Mercy Not Sacrifice
There’s a wonky term that gets thrown around a lot among Christian educators called “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The term was coined in 2005 by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton in a book about the spiritual life of American teenagers. Moralistic therapeutic deism describes the phenomenon by which (white middle-class) Christian kids, whether they’re evangelical or mainline, seem to wind up believing that God is a lot like Mr. Rogers. He’s a gentle, infinitely understanding, introverted man in a cardigan you can talk to whenever you’re sad or need help, and you can pretty much ignore him through young adulthood because he’ll be right there smiling with his little train when you come back around as a married yuppie with small children looking for a world of niceness to raise your family in. This is supposedly why the kids stop going to church and why they become “spiritual but not religious” instead. For many of my fellow evangelicals, the crisis of the Mr. Rogers God is that the kids today no longer “fear God.” And so the lesson of moralistic therapeutic deism is that we need to make God scary again, maybe by starting a hell house ministry or something. But I would like to propose that the loss of the scary monster God in the popular consciousness actually provides an opportunity for a truer gospel to be preached in which we are the tyrannical monsters who have taken the universe hostage with our sin and God is the underground resistance we are called to join.
So how did God become the blithely benevolent inobtrusive Mr. Rogers of the universe? One answer lies in the giant gulf separating the presuppositions under which both the New and Old Testament were written and our time, which is the rise of science as an explanation for everything in the universe. Before science, earthquakes and famines and plagues meant that God was angry about something. Whenever enemy armies conquered God’s people, it couldn’t be allowed to mean that God had been conquered by the enemy army’s god, so it had to mean that God had sent the enemy armies as punishment for the sins of his people. All of the ancient people said this about their gods; it wasn’t just the Israelites. Throughout the Bible, any time the natural phenomena or powerful emperors of the world made life “wrathful” for God’s people, it gave God’s prophets a soapbox from which to confront their societies about idolatry and injustice.
Today, when preachers like John Piper or Pat Robertson try to say that homosexuality causes hurricanes and earthquakes, they get laughed out of the room. But John Piper and Pat Robertson are just being faithful to what they understand as a “Biblical worldview,” which to their minds must also be pre-scientific. If earthquakes in Biblical texts like Isaiah 2:21 are literally God grabbing the earth with his giant invisible anthropomorphic hands and shaking it because he’s pissed off, then whenever an earthquake happens today, it’s because God is pissed off about whatever the preacher thinks is society’s greatest sin. (By the way, it’s worth noticing that nobody ever attributed earthquakes or hurricanes to black people getting lynched and roasted with gasoline back in the good old days before the moral breakdown of the Sixties when everyone in ‘Mur’ka “feared God.” Just saying…)
Largely because I’m the son of a scientist, I don’t share Piper and Robertson’s Biblical inerrantist perspective. I suspect that the drought during the reign of King Ahab happened as part of a naturally occurring ecosystem, just as the conquest of Israel by Babylon occurred as a reasonably predictable sociological event in the story of ancient empires. To me, the fact that prophets attributed these acts to God doesn’t mean that the mysterious creator of the universe who is the source of being of every atom is an infinitely large invisible man who gets angry a lot and dives into history at some particular moments to punish people, but not at others. It is rather that the Holy Spirit inspired God’s prophets to use naturally occurring events in his cosmic order as teaching tools to call out God’s people on their idolatry and injustice. I would say that these inspired words of scripture are God’s accommodation of our need for divine teaching in forms that we can grasp. Where I am going to part ways with the inerrantists is when I say that God’s punitive acts according to the testimony of Old Testament prophets are provisionally conditioned to the historical needs of his Israelite people at each phase of their development and should not be analyzed as a primary window into God’s eternal character, for which Jesus is the fully developed, perfectly sufficient revelation.
When Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu are struck dead for lighting incense without permission in Leviticus 10 and Uzzah gets killed for trying to catch the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6, it’s not because God’s holiness makes him an infinitely picky curmudgeon as R.C. Sproul tries to argue in The Holiness of God, but because these things needed to happen to establish the radical set-apart-ness of God’s tabernacle as a place that had the power to heal God’s people from their sin through the ritualistic violence of animal sacrifice for a covenantal season of Israel’s development as a people. You have to establish a reverence for the physical sanctity of the temple before you can offer the sacrifices there by which a community’s sin is put to death; you have to have a long-standing concept of sacrificial atonement before you can have a messiah who is anointed as king by absorbing all the world’s violence into his flesh. Against Anselm, I would contend that there is no divine “need” to be “satisfied” by the violence of sacrificial atonement; sacrifice is God’s accommodation of the human need to see innocent lambs bleed and burn for our sin and ultimately see God himself become a man who bleeds to show us that the wrath of our sin has been consumed completely.
