God was my abuser, until the Father stepped in
As a young evangelical, I heard the refrain: legalism is rules without love. It’s trying to earn your salvation.
In evangelicalism, we have become immune to other forms of legalism than the earn-your-salvation kind. As long as love is your motive, you don’t have to worry about legalism and unhealthiness, right?
Wrong.
The legalism found in devout evangelicalism is fueled by love.
Think of how many young women were told to look out for a man sold out to God, a man with that kind of above-average devotion and religious scrupulosity like Jim Elliot, the kind of man who worries that commiting to a woman into his life would mean that Jesus was not sufficient for him. Women were told to look for a godly, brave-hearted, “warrior-poet” who would go to the ends of the earth and die to declare the name of Jesus, a man like A. W. Tozer who would spend hours and hours communing with God in prayer and in studying the scriptures, a man whose, constant, burning, anguish to know God, be holy, and be immolated on the sacrificial altars of surrender. It’s not even an exaggeration to call this religious suicidalism, because it is literally a culture that glorifies death and self-imposed martyrdom.
We weren’t told that these kind of men are often emotionally unhealthy, unbalanced, unloving, and downright cruel. Ada Tozer wrote about how she always felt unloved, and Christians today still condemn her for failing to appreciate her husband’s negligent devotionalism.
The kind of surrender that evangelicalism fetishizes is emotional death. You love God so, so, so, very much that you are dead to your family, your feelings, your dreams, your life. We cobble together disparate Scriptures to present emotional death as the imperative of discipleship. This religious limerance is the kind of zeal and love for God that consumes you and destroys your well-being. Sometimes it is accompanied by guilt and shame, sometimes by positive feelings and desires to do more and more for God.
As an adolescent, seeing the vast corruption of the prosperity gospel and cheap grace movement, I embraced radical holiness, devotionalism, and a belief in the sovereign will of God. I believe God wanted me to live a life of surrender, which meant coming to an “end of myself” and emotionally “laying it all on the altar” to the point that I really felt as if I did not have a life. I didn’t know what I wanted — it was fleshly and carnal to “want”.
Two years ago, I began to realize that this was wrong.
Imbibing the message of “dying” didn’t teach me how to live, and it made living confusing and difficult. Wanting to “obey God” in an excessive way, in every aspect of life, made it difficult to plan, difficult to make decisions, difficult to look at a whole life ahead of me and figure out what each step should be.
The holiness movement and pietism told us to sacrifice our all on the altar to God, holding nothing back. Nonviolence and Anabaptism taught us that we should be willing to follow Jesus even to the deadly end. It taught us that suffering can bring glory to Jesus.
We all know the story of Abraham and how it has been a typology for God’s jealous devotion: God stripped Abraham from his home and family, gave him a new name, and kept him wandering and wanting for decades. When God finally gave Abraham the son he most desired, he wanted to make sure Abraham did not commit the cardinal sin of loving his son — God needed Abraham to love Him so much he would lay his son on the altar and burn him as a sacrifice. The mind games we believe were inherent to the “friendship” between Abraham and God plague the Christian life today.
We believe that we don’t love God, until we are willing to smite and destroy the things we love and hold dearest to prove our devotion.
Our emotions must be dead.
God, let me be so consumed by you that nothing on earth matters but you. Let all my other idols and affections die.
Sheila Gregoire, Rebecca Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky in “She Deserves Better” (read my review here) describe one effect of this kind of devotionalism as “spiritual bypassing”.
There’s a term for using religious language to avoid dealing with uncomfortable emotions: spiritual bypassing. Psycho-therapist John Welwood, who coined the term, describes spiritual bypassing as the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” Instead of truly listening to a person’s pain, we provide distance from unresolved feelings using God-language.
Another effect of this, and one that has devastating implications, is the pressure to direct this extreme devotionalism towards others. Because women tend to have very high levels of religious devotion (and I believe, as a result, scrupulosity) as well as a strong social pressure to be acquiescent and put “Jesus first, others second, and yourself last.” Any kind of assertion of the need for safety or respect can easily be countered with an admonition to surrender it to the Lord in prayer and repent of your own sins. Religious abusers know how to tug on a victim’s “spiritual lever” and use the right language to keep them compliant and quiet.
Spiritual abuse is effective because the seed is already planted in the subject’s heart, like a microchip to control the victim from within.
God is already an abuser, so an abuser’s way of relating is normal, reasonable, and right.
In this video from the Institute in Basic Life Principles, Priscilla Keller describes the kind of emotional death she went through to hide her feelings for her future husband, surrender it to the Lord, “keep her heart with all diligence” and wait patiently. In these fundamentalist evangelical circles, women are expected to only wait, prayer, and work on surrender. If it is the Lord’s will, He will reveal it to her authority figures and to her husband, and reward her for her silent waiting. In the most conservative circles, a woman is expected to have “emotional purity” to the extent that she watches against any and all feelings and desires. She can only have the feelings she believes God (and her authority figures) allow her to have.
The language in the video by Priscilla Keller struck a chord with me within the last year, because upon hearing the words come out of her mouth, I realize that this was the entire way my mind worked. My love for God had been groomed and structured in such a way that total surrender was an entire way of life. This made God into a jealous abuser, whose demands could not be met and for whom I needed to have undivided, self-destructive, loyalty. God wanted me, my emotions, my being, nailed to the cross. It should not be I who liveth, but Christ who liveth in me.
