When the Church Gets God Wrong
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 8-75
If religion hurt you, Jesus is not on religion’s side. He was furious about it long before you were.
That sentence is worth sitting with before anything else, because it runs against one of the most common and most understandable assumptions that people carry away from a painful experience with religious institutions. The assumption goes like this: the church represents God, the church hurt me, therefore God either permitted the hurt or was indifferent to it or was somehow complicit in it. The church and God are on the same side, the logic runs, and if the church did this to me then God was at least a silent partner in what happened.
This assumption is understandable. It is also, according to the very book the church claims to believe, wrong. Not slightly wrong. Not wrong in a minor theological detail that requires careful qualification. Wrong at the center, in the most important part of the claim. And the evidence against it is not hidden in obscure passages that require specialist knowledge to find. It is sitting in the most public and the most dramatic moments of the Gospel accounts, available to anyone who reads them, and it has been consistently underpowered in the preaching of the institutional church precisely because the institutional church has a structural interest in not drawing too much attention to what Jesus said about institutional religion.
But before the evidence, something else needs to be said. Something the church does not say often enough, clearly enough, or with sufficient willingness to sit with the weight of it rather than moving quickly to reassurance and resolution.
We have hurt people. Badly. In God’s name.
Not only in the distant past, in the Crusades and the Inquisition and the historical chapters that are easy to condemn from a distance because the people involved are long dead and the institutions that produced them have changed their branding. Not only in the headline scandals, the ones that broke through into public consciousness and produced the investigations and the settlements and the official apologies. In regular churches. In ordinary communities. In the kind of ministry that most people driving past on a Sunday morning would consider entirely unremarkable.
People have been shamed from pulpits in ways that left marks that decades have not fully erased. Spiritual manipulation has been practiced and defended as pastoral care, the kind of thing that would be recognized immediately as abuse in any other relational context but gets a different name when the person doing it has a title and a Bible. Questions have been treated as evidence of insufficient faith or insufficient submission or insufficient commitment to the community, as though the honest admission of doubt were a form of betrayal rather than the beginning of genuine engagement. Doubt has been punished rather than engaged, which produces not stronger faith but hidden faith, the kind that lives underground because it has learned that the surface is not safe.
Suffering has been attributed to insufficient faith, which is one of the most damaging things you can say to a person who is already in pain. The person who is sick and does not get better is told they did not pray with enough belief. The person whose marriage ends despite everything they tried is told there must have been something unconfessed. The person whose child died is told that God needed another angel, which is not in the Bible and which compounds grief with theological confusion. Survivors have been silenced to protect institutions, asked to forgive quickly and quietly and to consider the damage that speaking honestly might do to people who were not the ones who were harmed. People have been told, in a hundred different registers and a hundred different contexts, that they are not enough, have not done enough, will never be enough, and told it in the name of a God who, according to the very book the church claims to believe, is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
If any of that is in your history, this piece is written for you. And the first thing that needs to be said, clearly and without qualification, is this: what was done to you was not God. The harm you received did not come from God and God was not on the side of the people who caused it. That is not a therapeutic reframe designed to make you feel better. It is not a public relations adjustment aimed at salvaging the institution’s reputation. It is the position of the Bible. It is, most specifically and most forcefully, the position of Jesus.
Here is one of the most consistently underpowered facts in the entire Gospel record, one that the institutional church has never quite known what to do with because it cuts too close to structures the institution depends on. Jesus reserved his most sustained, his most detailed, his most publicly delivered anger not for the people his culture had designated as sinners. Not for the tax collectors he ate dinner with or the prostitutes whose company he kept or the Samaritans the religious establishment had written off or the Romans who occupied the land. Not for the doubters or the questioners or the people whose faith was fragile and inconsistent and honest about its own fragility. For religious leaders. For the specific people who held the specific kind of authority that the religious institution granted and who used that authority in the specific ways that the religious institution enabled and protected.
Matthew 23 is not a mild passage and it has never been a mild passage no matter how many centuries of pulpit familiarity have smoothed its edges in the popular imagination. Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem in what will turn out to be the last week of his life, speaking publicly, with his disciples and with the crowds present, and what he says is not diplomatic. He calls the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites. He calls them blind guides leading blind followers into pits. He calls them whitewashed tombs, a specific image chosen with precision, beautiful on the outside and full of dead men’s bones on the inside. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says they travel across land and sea to make a single convert and then make that convert twice the child of hell that they are, which is a sentence of such controlled fury that it is almost startling to read even now.
But the charge that matters most for the person who has been hurt by religious authority, the one that goes to the center of what institutional religion tends to do when it drifts from its purpose, is the one about burdens. He says they tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders and will not lift a finger to move them. They load people down with obligation and expectation and the perpetual management of divine disapproval, and then they watch the loading from a comfortable distance, untouched by the weight they have created. They have made the access to God conditional on performance they do not share. They have built a religious system that produces exhaustion and shame in the people who try to follow it and a sense of superiority and entitlement in the people who administer it. And Jesus, looking at this system in the full light of public visibility, says: this is not from my Father. This is a distortion. This is what happens when the structures built in God’s name become more interested in their own perpetuation than in the people they were built to serve.
