Finding a Faith That Fits You

A former Mormon on church-shopping, the God you can return for in-store credit, and the one pearl that was never on sale.

The most reasonable-sounding, diplomatic statement in modern religious culture. It is also the precise opposite of what Jesus said.

Imagine the pitch.

“Tired of religions that just don’t get you? Sick of rigid rules, judgmental communities, and a God with strong opinions about how you spend your Friday night? Introducing Faith™ — the first belief system engineered around the most important person, the ultimate God of the universe: YOU. Take our thirty-second quiz. Tell us your values, your vibe, your hard no’s. Our algorithm matches you with a spirituality that fits your sensibilities and your lifestyle. Flexible plans. No long-term commitment. Cancel anytime. The first eternity is free.”

If that made you wince — good. Keep wincing. You’re going to need it.

Because a softer, kinder, holier-sounding version of that exact ad is the single most common thing I hear from sincere, intelligent, genuinely Christ-loving people. It came up recently. A dear and beloved friend, in the middle of a good and decent argument about how Christians shouldn’t be criticizing each other, but instead uniting against a common enemy, put it like this (I’m paraphrasing):

We should each find the religion that fits us. Who has the truth? We’ll all find out later.

And honestly? I get it. I want to be careful here, because there is something real and good buried under that sentence, and if I steamroll it, I’ll have missed the point.¹

What’s good is the instinct against contempt. My friend was reacting, rightly, against the spectacle of believers knifing each other over differences while the house burns down around them. Don’t tear each other down. That instinct is valuable and correct. Mormons - the most attacked religious group in the Western world - know this all too well and are hypersensitive to it. This impulse is, in fact, deeply Christian. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” So I want to honor the heart of it before I take a scalpel to its logic.

But the logic has to come out. Because the cure my friend reached for- find what fits you- is not a peace treaty; it’s poison. And it’s poison precisely because it sounds so humble, so generous, so live-and-let-live. Let me show you what it’s actually smuggling in right under your nose.

“Fits You” Is Fitting-Room Language

Listen to the verb. Fits.

That is not a religious word. It’s a retail word. It belongs in a fitting room, next to the mirror, the little bench, the sign that says "maximum 6 items,” and the warning about the penalties for shoplifting. You try things on. You check the fit. If it pinches you put it back on the rack and reach for a different size. The customer is always right.

It seems to me that we are the first civilization in our history who shop for Gods the way we shop for jeans. And we don’t even notice we’re doing it because the market isn’t a place we go anymore. It’s the air we breathe.

Everything is a product now. Your education is a product. Your relationships are a product (swipe, match, return). Your attention is a product being sold to someone else while you sleep. So, of course, faith became a product too. Of course, we started asking the living God the one question we ask of everything else in our lives: Does it suit me?

Here is the trap, and it’s airtight. If the customer is always right, then the customer isn’t God; it’s us, and God is just inventory. The moment you make “fit” the test, you have quietly crowned yourself the thing that does not move, the fixed point, the judge before whom all the religions of the earth must audition. They line up. They do a shark-tank pitch. You select. You have not found a faith. You have held a casting call, and the role was a god who agrees with me.

How American.²

I mean that precisely, not as an insult. The free-market church, the one you choose for how it suits you and how it makes you feel, is one of the most distinctly Western, consumer-centric, distinctly modern inventions in the whole history of Christianity. The early Christians would not have understood the question. You did not “find a church that fit you” in second-century Antioch. The Church was there. It had been handed something. And the only question on the table was whether you would conform to it. The direction of the verb ran the other way.

Ego is the Western mind’s true God. And “finding a faith that fits you” is its liturgy.

The Sleight of Hand in “We’ll All Find Out Later”

Now to the second half of my friend’s sentence, which is even sneakier than the first.

Everybody thinks they have the truth, so who really knows? We’ll find out later.

This feels like humility. It wears humility’s clothes. But watch the hands, because two completely different claims are being palmed as one:

1. People disagree about religious truth. Obviously. Wildly. This is just true.

2. Therefore, (the subtle implication is that) the truth can’t be known with certainty — or isn’t really there at all. (It seems to me to be back-door agnosticism.)

Claim one is a fact about us. Claim two is a conclusion about reality. And claim two does not follow from claim one. Not even a little.

Try it with anything else. Hand three strangers the address of where you’re trying to go, and watch them give you three different routes. Do you conclude that the city doesn’t exist? Are all roads equally good? Should you just drive in whatever direction fits you? Of course not. You conclude that at most one of them is right, possibly none of them, and your job is to figure out which. Disagreement is not a verdict that the destination is unreachable. It’s an invitation to do the navigation.

We already know this, by the way. We acknowledge this the moment we admit that each different “church” tradition teaches incompatible things. A thing cannot be both true and not-true in the same way at the same time. That’s the oldest rule in the universe; it’s a fundamental principle of Logic, and no amount of polite shrugging repeals it.

Also known as “the law of non-contradiction.” Aristotle states it in Metaphysics Book IV, but he didn’t invent it any more than Newton invented gravity; he just wrote it down. A claim cannot be both true and false in the same respect at the same time. Accepting such contradictions to both be true, by the very rules of formal logic, means that you can sneak ANY kind of absurdity or lie in the back door.

Note the self-detonating quality of the relativist proposition here. The sentence “there is no truth” is itself advanced as a truth.

Rationally, it follows that if that statement is true, then the very proposition it advances is false. It eats its own tail (it’s a self-refuting proposition, or self-referential inconsistency)

The 40 thousand different Christian denominations, springing from hundreds of different, contradictory theologies, can’t all be right. Some of them, likely most of them, are wrong about enormously important things. That’s not me being unkind. That’s just probability and math.

And then there’s the quiet little phrase doing the most damage of all: “we’ll find out later.”

It sounds patient. It sounds humble. In fact, it’s a permission slip, a doctor’s note excusing you from the hardest and most important homework of your life, because the answer key won’t be released until you’re dead. It sounds nice, but rationally considering your very eternal salvation (because that’s what’s at stake), it’s massively dangerous. It’s probably the most dangerous thought you can ever think.

AND it is not what Jesus said. He did not say ye shall know the truth eventually, in the fog, after the funeral. He said, present tense, on this side of the grave: “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And Jude tells us the faith was “once delivered unto the saints” — once. Past tense. Finished. Handed over. A deposit with a return address. Not an ongoing slow rollout of “continuing revelation” that updates itself with every change of ecclesiastical leadership.

You don’t wait for the truth to be revealed in the afterlife like exam results. It already happened. It has an address, a date, and a location. Your job is to trace it back to where it was delivered. That can be done, BUT it’s not easy. It costs you time, comfort, and a fair number of your assumptions. But it can be done. I know because I did it, and there is absolutely nothing about me that is special.