There are so many ways I can go with this. I think it’s dangerous when we smugly claim that we know who God is, and what God wants. The danger is when God appears to want only our happiness and success. This kind of thinking reeks of wish-fulfillment. The danger is that we become complacent, or hateful, or even cruel, and we do this with the conviction that God approves of us and our goals. We feel that we are the chosen people, so we don’t need to question our motives or our actions. We feel that whatever we do is God’s will, so that excuses a host of horrors. This is dangerous politically and personally.
When I say that it’s dangerous politically, I don’t mean that Mrs. Bachmann is in danger of losing any elections because of this kind of language and thinking. What I mean is that if the electorate endorses this kind of language and thinking, we are in danger of losing our way as a country. We are in danger of setting up our self-interest as our god, and claiming that we have divine sanction whatever we feel driven to do.
When we, either as a people, or at the prompting of our leaders, think that our country has been given a God-given directive, we are engaging in idol-building. We are identifying God based solely on projections of our own hopes and fears.
This kind of thinking is also dangerous personally. I know a man who feels that God loves him, and wants him to be able to live a life of sexual promiscuity. (This man is married, by the way, and his wife does not feel that God’s message is quite the same.) Here’s his line of reasoning. “God loves me. God approves of me. I can do no wrong, as long as I continue to have God’s favor. Abraham had multiple wives. David had multiple wives. Hell, Solomon had 1,000 wives. God obviously condones promiscuity among his men of faith, as each of these men were patriarchs who lived in God’s favor.”
By the way, this man would identify himself as a fundamentalist. He claims that the only way to read the Bible correctly is to read it literally. His very biased study has made it clear to him that the Bible contains no contradictions or difficulties. It has also made it clear to him that he is one of God’s favored people, and God wants him to have sex with as many women as possible. Needless to say, this has created many problems for the rest of his family, who don’t read the Bible in quite the same way.
The temptation to reduce God to an idol who agrees with our politics, both in and out of the bedroom, is nothing new, as Karen Armstrong makes clear in The Case for God. She also makes it clear what a disservice we are doing to ourselves when we limit our concept of God in this way.
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