God As Asceticism vs. God As Love
It was on a Sunday morning—that of August 25, 2024 to be exact, when church was starting—that God gave me a revelation, not unlike others He has given me in the past. It's the kind of revelation that gave me understanding of something about myself that had been eluding me. In this case, it was the way church and church culture, at least in the ways I've experienced them, have been a stumbling block in my ability to know God, desire Him, and feel desired and loved by Him.
We Christians represent God to the people. I think He's chosen to make us His ambassadors because He's a big fan of free will—it's kind of necessary for love, after all (you can't force genuine love). So in a very real sense, Christian culture, and more directly church culture, paints a picture of God. Unfortunately, this picture is often inaccurate in many ways, as it's affected by the world; for me, the most warped part has been the way the church has so often adopted the world's concept of holiness.
Paul describes worldly holiness (or purity, if you prefer) well in Colossians 2:20-23, though that take on it is looking at but one facet and not the whole. Put simply, worldly holiness is the belief that physical pleasures are somehow bad and that abstaining from them makes you more holy, pious, pure, and/or righteous. In short, it separates a person into the mind/spirit and the body and calls the former good and the latter bad. We see this idea expressed by both philosophies and religions the world over, and it is believed, both consciously or subconsciously, by most cultures. I will refer to this idea by its common name, asceticism.
Asceticism is not godly. To be sure, neither is living for the sake of pleasure, but we can distract ourselves on that one all day, and indeed, we often do. But consider that God intentionally made us humans as both body and soul. Physical pleasures are a gift from God. What is the most common way the promised land of Canaan was described? A land flowing with milk and honey! And I don't know about you, but that sounds like ice cream to me.
Of the physical pleasures, two commonly denigrated by asceticism are delicious foods and sexual pleasures. (Possessions, especially "nice things," are also often condemned by it, but that ascetic belief is incompatible with Capitalism.) We can see how this affects our culture at large through language. For example, have you ever been to the supermarket and seen a package of chocolates being advertised as "sinfully delicious"? It's a ridiculous conceit—there's nothing inherently sinful about delicious food—that derives from ascetic ideas about holiness and sin. However, nothing has been more affected by asceticism than sexuality.
Language around sexuality demonstrates the way asceticism demonizes it. It is considered filthy and naughty. Being aware of sex is considered a loss of innocence, as if purity and innocence can only be maintained while one knows nothing of sexuality. I have come to believe that this is a key aspect of "childhood innocence," because when I look at the behavior of children, they are guilty of many sins, including things like violence and lying.
The concept of "polite society" only reinforces this demonizing of sexuality by softly censoring what we speak about and how we speak of it. To the first point, the idea of "polite society" promises to ensure safe interactions by telling us not to talk about things that might upset others, but in so doing, it also teaches us what topics of conversation we should find upsetting. It molds our minds in this way. Further, it is an enemy to authenticity, forcing us to hide behind masks for its sake. To the second point, any censorship will just spawn workarounds—see the way TikTok's censorship of the word "dead" has popularized the ridiculous word "unalive." In the case of polite society's demonization of sexuality, it has spawned an endless cavalcade of euphemisms for sex and genitals.
This brings us back to church culture more specifically. In my experience, churches tend to have a rather strong version of "polite society," one that emphasizes a high degree of conformity and groupthink. Everything is religiously focused. The gatherings are always about singing Christian songs and Bible studies (not to knock Bible study, but there's more to life than studying the scriptures). For me, it has presented a very narrow view of God that I've struggled to overcome, one that lacks the fullness of life. While this has affected me from a nerd/geek standpoint, it's had an even greater impact on me from a sexuality standpoint.
In my church-going experience, the only times sex or sexuality are brought up are negative. This isn't to say that people don't speak positively of marriage, but that isn't my point here: that's cloistering sex and sexuality, hiding them within marriage and not discussing them openly. No, when they're openly discussed, it's pretty much always in the context of sin or temptation.
What's the go to example of temptation? It isn't something like road rage or demonizing and dehumanizing political enemies. No, the go to example is pornography. What's one of the big reasons Christians say the culture is going downhill? Because it isn't adhering to their sexual norms. Overall, what has been presented to me is that sex and sexuality aren't things worth celebrating as gifts from God, nor are they worth talking about unless they go wrong, which makes them seem to only be wrong.
In short, Christian culture has presented me a view of God I know to be false, but that I've found very hard to shake. It's a narrow vision of God, one whose morality is asceticism, a "pure" white light devoid of the fullness of life. It is a harrowing vision, one that has seeped into the depths of my fears. It makes me fear that Heaven will just be one unending church service that's empty of many of the things I enjoy in life, and even more than that, it's made it hard for me to relate to and love God, especially with my whole being, since it makes many parts of me feel unacceptable to God.
However, there is good news! One of the things I regularly ask God for in prayer is for Him to increase my love for Him, and He has been faithful in answering this prayer. It's taken Him a lot of work to help me process through the many things I've struggled with, with this particular issue feeling like the pinnacle of those struggles.
As I reflect on all of this, I feel like a major turning point was a reconceptualization of morality that I wrote about in my article The Tragedy of Virtue late last year. It's taken time to begin to internalize the significance of shifting from a virtue-/law-based concept of morality to one centered on love, and by no means do I claim to have fully arrived (and the structure of the world makes it hard to arrive there, since I'm forced to regularly interact with the former mode of morality), but I have made progress.
Critically, coming to recognize what it means for morality to be centered in love rather than law has been foundational for coming to understand and accept God's love and desire for me, which enabled me to love and delight in Him in turn.
Let me explain what I mean. Christian and church culture had built up for me a view of God that was rooted in asceticism, where anything "unnecessary" to life was considered, in essence, "bad." This view sees God as fundamentally narcissistic and casts our role as one of Bible study and unending worship—narrowly defined as singing songs of praise, and oh how very many of those songs emphasize the idea of singing about how great God is without ceasing. These two things—Bible study and singing Christian songs—are the best use of time, and any other human endeavor serves only to facilitate them. This view of God is accompanied by a contrast with a pleasure-seeking world. And thus the dichotomy is set up: on the one hand, we have good Christians devoting themselves to singing praises to God and studying the Bible, and on the other hand, we have pleasure-seeking heathens who pursue sensuality, excess, and other forms of hedonism. Like all binaries, it forces things into one group or the other, which creates the sort of strict boundaries that tribalism and law-based morality (with its self-righteousness and self-flagellation) thrive on.
However, understanding morality as fundamentally rooted in love obliterates all of that thinking, which is good, because studying the Bible shows that way of thinking is fundamentally in error. When John writes that "God is love," he means it, and the ramifications of that are profound, so much so that it's hard to describe. The way one might state it is to say that no longer is the question of right and wrong resolved through a set of rules, but rather it is evaluated on the basis of love; though to be clear, that is on the basis of a godly love best described in the scriptures by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13.
Coming to understand this different moral core of God has freed me up to receive a powerful message of love from God, one heard through times of prayer: God truly wants all of me, including my nerdery and sexuality. These aren't things He's going to get rid of, but rather things He refines to His glory and delight. Accepting the idea that God can delight in my sexuality, or random mental rambles, has done so much to increase my ability to love and delight in God because I can worship Him through them by recognizing them as a gift from Him and a part of me that we both can delight in.
Honestly, this has moved beyond the point where prose can express well what I'm thinking and feeling, for it has entered the land of poetry. Thus, I think the only fitting way to end this article is with a poem.
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