Pretending God

I wonder how many of us are pretending God? I suspect that many of us, compelled by the disturbing disparity between what’s supposed to be and what actually is, regularly (even continually) invent divine presence and sometimes concoct evidence for divine activity. In other words, I think that lots of the time we’re faking him.

I’m not saying we’re not having an experience. Some of these experiences are very real and can be deeply meaningful. I am wondering, though, how many of these experiences are fabricated. With our Western, Emersonian preoccupation with inward, self-validating events, it’s not clear at all whether what we experience as the presence or move of God is actually the case. John Derbyshire in his article God & Me for The National Review, speaks of his strange, often disappointing faith odyssey. He acknowledges that many people seem to have genuine religious experiences (even Freud granted this), but, he writes, “whether the content of the experience is real, in the sense of putting you in touch with the supernatural, seems to be a subjective opinion.” I’m not questioning the experience; but I do wonder if it is always an authentic experience of the divine.

This wondering is prompted by what often appears to me to be religious playacting among us. I’m not talking about hypocrisy, but sincere pretending. In our gatherings or individual spiritual lives, we construct our own divine signifiers which we interpret as presence or power—a certain feeling or idea or practice we associate with God becomes its own evidence of divine visitation. As such, these signifiers can become more important than the God they signify.

If God is real and can be experienced, there must be signifiers of his reality or we couldn’t experience him at all. The Bible does indeed identify many of them. But I’m not talking about Biblical signifiers; I’m speaking of our own inventions which we have constructed as surrogates for the missing Biblical ones. With them we can do the God program—complete with affirming experiential evidence—without him.

Why would we want to pretend God? First, I think we’re afraid of the implications of an absent Deity, of a God who does nothing. We often try to protect God from incompetence, impotence, or delusions of grandeur by fabricating evidence on his behalf. If he won ‘t come in power, we’ll construct an experience that reassures us that he did. If he doesn’t do what the Bible says he’s supposed to do, we’ll build an approximation of divine activity or interpret non-events as divine events. (We’re really very good at this.) In this way we can keep the Old Boy from collapsing under the weight of unmet expectations.

Another reason why we might pretend God is to avoid any intimation that something is wrong with us. As long as God “shows up” we’re okay. As long as we have a spiritual experience, we can confidently assume divine concurrence. To admit that our faith might be a mere collection of ritualized words and gestures would invite a cataclysmic collapse of self, a fall into the terrifying abyss of meaninglessness. In order to save ourselves (if God won’t) we must invent an affirming experience. Our lives depend upon it.

Lastly, we pretend God because the whole Western Church edifice we’ve inherited depends upon it. It’s the only thing we know, the only manifestation of the invisible we can see. It’s our organizational ark, and we’ve got to keep it afloat no matter what.

What would happen if we admitted to pretending? Would God fall down? Would we ourselves pitch over the brink? Would the Church implode on the vacuum? If all there is is pretend, then, yes. But I suspect that there is something genuine to be had, something honest and not so dependent upon a collective illusion.

But then again, I don’t pretend to know all the answers.

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