What does it mean when a Christian describes someone as “God-fearing”? Is this a good thing? And what does it imply about their view of God, or human relationships with God, or the consequences of NOT being “God-fearing”? Dan explores these topics in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that 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, I am your host.
And as always, thank you so much for listening.
I spent a fair amount of time this week trying to catch up on emails.
Always behind on the emails.
But it's always refreshing when I get a chance to just kind of plow through some of those, because I get so many great insights from folks, great ideas, great feedback.
Sometimes really, I think, provocative and productive and useful pushback, you know, sort of counterpoints and so forth.
Responded to a lot of those this week trying to make a concerted effort to kind of close the gap So as always if you've got comments thoughts and certainly topic ideas, please let me know I'm also going to throw this out there.
We're coming into the fall and the holiday season again and Last season, I guess, if we have seasons in this series, last fall, solicited this.
But again, if you've got topics or ideas that you think are specifically related to, like, holidays, the holiday season, things that need to be decoded that might be of religious significance or value, let me know.
I'd love to hear.
I did some things like the war on Christmas and stuff like that last year.
I'm not looking to just, you know, rehash the same things.
Let the ideas come.
I've got a couple in mind, and it just sort of occurred to me that it would be a great time to throw that idea out as we're coming into October.
I've got Halloween coming up, then Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, the whole deal.
So let me know.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Please let me know.
I would love to hear from you, okay?
Tied in with that, there's a theme I want to talk about today that I've been kind of kicking around for a while.
I'm not going to go into my whole messy process of like, you know, how I come up with themes and topics and such, but I've got this kind of running list that I sort of work on and think about and let them sort of percolate.
And this is one that I've been doing that for a while.
And then going through the emails, you know, somebody specifically brought this up again and kind of threw it in front of me.
I thought, yeah, I think I really want to sort of jump into this one.
And it's the idea of being, quote, God fearing, of being a God fearing person.
And specifically, as this is used as a kind of laudatory description of a certain kind of idealized individual.
What do I mean by that?
I'll explain that, you know, here in just a few minutes.
Okay.
And with that, what I have in mind is, again, you know, thanks to the listener who kind of emailed me this week about this and kind of got me, you know, pushed over the edge to present on this.
It's the hope to find, for example, a God-fearing partner or to have kids who grow up to fear God.
And if you have, again, a certain kind of Christian person in your life, This is what you might hear.
You might hear the desire that, you know, your kids grow up to be God-fearing people, that they find God-fearing partners to marry, that maybe yourself, or somebody's hope, that they can find a God-fearing man or woman to be a part of their life or whatever.
And so I'm interested, as always, right, in kind of what this idea means.
And I'm interested in delving deeper into what I think are the implications of this way of thinking about being quote-unquote God-fearing.
So first, what does it mean?
And I've had some people ask me this question, a person who reached out once and I've been dating somebody a long time and it finally came time to, you know, meet the parents, you know, kind of thing.
And this person and their dating partner were not in... The person emailing me was not a Christian.
The partner had come out of an evangelical Christian background.
And for those who would know what this means, a Reformed background, where I think that this is going to be significant.
And, you know, had kind of warned his partner that, you know, the parents were still religious and so forth.
But one of the first questions that this person was confronted with when they met the parents was, are you a God-fearing person?
And the person had no idea kind of what that meant, or how to respond to that, or like, If it was a good thing or a bad thing to be a God fearing, like just did not get it.
And I've had real conversations with people who pose that question, like, what does that mean?
So what does it mean?
God fearing is then a certain kind of Christian discourse.
And this this doesn't necessarily just line up, in my view, as so many things I talk about do with sort of theologically conservative Christians versus other kinds of Christians or white Christians versus Maybe people in the historically African-American church tradition or something like that.
This is something that can transcend that.
But for people who speak this way, Christians who speak this way, to say that somebody is God-fearing, it's just another way of saying that they are a godly person.
Okay?
Which also means that they're a Christian.
Because within a sort of Christian framework, to be godly, one has to be a Christian.
You can't please God or live according to God's dictates or whatever if you're not a Christian.
So they're a Christian.
What does that mean?
It means whatever the person using the language thinks it means.
They're a Christian is understood by the person who says this.
It typically implies the person who is described as God-fearing or Godly understood in these terms.
It means that, you know, for them, their Christian faith is really important to them.
Developing their Christian faith is a conscious, intentional part of their life.
They explicitly aim to live their life in accordance with Christian teachings as they understand them.
So to be described as God-fearing would be experienced by somebody described that way, typically, and certainly somebody using the description would intend it as a kind of superlative compliment, right?
Then a certain kind of Christian culture There probably can't be a higher compliment than to be described as a God-fearing person.
And as I say this a few minutes ago, I said this is often also language that is articulated as a kind of hope or a prayer, at least in my experience, this is how it was, right?
