Too clever for faith, too anxious for deism

Or: How I'm trying to deconstruct my deconstruction while fighting the spicy worry

So, my mental health has been abysmal lately.

What else is new, you chronically depressed bitch? I hear you say, not unkindly. But wait! This is different! This is *A*N*X*I*E*T*Y*, aka the spicy concern, aka the Viking worry, aka the intrusive thought that bypasses your mind and goes straight to your body. Yay for variety!

As I am usually more of a Big Sad kind of guy, I think we can take this as a diversity win.

Please note: this is not some kind of special give me affirmation post (every post is a give me affirmation post). It’s mostly to ask a theological question. And because a few people have subscribed recently and I feel guilty for not having written anything here for months.

So. To the theological question.

The form my anxiety has been taking is fearing death, body horror, health paranoia. It’s been prompted by physical symptoms, but, as we all know, anxiety can be hella somatic and after a while it is both unclear and irrelevant where symptoms begin and causes end in the sick/worried-that-I’m-sick axis of evil. I keep thinking I am going to die. And in all of it, what keeps coming up is: you’re a Christian, though. Doesn’t your faith help?

At the risk of being a shitty witness, I have to answer honestly: No.

It used to. But it doesn’t now. I remember how, as a newish convert, I legit felt and believed the truth of ‘to live is Christ, to die is gain’. I remember knowing that it was better to die despised in a gutter than to step out of God’s will.

And before you think I was pious, I wasn’t. I was cheating on girlfriends, getting spicy massages, bitching about friends and not caring much about the poor. I was not particularly moral or righteous, but I was 100% sure that God loved me and that I could count on that love translating into intervention. I didn’t demand it – I was always clear that God did not have to help me. But he did. The way I experienced God’s miraculous intervention in my early twenties is a story for another time. More important was the sense of hope it gave me. The faith.

I knew that even if God didn’t intervene in whatever ridiculous situation I had got myself into, he still loved me. And I knew beyond a shadow of a shadow that not helping was not the norm but a deviation from it. God could intervene, he wanted to, and he often did. I never fully understood why or how it worked, beyond the fact that he loved me and he was God.

Now, not so much. And part of that, I know, is down to growing up. Moving from spiritual milk to solid food. Dark night of the soul as a metaphor for God no longer indulging you like a kid. All those things.

Part of it, too, was experiencing actual pain and fear and a realisation that bad things – really bad things – could actually happen to me. That lesson comes late to men, later to white men, and later still to middle class white men in an aggressive racist patriarchy – even if they are hippie femme boys. But the lesson came, through illness and injury and interactions with the hard edge of a world I’d been protected from. When danger, suffering and consequences are real rather than abstractions, it’s harder to believe they will be removed, even by a loving God.

But mostly, I think, it was argument. Theology. Philosophy. Smart people writing and saying smart things. Conclusions I came to myself. Books I read and assumptions I imbibed from older, smarter Christians who were not brainwashed by fundamentalism. These taught me that ‘truths’ I had thought of as universal were in fact very contextual. God had always provided for me, but then, I had grown up with privilege. God loved me and didn’t want me to suffer, but then, what of all the people he was supposed to love who very much did suffer? When I prayed in Jesus’ name, I often saw God intervene, but so many people didn’t.

I met many Christians whose response to these facts was to back away from the idea that prayer was for anything other than meditative gratitude. Who vilified any faith preaching as ‘prosperity gospel’ nonsense. Who helped to re-form my faith and witness so that I no longer thought of following Jesus as lifting a spiritual weight of sin from the shoulders but, instead, offering a more full and profound vision of living positively. Followers of Jesus were called to make the world better now, for the least of these. Leave that opiate of the masses stuff to the naïve conservatives.

And a lot of that has been very valuable.

Except.

Except I’m not sure it wasn’t unkind.

I don’t mean unkindness on the part of the Christian friends and mentors or the authors and teachers who helped me question and deconstruct my faith – not intentional or knowing unkindness. But a net unkindness, and effective unkindness in what it took from me.

The thing is: being okay with a non-interventionist God is like not caring about money. It is often (though not always, I know) coincidental with privilege. As Francis Spufford wrote about the atheist bus campaign of a few years ago: telling someone caring for a dying loved-one in horrible conditions that they ‘shouldn’t worry because there’s probably no God’ doesn’t just fail to comfort. It’s fucking cruel.

Now, I believe in Truth. I don’t think comforting fictions have spiritual value and I think lies become cancers that grow into terrible things. I’m not arguing for leaving me with my illusions intact. I’m just saying that those of us pushing against ‘magical thinking’ and ‘Christian superstition’ (and I say ‘us’ because I am part of this) are usually so unwilling to give concrete, definitive answers now that we are post-evangelical. And yet we are so sure about what is definitely not true. Spoiler: in true evangelical fashion, it’s a position that we, until recently, held unquestioningly. Now we are enlightened we can know for sure it’s bullshit.

We preach with confidence something we cannot possibly know for sure: that God does not answer prayer in any practical sense. And when you’re in the grip of anxiety (and that word is insufficient to describe the all-consuming dread, the relentless body-possessing fear), this leaves you feeling completely hopeless and utterly alone.

