Salvation was the single most important dogma that encapsulated that religious upbringing, fed by various indisputable streams of doctrine such as the virgin birth, the inerrancy of Scripture, a physical resurrection, and the imminent return of Jesus after the rapture in precisely the order spelled out in the Left Behind book series. All those constructs attempted to make clear one inarguable and fundamentally unchangeable fact: we are wretched in the eyes of God, whose own holiness demands atonement. And as humans, mortal and doomed to the fiery pits of hell as the rightful justice that such holiness requires, we are simply incapable of rectifying the situation on our own. No amount of good works, humanitarian effort, reparations for past wrongs, or altering our behavior on our own would ever change God’s mind about us.

Conservative evangelism as it was practiced in the 1990s and is still practiced today is a religious perspective that looks nothing like the one embraced by the homeless mystic-sage of peasant Galilee. And it’s a theological house of cards, wobbling precariously atop the biblical narrative upon which it is built.

Look at any evangelical teenager in the 1990s and you’ll see a woven or elastic bracelet hanging from their wrist with the letters WWJD prominently displayed. For teens like me during what we would have declared to be the golden age of Christianity, it was more than a platitude for those committed to soul winning. It was virtue signaling, a marker to the world that you were one of the ones who understood what really mattered. You, unlike so many in this fallen world, asked the important question that should precede every decision and action: what would Jesus do?

But this seemingly innocuous phrase can be so easily used – as all language can – to function in any capacity we want it to. So, then, we need to ask some follow-up questions. Who is determining the nuance of context in which Jesus’ hypothetical action is required? How can people from two or more different contexts discern which Jesus-action is the right one? Is that “one-right decision” universal across all times and places, amid all cultures and ethnic groups that have ever existed?

But perhaps more importantly, the functional nature of the question betrays the deeper reality of its linguistic limitation: “To which Jesus are we referring?” In other words, “What would Jesus do?” begs the follow-up question, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?”

In this episode we continue the second season look at the faith that exudes the cringe-worthy sentiments of conservative evangelicalism and try to imagine and craft a healthier way to discuss our religious endeavors and our encounter with that which we call Holy.

If you grew up or came of age in conservative Christianity, you’ve heard those expressions, and you might have even uttered them. It’s a language affectionately known in America as “Christianese,” and now that you’re deconstructing and your faith journey has brought you to a place of distrust and disgust with American-brand Christianity, you find yourself repelled by such sentiments. It signals a faith that you not only don’t hold any longer, but a faith and public discourse from which you desire the furthest possible distance. It creates an unwanted feeling within you as those questions and expressions don’t really get to the heart of what you’re experiencing: religious emptiness and longing for something that is more genuine to your unfolding view of the human journey. This podcast season will take the words of evangelicalism that make exvangelicals cringe. We’ll unpack their use, their speakers’ intent, and their harm, then try to rebuild a new linguistic framework for how we can talk about this nebulous thing called faith.

We must accept our own negotiation of the Bible and faith because, in doing so, we allow all parties involved in biblical interpretation and the work of following Jesus to be their fullest selves. It is okay to disagree with the Bible. It is okay to not believe. When we afford ourselves and others the permission to accept the inadequacy of our own religious perspective, the text can be what the text was meant to be. Jesus can be what Jesus was meant to be. And we can be who we were meant to be.

The future of Christianity must look past a God who cares almost exclusively about the morals of the self, demonstrated in an overblown fury over the lack of morals in our neighbor. And it must move beyond the bland self-deprecation that limits creativity, imagination, and ingenuity in the public sphere in favor of a false humility.

The God-who-is-nice presides over a Christian culture that decries social upheaval of any kind. It recognizes that there are traditions that must be kept intact for the social order to thrive. These are traditions that are often rooted deeply in racism or sexism, such as normative gender roles like the stay-at-home Mom or “boys will be boys.” It’s a God that is the mascot for communities that are white-washed and dyed in the red-white-and-blue, communities whose watchwords are “traditional values.”

Evangelical Christianity in the United States has been enamored by a God of white respectability since before the nation’s founding: a God that looks, acts, and speaks like a good white man. It’s cliched to discuss images of God as an elderly gentleman with a flowing white beard casting lightning bolts against evil from atop a gold-lined cloud, and that image no longer captures the imagination of people for whom God is fundamentally about law, order, and righteousness. For that, many white evangelicals envision their God as a middle-aged white man in a police uniform, valiantly defending their sensibilities with a thin blue line of pre-integration nostalgia.

What happens when we mistake our inner voice – our conscience – for God? At the best we may recognize that doing good to other people is better than doing wrong. But how is that good and wrong defined? Who sets its parameters? That can lead to the worst parts of our inner dialogue, wherein we believe that the inclinations we feel are good and virtuous even when they propel us toward horrific acts.

Deconstruction from evangelicalism and conservative Christianity has trended for more than a decade in among millennials in the United States. It’s rooted in the disconnect our generation has felt between the Jesus we believe is love and peace, and the often fundamentalist leanings of our upbringing that seem now to espouse dogmatic partisanship and hate.

Christena Cleveland writes, “Imagination is theology; we can only believe what we can imagine.”

This series will focus on helping us tear down the harmful and decaying artifices of a god that doesn’t deserve our belief and help us reconstruct a system of hope and faith that does deserve our following.