If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk

Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

John Pavlovitz

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780664266844
• eBook ISBN:
  9781646982134
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Thou Shalt Not Be Horrible.

Imagine for a moment what the world might look like if we as people of faith, morality, and conscience actually aspired to this mantra.

What if we were fully burdened to create a world that was more loving and equitable than when we arrived?

What if we invited one another to share in wide-open, fearless, spiritual communities truly marked by compassion and interdependence?

What if we daily challenged ourselves to live a faith that simply made us better humans?

John Pavlovitz explores how we can embody this kinder kind of spirituality where we humbly examine our belief system to understand how it might compel us to act in less-than-loving ways toward others.

This simple phrase, "Thou Shalt Not Be Horrible," could help us practice what we preach by creating a world where:

• spiritual community provides a sense of belonging where all people are received as we are;
• the most important question we ask of a religious belief is not Is it true? but rather, is it helpful?
• it is morally impossible to pledge complete allegiance to both Jesus and America simultaneously;
• the way we treat others is the most tangible and meaningful expression of our belief system.

In If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk, John Pavlovitz examines the bedrock ideas of our religion: the existence of hell, the utility of prayer, the way we treat LGBTQ people, the value of anger, and other doctrines to help all of us take a good, honest look at how the beliefs we hold can shape our relationships with God and our fellow humans—and to make sure that love has the last, loudest word.

Chapter 1

UNBOXING GOD

“Oh, no—I’m trapped in these pants.”

That was the first thought I had as I careened wildly around my walk-in closet. It probably sounds as ridiculous to you now as it did in my head in that moment. The situation had deteriorated rapidly. Just five minutes earlier I’d been quietly thumbing through the outer reaches of my clothes rack, far from the well-traveled middle section, where outfits no longer suitable for respectable humans languish for years in dust and darkness before finally being evicted into cardboard boxes or garbage bags and sentenced to spend their remaining days in the attic or garage. As a series of once-sensible (and now tragically laughable) fashion decisions slid past me, I stopped abruptly as I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a thirty-year-old friend: a pair of ladies’ stretch denim pants I’d purchased in 1988 at the Cherry Hill Mall in southern New Jersey. (Author’s note: I was twenty years old, had a long and luxurious mane of thick, naturally curly chestnut hair—and as the male singer in a local “hair band,” as they were affectionately known, there was absolutely nothing unusual about buying my clothes in a women’s clothing store.) As I stared reverently at the glorious acid-washed relic of my youth gone wild, suddenly a voice in my head that strongly resembled my own said, “You know, I bet they still fit.” Like the crafty serpent tempting Adam and Eve in the garden, the voice dared me forward. “Go ahead . . . try them on.” At fifty-one years old, I still consider myself in pretty good shape, so I answered back with naive optimism, “Why not?”

I was about to get a definitive answer.

Things started off promisingly enough. I bent down and grabbed the waistband, stepped into the small leg holes that easily traversed my ankles, but by the time I reached my calves I realized I was in trouble as progress slowed substantially. Undaunted, I doubled my resolve and pressed on (which turned out to be a really terrible idea). I was soon wriggling wildly and my breathing became noticeably labored as I tried to muscle myself all the way into what had quickly become a pair of pale blue human sausage casings. When those efforts proved futile, I began to hop violently like a stationary sack-race participant, hoping the blunt force of gravity would thrust my thighs the rest of the way through the now obviously woefully undersized space provided. After four or five desperate heaves, I felt a rush of air suddenly vacuum-sealing me in, and mercifully came to rest on the ground. I stood there with my chest heaving and forehead perspiring, as if having just completed high-intensity cardio training, and initially feeling pleased with myself—however, any satisfaction was only a momentary victory, as I felt the elastic waistband sharply digging into my skin and my legs started to quickly lose feeling due to lack of blood flow. It was then that I came to three sobering realizations: (1) I was no longer twenty years old, (2) I still hadn’t fully exhaled, and (3) I wasn’t getting out of these pants by myself.

They say that the first step in getting help of any kind is admitting that you have a problem. I could tell from the substantial tension my lower extremities were under that if I’d tried to sit down in that moment, I’d surely have set off a powerful explosion, sending spandex shrapnel into every corner of our walk-in closet. In a welcome moment of sober humility, I reluctantly called for help. Hearing my distant, muffled cries for assistance, my wife and kids came running in from other rooms of the house, expecting from the desperation in my voice that I’d had a bad fall or heart episode—and instead were greeted by a grown man imprisoned by his own pair of ladies’ slacks. After they helped to extricate me, we all had a good laugh at my expense, and when sensation returned to my legs, I placed the pants (which had now shrunken back to their original size) back on the hanger. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to them just yet.

If I had expired there in that closet, my cause of death would have been listed as Unintentional Spandecide caused by reckless arrogance. It would have been a classic case of user error. No one would have blamed the pants. They may have functioned back when I bought them, but they certainly weren’t designed to contain me thirty years and four inches of girth later. I wasn’t supposed to fit into them any longer and shouldn’t have tried. That’s how you find yourself in peril in your bedroom closet.

