Getting Rid of God

What to do when the old language for God stops working

Here is my response to a relatable and common question many of us encounter through deconstruction:

Question: I’m reintroducing the word ‘God’ (and it feels weird), after using Source, Universe, etc. for YEARS because my mom would say that when I said God, it wasn’t the God of the Bible and we were talking about two different things. I know when I say God, I definitely don’t mean the eternal damnation one. So my question is, was there a time you called the God of the Bible by another name in this way?

Yes. For a time it was difficult to speak of God without feeling complicit in something ugly. This is a very normal part of deconstruction—losing language, and then gaining it back in a new form. Often the meaning is more expansive, including and integrating parts of what came before, but transcending it, and shedding the parts that don’t work anymore.

My friend Keri went through a traumatic experience with church leadership. She was a pastor at the time, and yet afterwards she “could no longer speak the things of God,” because it was too loaded with patriarchal abuse. She liked referring to “the algorithm of the universe.” She still saw a universe filled with meaning and a loving presence at the center of it all, but ‘God-talk’ was too loaded.

my buddy Keri, who has reintegrated God talk in a new and expansive way

Losing words is no small thing; it is tremendously sad—it can feel like a death. But things need to die in order to rise again. In fact, this is an essential part of the spiritual journey.

Meister Eckhart

The 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “God, rid me of God.” Our tendency is always to be putting God in a box that we can claim and manage. Whatever God we think we know likely contains projections of our own ego. Perhaps the best thing we can do for our relationship with God is get rid of Him completely, get rid of the metaphors (including the ones that call God Him), lose the language, lose the answers. Having no answers is scary, because many of us learned of a punitive God who demands correct answers. Rid yourself of such a God. Why not?—say Universe. Say Source. Say Spirit. Say Nothing At All. There is actually good biblical precedent for this—the Jewish people did not refer to the name of God directly. The four-letter divine name, YHWH, was considered too sacred to pronounce. So when reading scripture aloud, they would substitute Adonai (Lord). Centuries later, medieval Christian scholars who didn’t understand this practice saw YHWH written with the vowel markings of Adonai and mashed them together into “Jehovah”—a name that never existed in Hebrew, a name that only came into being because the original name was too holy to speak. When Jesus refers to the “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew, he means the same thing as when he says “kingdom of God” in Luke. But Matthew was written to a Jewish audience that would have avoided naming God. This refusal to put God in a box reminds us that we do not own God. God is not ours. When we rid ourselves of God, we have the opportunity to encounter something more universal, more loving, and more free.

Another favorite quote comes to mind, from the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.” Rid yourself of your God—God does not belong to you. Any God worth believing in must be wilder and more unnamable than we have made her.

Early in my deconstruction, I was worried that I might lose faith in God altogether and become an atheist. The best thing I did for my spiritual life was to accept that if I de-converted entirely, that would be totally fine. You do not get moral points for believing in God—some of the most evil people who have ever lived have believed in God, and used that God for supremacist power plays, meanwhile millions of atheists all over the world are loving deeply, serving their neighbors, and being present to their lives in the way that (I believe) God intended.

sometimes I don't believe in God, and then I see a cathedral and I’m like, “okay you win.”

Jesus’ unique name for God was Abba, a loving, nurturing father. One of the final identities for God in the Bible is the simple pronouncement that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This one has served me best through seasons where I could not easily speak the name of God. I would just say love. Like God, love is for everyone. It is not owned by any religion—loving is what it means to be human, it’s what life is all about. I still find it very helpful to replace the word God with love. For example, what Jesus spoke of as “the kingdom of God” is truly the kingdom of love—what the world would be like if Love had dominion. May Love’s will be done, on earth, as in heaven.

So don’t be hard on yourself. If God talk doesn’t work for you, getting rid of God may be exactly what your spiritual life requires. Life is not about believing the right things or naming things in a particular way. Life is about love and connection—this, I believe, is what God is about as well, and I want to rid myself of any God that leads me anywhere else.

As usual, James Baldwin puts words to this better than almost anyone. This is a very popular quote that I return to again and again, but although I see it everywhere, I usually only hear the second half of it. The first half is bracing and confrontational, but also difficult to argue with: “It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being… must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

The churches that introduced us to God have hypocrisies that must be deconstructed, and the lies we were told are so deeply intertwined in our understanding of the divine that ripping out those falsehoods may feel like killing God altogether. Beloved, let me tell you one of the greatest truths I believe: what is real cannot really die. What is love cannot really die. As my friend Tamice frequently says, you cannot kill life. If God is real, if the Spirit is alive, then you are free to get rid of him. For all you will get rid of is death.