It's In the Code Ep. 36: A God-Shaped Hole in My Heart
Many have had someone tell them, or grew up hearing, that we all have a “God-shaped hole” in our souls or hearts, and that only faith in (or a “personal relationship with”) Jesus can fill it. What do they mean by this? Where does this idea come from? And what are the consequences, intentional or not, of this way of understanding the human person and the Christian faith? Dan tackles these questions in this week’s episode
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Hello and welcome to the series It's in the Code.
This is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, delighted to be with you.
I want to begin, as I always do, by thanking those of you who listen, those of you who support us, whether directly, financially, we can't do it without you, or just by suffering through the ads and supporting us that way.
As well as those who send the emails that are encouraging or challenging or come up with new ideas and topics.
All of you are so vital a part of what we do and I want to thank you for that.
Related to that, as always, this is a series that builds off of your insights and ideas.
I continue to go through the emails I get every week to respond to as many as I can, though that's not everybody.
But please do keep them coming.
If you would, you can reach me, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always eager to hear from you, the great insights that all of you have and great things that you see, great ideas that you have.
And thank you for sharing those.
So diving right in here from that, I want to pick up on a topic that sort of builds from the topic from last episode and another theme that I've heard a lot from people, and I don't know if it's just sort of happenstance or things going on in people's lives or whatever, but it's a theme that I feel like I've heard a lot about sort of recently.
And it's the idea that we have a, quote, God-shaped hole that has to be filled within us, right?
The idea of the God-shaped hole, that there's a hole or a gap or something in us that can only be filled by God.
And of course, this implies a very specific God, right, that can fill this supposed hole, right?
It's the God of Christianity And it's not even just the God of Christianity, I would suggest, in its contemporary usage, in the way that people now experience it, the people who hear it, the people who reach out to me, me when I hear it, it's the God that is only present through one's personal faith in Jesus Christ.
That's the language, right?
The kind of pietistic, personalistic language of predominantly, I think, conservative American Christianity.
Well, this is a really old idea.
We'll get into that in a minute, this idea that there's a God-shaped hole within us, and it is not limited to evangelical or conservative Christianity.
You know, I just sort of indicated that connection because I know somebody's going to reach out, you're going to be right, and say, well, I come from a Catholic tradition or I come from a mainline tradition or I come from a, you know, a tradition that talks this way but is not, you know, evangelical or politically conservative or whatever.
All of that is true, right?
It's not limited to that kind of Christianity.
But having said that, like so many of the topics that come up in this series, I think that it does have a particular nuance within evangelical Christianity.
I think it has a presence, a predominance coming out of that tradition.
If I hear that phrase, There's a God-shaped hole in us, or there's a hole inside of us that only God can fill.
There's a God-shaped hole that we all have within us.
If I hear somebody say that, I'll put down good money that I am talking to or hearing from a theologically and probably socially conservative Christian.
I'm probably talking to somebody who's white.
I'm probably talking to an American evangelical and so forth.
Right?
Are there exceptions to that?
Absolutely.
Anytime you bet money, You could lose even on the so-called sure thing, but that's where I would put my money.
Okay?
And that's where I encounter this language.
That's where certainly everybody I hear from has encountered this language.
So, just a little bit on that background, as I say, this is a really old way of talking.
There's a little bit of debate about exactly where this idea comes from, but two names that will loom large are Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustine, and so that's all the way back to the 4th and 5th century BCE.
who says some things that could be translated and understood this way, as well as the Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 1600s, the 17th century.
So in terms of the idea, the language itself is older than that.
And I'll get some people who reach out or I've occasionally had like sort of conservative Christians who want to defend themselves or something and they'll say, well, this isn't our idea.
It's really old.
It's part of classical or, you know, maybe medieval Christianity or whatever.
It's fine.
Yeah.
It's a really, really old idea.
Okay.
And if you wanted to dive into that background some more, you could.
And if you wanted to take a look at what the phrase means, or the possible meanings of it, that would be really interesting, because I would suggest that Augustine doesn't mean quite the same thing that Pascal means, and Pascal doesn't mean quite the same thing Augustine means and probably neither one of them mean exactly what contemporary people mean when they say this because they're just separated by a lot of time and culture and complex theology and metaphysics and a bunch of other things, okay?
That would be interesting but that's that's not sort of what we do in this series, right?