This has been my spiritual journey over the past decade and a half: trying desperately to cram my belief into a space it was no longer capable of fitting into, hoping that sheer will, a little denial, and lots of wishful thinking would allow me to stay in something I’d long outgrown but couldn’t quite bring myself to admit did not fit anymore. There’s a song church people have sung together for decades: Gimme that ol’ time religion, it’s good enough for me. (Far from a ringing endorsement, by the way.) But what do you do when that ol’ time religion isn’t good enough for you anymore, when good enough is far less than what you are seeking in the deepest recesses of your heart? If I’m honest, the further I’ve walked into my adult life and the more open I’ve been to being surprised and to changing my mind and to considering better stories about spiritual things, the more organized religion has been an exercise in diminishing returns: God getting progressively bigger, while the space I’d once created to contain that God grows more and more restrictive, more and more suffocating. When you find yourself in that newly confining space, the fear and the guilt can be overwhelming, and it can make you freeze. For years as a local church pastor I stayed where I was (literally and figuratively), either because I thought something might give if I prayed hard enough, or maybe because I was too terrified to confront the reality that my faith was shifting—but the pressure was profound and constant. Something that was supposed to be life-giving suddenly became difficult to breathe inside of.

You don’t need to be a pastor or a Christian to understand spiritual claustrophobia, because it is consistent in all existential crises, and it’s more common than most of us admit or realize. In my travels both online and around the country, I meet thousands of similarly squeezed people: human beings who still passionately crave the wide-open wonder of genuine spiritual pursuits and the transformative spaces of loving community, but who aren’t finding those things in the religious stories and systems and buildings of their childhoods. Now that they’re getting older, they’re taking off the no longer useful hand-me-down theologies they inherited and looking for something that fits them today. These days, Sundays are different for them, church is different, and God is different, but the yearning is still there and the burdens still twist their insides. They may be losing their ol’ time religion, but they haven’t lost their hunger to find sacred spaces, to confront the persistent questions, to live in justice communities, to see realities deeper than the surface, or to participate in something greater than themselves—and this is where the journey to a more loving religion begins: embracing the questions, discarding old stories, being humble enough to start again.

Whenever people say, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” this is usually another way of saying, “I’ve outgrown my God box and am currently looking for a bigger one.” They’re telling you that they’ve either willingly left or been evicted from the place they once called home, the geography of their former faith. They are wandering prodigals either by choice or by necessity. They may have discovered an irreconcilable difference with a theological position in their faith tradition or grown exhausted from a silent response to injustice from the pews, or they simply woke up one day and realized they can’t pray the prayers they used to—and something has to give. I think most honest people of faith, every sincere sojourner, and lots of introspective human beings who are pressed up against the profound mysteries of this life (and whatever might happen beyond its conclusion) are looking for a bigger God and for a tangible expression of goodness that feels proportional to that God. We all want something unbelievable to believe in—something that is so massive and so capable of surprising us that it is always just slightly out of reach and just a little beyond our capacity to comprehend—and we want something that makes us and the people around us better humans. If not, it’s probably not worth our time.

The moment someone tells you they have this spiritual life figured out, that’s a red flag that they’re lying to you or to themselves. This book is for the rest of us: the restless, the unsettled, the unconvinced, and even the downright defiantly opposed; for people who want more love than they’ve encountered in organized religion. I think if we’re doing faith right, we’re supposed to be there. Evolving spirituality will always give people the desire to shed the skins of their current belief system, always push them to outgrow their present assumptions about the world, and it will forever be increasing their capacity for change. That expansion is necessary. But narrow religion will usually shrink everything over time—until one day it all blows up.

A few months ago I got a frantic email from my friend Tiffany, who said she needed to talk as soon as possible. This was out of character for her, and the unusual urgency of her message moved me to reach for the phone. “I’m in free fall,” she said almost immediately, and continued quickly, her voice breaking, “I feel like I have no ground to stand on right now.” Then there was silence, broken only by quiet sniffs. I knew a good deal of Tiffany’s backstory: a lifelong evangelical, raised Southern Baptist in Texas, she always had a tidy, clearly defined God box and a go-to set of Scriptures she wielded like a rudimentary first-aid kit for herself and others. In college she’d met Scott, a local student pastor, and—like a good, respectable Southern Baptist girl—soon became a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife. For years everything was perfect (or at least, it worked for her given the story they’d told themselves), until she began to see hairline cracks forming in the bedrock of what she once believed. Their senior pastor’s increasingly incendiary messages about the evils of the “gay agenda” and her church’s silence in response to a new wave of bathroom-bill legislation started to conflict with the LGBTQ people she’d met and come to love. As so often happens as we grow and get better stories, life begins to argue with our theology—and Tiffany was in the middle of that increasingly heated disagreement with her former self. Over the past few years, she’d gradually cut many of the tethers of her previous religious narrative, which at first felt freeing; that is, until her marriage began to go south and her youngest daughter became very sick. In the past, during times of emotional, financial, and relational crisis, she’d gone to the familiar religious places of refuge—and they weren’t cutting it any longer.

