{"id":14162,"date":"2013-03-02T01:32:04","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T06:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=14162"},"modified":"2013-03-02T01:32:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T06:32:04","slug":"lay-your-burden-down-god-is-not-a-jerk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/02\/lay-your-burden-down-god-is-not-a-jerk\/","title":{"rendered":"Lay your burden down, God is not a jerk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.\u00a0Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Matthew 11:28-30<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was reminded of that passage from Matthew\u2019s Gospel when watching the video below<\/a> (via<\/em> Joe Jervis<\/a>). It\u2019s part of an interview with\u00a0David Blankenhorn<\/a>, who founded the National Fatherhood Initiative back in the 1990s, but may be most famous for his role as an expert witness in support of California\u2019s Proposition 8, the law banning same-sex marriage (John C. Reilly played Blankenhorn in the all-star staged reading of <\/a>8<\/a>,<\/em> Dustin Lance Black\u2019s play based on the court transcripts.)<\/p>\n

Blankenhorn has since changed his mind and he now supports marriage equality. In this video he responds to a question about the \u201cspiritual or religious dimension\u201d of that change:<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=AZFnaOSAdYM<\/a>\n

Here\u2019s my rough transcript of what Blankenhorn says there:<\/p>\n

You ask if there was any spiritual or religious dimension. I\u2019m a Christian and I grew up in the church and I think of myself as trying to live, you know, a Christian life. For me, I\u2019m not saying this would happen to everybody, but for me, when I was able to change on this issue, it felt like a burden had been lifted. \u2026 It just felt like I had been carrying around a weight, and it felt like the weight was just not there,<\/em> you know? And I think it was because I had, I felt that at some level, I was, you know, pointing the finger of condemnation at other people, and I was saying \u2026 \u201cBad!\u201d \u2026 these people, \u201cBad!\u201d \u2026 \u201cOh, sin! Wrong!\u201d Based on, you know, who they are. And when, from a spiritual point of view, just my own spiritual life, when I felt that I was no longer doing that? I felt better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This struck me as remarkably similar to what Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said about her own sense of relief<\/a> when she allowed herself to stop opposing marriage equality:<\/p>\n

[Gregoire] came into office a supporter of gay rights, but not marriage. \u201cAnd it\u2019s probably the biggest occasion in which my religion, something that I hold very dear, stood in the way of me doing what I thought was right,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Gregoire is Catholic. In 2011 she changed her position on marriage. As a lawyer she kept coming back to the concept of separate but equal. But it didn\u2019t sit well with her. It was at Thanksgiving with her husband and daughters that she told her family she would not only come out in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed, but she would lead the effort to pass the legislation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt resulted in all of us hugging each other and crying,\u201d she says. \u201cI look back on it, it was an emotional moment for me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Blankenhorn describes as a great weight or great burden, Gregoire identifies more precisely as the experience of allowing religion to stand in the way of doing what you believe is right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That burden, that discomfiting sense that religion and goodness are at odds, is something I\u2019ve seen dozens of Christians wrestling with when it comes to the simple justice of marriage equality. Their instinct, their conscience, their sense of fairness and rightness all compel them to support equality, but religion stands in the way. Religion says there\u2019s a rule, a text, a verse, a passage, some words on a page somewhere \u2014 and that those words trump your conscience, your sense of fairness, your desire to be kind, and just, and loving to your neighbors.<\/p>\n

If you let that happen, it won\u2019t sit well with you. You will feel like you\u2019re carrying around a weight.<\/p>\n

And unlike Blankenhorn, I am<\/em> saying that this will happen for everybody: If you let it go, set it down, and stop allowing religiosity or rules to overrule what you know is right, you will feel the burden lift. You will feel that immense relief when suddenly that weight is just not there<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In a recent post, Rachel Held Evans discussed \u201cThe Scandal of the Evangelical Heart<\/a>,\u201d asking:<\/p>\n

What makes the church any different from a cult if it demands we sacrifice our conscience in exchange for unquestioned allegiance to authority?\u00a0 What sort of God would call himself love and then ask that I betray everything I know in my bones to be love in order to worship him? Did following Jesus mean becoming some shadow of myself, drained of empathy and compassion and revulsion to injustice?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A while back I wrote about similar questions in a post called \u201cMaybe God is a better person than you think<\/a>.\u201d That post included my second-hand garbling of Pascal\u2019s idea that \u201cChristianity is bound to be despised unless it seems like something that a good person would\u00a0wish<\/em>\u00a0to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, to put it more directly, if Christianity is something that a good person would not<\/em> wish to be true, then Christianity seems despicable.<\/p>\n

That, I think, is the burden that Blankenhorn describes. It\u2019s the fear that his faith might be something despicable. That it might even be despicable to him<\/em> \u2014 something that he, at his best,<\/em>\u00a0could not in good conscience wish to be true. That\u2019s the same fear that Gov. Gregoire and Rachel describe.<\/p>\n

Another way of describing it would be to say it\u2019s the fear that God is a jerk.<\/p>\n

So listen carefully: God is not a jerk. God does not want you<\/em> to be a jerk. So if you ever feel like God\u2019s will, or God\u2019s commands, or God\u2019s rules are compelling you to act<\/em> like a jerk \u2014 to betray your conscience, to be unloving, unjust, unkind, unfair \u2014 then that\u2019s not God.<\/p>\n

Get out from under that weight.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That burden, that discomfiting sense that religion and goodness are at odds, is something I’ve seen dozens of Christians wrestling with when it comes to the simple justice of marriage equality. Their instinct, their conscience, their sense of fairness and rightness all compel them to support equality, but religion stands in the way. Religion says there’s a rule, a text, a verse, a passage, some words on a page somewhere — and that those words trump your conscience, your sense of fairness, your desire to be kind, and just, and loving to your neighbors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-14162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-equality"],"yoast_head":"\nLay your burden down, God is not a jerk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"That burden, that discomfiting sense that religion and goodness are at odds, is something I've seen dozens of Christians wrestling with when it comes to the simple justice of marriage equality. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Lay your burden down, God is not a jerk","description":"That burden, that discomfiting sense that religion and goodness are at odds, is something I've seen dozens of Christians wrestling with when it comes to the simple justice of marriage equality. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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