We might look at real people and say it's a God-fearing person, but it was also often wrapped up with this kind of hope for a God-fearing person.
This is what I get out, you know, when people, and I've heard this, right, when people will pray that their kids will be grow up to be God-fearing adults, or the hope or prayer that one can find a God-fearing partner to marry, or as the listener who emailed me most recently pointed out, praying that their children will find God-fearing partners to marry and so forth.
So it's often wrapped up in this notion of Something that doesn't yet hold, it's kind of a hope, a hoped-for reality.
And I think that lends an idealized aspect to this idea of the God-fearing person.
In other words, it's not always a description of real flesh-and-blood people, but it often expresses a desire for a kind of hypothetical person that hasn't materialized yet.
A sort of idealized imaginary person that could come along at some point in the future.
And in some ways that's easier.
As we all know, no flesh and blood people are perfect, right?
We all fail in lots of different ways.
Imagining an idealized version of somebody that doesn't yet exist can kind of free us from that.
But it also means that like any idealized representation, it can make it so that, you know, it can become an ideal that no real person can live up to.
I think that's a problem, but that would be an entirely different podcast and one that probably doesn't fit in this series.
A podcast on, you know, I don't know, relationships and realistic expectations and accepting ourselves and others as we are and so on.
Good important stuff, but not the stuff for here.
That's what it means when somebody says God fearing.
That's what it means.
In some ways.
It's a kind of archaism.
It's an older way of talking would have been much more common in a bygone era, but you will still hear it from some people.
So that's the basic meaning and it's straightforward enough.
But of course, we're not interested in this series just in the sort of surface meaning.
I'm interested in what it can actually sort of mean, what it implies more deeply below the surface, I guess, as it were.
And here's what's significant for me is that when somebody says this, they say God-fearing instead of saying Godly.
And I've had this conversation with real people, okay?
It's a conversation that goes like this.
Somebody says, you know, they desire to be a God-fearing person.
When people look at me, I hope they see me as a God-fearing man or a God-fearing woman or hoping that, you know, hoping that their kids meet a God-fearing person or so forth.
And I might say something like, you know, it's interesting to me that you say God-fearing instead of just like a godly person.
Like, why do you say that?
And they say, well, it's the same thing.
I'm like, okay, cool, I get it, like, it's the same thing, but you didn't say godly, you said God-fearing.
You chose to say something else instead.
If they're the same thing, why use the two different descriptors?
Or more importantly, if they are, for these people, the same thing, what does it mean to equate being quote-unquote godly with being God-fearing, with fearing God?
And what's my point?
My point is that I think there are real implications and assumptions expressed in this language of fearing God or being God-fearing.
And for me, everything hinges on that idea of fear.
I think it's real.
I think it's significant.
I think it is loaded.
I think it is worth decoding.
And so if you think about like sort of other popular expressions of American Christianity, they emphasize love a lot.
God's love for us.
Christians love for God.
I think there are a lot of things behind that.
Certainly there are parts of the Bible that speak that way.
There are theological traditions that speak that way.
I think it's also a way of trying to create what I've called in other places or other episodes a kinder, gentler Christianity that moved to a vision of God as love and so on.
But the Christian tradition has not always foregrounded love when talking about God.
And I think this is particularly true, almost like sort of, excuse me, infamously true in within Calvinistic or Reformed wings of Protestantism.
And if you don't know what those terms mean, that's fine.
But I know I've got listeners out there who do and I know that you're nodding your head right now enthusiastically as I say this.
If you're familiar with the Bible at all, you also know that it frequently speaks about God in terms that are very different from love.
And in fact, if you were to, I don't know, just count words or something, there's a lot more descriptions of God that are not about love, I would argue, than there are that are, that picture God as love.
So lots of ways of talking about God.
And so when somebody Talks about that.
One of the most common ways that God is figured in places like the Bible and lots of parts of the Christian tradition because of that is in terms of fear.
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So when someone equates being godly with fearing God, I think that that's significant.
I think it communicates something real about the primary emotion that attaches to God, even for Christians.
This is a question that's posed to the clients I work with as a coach working with trauma resolution.
One of the questions on the kind of intake form that clients fill out is, you know, what are some primary emotions that attach to religion for you?
Most of my clients are coming out of conservative Protestantism and Fear is one of the dominant emotions that they identify.
I think it communicates something real about the primary emotion that attaches to God.
When people use the language of fearing God, I think it also communicates a lot about what God is presumed to be like.
And I think it communicates a lot about what God thinks of those who aren't deemed to be godly.
So I'm gonna start with the second thing of this, like what is God presumed to be like?
What are the assumptions about God that are sort of lodged in the language of fearing God?
I think it's...
Excuse me.
