One of the most important ways my writing and theological lives have collided in recent years is in conversations about how the church could show up for people who have left the church, conversations on deconstruction and reconstruction in the age of Donald Trump and the Southern Baptist Convention. In this breakfast talk with Lizzie McManus-Dail (or as she’s known on the Interwebs, “Father Lizzie”), we addressed the state of the church, her work reaching out to the broken-hearted (those she calls the “beautiful babes of God”) at her church and online, and her remarkable first book God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us. I curated our long conversation here for Baptist News Global (Look for the extended interview on my Substack “Good Trouble”). Thanks to Lizzie, her husband Jonathan McManus-Dail, and the waitstaff at Phoebe’s Diner in North Austin.
Greg Garrett: Many of the folks I’m talking with now are trying to find a faithful way forward. One of the reasons these conversations are so necessary, the meditations in your book are so necessary, books like Better Ways to Read the Bible are so necessary, is that the experience I had growing up was, “This is what God is,” when actually it’s just what this version of God’s people think God is and how they manifest that God. Could you talk a little bit about what you were hoping to do in terms of deconstruction and reconstruction and how saying that everybody is a beloved child of God might be a way into understanding all that?
Lizzie McManus-Dail
Lizzie McManus-Dail: The deepest thing I wanted people to know is that God is just absolutely profligately enchanted with us. It’s very essential to me in the book, but also in my own lived theology, that God doesn’t need us. God is not bored. God is not some cruel vindictive playing toy soldiers bullying boy up in the sky. God created us out of joy and out of an almost whimsical delight.
And that is such a profound difference, because when we start with thinking God needs us and we have to fear God at all times, we never will truly know or love God. I’ve been reading Communion by bell hooks, and she has this great line where she’s talking about her father: “I feared my father and because I feared him, I never truly knew him, and I never truly was able to receive his love or know his love or even love him fully.” And that is how God has been presented in so many spaces.
My deepest desire is for people to be able to fall in love with God as God in the ways we human creatures can, but to see how much God is in love with us. And also, because I started writing this book when my oldest daughter was about a year old and finished it when she was about 18 months old, I was very thick in my own fresh entrance into motherhood. It was heartbreaking. It was gorgeous.
But I was like, “My God, I love this child more than I ever thought my body or soul could contain. And this is how God feels infinitely more about each and every one of us? How did we lose the plot?”
GG: In your meditation on Matthew 20, you use the phrase that God is promiscuous with generosity. And first it’s such a remarkable phrase, but I think sometimes what you do in this book is you shock us with a new way of understanding a theological concept and to say God is love.
You reference a lot of womanist and Black theologians in God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us. There’s this very powerful sense that as you’re thinking about who belongs to God, who does God love, you too are being promiscuous with generosity because that’s how you understand what God is doing. What can we learn by paying attention to these traditions, to queer theology, to Black theology and the Black Church, to feminist and womanist theologians?
LMD: Oh my gosh. I think two critical things. One, I have thought a lot about in Matthew when Jesus says, and there’s the separating of the sheep from the goats and the people say, “But Lord, when did we see you naked and clothe you? When did we see you hungry and feed you?” And Jesus says, “Whatever you did to the least of these you did to me.” I think this implies that wherever people are most marginalized, God is particularly present. And that is a teaching of liberation theology I’m deeply persuaded by. I think it is essential for us to understand that the body of Christ — I’m pulling now from 1 Corinthians 12 — is St. Paul says the weakest parts are the parts we give the most honor. And I think we ought to honor the parts of the body of Christ incarnate in this world by listening to those whom empire power deems unworthy or unnecessary or dangerous because we will see Christ truly present there. That’s the theological framework.
But I will say personally, womanist theology gave me Jesus in a way I had not known. And I try to do this with humility because I say in the book, I am a guest in womanist theology spaces. But I even in my young life had experienced a lot of suffering and a lot of inexplicable loss that whiteness and patriarchy do not teach us how to deal with.
This is a lot of the research I’m doing now for my next book, but I am really sitting with how whiteness desires us to be spiritually immature and therefore not ask complex questions so we may receive a simple God and obey a simple God, which is not actually our triune, profligate, extravagant, whimsical God who created the Leviathan for the sport of it, and who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death and who is transfigured on the top of the mountain.
“Whiteness desires us to be spiritually immature and therefore not ask complex questions so we may receive a simple God.”
That is not our God. But a simple God wants us to see suffering as something that teaches us a lesson rather than as a deep and complicated and almost inexplicable walk we take with God. How God is present to Hagar in the wilderness. What Dolores Williams and Wil Gafney in particular dwell on is that God sends her back and she goes. She has the faith to understand that. That is something that takes a great depth of spiritual maturity and a great depth of willingness to continue to see God in a world that feels godless.
I was learning that well over a decade ago when I first started to encounter womanist theology. But my God, now more than ever, I think it’s essential because so many of us, whether we woke up a decade ago, whether we woke up a long time ago, or whether there are folks just now coming into the fold saying, “Actually, this president is not what I think a president should be. This is not what I think Christianity should look like. These people say they read the Bible literally, but they’re literally kicking out the foreigner.”
Not only do we need to be listening to theologies that are close to the heart of Jesus, we also have to be listening to people who have practiced enduring an unjust world while still seeking justice that will not be fully realized in our lifetime because that also is a mark of spiritual maturity.
And that is deeply difficult work, but learning to step into that spiritual discipline of cultivating and seeking joy is the practice of resurrection.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.