I'm interested in both sort of its contemporary meaning But those of you who listen, although I'm really interested in more than the meaning, what people mean when they say this, is what this phrase does, what people are doing when they talk this way, right?
And so that's what I want to focus on, and it's contemporary usage, the meaning of the phrase, it's basic enough, right?
It's basically the sense that apart from our salvation, We are, in an important sense, incomplete.
We are not finished, as it were, right?
In evangelical parlance, we could say that our personal relationship with Jesus completes us, right?
With all due respect to Jerry Maguire, right?
It's not a human love that completes us, it is our faith in Jesus.
It completes us, it finishes us, and so forth.
And there are lots of layers to this, right?
If you wanted to get into the metaphysics and the theology of it, for many it's a sense that we are literally incomplete in our essence.
There is something fundamentally wrong with us.
This is human fallenness.
We are fundamentally broken.
And only a personal relationship with Jesus and faith in Jesus that restores us to God and so forth, only that can fix that, okay?
So that's the kind of theological side as this is used.
On a more individualistic and emotional level, a kind of experienced evangelicalism, the idea usually has more to do with sort of desire and longing, right?
It's the idea that we will be endlessly restless, sort of chasing after empty desires without God.
That if we are not Christians, if we don't have faith in Jesus, we will sort of chase around after things that can't possibly satisfy us.
This is what is usually within that framework and vision is the kind of the peace of Christ Within these forms of Christianity that Christ completes us fulfills those desires and so forth Often also the notion that those of us who are sort of casting about, looking for meaning and value and so forth, are searching for a God that we don't know, right?
It's like Jesus is the missing thing that we don't know that we're missing, right?
And so it's not just used as a kind of aim, a goal of Christianity, right?
To find our meaning, to find our purpose in Jesus.
And of course this ties in with what we talked about last episode, right?
That notion of meaning or purpose.
But this language of the God-shaped hole, it also becomes an explanation for why people fall into negative or self-destructive habits, right?
If they want to know why is it that people, and I think addiction looms large here, right?
Why is it that people fall into addictive behaviors or self-destructive behaviors?
Maybe it's, you know, sexually self-destructive behaviors.
Maybe it is negative mental health issues.
Maybe it's dependency issues, whatever.
The idea is that they are chasing illusory truths.
They are chasing things that they hope will fill the space within them, even if they couldn't articulate it this way.
But they're bound to fail because they can never get enough and so forth, because only God can fill that hole.
And this becomes an explanation for things, as I say, like dependency.
So that's the basic idea, right?
That's the basic meaning.
That's the basic appeal.
If you were to sit down and talk to somebody who talks this way, I think that's what you would hear.
That's what I've heard.
I was never, when I was an evangelical, really into this language of the God-shaped hole.
But if I were explaining to somebody what it meant, that's how I would have explained it.
It's what I hear.
It is what I hear from others.
It's the message that they heard.
It's what they were told.
To those of you who may not be familiar with that, right?
Maybe there's somebody in your life who has said that, like, you know, the problem is you have a God-sized hole you're filling with other things.
Like, what in the world are they talking about?
That's what they're talking about.
Okay?
So again, though, that's the meaning.
What does it do?
What does that language do?
The first thing I want to say, and I'll be really clear about this, is that for some, this notion of a God-shaped hole, it lines up with their experience.
It lines up with their understanding.
There are people Who, if you ask for their stories, if you listen to their personal account, for them, this rings true.
They will say, this makes sense of my experience.
After I became a Christian, I experienced this kind of peace, this kind of fulfillment.
I didn't have it before.
And as I now look back on my life, that's what I see.
I see that I was casting about looking for things that couldn't fulfill this, this desire, this need that I didn't even know that I had.
And I've found this kind of completion through my faith, right?
And one place where I've heard this language and where it has had a profound effect on lots of people is in the realm of recovery, right?
As most of you probably know, right, there are many recovering addicts for whom a turn to faith or a faith-based recovery program has been really, really essential, right?
And for them, this narrative makes sense.
It feels right.
It is true for them.
And it helps them break the cycle of dependency.
When they turn to God, as they understand it, when they become Christians in this model, they're not going to say that they're no longer dependent.
They're not going to say they're no longer addicts and so forth.
But for them, this is what brought freedom, right?
And the ability to break a cycle of what they see as a kind of seeking to fulfill a need that was deeper and bigger than that, right?
