The Useful God: When Faith Becomes Identity

Religion becomes politically useful when its language begins to do more work for identity than its ethics do for conduct. Scripture, prayer and divine authority can then serve as markers of belonging, legitimacy and collective memory while the more difficult obligations of faith recede into the background. The process need not be cynical or centrally directed. It can emerge through repetition, selective emphasis and the ordinary pressures of political life, where simple signals travel further than difficult moral demands. Compassion becomes easier to praise than practise. Humility rarely makes a good slogan. Loving one’s enemy remains especially poor campaign material. The result is not the disappearance of religion, but a shift in what its language is being asked to do.

There is a simple diagnostic. A serious religion should occasionally make life difficult for the believer. It should interfere with appetite, vanity, greed, vengeance, certainty and the deeply satisfying conviction that one’s enemies deserve whatever happens to them. Christianity is especially inconvenient in this respect. Love your neighbour. Love your enemy. Forgive. Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Distrust wealth. Attend to the weak. These are not ornamental phrases hanging around the edges of an otherwise useful identity system. They are constraints. Strip away the constraints while preserving the language and Christianity becomes wonderfully easy to perform because almost nothing Christian remains to get in the way.

The inversion is subtle because language is extremely good at concealing what has gone missing. Instead of the person being transformed through relation to God, God is gradually reconstructed around the person. Difficult obligations are displaced, softened or interpreted into irrelevance. Transcendence contracts into identity. Faith becomes confirmation. Moral uncertainty becomes righteous certainty. God develops the extraordinary habit of agreeing with the speaker on every significant political, economic and cultural question. The trick is not that God disappears. The trick is that the word remains after almost everything that could have contradicted its user has been removed.

The useful God is consequently a very small God. He fits neatly inside boundaries already drawn around nation, tribe, property, grievance, status and self. He asks for nothing that seriously threatens them and blesses an impressive amount that preserves them. The deeper failure here is not hypocrisy, which at least requires some awareness of contradiction. It is enclosure mistaken for transcendence. A God who cannot unsettle us, exceed our categories, interrupt our appetites or oblige us to recognise humanity beyond the borders of ourselves is not infinite in any meaningful sense. We have put infinity in a box, made it useful, and then become strangely offended when anyone points out that the voice coming from inside sounds very much like our own.