First of all, let me say that I am not an evangelical heretic. I don’t believe the path I’m on is the one for everyone. That’s actually part of the happiness and peace I’ve found. I no longer feel responsible for the faith journeys of other people. Those are solo passages.

For the record, evangelical in a broad sense of the word means “to be zealous in advocating for something.” More specifically, evangelicalism is associated with Protestant Christianity and refers to proclaiming the gospel or good news, i.e., being an Evangelist.

I believe I have found good news for myself. Good news that helps me sleep at night, relieves stress, and helps me to be a more flexible and happy person. I’m fine with sharing my story with people if they are interested. However, I don’t feel like I need to go into the world and preach “the gospel.” My story is uniquely mine and no one else needs to be like me.

Basically, I love good news, and I love to give grace to people and make them feel welcome and safe. I don’t feel like I need to “go into the world” with a specific intent to preach “the gospel” unless that means to do exactly what I’m doing now.

I am a competitive and compassionate person who has always wanted to find the best way to do things so I could share that best way with others. I believed that there was a “best way” to do almost everything from folding clothes to parenting, from organizing the pantry to having right beliefs. I was sure that underneath all of the customs and traditions of Christianity one could find undeniable truth: the core of the gospel which would be for everyone, everywhere, throughout all of time.

Even before I began to seriously search for that gospel core, I questioned the role of the Bible in church. It made sense to me to trust in an all-powerful God and to appreciate the grace taught to me through the stories of Jesus, but I wondered how we could trust the Bible as the word of God. I sought resources to discover how it was determined which scriptures should be included. The canonization of the Bible was the process of recognizing which writings should be included and which should be excluded. That process was completed over hundreds of years by leaders in the Catholic church, who at that time were all men. So, if one believes that the scriptures themselves are inspired by God, it seems as if one also must believe that the canonization process was inspired by God. Perhaps that’s not a stretch to some, but it really caused deep concerns for me.

In my faith tradition, we are taught that the Bible is the only source for life and truth. It is the only way to figure out how to live a good, moral life. It offers the only means for following God’s path in this life in order to secure an infinite future life in heaven.

To be fair, there are many, many truths, stories, and insights in the Bible that are timeless, informative, and life changing. There is much wisdom to be gained from reading the Bible. However, another step down the ladder of deconstruction and the first hint of heresy in my life occurred when trying to reconcile the books of the Bible that recount God’s commands to destroy cities and people groups in their entirety, often including women, children, and animals.

I could not reconcile the God of reconciliation with this God of retribution. Before I even started studying theology with a progressive professor, I began to assert that the writers of these passages were telling their stories the way they experienced them, including their impressions of God’s role as warrior king. It was their truth about their encounters with the divine, and I don’t doubt that they experienced the presence of God. Their experiences were true. Their stories give credence to a power beyond themselves. It just isn’t so obvious that these stories were handed down by God himself (or herself, or themselves) to all people groups as prescriptive for all times.

Perhaps they are “inspired” by God in the way that watching Coco Gauff play tennis might inspire me to get active and attempt to revive my long retired tennis game. Maybe they are “inspired” like I am inspired by my mother to be a woman of kindness, love, and peace. It is conceivable that these scriptures speak truths about God, but there is no certainty that God’s identity is encapsulated in the descriptive encounters traditionally attributed to Moses, Joshua, and Samuel.

Many apologists who support the position that God actually commanded violence and destruction reference verses 8 and 9 of Isaiah 55 which state in the New International Version translation, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” They posit that it is due to our limited understanding as humans that we cannot comprehend why God would command his people to overtake other nations. Furthermore, because it’s in the Bible, and the Bible is the word of God, the word he wants us to know and believe about him, we just need to accept it as truth.

I believe it is important to be humble, particularly when comparing oneself as a human creature to a divine being who is believed to have created the universe. I’m certain there are many things that God thinks that I wouldn’t even dream of. I’m positive that the chasm between the heavenly and earthly realms is exponentially infinite! (Is that even possible?) What I’m not confident of is that, when I don’t understand something that seems to go against the very nature of the grace of God I’ve been taught, the verses in Isaiah should persuade me to trust that barbarity and ruination commanded by God is ever acceptable.

The surrounding text in Isaiah 55 speaks to God’s generosity and call to people to experience God’s plentiful provision. It is an appeal to enjoy the goodness of God readily available to anyone. “Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” (v. 1) That certainly sounds good to me right now in our time of economic uncertainty and fear. It is an entreaty to the chosen people to be a light on a hill to the surrounding nations inviting them to share in the bounty. “Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations you do not know will come running to you…for he has endowed you with splendor.” (v. 5) It is a plea to those who are trying to meet their needs outside of the free and available supply given away with no strings attached to turn around and quit trying futilely to recreate prosperity that already is accessible and without cost. “Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.” (v.7)

Then come the lofty words of verses 8-9 whose apex is that “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” The chapter continues to describe how rain and snow nourish the earth and enable it to yield a harvest of food and seed for the future, how God’s word will be accomplished and achieve its purposes, and how joy and peace will be so plentiful that the mountains will sing and the trees will clap their hands.

