My psychotherapy training is in attachment theory. Secure attachment is a state of being in which I am rooted firmly enough not to be anxious or volatile in my relationships. I think secure attachment and the Christian concept of grace are (or should be) the same thing. When we feel safe and like we belong, we relax and treat others with compassion in a way that doesn’t happen when our behavior is motivated by anxious obligatory rule-following. I think that’s what the apostle Paul is getting at in his distinction between “grace” and “the law.”

I’ve been reflecting on the way that we can read the same religious text and come away with such different understandings of what the main point is and I’m realizing my perspective is shaped by my experience as an electronic dance musician. Electronic dance music is an ocean of samples and remixes by which each song builds off of previous songs. I can take a melody hook from one song and turn it into a completely different song in combination with a different bass line and rhythm.

What I keep coming back to in my understanding of Christianity is that it’s fundamentally about the freedom to be wrong. I don’t have to walk on eggshells worrying about whether my theology is correct and pleasing to God because God has atoned for me unilaterally. If I need to be right and win every argument, then my experience of grace has somehow been hijacked and I am stuck in the performativity the apostle Paul spent most of his letters emphatically exhorting against.

Two things I read ruined me forever to the idea that Christianity is mostly about learning how to speak correctly of God (which is what “orthodoxy” usually looks like to me at least in Protestantism). First, it was Thomas Merton who wrote that when Paul says, “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me,” he isn’t making a doctrinal assertion; he’s describing a mystical union we can enjoy. The few times I’ve been there, nothing else matters.

I think one very basic theological problem Christians have is that they take everything in the Bible literally except for the statement that God is love. Most Christians have a God who is basically a Roman emperor with grace for the people who have performed the proper ritual and/or thought the right thoughts to become “saved” but brutal to all outside of that.

Authority ruins Christianity. When Christianity becomes authoritarian, it is hijacked by the prince of this world who is the serpent in Genesis 3 offering the church the “knowledge of good and evil” by which patriarchal church leaders justify their authority. God wants to offer us something better than authority: divine intimacy, which is difficult to experience in neurotically performative authoritarian Christian culture. If our worship of God is about speaking correctly about God, we will worship our correctness, not God.

My son just schooled me in how to be a confident #autistic. He’s going to a back to school event. He told me that he was going to respond “verbosely” if people asked about his sunburn he got at a water park today. He said he would say, “I got a first degree burn from ultraviolet radiation.” And I started to panic that he might get made fun of but I didn’t want to transmit my anxiety to him. So instead I was like you know I really admire the way you are fearlessly nerdy.

So here’s the movement I want to see unfold. I’d like there to be groups of neighbors who get together to do rituals outside that they discover by sitting with the land and asking to be shown what to do to worship, in the rain, around campfires, with sacred plants, etc. This would likely involve learning from indigenous people when possible and not imposed on them as a burden, but the land also seems to be saying that she herself can teach us what we need to know to gain synchronicity with her.

The reason I’m not scandalized by deconstruction or ex-evangelicals becoming witches or whatever honestly goes back to my understanding of the Christian gospel. I believe hypervigilant performativity is the hell Jesus wants to save us from. When I read the Bible looking at how Jesus and the apostle Paul positioned themselves in theological debate, I see them both defining themselves against people who leveraged their sense of personal religious sacrifice and correctness as a basis for giving themselves authority.

I don’t need to come up with a speculative explanation for why the apostle Paul wrote in some places that women need to be quiet. Inerrancy be damned. The fruit is plain: silencing women has been a disaster for the church. I don’t care what Paul says in those passages or why. The reason I don’t need to do exegetical acrobatics with Paul’s words is that I read Paul the way he tells me to read him and I’m emulating his playful, creative engagement with his theological tradition. Paul is an irreverent poet, not a high-strung lawyer like John Calvin.

The greatest obstacle to our ability to hear the voice that anoints us with belovedness is our desperate need for validation. As long as I am seeking validation, I will invalidate every offer of belonging God sends me. When I was severely depressed, I remember thinking it doesn’t “count” that my mother loves me because it's her job to love me. But every day she anointed me a little more with her patient refusal to give up on me. And it planted a seed by giving me a taste of belovedness.

The God I connect to is not the God who has a wise, perfect reason for every stage 4 cancer diagnosis but the God who is crucified with us as the world continuously blows up in God’s face. The crucified God is a lot scarier to believe in than the God who is in absolute control of everything all the time. But the paradox is that crucifixion is more powerful than control. A crucified God compels a crucified people to rise up and become his body.

I want to propose a vocation for white men: becoming fools. That is, learning how to engage in the opposite of disembodied rationalism, which is the cultural disease our ancestors bequeathed us and everyone else they tried to colonize. Now when I talk about white men, I have to first of all specify that I’m talking about a specific kind of white man: those of us who use the word “we” presumptuously because we know ourselves to be the protagonists of history.

And of course #CalvinistTwitter is mad because a preacher yesterday used the suffering servant passage to talk about John Lewis instead of Jesus. So let’s talk about that. #thread Was John Lewis wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities? Did his stripes cause us healing as a people? I don’t think any white person should ever say anything close to that. It would be terribly presumptuous. But can a black preacher?

Authoritarianism is the heresy of American evangelical Christianity. Thankfully Trump has revealed that it's about worshiping authority, not Jesus, the Bible, or anything else. Jesus and the Bible were only tools in the service of authority. I honestly believe that American evangelicalism today is a manifestation of what Romans 1:18 looks like in action. The wrath of God is revealed as heresy is handed over to the full nakedness of its blasphemy.

Lately as the abortion bans have picked up steam, I’ve seen more and more social conservatives circulating the idea that extramarital sex can be regulated naturally by the threat of pregnancy.

https://twitter.com/drantbradley/status/1136741024968187920

This has always been at the core of Roman Catholic “natural law”: that if sex has “consequences,” people will do it the “right” way. But now it’s being mainstreamed in evangelical circles as well.

Many conservative evangelicals define “faith” as believing hard things. What this means is that justification by faith is actually earning your salvation through believing hard things and orthodoxy is whatever seems hard to believe in today’s world. Conservative evangelicals have bastardized the concept of orthodoxy by redefining it as hard beliefs that cut against the grain of secular humanism, the most prominent one being that practicing homosexuality is a sin. This allows them to feel like their faith is “costly.”