Friday, September 24, 2004
(7:48 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
This confessional might be a little more serious than those in the past. Throughout my life, I have been led to believe that faithfulness to God will bring with it certain benefits. For instance, there's the famous line that "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life," and part of that plan is most certainly marriage, a highly idealized picture of what marriage is like. The language of "soulmates" might have been a little too New Age-y for my fellow churchgoers, but the assumption seemed to be that God had someone picked out for you, which was functionally the same -- in fact, it's such a sure bet that God has that perfect someone picked out for you that having sex with someone else, even kissing someone else if you were being really rigorous about the whole thing, is preemptively committing adultery against that person. That's pretty serious business. Unlike fornication, adultery is in the Ten Commandments. Now I never consciously bought into all of this, having been blessed by the Lord with a strong bullshit detector, but I think that at the most fundamental level, I was convinced of it. It's hard to go through so many deeply emotionally manipulative services and revivals and youth group meetings without starting to feel like they want you to feel.
What's worse is that of all the psychologizing religious groups out there, the Nazarenes are certainly the most thorough. They taught the idea of "entire sanctification," a "second infilling" of the Holy Spirit that would mean perfect communion with God in this life. In Wesley's Plain Account of Christian Perfection, he details the ways you can tell someone is entirely sanctified. Certainly there's a higher level of piety involved, but everyone in the church should be very pious. The best way to tell that someone isn't sanctified is that they “are not happy, at least, not always happy; for sometimes they complain. They say this or that is hard!” Believe me -- I'm not always happy. Far from it. And sure, I knew it was bullshit. I knew that there's no cure, much less a "double cure." But I went up to the altar anyway, a million times, and it never took.
Worse, it was my fault that it never took, because I couldn't believe hard enough. My mind kept cheating me out of this final solution for happiness -- and I wonder, why the fuck were they encouraging teenagers to go for this? It wasn't just my mental resistance, either. How, I wondered, could I be sanctified if I kept masturbating? Or if I kept making out with my girlfriend for hours at a time? I was committing adultery of the heart, most certainly, and that's bad stuff -- that's in the Ten Commandments. God must be very disappointed in me. Switching over to the Catholic Church didn't necessarily help matters. I found the system of sacraments appealling because there was some solidity to it, because God worked his magic through those particular acts even if I didn't believe hard enough. But I felt like I had to keep following the rules or keep going to confession all the time, and one of the rules that was emphasized in the reactionary Catholic apologetics that helped to convince me to join up was that masturbation was always a mortal sin, always represented a decisive turn away from God. If masturbation is a mortal sin, then certainly dry-humping with my girlfriend must be a mortal sin as well! (When I look back at my great successes of high school and all the pleasure that was ruined by my stupid guilt, I am filled with regret -- especially given my four-year dry spell in college, when it was precisely my skepticism about God's ability to keep me from "sin" and my conversion to Catholicism that kept me not-so-blissfully free of "near occasions to sin.")
So I would say the God that I believe in -- not the wonderful outgoing trinitary movement of kenoticism that I can talk about, but the God who comes to mind when I say God -- is not a very good God. He is the God who created me to be a sexual being -- and given the hypocrisy that runs rampant in church circles, I was led to believe that my sexual desires were freakishly intense, which maybe they are -- and who punished me for it at every step. He was supposed to provide me with a wife to take care of this problem, but just like with the implicit promise to give me emotional peace, he reneged. But I can't say that -- I have to say that it was my fault, for not believing hard enough, for not trying hard enough to overcome temptation, for letting my mind get in the way.
We're all party hacks for God, trying our hardest to make sure that God never has to take responsibility for anything. After all, we're told, he sent his Son out of his incredible love, to save us from our sins. Well, let me tell you something: I never asked to be a sinner. I never asked you to let us kill your Son to fulfill your sick need for "justice." I've heard the story a million times, each time told as if it were just common sense that some guy long ago pissed God off by eating off a particular tree, then the whole human race was doomed to be a bunch of sinners henceforth, but it's okay! because at just the right time, God became a human being and, despite showing no evidence of desiring human sacrifice before that, himself became the sacrifice for sin (that he had apparently demanded and we were supposed to somehow know, but I guess he kind of kept it to himself), so that now, if we just go up to an altar and pray and believe really hard, we can get a piece of that action -- and even better, if we go up a second time, he'll send the Holy Spirit to be with us all the time and make sure we never fuck up! But until that second time takes, we're in constant danger of losing that salvation, because once we are identified with God's saving work in Christ, we get the privilege of constantly beating ourselves up over our petty sins.
As I said in a comment thread below: "Curse God and die -- if only it were that easy!" It's not that easy. I can say a million nice things about God, things that I really wish were true, but I can't believe them. Whenever I talk to someone about how my picture of God is so negative and they go into this speculation about how they think that God is actually a really cool guy and the church just messed it all up, I become very angry. God has never played that positive role in my life, from what I can tell. The inner peace that is supposed to come from a daily discipline of prayer -- I got none of it. The joyful feeling of receiving Christ in the Eucharist -- again, except for one time, nothing. The fruits of the Spirit -- jack squat. I tried. I really tried. But I failed. And it's my fault, not God's. That's what those free-thinking people are saying -- again, it's my fault, not God's, because I should have known that God is a really cool guy and I shouldn't have listened to what the church told me about him.
If I can risk saying it: I confess that I hate the God I believe in. I feel like God has ruined my life for no good reason. I feel like he's spent a whole lot of time and energy coming to the earth as a man, dying, being raised, founding a church, all to turn me into a self-loathing emotional cripple. The times when I'm generally happiest are either when I am involved in intellectual pursuits or when I am sexually involved with a woman -- that is, I am happiest when I am engaging in the two behaviors that are the biggest obstacles to a relationship with the God I have been rigorously conditioned to believe in, and in whom I still believe, despite everything.
That is why I'm so torn up about whether I should study theology or not -- on the one hand, I hate what the church has done in my life and wish that I had never heard of God, but on the other hand, I wonder if it's possible for me to become a Christian to the Christians so that I might save some. If the church isn't going to go away, I wonder if I could somehow channel my anger and resentment into a lifetime of teaching people to see the church for what it is and hopefully change it. In a lot of ways, that sounds like a sad waste of a life, but it's still tempting.
