intertwined.  There were no thoughtful persuasions or clever arguments that moved me away from church life.  I was simply forced to stop going because of circumstances.  And within that time away, I began to see things differently.  That’s it.  I don’t have a desire to condemn the church, I just can’t participate anymore.  It seems I’m understanding more and more every day about why I feel that way.  It seems absurd but becoming comfortable with uncertainty has given me a new clarity.  Actually, there is nothing more absurd than having complete certainty in a world full of contradictions.

I heard a short clip of Sam Harris (atheist and scientist) debating a Christian.  Harris made the point that the Church, in all its years, has never changed of its own volition.   Of course, there have always been people inside of the religious systems working for change and progress, but nothing would ever happen without societal pressure from the outside of the church. This was a stunning and simple point and hard, if not impossible to deny.  Harris brings this up to point out the moral failing of religion itself. Surely, we do not want the moral perspective of the church from 300 years ago, or even 50 years ago.  What seemed to be a clear and effective condemnation from an atheist perspective was a hopeful epiphany for me.  Of course, God is using the world to change the church.  God is in everything!  This newly understood perspective made it clear as to why the isolationist messages of the church of my father and the church of my youth are so troubling.  These churches seek to set themselves apart from the very world, that according to their message, God is so desperately in love with (too).  It creates an incestuous and compromised version of God’s Grace.  That is why 17-year-old Scott turned away from God.  That is also why I remain hopeful.  Religion can make God seem so small and petty.  Love makes God seem quite big.

I’ve kept my terms intentionally generic.  I think this may be a common experience for many, but it’s also specific to my Evangelical background.  This post is a marker of sorts.  This is where I was in February of 2023: still in love with God, comfortable with uncertainty, and still seeking to understand.  I’m just a bit quieter about the “telling”.