Throwing God Out With the Bath Water

It happens all the time in people who think they are on the cutting edge of intellectualism and progressivism: they reject the denomination of their youth or family upbringing by rejecting God altogether. It’s the proverbial throwing of the baby out with the bath water.

It doesn’t happen to everyone raised within a denomination. Some raised in a specific institutional church continue on in it throughout their life.

Others reject it, but find another formal religious creed and practice to live within.

Others, like myself, eschew denominationalism for a life in the Triune God of the Bible.

Regardless, the rejecting of God often goes like this:

People find philosophers, professors, faith leaders and theologians who introduce them to and add support to their personal contentions of how “wrong” a denomination is—how it manipulated and tried to control; that it was all a bunch of shallow super spiritual “group-think” of which one breaks free through educational and idealogical enlightenment. 

Embarrassed by a previous “buy-in” to the denominational teachings, they jettison all of it, including God Himself.

This then frees them up to piece together and formulate a religious construct that assuages the guilt and shame they feel for having been “one of those people” in their youth and teenage years. 

Often, it is their way of retaliation. Thus, their new-found “faith” is nothing but revenge (though they miss this point entirely). 

I understand this. And find it very sad.

That God would be so closely aligned in people’s minds with a denomination or a corporate church and not a Savior is, to be honest, alarming. 

And yet it is so prevalent. Many people, even those who love their denomination, know the denomination and not the Lord. 

I’ve witnessed young people in their twenties with a desire to explore and love the Lord who are bullied, pressured and dissuaded from that journey by those who, because they have jettisoned the faith, think they are doing others a favor by getting them to discard it too. 

But I believe a time will come when the person who has turned away from God, and has influenced a close friend or loved one to do the same, will one day wake up to having that very decision turn against him or her self. 

They will look at their friend or loved one who is struggling and frustrated with life. And it will dawn on them that maybe, just maybe, it is because the only semblance of surety that their friend ever had—a desire for God—was stripped away by peer pressure, and they were the person who had negatively influenced them.

In that moment it will be clear that when they turned away from God, and turned their friend or loved one away from God, they created a monster that has now turned against them both. 

And in that instance of precise conviction, they understand, finally—aghast—that everything they thought they rightfully rebelled against: manipulation, blind faith, controlling personalities, coercion…they actually became in their triumphant zeal to push their own “denomination” of Bible-free, Christ-free, God-free allegiance. 

That is when they realize that more than having been duped by the denomination of their youth, they have duped themselves. 

In the words of American animator and cartoonist Walt Kelly, they recognize without a doubt that they “have met the enemy and he is us.”

And that is the point of return to the beginning of a true faith in God through Christ.

Copyright Barb Harwood