“It’s Part of God’s Plan”
“God has a plan for your life.” “It’s all part of God’s plan.” How do we decode common religious sentiments like these? Are they sources of hope? Affirmations of a loving and caring God? Sources of solace in difficult times? They can be all of these things. But they can also have a darker side, legitimating authoritarian religious institutions and individuals. They can shut down dissent, questioning, and calls for social justice in name of existing structures of power. In this episode, Dan decodes the complex and often damaging dynamics at work in such sentiments.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, so we give our thanks to them.
Also thank all of you who listen to us, support us in various ways, whether it's financially, whether it's just word of mouth, Whether it's keeping people listening to us.
We couldn't do what we do without you.
So thank you to you all And this is the series.
It's in the code where we take a look at sort of some of the What do we say the messages?
the images the ideas the slogans that circulate in a lot of American religion and specifically American Christianity and Sort of decode these to look at the work that they do and and what it is that we can learn about that As always in this series, I need your help.
Welcome solicitations from folks of ideas to talk about and topics to raise.
You can reach me at Daniel Miller Swaj, that's Daniel Miller S-W-A-J, sorry, at gmail.com.
Daniel Miller SWAJ at gmail.com.
Thank you to you all who have kept so many ideas flowing my way.
I continue to be informed by those, be shaped by those, and will continue to build the series around those.
And in fact, as I discussed in the last episode, that's where we're turning today, to a theme and a topic that a lot of people brought up, and essentially the language that it's all part of God's plan.
What's the it?
Everything.
Everything is part of God's plan.
God has a plan and related notions.
God loves you and has a plan for your life.
Maybe it's the more scriptural language of all things work together for the glory of God, or whatever it is.
But if you've ever moved within particular religious circles, you will have heard a phrase like this.
And if you haven't, you're also going to be familiar with more secular versions of it, right?
The notion that everything happens for a reason, there's no such thing as coincidence.
And so forth.
So this is one that a lot of people contacted me about, and to a point that I'll return later, this indicates just how much this weighs on people, this language, how memorable it is, the impact that it can have, and so forth.
And as with the other religious language, the literal meaning is straightforward enough.
It's the idea that there's a guiding agency behind what happens on a daily basis.
Do you want to put this in a theistic perspective?
It means that God is sort of pulling the strings and making things happen the way that they are.
So the events in our lives have meaning.
They fit into a larger plan.
All of history fits into a larger plan and so forth.
That's the straightforward literal meaning.
But if you're listening to this series, and you've listened to the podcast at all, you know that we're interested in sort of decoding this phrase and some of its analogs.
And so the question that comes up is, what's happening when someone makes this claim?
What are they doing?
By making this claim.
That's the interest that drives me, that's the interest that drives this series.
Not just what does the phrase literally mean, but what are people doing or trying to bring about, trying to make happen when they bring it up.
And so what we're interested here is the explicit work that's being done when religious folks talk this way.
So I'm not so concerned about the kind of, for lack of a better word, the secularized version of everything happens for a reason.
I don't think the dynamics are often the same, though they could be.
Focusing specifically on what it means when religious folks make this statement.
And I want to start by addressing an issue that I can hear right now, people saying, like, you make it sound like this is a bad thing, Dan, and I'll get to why I think it's a bad thing.
But we have to start with an honest admission about this phrase, which is that people who use it often mean well.
And in fact, this is going to be true of so much of what we talk about in this series, when we talk about decoding religion.
And this is one of the things that can be really hard for people to get their heads around, Is that people who say things that need to be decoded, people who use religious language in a way that that bludgeons others, in a way that can harm others, the ideologies of Christian nationalism that we talk about so often that are harbored in these ways of speaking, they are not often, often they are not part of the intention of those who speak in this way.
And that can be really hard to get our heads around.
And it just opens up the possibility that all of us, when we say or do certain things, may be communicating things other than we mean to communicate, may be bringing about social effects that we don't intend to communicate.
So, it's the same way with this.
For many people who use this phrase, they mean it well.
They're trying to provide comfort or hope to others.
They're offering what they see as the insight that no matter how chaotic things might be, there's a meaning and purpose to the lived experience that other people are having, that the chaos of their lives is not in fact chaotic, that they are valued by God, valued enough to be a part of a divine plan.
And for many, many people, a phrase like this is experienced as a positive and hopeful affirmation.
They find great comfort in this idea.
It often, again, it offers hope in situations that might otherwise feel hopeless.
Right?
So for many people, this is not a negative experience when we go to decoding this or looking at the effects that it has.
Many people mean well when they say it, and many people experience, I think, the positive intentions of that.
There are also, even within religious contexts, Different resonances to this affirmation.
You might encounter, if you're looking at say American religious life, or more specifically American Christian life, you might encounter a phrase like this, that God has a plan, across the full ideological and political spectrum.
You might hear this in the Bible churches that we talked about in the first session in this series, the first episode in this series.
You might hear about it in really progressive or liberal churches.
You're going to hear it from the Catholics.
You're going to hear it from the Protestants.
You'll hear it in the white churches.
You'll hear it in ethnic churches.
You'll hear it in black churches.
You'll hear it all over.
And so it can have a lot of different resonances.
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