Despite the fact that I had walked away from so much of it all, the way I thought about God and viewed my spiritual life still followed these same patterns. Recently, in going through loss, the thought came to mind that my younger self would have identified as the Holy Spirit: “Maybe God took this away so that you don’t love anything more than Him”. For a moment, I sat there helplessly, contemplating that feeling of “conviction”. I realized it was religious programming with not a stripe of truth. Finally, I am free. I am free indeed.
In the past few years, it was God Himself who wrestled this Stockholm Spirituality out of my hands. It was God, as a Father, who came in and said, “No, I don’t ask this of you. This is hurting you. This is abusive. I know you love me, and you don’t need to live in constant guilt and compulsion. You don’t need to force yourself to die to everything you want.”
This was mind-blowing for me as someone who constantly went to my knees and surrendered things to God every time life decisions had to be made, and who found letting go cathartic. In a sense, it is. But we don’t need to carry with us that constant pressure to say, “Not my will but Thine be done, let it be to me according to Thy will” about everything single decision or desire.
Here’s an illustration: imagine a conservative woman who marries a pretty chill, affectionate, straightforward guy. She has it in her head that she needs to relate to him as if he was extremely sensitive and demanding. She speaks to him with extreme care, cautiously treading about and making the least direct, least assertive “appeals” possible. She profusely apologizes if she thinks she crosses the line, feeling guilty for every perceived mis-step. This perplexes him. She asks him about decisions, checks in with him, and is deferential to everything that she thinks he wants: the toothpaste, the toilet paper, the towels, the dishes. If he says that it doesn’t matter to him, she quickly apologize for bothering him. She rushes in to take over every time he tries to do a load of laundry or picks up the dishes. She conscientiously lives every moment doing emotional labor he never even asks of her. She frets, and her level of anxiety about being a good wife is extremely high.
“Look,” he says, “I’m not asking all this of you. I don’t need you to cater to my every whim. I don’t need you to worry about pleasing me all the time. I love you and I care about you, and this level of stress is not okay. I’m not a demanding brute, and I want us to have a relationship where you don’t treat me like one. It’s not your fault, but I feel terrible for what you’re going through. I’m not cruel, I’m not selfish. This isn’t the kind of relationship I want.”
So it is with God our Father. I genuinely feel as if God came into my life and said, “Looking, I’m not asking all this of you. The way Christian culture has taught you to see me paints me as an abuser. I’m not. I love you. I care about how you feel. It hurts me when you think you need to go through that kind of emotional toil and pain. I want you to lie in green pastures, I want you to rest.”
I used to believe that the holiest belief was the hardest belief, that God was a Ruler With A Sovereign Will For Our Best that we needed to come under. I believed in the same kind of God that extreme Calvinists describe, the One who thinks nothing of torturing souls in hell to prove His power and glory. I believed that as humanity we had to think of ourselves as deeply evil, wretched, and depraved, but grovelling worms in His sight.
Part of all this has been the strong Wesleyan/holiness influence on my theology and on evangelicalism writ large. I believe that John Wesley likely had high levels of scrupulosity and conscientious, even religious anxiety, that plagued him.
“I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things
to thy pleasure and disposal…” — John Wesley
Today, I don’t believe God saves us only to salaciously and sadistically relish our suffering and to glory in literal and emotional torture and martyrdom .What, then, does surrender mean? This is a poem I wrote in 2019, and while many of these sentiments remain true, I know that I was still working through my belief in an “abuser God” who demands “slave discipleship”.
So you are no longer a slave, but a son… (Galatians 4:7a)
It’s not that we don’t love God. It’s not that we don’t carry our cross. It’s not that we reject discipleship altogether. The funny thing is that one response I received on Twitter was that I must be opposed to the Christian life and to Scripture in some way to point out these abuses, but that only serves to illustrate how we fail to separate Christian culture from the relationship God wants to have with us.
I’m not someone opposed to the hardships and costs of the Christian life. I feel like many of us probably say to God, “Bring it on!”. That desire to put ourselves through the ringer — I’m not going to say it’s fleshly and prideful because that stirs up more guilt — is misguided at best. It’s culturally groomed. But what if God didn’t want us to go through extreme deprivation and self-negation because He isn’t that kind of Sovereign Master we make Him out to be?
Today, I see surrender as being placing my hands in God’s. There are many moments where I feel powerless, at a loss, and without agency. I reach the end of what is humanly possible. Thus, it is empowering to believe that God has more power than I do, and that through Him I have access to power and to agency in moments of abject helplessness. Surrender feels more like active partnership than emotional death. It feels like a co-inhabitation of spiritual power than the destruction of “I” for the sake of “He”. and I finally feel like I can tell God what I desire and what I want rather than say, “I leave it to Thy will. I have no desire.”
Willingness to serve God, openness to challenges and sacrifices, and love for God are all good things — don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s already a step beyond the capitalist-imperial “prosperity gospel” religion that will always be deeply distasteful for many of us in the radical holiness camp. But know that Jesus who calls you, loves you.
Recently, a Mennonite missionary at a youth rally said something I thought was incredibly beautiful, and true. To paraphrase: God doesn’t call you to do things you hate. He made you and formed you, gave you likes and dislikes. What God calls you to do often will bring a lot of joy and fulfillment. This felt like one of the healthiest things I have heard on Christian service.
Here an excerpt from a previous article on this subject. I am still learning, but each day I feel like the Christian life is more about joy, assurance, and feeling seen and known by God. This isn’t weak or carnal, as you might be led to believe, but simply, essentially, faith.
