Pissing on Dead Things

I've been reading this book that one of my Oregon professors wrote and it has been a really great experience so far. It's called A Gentler God: Breaking Free of the Almighty in the Company of the Human Jesus by Doug Frank and it talks about the story of the evangelical God -- a God of equal parts love and condemnation. He talks about where those conceptions come from, how evangelicals so readily see a theology that the rest of the world so obviously sees as anything but love, and how evangelicalism has embedded itself into our culture so much that it's hard to envision God any differently. I'm just getting into the second half of the book where he dismantles Protestantism's angry and punitive God and invites you to look at a much more welcoming God.

I've never had a book so perfectly timed and that so perfectly addresses exactly what I'm struggling with right now. It's been really great so far. I didn't really do it justice in the explanation I just gave, but if you have issues with God like I do, I highly recommend it.

There are a lot of parts I've wanted to pull out and quote, but I'm afraid without the context some of those parts would end up distorting what the author was trying to say and leave people feeling disgruntled and angry, or with pieces of something that just don't add up. Kind of like what can happen when you quote a bible verse.

I did like this one story, though, and I feel like it wouldn't hurt the content to post it. It's a story an old Oregon Extension student told Doug one time about the way he noticed the falseness present in American evangelicals:

My parents were respected lay leaders in an evangelical church. They showed up at church every Sunday morning, and my three younger brothers and I had to go with them.

My older brother and I had usually been out carousing until the wee hours of the morning, so we were in a foul mood when our parents came to wake us up. Actually, all four of us hated getting up for church. Mom and Dad had to nag us out of bed, badger us into wearing something 'presentable,' and plead with us to wolf down some breakfast. They'd almost physically push us out of the house and into the car.

All the way to church, we'd sit in the back bitching and moaning and scrapping with one another while our parents yelled at us to straighten up. We always got to church a couple minutes late. Mom would herd us up the front steps, still grousing at each other. But the minute we stepped inside the door, we turned into perfect angels. The only pews still empty were usually at the front of the sanctuary. Everybody's eyes would follow us. I knew exactly what they were thinking, because I'd hear them saying it to our folks after church: 'What a fine family you have! Such good Christian boys!'

I would sit there in the pew and look around me. Here were all these fine Christian families, all decked out in their Sunday best, smiling their Sunday smiles, just like us. I knew a lot of those kinds. They had been out all night, too -- drugs, sex, alcohol, general mischief. I knew their families were as messed up as my family was. But there we sat, singing our hymns and praying and looking or all the world like perfect little Christian families.

I remember one Sunday having this sudden urge to do something really crazy. I wanted to get up and walk to the front and stand there on the platform and open my pants and piss on the carpet. And then I wanted to look around at the whole bunch of them and say: 'See this? This is me. This down here on the carpet? This is real.'

I never did it, of course. But sometimes I wish I had.
(Australia: Albatross Books, 2010), 177