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Earlier today a post came across Bluesky that stopped me short. Canadian author Ryan North put it this way:

All pleasures are guilty pleasures if you have high enough anxiety

Now, as far as I know, North is just trying (with some reasonable success) to be funny. But as a former evangelical this single line sums up the angst of modern neo-Calvinism as well as anything I’ve ever seen.

The core conflict of the neo-Reformed theology I spent most of my adult life with was that for all the assertions that God controls and predestines everything, serious believers should have an ongoing concern, verging on fear, that they are not doing enough. Not living piously enough. Not evangelizing enough. Not spending enough time in prayer and Scripture. Not having theological arguments honed well enough. In one breath the pastor would say “you can’t do anything about whether you’re one of the elect or not, it’s all God’s decision if you are saved” and in the next would say “if you’re not doing X or Y or Z you should probably be worried about whether or not you’re actually one of God’s elect”.

Neo-Reformed guiding light John Piper is a sterling example of this sort of divinely-inspired angst. Listen to any sermon of his, read any book, watch any interview, and you will get the sense of a man who is driven with a wretched, endless anxiety about his relationship to God. He’s always on edge, always afraid that he (and by extension, you, his listener) might be knowingly or unknowingly Wasting Your Life or Wasting Your Cancer or wasting your Retirement or missing What Jesus Demands or not Delighting In God or not Desiring God enough. Joy comes with the companion fear that the joy might be misplaced or appreciated a little too much. There is very little chill or rest or peace or pleasure that comes across there.

And let’s face it, friends: if you take the evangelical teaching on eternal conscious torment seriously, it’s hard to see how you could not live that anxiously all the time. Is there even a minute chance that you, or someone you love, is going to experience ultimate torture for all eternity? How could that not make you anxious? How could you ever enjoy life?

My therapist likes to say that there are two basic types of religion: one that has a goal to control, and one who has a goal of life enhancement. It’s a sign of how steeped I was in anxious evangelicalism that I had a visceral reaction to “life enhancement” as a religious goal. Isn’t that self-centered? Wouldn’t that make God mad? Shouldn’t we be God-centered instead?

It took several years of detox under other Christian teachers to find that I could actually be a Christian with a level of peace and chill that seems more in line with what Jesus seemed to be hoping for his followers. It doesn’t include the fear that God is going to eternally torture anyone. It does allow me to think about sin, healing, forgiveness, and godliness in terms of how our behavior encourages or hampers human flourishing. Suddenly the Gospel feels like real “good news” - not in the “hey if you’re desperately lucky and get stuff right you might avoid eternal damnation but you’re not gonna be sure about that until you die” sense but in the “wow that makes me smile and breathe easier” sense.

Friends, if you find yourself in a church that stokes your anxiety about whether or not God loves and will accept you: it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus came that we might have abundant life (which sounds an awful lot like “life enhancement”, now that I think about it), and gave us peace. Let’s not let anxious teaching rob that from us.

Image credit: Anxiety by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images