Nothing in this excerpt of Isaiah indicates to me that God’s higher ways, boundlessly separate from my human capacity, should be understood to account for commands to perpetrate atrocities being within God’s grasp. Rather, I see that God’s higher ways hint at provision beyond sufficiency, enough for everyone, sharing without making a profit, using one’s good fortune to serve all – even other nations, being merciful, forgiving and pardoning.

The first time I identified as a heretic was when I told my twins that I didn’t believe God actually commanded the chosen people to kill those who occupied lands they understood were promised to them. With a small chuckle, I shared that identification with them when they were middle school students while we were working in the kitchen. That was over ten years ago.

Descending rung by rung through deconstruction increased in speed the deeper I went in my pursuit of understanding and truth. I studied incessantly, reading books and articles about science and faith, death and hell, world religions and atheism. I attended theology and history classes at a local, progressive church for several months. The revelations were mind-blowing. There were real laymen and scholars who saw scripture through an entirely different yet still Christian and God-believing lens. The literal interpretation of scripture, the only one I’d ever been taught and the only one that was revered as correct in my limited understanding, was not the only way to read the Bible.

One of the stories that really knocked my socks off was studying the saga of Jacob and his 12 sons. The instructor explained that there was no historical basis for there being a man who was the father of 12 sons who became the 12 tribes of Israel, but there was historical basis and precedent for there being 12 tribes who came together over time and realized that each of them served the one true God, although they knew him by different names. In my 50 years of life at that point, I had never even considered the possibility that they weren’t actually 12 sons and brothers. I’m sure that some reading this will think I was being taught by liberal teachers who shouldn’t be trusted, and they will question whether this more allegorical interpretation of scripture is valid, or they might wonder if I’ve been led astray.

I can’t answer any of those questions with certainty. All I can say is that, not long after participating in these eye-opening, confounding, fascinating, challenging sessions, I had an epiphany.

As I was pinning up a quote by Francis Collins on the bulletin board above my desk in the kitchen, my inner consciousness stated unequivocally, “You cannot believe what you don’t believe.” I intrinsically realized that there were things that I had been taught as part of my faith, and honestly as part of my education in general, that I did not believe. I came to understand that I probably hadn’t believed them for quite some time, but instead of listening to my own questions, I felt as if I just needed to try harder to believe.

At that moment, I no longer felt bad. I just knew that I was where I was and that was that. I trusted that a good God would still love and accept me even if I didn’t accept the Bible as literal, historical, inerrant truth and wasn’t confident in the certainty with which the various institutions of the church held their (often differing) tenets of faith.

A final story to share regarding one of the last and particularly significant steps in the breakdown of my faith has to do with my twins’ journeys through gender identity and transitioning. I struggled to understand where they were coming from, to empathize with their reality, to get beyond my own loss and pain. I studied and asked questions. I read and listened to friends who were experts in psychology, theology, ministry, and parenting. I sought God through anxious and heartfelt prayers. In the midst of my self-reflection, I experienced another epiphany.

My internal voice said, “God doesn’t care if your twins are boys or girls. He just wants them to know and feel that they are loved.” I have no specific science or Bible verse to back me up, and I’m not looking to prove my statement to anyone. However, I know that the peace that accompanied this insight was unquestionable. My body and mind alike could relax for a moment.

Because it was personally validating for me to show up at a Meetup group and share my story and have people affirm my experience, I realized I wanted that same feeling for my kids. The members of the group didn’t feel sorry for me or give me advice. They didn’t tell me I was a bad parent for not affirming my kids immediately when they came out to us. They didn’t tell me that my kids were going to hell because God hates LGBTQ+ people. They listened, accepted my story as real and credible, and then treated me like everyone else…someone who belongs. I desired that same validation for my kids. That kind of validation was elusive to me through all of my years in church. Now that I had felt it, I longed to share that sense of belonging with my amazingly wonderful and very unique kids.

The etymology of heretic goes back to the Greek and means “able to choose.” To me, being able to choose is integral to following Jesus. That freedom doesn’t just extend to making the choice to “ask Jesus into one’s heart or not”, it extends to choosing how to understand the scriptures, how to live one’s life, how to honor a belief in a divine being who is credited with creation, to choosing which faith practices are healthy in general and for you individually, discovering what other religions can teach us about the desire and ability to seek and find God, and whether Jesus had to be a real human and really divine in order for his story to be truth.

My path to becoming a happy heretic was twisty and took many years. I so wanted to find “the” right way to live out my faith. I wanted to be a model of the best. I wanted to help others and share my faith. I wanted to find the core of the gospel that would be transformative so I could totally believe it truly was good news. I identified as a person of faith, a wife and a mother. I wanted people to believe I was good. My husband’s and kids’ lives felt like an extension of me, and if they were “good”, people would know that I was good, too. However, as I began to realize my own power to become real and happy, the deconstruction process really took hold. It was a series of letting things go, being humbled, and finding my identity within me.

I am “a happy heretic.” I am just one of many. I am content, even when things are tough. I have the power to choose my life, my faith (not my certainty), and how I live out what I believe is true. I don’t need to tell you what that is. You should be able to determine the tenor of my actions, that is, my “clearly perceptible direction and continuing, undeviating course”, by being around me and observing who and what I stand for.