I recognize that I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent here. Let’s get back to the question of whether the demise of the scary monster God is a devastating crisis for Christian morality. I would contend that just because God used the interpretation of natural phenomena as divine punishment to teach his people in a pre-scientific age, that does not mean that we need to live forever with a pre-scientific understanding of how the phenomena of the world take place and that we need to start taking guesses about which sin God is punishing with each hurricane. Maybe this still works in some parts of the world, but it becomes an awkward comedy when we’re preaching to people who study the way that nature works on a daily basis, and there’s no reason to sneer at scientific-minded people and call them snobby elitists because they can’t muster up a monster God to scare themselves into moral living, as badly as they might want to be able to.
So how does God speak today in a world where science claims to explain everything? If all the scary things that happen in the world have scientific explanations, there is no room for a scary monster God anymore. All that God has left to do is put on his cardigan sweater and smile and wait for us to come play trains with him again when our anxiety about parenting brings us back to church after a young adulthood of ignoring Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood because we’re living on the set of Sex in the City instead. Many Christians insist that our whole world falls apart without the scary monster God. Unless you’re afraid of a God who sics earthquakes on people when he gets angry, there’s no reason not to run around like wild hooligans in absolute debauchery.
For people invested in the scary monster God, what needs to be preached as the gospel is that 1) God is mad enough to put everybody in hell for their sins, but 2) Jesus died on the cross for our sins so that if we 3) accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and savior, then… wait for it… we can 4) live in our gated community heaven forever with our Mr. Rogers God, comfortable in our privileged ability not to talk about all the not-nice things about our world that our gospel hasn’t articulated any interest in addressing. The dirty little secret is that even the supposedly hard core evangelical gospel actually produces the same Mr. Rogers God by a different means. In fact, from what I understand, Christian Smith’s primary research set for his “moralistic therapeutic deism” diagnosis were young adults who grew evangelical like me. The Mr. Rogers God is where we end up after being fed a completely uncompelling scary monster God.
The way I ended up with an unreal, blithe Mr. Rogers God was because all the teaching about God wanting to torture me eternally in hell for saying a few cuss word because it offended his honor infinitely (a la Anselm) just never landed. Privileged evangelicals like me who live in Mr. Roger’s middle-upper class neighborhood grow up with an unreal Mr. Roger’s neighborhood understanding of sin as a banal set of middle school gym class style infractions, mostly having to do with things like masturbation, cussing, and smoking. So basically, I grew up with a doctrine of sin shaped by a complete ignorance of my participation through my personal sin in the global forces that cause incredible actual suffering to people who live outside of my Mr. Roger’s neighborhood.
A bourgeois pietistic doctrine of sin is the reason that the threat of hell doesn’t stick with privileged white evangelical young adults if they ever leave the gated community of privileged white evangelicalism. Sin and hell have been made into complete abstractions. It’s sickly comical to talk about God torturing people forever because they masturbate, cuss, and smoke, but we all know that it’s better just to play along. So we nod our heads appropriately through the youth group Powerpoints on which there’s a canyon of sin separating God from “man” (sic) and Jesus’ cross is the bridge that gives us the means to spend forever in a heaven that looks exactly like the Mr. Roger’s neighborhood where we already live. But deep down we never really believe that the scary monster God is actually real and we admit it as soon as we won’t get in trouble for doing so. Then, God becomes Mr. Rogers to us openly, unless we have an investment in staying on the shrinking island of evangelicalism, which constantly litmus tests us to make sure that we’ve still got our scary monster God.
