How to Know if You're Getting God Wrong

Some tips on not weaponizing religion

Photo by Diana Vargas on Unsplash

Hell hath no fury like religious people getting God horribly wrong.

What's worse: they (and we) usually don't have a clue when they’ve lost the plot. There are lots of reasons for our blunders of belief: an insular church culture that naturally resists difference, a rigid theology that tends to mark out a hard line between those who are in and those who are out, an insidious tribalism that can come with spiritual community, or plain old-fashioned ego that insists on being right in matters of faith.

But regardless of the causes, the bottom line is that it's difficult to detect our personal blind spots and this makes it really easy for we who claim faith to fail miserably. When we do, our religion can become weaponized and we can totally jack people up in the name of God while feeling fully righteous in the process.

So, if you fancy yourself a religious person and you want to know if you may be getting it wrong, here are a few possible clues:

You believe that God's pigmentation, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and personality exclusively mirror your own.

You find yourself invoking God's name to deny other people healthcare, food, safety, marriage, opportunity, or basic human rights.

Your religious worldview requires that others precisely share that worldview in order to have relational or physical proximity to you.

You believe God values your child more than a child across the street, across town, or across the world.

You find yourself continually separating people into either the saved or the damned—with you somehow always winding up among the former.

Your God leads you to respond to people with a closed fist more often than an open hand.

The voice you have in your head for God seems to miraculously always align with your preferences and prejudices—if God loves who you love and hates who you hate.

Your religion enables you to revel in the suffering of others, the shedding of blood, the waging of war, or the ending of life.

You believe God specifically blesses your country, votes for your political party, or roots for your football team.

Your religion can justify more money for the military than for healthcare.

You're certain that your religion is the only right one, your holy book is the only right one, and that your interpretation of that book is the only right one. 

You feel like God is out to squash you or someone else.

You are sure you've gotten religion fully right.

The essence of honest spirituality is that none of us have it all figured out, that there are always gaps in our understanding, and that unless we continually guard against it, we will invariably default to creating a God in our own image. Relentlessly pursuing a posture of humility in matters of belief is the only way to get it right more than we get it wrong.

Cling tightly to your spiritual pursuits and aspirations but hold your conclusions loosely.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how convinced you are that you've cracked the code or how certain you are that you're hearing God correctly or how fervently you believe what you believe. If you claim faith and your presence here on the planet doesn't leave it more decent, more diverse, more generous, more compassionate, and more loving than when you got here—there's a problem.

As preacher Billy Sunday once said, "If you have no joy, there's a leak in your Christianity somewhere."

Likewise, if your theology leads you to animosity, hatred, pride, malice, or superiority, it's probably not worth holding onto and it probably doesn't reflect the truth of whatever and whoever God is—it likely just resembles you. So, cling tightly to the pursuits and aspirations but hold your conclusions loosely.

Religion at its best can be a beautiful thing. it can be a path to experiencing peace, to doing life better, and to becoming the kind of person the world needs. But it can also be the source of profound violence against people that we can come to believe God co-signs, so do all that you can to make sure yours is yielding something worthy.

Try like hell to get God right.