I think one of the assumptions is that God is defined by making demands for obedience, demands for recognition, recognition of God's holiness or righteousness or whatever, and that there's a fear that comes with those demands.
I think it implies a God that punishes those who don't offer that, people who don't offer that obedience, who don't offer that recognition.
Almost always in this kind of understanding of God, the consequence for that is some sort of punishment.
Maybe now in our daily life, in this world, but certainly eternally through condemnation and damnation and so forth.
And because of that, it's a God that, in my view, can only be described as vindictive, or violent, or at least really, really angry, who avenges perceived wrongs and slights directed God's direction.
You don't obey God?
You don't give God God's due?
What does God do?
He's going to strike you down.
He's going to smite you.
He's going to punish you.
He's going to take something away from you.
At worst, you might be condemned to hell for all eternity.
I mean, talk about like the ultimate disproportionate Vindictive response there is nothing you could do in I don't know 80 90 years on earth That would warrant like an eternity of torment and that might sound as a weird statement I'm not defending terrible people or anything, but if you just think about it sort of like in terms of I don't know reciprocity or something There's nothing you could do in that short amount of time that would demand an eternity of recompense.
It just doesn't make sense.
Describes a violent, vindictive God.
And that brings up that question of people who aren't perceived as being godly, right?
What do they get?
They get punishment.
They get punishment for that.
That's what happens.
It's also the God that I guess is satisfied with human obedience out of fear of what will happen if people don't obey.
Why obey God?
Because God's gonna do terrible things if I don't.
And so don't even get me started by the way on The kind of logic that goes like this, I've had this conversation.
I'll say, so we obey God because we're afraid of God.
What does that say about the kind of God that you're worshiping?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not like that.
God wants us to do what God tells us to do because we love God and we want to do it.
And I'm like, yeah, but like he'll smite us, punish us, whatever if we don't.
They're like, well, yeah.
I'm like, so God demands that we love God?
God demands that we have to want to do what God demands that we do and will punish us if we don't?
Like, what kind of logic is that?
Folks, these are all things that propelled me out of a certain kind of Christian tradition, okay?
I say all the time, bad theology hurts people and this is bad theology.
That's what it is.
It's a theology that at the very least says it is absolutely right or appropriate or even desirable that what people feel toward God is fear.
Okay?
That's the connection that I see.
And none of these concerns are new with me because I've gotten some emails lately from folks and I appreciate them, keep them coming, who I say I talk about these kind of things sometimes and I think there's an assumption that maybe I don't know much about sort of the Christian tradition outside of like popular culture and stuff.
And so I'll get the emails from folks like, well you know there's this theological tradition here or this this theologian there or whatever.
I know that.
I get it.
I don't consider myself an expert in theology.
I do have a master's degree in systematic theology from one of the preeminent theological programs in the world.
So I'm also not sort of unaware of this.
And the reason I bring this up is because somebody could say, well, you know, the Bible, yeah, it talks a lot about fear, but it really means awe or reverence.
So, our conceptions of fear, when you say Dan, that it's about fearing God, you're really, you're kind of investing it with a meaning that it doesn't have.
To which my responses are multiple, I can't get into them all here, but one of them is, okay, but the actions depicted of that God who doesn't, you know, for whom we don't show proper reverence, What do those actions do?
We're back to the vindictiveness.
We're back to the punishment.
We're back to coercion.
We're back to actions that produce good, old-fashioned fear.
Another theological answer, this goes back to that Reformed and Calvinistic tradition that I'm talking about.
It predates that, but they picked up this line of theology, which is say, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, God is love.
Bible says God is love, but God's love has to be balanced by God's justice and wrath.
And this is where the fear part comes in.
Which my response is, and always has been, why?
Or, okay, let's say that God is into justice.
Like, are justice and wrath the same thing?
Many of us now would say that they're actually diametrically opposed.
That's why if, I don't know, if somebody commits a wrong against us, we depend upon the judicial system.
to meet out a punishment for that rather than just going and exercising our wrath in a form of vigilantism or something like that.
We would differentiate justice and wrath.
So saying that God's love has to be balanced by this, does that make sense?
It never has to me, especially from a kind of theology that says as well that God is not sort of constrained in any way, that God's will is supreme, that what God wants or desires is what God can do.
So I'm always like, well, Okay, so why does God have to be wrathful?
Anyway, can't get into all of that.
Just throw that out there to say that these concerns I'm raising, they're not new.
They go back a long time.
Theologians have responded to them.
I know about those responses.
I don't find them compelling.
If you do, more power to you, okay?
But very broadly, another set of reasons that I think is more compelling why those responses have never sort of worked for me is that the same people that say that God is wrathful or that, you know, talk about reverence and awe, they also say that God is supremely good.
And following from this, God is supposed to be our absolute moral exemplar.
