An unsettling tendency among religious people, especially those with a strong belief in an interventionist God, is to throw God under the bus when dealing with decisions they or others have made that seem unwise or even immoral. The narrative goes something like this: “I didn’t personally want to do x. It wasn’t my idea. But God told me to do it, so I had to obey.” There are clear payoffs for the person who adopts this story: you don’t have to take responsibility for decisions you’ve made that might appear morally dubious, just so long as you can maintain that they were divinely mandated; and as a bonus, you get to feel extra righteous because you were so obedient, even in a situation where you ostensibly didn’t want to be.
This justification comes up regularly when we’re grappling with things people did in scripture or in history that seem questionable at best. In Mormonism, Joseph Smith is a prominent example. He didn’t actually want to secretly marry a bunch of other women, the story goes. It didn’t have anything at all to do with his personal desires. An angel with a flaming sword appeared and forced him to do it. Rather than raise questions about his choices with polygamy, then, we should honor his obedience, and even feel sympathy for him, for having to make such a terrible decision. In a nutshell, he was God’s victim. Similar stories get told about church leaders who supposedly never would have denied black people the priesthood or temple access if it had just been up to them personally. But they had to do it, because that was God’s will. In our day, I hear a similar thing about the Nov 2015 Policy. It’s not that the leaders want to harm gay people and their families. But God is making them. If anything, we should feel sympathy for the difficult situation they’re in.
To be fair, this narrative is not without scriptural precedent. Perhaps the oldest and most heavily-discussed story in this genre is that of Abraham and Isaac. A common interpretation of the tale is that Abraham was essentially victimized by a God who demanded absolute obedience. As a result, he can’t be held accountable for his willingness to kill his own child. In hearing the lesson taught multiple times over the years in Sunday School, I rarely if ever heard expressions of concern that he came so close to doing something so abhorrent. Rather, we were asked to sympathize with him, to think about how hard it would be do be asked to do something so awful. And he was held up as a model of faithfulness, with the implicit suggestion that all of us should likewise be open to killing people if that’s what God requires of us. Which is of course exactly what happens in the story of Nephi and Laban. Nephi is completely exonerated for his murder of Laban, because God made him do it.
I think it’s worth asking, though, whether making God into the villain in all of these stories really the best move. I have been rather amazed throughout my life to observe just how often when people are posed with the choice of believing in human fallibility in interpreting God’s will, or believing that God is an immoral and capricious tyrant who orders people to do horrific things, they opt for the latter.
And in addition to this raising very troubling questions about God’s character, and why exactly we would worship a being who does this sort of thing, there are costs to humans, too, when this is the default narrative. Most fundamentally, I think, it robs you of your agency, and of the power that comes with claiming your choices as your own. All the examples I’ve mentioned so far are pretty dramatic, but I think this story shows up in mundane situations as well. “I didn’t want to do this thing that really hurt you, but I felt inspired to do it.” Or the classic BYU spin-off: “I’m only making this marriage proposal because God directed me to do so. It’s not me that’s asking you. It’s God’s will.” I’ve also been blown away by narratives of parents who reject their LGBTQ children and then paint themselves as the victims of a God who simply gave them no choice in the matter. At this point in my life, when someone leads with a comment like, “It’s not that I want to do this, but I just feel deeply impressed to do it,” especially in a situation where they’re very aware that their choice is going to hurt someone, I feel wary.
Of course, all of us are faced at times with difficult decisions that have no good answer and no choice that won’t involve someone getting hurt, and I’m open to the possibility that God might sometimes be involved in guiding people through such things. I’m not saying that God might not ask hard things of us sometimes. Nonetheless, I think a good baseline is that if you feel like God is asking you to do something that seems kind of immoral to you, or involves direct harm to others, it’s really worth giving that a whole lot of thought before moving forward. Like, a lot of thought. If you find yourself in a situation like the Lafferty brothers and you’re having a revelation that God wants you to kill people, that might actually be a time to lighten up on the prayer and seek out some professional help. I’m guessing most people would be on board with that recommendation. But even in less dramatic situations, it seems like some sober self-reflection, and as much honesty as you can muster about your own desires and what role they might be playing, are worth putting into conversation with whatever divine message you believe you are hearing.
I don’t mean to be smugly talking about this tendency from a distance, by the way, because I’ve totally done it. Justified obnoxious behavior by telling myself that I was just being obedient? Yep, been there. Gotten my desires conflated with personal revelation? Oh, yeah. Not taken responsibility for my choices? An interesting example of this last one was my decision to stay in the LDS church for a really long time, despite all my issues with it. Just to clarify, I’m not saying it was immoral to do that, or even necessarily the wrong choice for me. But for years, I refused to really own it as my decision. I spun a tale to myself as well as others that it wasn’t that I really wanted to be LDS, given the extent to which the church was an enormously frustrating place for me to be, but that it was what God wanted. And yes, I was basing this belief on spiritual experiences—but without noticing it I’d managed to make a leap from “I’ve had spiritual experiences in this church” to “God is requiring me to stay in this church.” And even setting aside the question of to what extent genuine inspiration was involved—I don’t have a clear answer there—I am struck by how much I cast myself as God’s victim in the whole thing. Like, “poor poor me, I don’t really want to be a Mormon, but God is making me do it so I guess I will.” Even if staying LDS for all those years was the right decision (which it may well have been), I don’t think it was healthy for me to be casting myself in that passive of a role. Because I was still making a choice.
Another example from my own life has to do with my choice of study. I really did feel very good, and just fundamentally right, and possibly even inspired, about my decision to study theology in grad school. But when it all imploded and I couldn’t land an academic job afterward, I got very bitter. I adopted a narrative in which God had told me to do it, and I blamed God for leading me along a path in which things didn’t work out. Yes, I can see the numerous holes in that narrative, but for a while I was just really mad and didn’t want to think about the holes. But finally I had to get back in touch with something really basic about the situation: I wanted to study theology, and I decided to do so. It wasn’t God’s choice. God didn’t fill out a bunch of applications to grad programs on my behalf. I was mad enough that it was hard to stop throwing God under the bus and accept more responsibility for where I’d ended up, but in the long run, it helped a lot to reframe things, both in my relationship with God, and just in my sense of being empowered in my own life.
So I have a lot of reservation about narratives in which humans portray themselves as God’s victims. And I’m not letting Nephi off the hook. The story is a deeply troubling one. I don’t know what to make of his insistence that his actions were directly commanded by God. But let’s say that if nothing else, he genuinely believed that God was telling him to do it, and he was only carrying out God’s wishes. Does that mean he’s not responsible for what he did? I would say, absolutely not. If we believe in agency in any meaningful way, we can’t make an exception for people who have a deep belief that they are just doing what God wants. Even in cases where inspiration is legitimately involved, we are still the ones making choices. It seems important to hold on to that.