God Wants Humans
In the song “Hard To Be” off his revelatory album Curse Your Branches, David Bazan re-envisions the Western view of the Fall narrative. He sings:
You've heard the story you know how it goes Once upon a garden we were lovers with no clothes Fresh from the soil we were beautiful and true In control of our emotions to till we ate the poison fruit And now its Hard to be Hard to be Hard to be A decent human being
Curse Your Branches was touted as a sort of “break-up letter to God” from one of the most uneasy voices of Christian rock music. Bazan, who served as the creative lead of the seminal band Pedro the Lion, eventually got fed-up with the Evangelical Christian world and became a sort of artistic torch-bearer for those (of us) who “deconstructed” their faith-background. He would wind up leaving his Christian faith altogether, this album being the monument to that event—chronicling all the complex thoughts and emotions that come with it. In the third verse of “Hard to Be” he articulates his leave-of-faith in terms of a graduation:
Childbirth is painful, toil to grow our food Ignorance made us hungry Information made us no good Every burden misunderstood I swung my tassel to the left side of my cap Knowing after graduation there would be no going back and no congratulations from my faithful family some of whom are already fasting to intercede for me Because it's... Hard to be Hard to be Hard to be A decent human being
I thought of this song when reading about the recent news regarding the “kicked-around” idea of the Department of Homeland Security producing a sort of game-show where immigrants compete to become citizens of the United States. This immediately brings to mind the sort of thing envisioned in The Hunger Games and Squid Game and is of course deeply dehumanizing. I’m reminded also of the infamous early 2000s video series Bum Fights where people filmed homeless people fight for food and money.
Bazan’s song notes the two-fold issue with the conventional interpretation of the Fall narrative: it serves as a (mythological) explanation for why we humans do really really bad things, while also reinforcing a notion of “total depravity” (to use a Reformed theology term) that suggests goodness is out of reach unless we subscribe to particular dogmatic ideas. Bazan, perhaps, suggests that being a decent human being really isn’t that hard—we’ve just made it so.
Maybe decency isn’t all that out of reach?
In the Episcopal Church we speak a lot about human dignity. We have a line in our Baptismal Covenant where we vow to “respect the dignity of every human person.” This line sometimes gets treated like it’s the only line of the Baptismal Covenant—which only further demonstrates how seriously we take this vow (even if we’d do well to remember that the others are just as important). When Bishop Mariann Budde spoke at that now famous service during the 2025 inauguration proceedings, she was speaking from this vow in the convenant (and even though Trump referred to her words as “nasty,” these are words spoken on Barron’s behalf when he was baptized at Bethesda-by-the-Sea in 2006—I know, because I was there, but this is a story for another time…). Human dignity, for us, is seen as deeply entwined in our Baptismal theology.
Disrespecting human dignity is at the heart of the MAGA movement—and its attendant ideologies. Which is part of all totalitarian political philosophies. Just like the Nazis before it, MAGA holds to a notion that human dignity exists on a continuum—and that there are some humans who do not deserve dignity or they need to find ways of earning it, which is rooted in the pagan philosophies of the Roman Empire (still held up by the West as the pinnacle of civilization for some reason), where dignity could be taken and applied at will through economic practices like slavery.
Human dignity is of course connected to humanization. Stripping away one’s humanity diminishes human dignity. But it strikes me that this is a two-way street: not only does “dehumanization” happen when we “diminish” dignity, but it also happens when we “elevate” humans. In other words, making desperate people compete for basic needs and treating a public figure as a kind of God-anointed ruler who is chosen to stand over the rest of us are both examples of dehumanizing actions. This is because both refuse to see a human being as a human being.
I’ve mentioned this recently, but I garner a lot of meaning from the TV show The Dog Whisperer. What I appreciate about Cesar in that show is how he reminds us that dogs are happiest when they are allowed to be dogs. “Bad” dog behavior results from humans trying to make dogs behave like humans. This creates anxiety on the part of the dog because they do not know how to act like a human.
Similarly, several years back I led a sort of mission trip with parish youth to a Heifer International farm outside of Boston. While on that trip they talked to us about chickens and how, apparently, some scientists decided to hook a chicken up to a brain scanner to see what makes them happy. According to the farmer, the hippocampus of the chicken’s brain lit up when it was able to peck and scratch. That’s what made the chicken happy—chickens live to peck and scratch. Take them away from that and they get depressed.
I often think of these two stories when I prepare sermons dealing with the Fall narrative in Genesis. Eve and Adam’s sin is not actually in the eating of the fruit, but in the choosing of the serpent’s words over God’s. They heard in those words a chance to become something that they were not—to become “like God”—thus attempting to dehumanize themselves.
The rabbinical (and Orthodox Christian, I believe) take on the story of Eve and Adam is that God did actually intend for them to eat the fruit of the tree-of-the-knowledge-of good-and-evil (always a mouthful to say that), but only after God felt that they were ready. And so the serpent, in effect, presents them with a chance to bypass the process of growth that God had in store for us humans—which Adam and Eve choose; convenience over patience, an eternal struggle for us.
So the original sin of humanity is us seeking to be something that we’re not—which fosters in us anxiety and fear. We’re not God. But we try so often to be Him—or even “better” than Him.