I don’t know I that’s a reasonable place to be as a Christian. Maybe it is. Certainly huge swathes of life can’t easily be tied up in an evangelical bow and be anointed with meaning. Some shit just happens. And yeah, eventually everyone’s prayer to be spared goes unanswered. Many of our petitions to God, our fragile hopes aired sometimes only to him, will not come back to us. But all of them? Are we really saying that none of our hopes have anything but random chance governing their chances? Are we really to be left to a deist nightmare of intercessions echoing off the walls of an empty canyon as we weep alone? Asking for a friend.

And me. Obvs. Because the platitude ‘praying doesn’t change the world, it changes is’ is fucking useless when you are in Gethsemane, and it is at least as glib as any Footprints poster I encountered in my youth. I don’t need the answer to be yes every time. I don’t always need an answer at all. But I need there to be a chance. I need a yes and real help sometimes. I need that hope. And the philosophy, the theology, the intellectual orientation (that I have both encountered and embodied at times) that says: ‘God isn’t like that and that is not how prayer works’ is unkind.

I want us to tell the truth. I want us, as followers of Jesus, not to make wild pronouncements that give false hope and eventually lead to crushing disappointment. But I know God answers prayer. I have experienced it. So it is ludicrous, ridiculous, that I have forgotten that he does. Or that he can.

This is not to blame anyone but myself, you understand. I would have got to this point, I’m sure, by the sheer weight of my natural gloominess alone, never mind my over-arching desire not to be an idiot. But I think there is a lesson for my people – post-evangelicals, ex-fundamentalists, second half of lifers and self-identifying smart Christians – in not throwing the baby out with the fontwater. Not eradicating a medium sized illusion or delusion with an extra-large nuke.

And if my doubts about my doubts are wrong, if in fact the real beauty and good news of God is subtler and more nuanced than a Father who will (at least sometimes) reach down and comfort, heal or help, then I need your help in understanding what hope there really is. What makes this good news when you’re not doing well, when you’re living in fear, when you’re poor?

I suspect God still answers and intervenes. I suspect it’s not as simple as I once believed, nor as predictable. I am absolutely certain that my next understanding of it will fall wildly short of absolute truth. But I am hoping for a faith that trusts the way I used to. And trusting that before that faith lies real hope. Because I know beyond a doubt that God is good, even as life is often very hard. Even when I’m afraid.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I’m sure I’ll get back to bitching about politics soon. I can’t let this newsletter become an occasional update on my mental health. I’m not a monster.

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Episode 62 of Beer Christianity

Partygate scandal: politicians' perfidy and listeners' letters

There’s a great new episode of Beer Christianity (out now, get it while it’s hot) primarily about the kind of leadership we want versus the leadership we currently have in the UK, and also about what we mean when we say ‘Christian’. Is it a term you embrace or avoid? We’d love to hear your thoughts so go take a listen. Please forgive the awful formatting. I can’t be arsed to fix the page. Ignore the visuals and go straight to the listening.

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I’ve been writing, honest

Look, I know. I’ve been a bad newsletterer. It’s not you, it’s me. I think you should see other newsletters. I myself am going to try to be better. As a sign of good faith, here’s a piece I wrote for Premier Christianity magazine about the movie Belfast. I hope you can learn to love and trust me again and we can move on, find a little place of our own, and God willing raise a family.

I have also, since last I wrote to you, become a published author. Nothing grand — just a novel in the light horror / urban fantasy genre. It’s got a lot of Christian and political content (as well as southern African mythological content) and some people have really enjoyed it. But, then, some people enjoy Highschool Musical. People can’t be trusted.

This is it:

Anyway, if you’re interested, you can find out more at incredulousbook.com and buy it from Amazon (I know, but small presses can’t be choosers). If you really want to bypass Amazon, you can buy one from me, but honestly I need Amazon reviews so that people my be recommended the book.

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The end bit

You don’t have to! But this is how you can encourage the crap out of me.

I do this for free and for the love of getting to talk to you and informing your thinking. That is a massive privilege in itself, NGL. But sometimes people ask how they can help. So if you’d like to do even more than reading, there are two options:

1. Tell your friends about the newsletter and the podcast, share them on social media, leave reviews, all that kind of stuff. It is so encouraging. And makes it more worthwhile.

2. Buy me a beer. That is to say, you can make a donation to help support me doing this stuff. You really don’t have to, but it really does really help. And if you’re doing it specifically to support the podcast, I promise to buy drinks for Laura and Malky too if you like! Please leave a message if you do! But also no pressure! Good Lord this is awkward. [considering how infrequently I sometimes write, please do not feel in any way obliged!]

Anyway…

Follow/message Beer Christianity on Twitter: @beerxianity and Instagram. Listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Stitcher. 

Leave us a question or comment to be included in the podcast at: speakpipe.com/beerchristianity.

Or give! You know, whatever! No pressure! Aaaaaa!

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You made it to the end! Hi fren! I really can’t believe the last time I wrote something here was November. That is embarrassingly poor. Sorry. Also it’s Valentines Day (putting an apostrophe in there is to make an historical and theological judgement I just can’t deal with right now, so I will leave it like that.) I hope you got or sent a card or thought — I know it’s consumerist nonsense, but it’s also an excuse to make someone feel special. I love it. But of course I do. Anyway I will hopefully be in touch more soon. love you xoxoxox

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