This is not Jesus being provocative for effect. This is not a rhetorical strategy designed to generate attention or win an argument with his opponents. This is God’s genuine moral response to religious authority that has inverted its purpose, that has taken the name of the God of steadfast love and used it to manage and diminish and burden the very people it was supposed to set free.
The passage in Ezekiel 34 goes even further back to establish that this response is not new to the New Testament. God is speaking to the shepherds of Israel, the religious and political leaders who were responsible for the welfare of the people under their care, and what he says is an indictment so specific and so sustained that it cannot be read as general displeasure. You have not strengthened the weak, he says. You have not healed the sick. You have not bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. And then, because the indictment is not the final word, he says something that ought to stop every person who has been failed by religious leadership and concluded that God failed them along with it. He says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them.
When the shepherds fail, God does not simply note the failure and move on. He does not issue a memorandum of disappointment and then leave the sheep to manage. He steps in. He takes the role the shepherds abandoned. He goes looking for the ones who were driven away, the ones who were scattered, the ones who are injured and exhausted and have stopped expecting anyone to come. He finds them. The passage in Ezekiel is one of the most extended accounts of divine pastoral care in all of Scripture, and it is addressed specifically to the people who were failed by the official pastoral system, and God’s position in it is unambiguous. He is not on the side of the shepherds who caused the harm. He is on the side of the sheep.
This matters for how you read the church’s failures, if you are someone who has been failed. It means that the harm you experienced was not something God watched with indifference from a sufficient distance. It was something he had a position on. A position he stated explicitly and repeatedly in the text that the people causing the harm claimed to represent. The shepherds of Ezekiel 34 were not ignorant of what God required of them. The Pharisees of Matthew 23 were not operating without access to the Scripture that condemned their methods. The religious leaders in every century who have used spiritual authority to burden and diminish and silence were working within institutions that contained, in their own foundational documents, the words that condemned what they were doing.
The harm was not God. The harm was the distance between the institution and the God it claimed to represent, a distance that God himself named and condemned and has been naming and condemning throughout the entire record of his dealings with human religious structures.
There is a specific danger that comes after religious harm, and it deserves to be named honestly because it is the danger that causes the longest lasting damage. The danger is letting the distortion stand in permanently for the original. It is concluding that because the version of God you were given was harmful and distorted, there is no original to return to. That bad Christianity is an argument against Jesus rather than, as it is in most cases, exactly what Jesus condemned. That the people who hurt you were accurately representing the God of Scripture rather than catastrophically misrepresenting him. That there is nothing on the other side of the institution worth looking for.
This conclusion is understandable. It is the conclusion that a reasonable person who has been hurt in a specific way by a specific institution tends to draw, because the people who hurt them said they were acting in God’s name and the institution they represented said they were acting in God’s name and the whole structure confirmed the identification between the harm and the God being named in its delivery. Separating the harm from the God requires a kind of careful distinction that is very hard to make from inside the pain, and it requires a willingness to look at evidence that the pain itself can make it difficult to engage with fairly.
But the distinction is real and it matters and the evidence for it is available.
The Jesus of the Gospels is not a religious authority figure in the sense that the institution has generally presented him. He is not the chief shepherd of the system that hurt you, the ultimate source of the authority that was misused. He is the one who looked at the system and called it whitewashed tombs. He is the one who said the Sabbath was made for people and not people for the Sabbath, which was a direct challenge to every religious structure that had inverted the relationship between the institution and the human beings it existed to serve. He is the one who touched lepers that the religious system had declared untouchable, who spoke to women that the religious system treated as secondary, who sought out the people the religious system had expelled and offered them what the system had withheld.
He is also the one who said, in Matthew 11, come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take 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. That invitation was issued in a specific context. It was issued to people living under the weight of a religious system that had made the approach to God exhausting, that had turned the relationship with the divine into a management project requiring constant maintenance and producing constant anxiety. The rest he was offering was not rest from relationship with God. It was rest from the version of that relationship the religious system had manufactured. It was the offer of something different from what the institution had been providing. Gentleness instead of severity. Humility instead of authority performed as domination. A burden light enough to carry rather than one designed to keep people perpetually aware of how much they were falling short.
God grieves the misuse of his name. He is not waiting for you to get over what was done in that name before he will receive you. He is not asking you to perform a rehabilitation of the institution before you can access the Person the institution distorted. He does not require you to make peace with what happened to you on his behalf, because what happened to you was not on his behalf. It was against it.
The person you were prevented from meeting, or introduced to in such a distorted form that the introduction did damage rather than good, is still available to be met. Not through the system that hurt you, not through a performance of religious behavior that has become associated with harm, but directly, in the way that Hagar met El Roi by a spring in the wilderness with nothing to offer and no credentials to present. In the way that the prodigal son met his father on the road before he had finished his apology. In the way that the woman at the well met someone who knew everything about her and kept talking.
He may have been the first to leave the building. He is not far.