A Love Story with God

Excerpts from an interview published by Religion Dispatches:

Sarah Sentilles is the author of A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit (Harcourt, 2008) and Breaking Up with God (HarperOne, 2011).

Breaking Up with God: A Love Story
Sarah Sentilles
HarperOne (2011)

What inspired you to write it? What sparked your interest (person, event book)?

...I was almost an Episcopal priest, and now I don’t call myself a Christian. How did that happen? In the writing of the book I realized that the story I had been telling about what happened was not the whole story. I had been telling people that I left institutional Christianity because the church was sexist—which is true—but I also left institutional Christianity because my faith in God had changed dramatically. I no longer believed what I had once believed. I also told people that I lost faith in God, but I realized that isn’t exactly right either. I didn’t lose my faith. I left it. Writing this book I had to face deep parts of myself that were hard for me to look at, hard for me to admit.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

That there is more to God than most of us have been taught in church. That faith is an imaginative, constructive, ethical enterprise. That theology matters. That the way we think about God has a real effect on the earth and on other human beings. That we are the ones we have been waiting for. In the book I write, “This is my faith: a fragile hope in what humanity might be able to do when we stop looking for someone else to save us,” and I think that sentence sums up what the book is about.

I also think the book is an invitation, a way to let other people know that they don’t have to stay in faith communities just because they find themselves there by birth or by choice. It’s an invitation to come out as a seeker, an atheist, an agnostic, a dissatisfied believer, a questioner. Sometimes you know something doesn’t feel right, but you force yourself to stay—whether it’s in a relationship that isn’t working, in a job that is making you miserable, or in a faith community that is making you feel small and scared. That is part of why I figured my faith in God as a romantic relationship. Just like you wouldn’t tell your friend to stay with a partner who hits her, you shouldn’t tell someone to stay with a version of God that makes them sick or scared or impedes her ability to thrive and shine and be her biggest self in the world.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?

People assume I’m an atheist, but I’m not. I don’t know what I am, but if I had to choose a label I’d choose agnostic. When I say that people usually ask me if I think God exists, and I usually give them the answer that my teacher, Gordon Kaufman, used to give me: The question of God’s existence isn’t the right question because it won’t get you very far. It’s a question human beings can’t answer. If we take God’s mystery seriously, then we can never know. I think there are better questions that we can be answering: What does a particular vision of God do to those who submit to it and to those who won’t submit to it? What difference is my version of God making? Who is it harming? In one of his books, Kaufman writes, “The central question for theology... is a practical question. How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what causes give ourselves?” He argues that theology that does not contribute significantly to struggles against inhumanity and injustice has lost sight of its point of being.

I can’t know if God exists, but I do know the word God is operating in the world, running around doing all kinds of work, good and bad, and I think, as a theologian, I have a responsibility to think critically about the kinds of gods we make and worship and to try to come up with versions of god that might make the world a more just and life-giving place for everyone.



Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?

I am hoping to do all three. I hope to help people see the wide range of possible ways to think about God. There are so many more versions of God in the Christian theological tradition than most people know about. Why has our own tradition been kept from us? And I’m not just talking about feminist and liberation and black and womanist and queer theology, which I wish everyone would read. I’m also talking about the old white male theologians who wrote amazing stuff—like Freidrich Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich. These guys wrote powerful, revelatory, life-changing stuff about God, and I feel like most theology has been lost and forgotten, or just plain ignored. Communities need to reclaim their histories. I hope to help people expand their visions for God. And I hope that will be a pleasurable experience.

I am sure my book will piss people off. I seem to do that no matter how sweet I try to be. I’m trying to embrace that fact and let go of my “good girl” self who tries to please everyone all the time. My dad always says if they aren’t shooting at you, you probably aren’t doing anything worthwhile. Or, as James Cone says, “Now is not the time to be polite.”

What alternative title would you give the book?

I love the title of my book. It’s my best title yet, I think. I write in the preface about my hesitation to figure my relationship with God as a love relationship. It seemed simultaneously so medieval-mystic, so patriarchal, so oedipal that it made me cringe. Calling it a break-up also meant I had to come out: I had to admit to myself and to the rest of the world that the God I’d been dating was a man. I’m a feminist theologian. I was mortified.

I used “A Love Story” as the subtitle because at its heart the book is about love. I loved God because I wanted God to love me. Underneath my faith was a deep need to be unconditionally loved. How we think about God—the kind of relationship in which we imagine ourselves—influences how we approach our relationships with other people. Once I let go of my version of God that linked love with shame and anger and fear, I became better able to love myself and other people.