I want to propose reframing how we package the monstrosity in the universe which is very real and present in our world today despite the best efforts of scientific explanations that supposedly domesticate it. I think it’s okay for us to see God as Mr. Rogers if the choice is between that and a no longer tenable scary monster God, but the key recognition we must make is that all is not well in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. In fact, Mr. Rogers is getting beat up all the time. His cardigan sweater is ripped up and bloody. He’s still just as sweet, but he gets slapped around and pushed out of the way and run over by bulldozers. He’s missing a few teeth because they got punched out by the monsters who have overrun Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. Of course, the monsters that do this are not “those people” outside our gated communities who come in with their hoodies and eat skittles in a threatening manner. Our Mr. Rogers God is the one wearing the hoodie who got shot by our neighborhood watchman. We are the monsters, and our gated community that we consider to be Mr. Rogers’ friendly neighborhood is the monstrosity that crucifies our Mr. Rogers God. Through his cross, Jesus shows us that we are the monsters destroying God’s beautiful world. God chose to present his eternal nature most definitively through Jesus on the cross as the sacrificial victim of our monstrosity. He is the creator who is constantly being crucified by the little monsters that he never stops loving.
I realize that the reformed people probably won’t like this way of talking about things. The crucified Mr. Rogers God doesn’t seem enough in control of the universe. He needs to have a lightning bolt like Thor or nobody will take him seriously. But paradoxically, the beat-up Mr. Rogers God takes greater control of the universe than the scary monster God, because the powers and principalities of the world can’t co-opt the beat-up Mr. Rogers God to be the Chi and Rho on their shields as they conquer the world. The beat-up Mr. Rogers God has the power to invite people out of the monstrously sinful world we inhabit rather than simply being incorporated into our monstrosity as its puppet-figurehead, which is the role that the supposedly scary monster God has played on the mast of European civilization throughout the last five hundred years of its colonial imperial conquest in which they were simply obeying the will of their scary monster God to reach the heathens with the gospel.
I’m concerned that any Christian theology which was able to preside uncritically over the past centuries’ slavery and colonialism is irredeemably toxic and must be gutted down to the studs just like every house that got flooded and mildewed in New Orleans with Katrina. Just because other factors have pushed back against centuries of white supremacy so that white people today are not allowed to do some of the things we were allowed to do to black people a century ago, we cannot persist today with a theology that was never scandalized by the monstrosity of our past. I cannot help but suspect that the scary monster God has always been a puppet in the pocket of Caesar.
Until Jesus, the Roman cross was a primary means by which Caesar’s control over the universe was established. If our understanding of the cross simply puts God on Caesar’s throne as the emperor who remains completely in control and uses his son’s blood to inform rebels of the fate that awaits them in hell, then what is the difference between the Roman pagan vision of justice and the Christian one? What makes the cross radically different and actually something that Jesus has fully co-opted from Caesar is if on the cross God actually un-Caesars himself and loses his sovereignty (from the perspective of our world’s monstrously sinful conception of of sovereignty), because only in our recognition of Jesus’ utter rejection as messiah of our monster world can Jesus fully extend his invitation to leave our monstrosity and join the hidden underground kingdom where he really is king. The cross is our invitation to the underground resistance led by a still, small voice whose word incarnates as a light that the darkness cannot seize and who breathes us into a wind that blows where it wants to. Voice, light, and wind: a Trinity of paradoxically weak-seeming power, kind of like a God whose name is the sound of human breath.
I would say that the degree to which God has the sovereignty of a scary monster rather than a still, small voice (like the one that Mr. Rogers always had) is the degree to which Caesar has co-opted Jesus’ story back into Caesar’s story. So if the kids today have thrown off the scary monster God and their God looks like Mr. Rogers instead, that’s okay with me as long as they know that we are the monsters and that’s not okay. We should absolutely “fear God,” but not in the sense that we are worried about what earthquakes God might sic on us. What we should be afraid of is the perpetual risk of crucifying a beautiful savior with our sin. The God whom we fear is the bloody man on the cross, not some projected “in charge” Caesar hologram who presides in the clouds above it.
Christianity can survive the loss of a scary God as long as we recognize that we ourselves are plenty to be afraid of. Given that recognition, we can call Christian discipleship the art of being unmonstered by God through the sacramental and charismatic means of grace by which we are conformed to the breath of a God and incorporated into the body of Christ. God loves his little monsters and he’s willing to take our nails patiently, but as long as we’re monsters who trample everything in our path like that ancient beast Leviathan, then we will not never make it into the narrow gate of Christ’s secret kingdom because it’s too small for monstrous egos. We must be “crucified together with Christ” (Galatians 2:19) so that “our lives [can be] hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The cross is the portal through which we leave our monstrosity behind and join the secret beauty of the underground kingdom. I don’t think I’ve lost anything from the gospel with how I’ve rearticulated it for people with a Mr. Rogers God. But you tell me…
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