What stands Christianity apart from all other religions is that we claim that our central religious figure is God. The doctrine of the Incarnation proclaims that God was born to us as a human being named Jesus. The Incarnation was at the heart of the earliest controversies affecting the Christian religion. Gnostics and Docetists and Arians all denied, to some degree, that Jesus was God. This is partly due to a belief that they could not imagine anything as unbefitting of God as to be human. For them, humanity was a thing to be escaped, a sort of curse or even (in the case of the gnostics) an illusion pulled on us by a scheming “demi-urge” (who just so happened to be a Jewish form of God… lest we ever forget the deeply antisemitic roots of gnostic Christianity). The idea that God would be born as a human is a scandalous idea—but only scandalous if we assume that humanity is a repulsive thing.
When I was in my latter days as a Baptist, my church was embroiled in a controversy over “Calvinism” (that would wind up shaking the entire denomination to its core in a few years). This “Calvinism” was an extreme form of Reformed Christian theology that was summarized with the acronym TULIP:
Total Depravity Unconditional Election Limited Atonement Irresistible Grace Perseverance of the Saints
To put it very basic terms: this theology holds that humans are wholly wicked and undeserving of salvation, completely destined for hellfire and damnation; however, God chooses some humans to be saved from this destiny; as a result, Jesus died on the cross only for those who God knew from the beginning of time would be saved; those who God chooses are unable to resist God’s salvation (also implying that those God chose for damnation have no say in the matter either); and that salvation is irrevocable, persevering even to the end of days.
I find the whole thing deeply heretical, to be honest. The idea that God would create people for eternal damnation is a truly abhorrent theology that also believes that there are some things beyond God’s ability to control (thus undercutting the foundational theology of God’s sovereignty that such theologians go on about) and effectively says that Jesus’ work on the cross is insufficient.
The whole shit-show of this theology falls out of the key idea of “total depravity.” Now, I want to be clear here: I hold that humans are incapable of saving ourselves and that salvation comes only from Christ Jesus alone. But I’m not convinced that this is due to some concept of us humans being deeply depraved. I think it’s more that we’re mis-guided.
Depravity suggests a sort of filthiness to being human. It also suggests that God deigned Himself to become human so that we can become something more. In fact, this idea is reflected in the lyrics of a song by The OC Supertones, a (I kid you not) Calvinist ska band from the mid-90s to mid-2000s:
God look at me, I'm just a man But you tell me I'm not just a man You're so hard to understand After all I'm just a man (from “Who Can Be Against Me” off their debut album Adventures of the OC Supertones)
To me, this sounds like an admission that God expects us to be more than human.
Much evangelicalism is rooted in Reformed Christian theology. And evangelicalism has also managed to become the ecclesiology of MAGA (though, to be fair, not exclusively—the folks at Christianity Today and figures like Dr. Russell Moore are doing their level best to call out the hypocrisy and idolatry at root in the MAGA movement). Having come from that world myself, I’d argue that it is an inherently dehumanizing ecclesiology because it sees being human in heretical terms. Like the gnostics and Docetists of yore, such Reformed theology sees humanity as a thing to be escaped. I mean, just consider “Rapture” theology (Millennial Dispensationalism, if you’re a nerd), which longs for the day that Jesus calls Christians out of the earth and their earthly bodies so that He can destroy the world while they all look on from an elevated spiritual plane. And since this world and our bodies are meant to done away with, we see the world in disposable terms—including our fellow humans (who are likely not destined for the same eternal reward as the predestined elect and thus are less deserving of dignity).
This all flies in the face of the long arc of traditional Christian theology. Not only do we have verses like John 3:16 that declare God’s love for humanity being the catalyst for His incarnation, but we have hymns like “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” that declare:
Christ, by highest heaven adored; Christ, the everlasting Lord; late in time behold him come, offspring of a virgin’s womb. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail th’ incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel. Hark! the herald angels sing, “Glory to the new born King!
“Pleased as Man with Man to dwell.” God was pleased with humanity and so He chose to dwell among us. Charles Wesley, who wrote the above, also penned the words of hymn that brought me to tears many times this past Advent season:
Lo! he comes with clouds descending, Once for favored sinners slain! Thousand, thousand saints attending, Swell the triumph of his train. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! God appears on Earth to reign.
“Favored sinners.” Wow.
What God wants for us is to be human. Sin leads us to follow the path of temptation to be something other. And once we see ourselves as something other than human, we dehumanize.
The Incarnation of God in Jesus is, in part, to show us how to be human—not to exceed our humanity.
One of the definitive works on the subject is On the Incarnation by Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. Perhaps the most well-known quote from that work is:
“Christ was made man that we might be made God.”
The implication here is that humanity and God are brought together—not that humanity be expected to escape itself in exchange for something else. The Bible testifies that God loves everything He has made. This includes us humans. He doesn’t love us in spite of us. He loves us as us.
If we want to stem the tide of dehumanizing practices we first have to accept being human—nothing more and nothing less. For this is what God made us to be.
If God didn’t love humanity He wouldn’t have made humanity. Rather than expecting us to escape our humanity, He wants us to embrace it—in the same way He Himself embraced humanity in the Incarnation (see Philippians 2:5-11 ). We’ve only gone wrong by denying our humanity.
Maybe it’s not actually that hard to be a decent human being?
Maybe all we need is to just simply be human?
The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.