God is THE absolute, supremely moral being in the universe.
Surely, if we want to know what we should be like, who we should emulate, what it means to be a quote-unquote good person, God is the model.
And so here's the question that I have.
If God is supposed to be our model, it brings up this question.
If anyone in a human relationship with us, right?
In a position not only of authority, but a position that also claims love.
We're not just talking about bosses here or, I don't know, your commanding officer if you're in the military or something.
A relationship that is defined by both authority and love.
Maybe a parent-child relationship or something like that.
If anybody who's in a relationship with us that's supposed to be loving made the demands that this fearful or fear-inspiring God does, with the promised retribution that comes with it, would we define them as good, let alone loving?
Do I want a partner to love me because she fears what I'll do if she doesn't?
Do I really want kids who do what I ask them to do because they're terrified of how I'll respond if they don't?
Do I want friends who relate to me that way?
Do I want people in my life who relate to me that way, that demand that I love them and they'll punish me if I don't?
Of course not.
Are even the feelings of awe or reverence, are those the responses I want people that I claim to love to feel about me?
And if they don't, I mean, I don't think I want my kids to feel awe or reverence in me.
Those just feel like weird words to ascribe to them.
But even if I did, even if it was like I want them to feel reverence toward me, does that mean I respond in wrath if they don't?
I think our answer for all of us in like a mundane, this-worldly sense is no, of course not.
And my question is, great, so if God is supposed to be our moral exemplar and all of our moral intuitions tell us there's a problem with that, guess what?
I think there's a problem with thinking about God this way.
I think that linking God with fear, however we try to soften that concept, it's a fundamental mistake.
And too often throughout human history, right up to the present, ongoing in the world today, the fact that God is supposed to be our moral exemplar The fact that he is supposed to be fundamentally fearsome, those ideas have combined to license terrible human atrocities in the name of being godly or god-like or god-fearing.
And I think it carries through on interpersonal levels too.
Partners who do fear partners.
Children who do fear their parents.
Pastors who run roughshod over congregations who fear them.
These are all real things.
So this is for me why I think it's bad theology.
A last point that I'll throw out here, because this is another thing that I will hear from folks, I think really well-meaning folks, who will say, yeah, I hear everything you're saying, and man, it really hits, but the Bible, what about the Bible?
The Bible talks about God being, you know, provoking fear and living in fear of God and all this stuff about punishment and so forth, you know.
I know it sounds weird, but that's how the Bible describes it.
That doesn't make it okay for me, folks.
I've said this lots of times on this series.
I've said it in our main podcast for years.
The fact that the Bible says something for me doesn't mean, oh, well, okay, it's okay if God does it because the Bible says it.
What it shows is that there are some real shortcomings to the biblical view of God.
Again, highlights one of the many reasons why I ceased to be The kind of Christian that, you know, views the God is quote, or sorry, the Bible as quote, unquote, God's word or as an errant or whatever, there are just problematic conceptions of God.
Bad theology is present in the Bible as well.
And I'm aware as well, there are different visions of God in the Bible as also lots of people who read the Bible find meaning and value in it, find conceptions of God that are not conceptions of fear.
That is all true.
Okay.
So, wrap all this up.
I'm getting kind of worked up here.
When people use the language of somebody being God-fearing, the short version is it just means to be God-like.
Somebody who's pleasing to God in their life and actions and so forth.
It's intended as a laudatory description.
And again, for lots and lots of people to be described as God-fearing, That would mean a lot to them.
There was a time in my life where if somebody described me as God-fearing, I would take... I shouldn't say I would take pride in it, because that would be sinful.
I would take solace in being described that way.
There was a long time when, for me, that's how it resonated.
It resonated as the kind of laudatory statement that it was.
But I think it's worth decoding what it means to think of godliness in terms of fear.
Fear of God.
And once we do that, I think it alerts us to a lot of really concerning things, and I think that all of those things are there, present, lurking in the background, when people use this language of being God-fearing.
I also think this highlights why sometimes people, you know, Christian people, have other Christian people in their life, and they can all talk about godliness, but sometimes it's worth probing a little deeper to say, what do we mean by that?
Because if somebody says they want to be godly or they value godliness, but they have this fearful God model, that can be really different from somebody else who's working with a different conception or model of God.
Need to wrap this up.
Thank you for listening.
Again, I'm trying to close the gap on some of those emails and the correspondence with listeners.
Value what people have to say.
Please let me know other topics.
Keep in mind, as I say, coming into the fall, I would love to hear maybe topics or themes related to holidays.
If there are ones that I didn't hit on last holiday season, I would love to take a look at those.
Keep those ideas coming as well as other just comments, feedback, whatever you've got.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
We cannot do it without you, can't do it without our patrons, so thank you all so much and please be well until we have a chance to talk again.