And the reason I bring that up is because that's real and I am absolutely not here to deny that experience, right?
And I'm not here to deny the experience of millions of sincerely believing Christians for whom the sense that God has sort of filled a missing part of them is a reality, right?
How could I deny that, right?
I can't deny somebody's experience and I know That for many, many people, this is their lived experience, that they turned their faith to God through Christ in this way that I'm articulating, and it felt like they were completed.
It felt like it brought them a peace and a rest and a fulfillment that they never had.
So all of that's real, right?
So we're gonna talk about the effects, what that language does.
For lots of people, that's the effect.
But, right, and here's the big caveat, and those of you who listen to me know what's coming, right?
That isn't all that that language does.
It often that language is more than one's personal testimony, right?
Again, this is like the discussion on purpose.
It's one thing for somebody to say, I experienced a fulfillment and a peace and a tranquility or whatever when I, quote, turn my heart over to Jesus or whatever that I never experienced before.
That's my experience.
It's one thing to say that.
I think it's something different to say, this is true for everyone, or this is the only way to stop longing or self-destructing behavior or anything else.
And that's the code, folks.
That's the work that's going on that is often unstated, is the notion that this is not just a vision or a description of somebody's experience.
It's a normative claim of everybody's experience, right?
Why do I say that?
Why do I see that problematic?
Here's the thing.
There's no way to evaluate whether or not there is a God-sized hole or a God-shaped hole or an anything-shaped hole in all of us without delving into philosophy and psychology and some other things.
It gets pretty heady, right?
I have substantive philosophical and I think theological reasons why I don't think this language is an effective description of universal experience, right?
I can't get into all of that here.
It's reflected in my responses.
If people are interested in following up and maybe hearing more about that or getting into the technicalities, I'm happy to do that, right?
But, and you'll hear all that.
You'll hear that in my answers.
Why do I say that?
I say that because that's the distinction I see.
It is one thing for someone to say, hey, here's my experience.
That's what I live with.
I live with the experience that I was transformed by this.
My life was made different by this.
It was better by this.
I think that that is substantively different than saying what was true for me has to be true for everyone.
Everyone is the same.
Everyone has this God-shaped hole in their life.
Everyone will be incomplete or broken or casting about or caught in self-destructive behaviors unless they turn their heart to Jesus.
I think those are two very, very different claims, right?
And so this is the first point that I'll just make, is that I can't deny the experience of those who've had that reality in their lives, but I do deny that what they describe is universal.
I absolutely deny that only the Christian faith as they understand it can fulfill their deepest desires and longings, right?
And again, we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, it sort of dovetails with that, right?
One obvious reason, and I've had this conversation with Christians.
They'll say, well, prove it.
How do you show?
I'll say, the most people who've ever lived were not Christians.
You can talk to people who convert to Islam.
You can talk to people who practice Buddhist meditation.
You can talk to people who are practitioners of bhakti devotional practices in different Hindu traditions.
You can talk to all kinds of people.
You can talk to atheist humanists For whom a sort of contemplative life studying science is what fulfills them.
You can talk to them and they will have a similar story.
Many of them will have a story that I felt broken.
I felt incomplete.
I felt lost, whatever, until I found this.
It simply doesn't line up with the experience of lots of other people.
And it's the same thing I said last time with meaning and value.
People do find meaning and value apart from the Christian faith.
And to deny that they do is to me just, it's just disingenuous.
I've had lots of conversations with Christians who try to tell me that everything those other people experience is illusory and false and they're really lost and casting about.
I just don't buy it.
Okay.
But here's the bigger reason.
Why I don't accept this as a normative vision for people.
And again, there's a lot of philosophy behind this.
Happy to follow up with people if they want to do that.
But it's that I don't think there is anything that can ultimately complete us.
Why do I say that?
Because I think the kind of creatures we are, we are fundamentally and inherently and permanently incomplete.
That is, we are always evolving as the people that we are.
Our identity is always shifting.
It is always changing.
Anybody who's read my book Queer Democracy and the notion of queer identity, a queering of identity, that is, Identity that doesn't have fixed boundaries and definitions and shapes.
That's what I'm getting at.
I think that what makes us the kinds of realities that we are is that we are never complete.
This is what keeps us moving.
This is what keeps us changing.
This is what allows us to adapt to the reality around us.