Tiffany said, “Before, when things fell apart, my (very specific) faith story was the thing I could hold on to. My image of God, my go-to Bible verses, those default prayers, the fallback platitudes, and my church family were all comforting.” Her voice grew more desperate as sobs interrupted her. “Now that I don’t have those things—what do I turn to? To people? To myself? To medication? I don’t know what to anchor myself to anymore! I just feel like I’m drifting here.”

Tiffany was feeling the growing pains of an expanding spirituality, of outgrowing the box. She’d let go of the restrictive religious doctrine of her childhood and early adulthood and found that the tiny theological container was no longer big enough for her beliefs, but in a time of trauma she’d struggled to find a suitable replacement. She was and is living with a new disorientation—one we should probably get used to.

If we’re going to find a bigger God, one that makes us more loving, we have to admit and address two fundamental realities. The first is that small religion is a problem. It is the culprit of the suffocation and the source of our frustration because it tends to thrive on separation and breed exclusion. We’ve all seen and experienced small religion, so that may be the easier of the two truths to reckon with. The second and much more challenging reality is that all religion is small religion: yours, mine, that of the people you admire and those you can’t stand, the traditions you hold tightly to and the ones you’ve long ago rejected. A God our brains and buildings can fully hold just isn’t big enough to be truly God. The moment we imagine a rigid box adequately capable of containing the who, what, how, and why of everything that is or ever was or ever might be is the moment we’ve shrunken all the answers to the elemental questions down into something that is no longer God-sized. If we can fully fathom it, it ceases to be worthy of our reverence.

In writing to his church two thousand years ago and to those who would follow them in this journey, the apostle Paul writes a prayer that we as people of faith might “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”¹ That seems like both a beautiful aspiration and an impossible task. If there is no mystery left in our belief system, we need to move into a space that will accommodate it. No matter how fervently we’ve prayed, how earnestly we’ve searched, how diligently we’ve studied, or how sure of ourselves we currently are—we’re either partially or substantially wrong. Whatever God is made of, we don’t have the capacity to capture it completely in the minds we’re equipped with. No religious tradition, no specific denomination, and certainly no single human being can fit it. It’s all outdated, tight pants that can’t hold the intended occupant. It isn’t easy for good religious people to admit this, especially when most of us have been raised with certainty as a virtue and doubt as a mortal sin. We’ve been conditioned not only to believe, but to do so without hesitation or reservation or alteration—but that was never really the plan or the expectation. Jesus was surrounded by people who couldn’t banish disbelief even with him close enough to touch, human beings who struggled to love people well even with a tangible example in front of them. We should probably give ourselves a break for struggling with two thousand years between us.

My formative religious tradition has been Christianity, and you’ll hear many references to Jesus and to the stories of the Bible here, but this isn’t about us matching theologically; it’s about each of us stretching to reach a more expansive, more compassionate place than we started—which it turns out was always the point. The New Testament records Jesus teaching people about needing to put his “new wine” teaching into “new wineskins,” not the brittle, rigid old ones they’d been used to.² He was asking people to have minds pliable enough and imaginations limber enough to consider a God beyond the one they currently believed in or the systems they inherited—and to extend themselves to people they’d never have lovingly engaged before. Much of his initial audience was a group of devout and oppressed Jewish believers who’d been patiently waiting hundreds of years for what they expected to be a conquering warrior to forcibly deliver them from generations of captivity and oppression. By asking them to embrace a poor, itinerant street preacher who asked them to be “servants of all,” Jesus was inviting them into a disappointing, shocking—but necessary—heresy. His revolutionary movement of sacrificial love often involved him laying out a contrast between religious people’s old story and the better one he was writing for them: “You have heard it said . . . But I tell you . . .”³ Jesus’ gentle challenge has always pulled those of us willing to listen into the discomfort that comes with expanding our understanding of just how big a love we’re talking about here and what the implications are for us: the way we live and move through the world, the kind of audacious kindness we’re being asked to practice.

At first, all this religious rethinking feels like a betrayal, like spiritual rebellion, and many times we resist it in order to stay in the comfort of surety and free from guilt, but there is something life-giving outside of where we started. Our initial faith traditions are all valid and meaningful. They can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: You Had One Job
• 1. Unboxing God
• 2. Scary Bedtime Stories
• 3. The Sh*t Is Never Getting Together
• 4. Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk
• 5. The Dude Abides
• 6. Made in America
• 7. Oh, Hell No!
• 8. Let Them Eat Cake
• 9. Doppelganger God
• 10. Good Book, Lousy Hammer
• 11. GodFundMe
• 12. Inside Job
• 13. A Semi-Pro-Life Movement
• 14. Holy Ferocity
• 15. Love Your Damn Neighbor
• 16. The Church of Not Being Horrible
• 17. High Horses and Better Angels
• 18. The Gospel according to You
• Discussion Guide
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Excerpt from A Bigger Table, Expanded Edition with Study Guide, by John Pavlovitz