And that is the good news and it's the bad news.
The experience of incompletion can drive us in profound and important ways.
It can move us into new things.
We can develop new relationships and new interests.
We can change.
We can develop.
We can do these beautiful things.
But it can also be a source of pain because it absolutely can lead us into self-destructive behaviors.
Right?
You don't have to be a card-carrying conservative Christian to be concerned about people who experience dependency or people who enter into a series of self-destructive relationships or whatever, right?
We have all known somebody in our lives who thinks that the next job or partner or Or degree, or child, or adrenaline-inducing experience, or whatever will finally make them the person they're destined to be, who will constantly chase around after a completion that will sort of quote-unquote fix their life, and we know that it won't happen, right?
For those who are listening, right, this is not dissimilar to kind of some Buddhist perspectives, right, about the transitoriness of all desires and so forth.
You could get there on down that path.
That's not my path to this insight.
But I think it's the same point, right?
So that's where I think it fundamentally goes wrong, because I think it's based on a flawed conception of what we as human beings are.
And this is where I think the idea becomes really problematic when we decode it further.
Because if I'm right, okay, and I think I'm right, sometimes people are like, you always think you're right.
Of course, I think I'm right.
We all think we're right.
That's why we think the things we think.
If I'm right, and if we do experience a sense of incompletion, of not having all the answers, of not knowing what our purpose is all the time, what happens when we do try to fill that God-shaped hole exactly the way the Christians say we should, and we still don't experience that completion?
See for me, the problem is it's going to be a false set of goods for lots of people.
And I said I know lots of people experience something different and more power to them, good for them.
But lots of people don't.
Lots of people do exactly what this line of Christianity says you're supposed to do.
And they don't feel complete, or they don't have all the answers.
They still feel like there is a hole, if we want to use that metaphor, within them.
They've tried to put God there, and it didn't fit.
And within a tradition that says there's a God-shaped hole, and if you put God there, everything will be complete.
When you don't feel that, when you don't experience that, it can only be because you have failed.
It means there's something wrong with you.
It means you're not really saved or whatever.
And this is what I hear from so many people.
This is what I've experienced in my life.
The message that was supposed to bring peace and encouragement, it turns into a message of condemnation and self-judgment.
And in extreme cases, it can turn into really radical self-loathing.
I have known, and I've heard from many of you who have known, people who struggle with suicidal ideation and things because they feel that they are just so broken, they can't be fixed, and they're failing God in some way because they still feel this way.
That's what I fear is operative in this code of the God-shaped hole.
Right?
If I'm right that there's nothing that can complete us, that the ideal of completion at the heart of vision is just a fantasy, Then that vision of the self can only be doomed to failure.
And as long as Christians keep talking that way, and for me more importantly, as long as Christian leaders keep talking that way, as long as Christian pastors keep talking that way, as long as people who have an interest in going out and converting others keep talking that way, it becomes a tool of manipulation and control.
And the more that you can tell somebody who doesn't feel complete or fixed or whole that the reason they don't feel that is because of some shortcoming on their part, the more control over them you have.
And folks, I know I'll hear from people who say, I hear what you're saying, but that's not why I say that.
That's not why I believe that.
That's not why I evangelize to them.
I say, I'm sorry, but it is, it's in the code.
Built into this, what I consider a highly flawed conception of the self is built in this notion of manipulation and control, because that's where it goes.
So for me, that's the code.
So again, it's a very old idea, the God-shaped hole.
Let me just say, I don't agree with it when Augustine says it.
I don't agree with it when Pascal says it, right?
I don't agree with them either.
When they said it, I still am not convinced, okay?
Within contemporary Christianity, it is a powerful vision for some.
And again, I don't want to detract from their experience.
But when that becomes universalized, when it becomes externalized, when it becomes a normative vision for what everybody has to be, how everybody has to experience religion or faith or ultimate reality, I have real concerns.
Because I don't think it lines up with experience.
I think it's built on a flawed conception of what we are as human beings.
And because of that, I think it invariably will come down to manipulation and control.
Got to wind this up.
I've already gone a bit longer than normal.
As always, thank you for listening.
Please keep the ideas coming.
Daniel Miller Swag.
DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Getting to as many ideas as I can.
Responding to as many emails as I can.
Please keep them coming.
Can't do it without you.
As always, please be well until we meet again in this strange virtual space.
