Why "God Loves You" Only Works on the Lonely

When someone says, "I hope you know God loves you," it feels a little weird — like it says more about their need for love than it does mine. There's a subtle insult tucked inside it: do they see me in poorer light than I see myself? Like they think I need to hear that?

I feel deep love from my spouse, my kids, my friends — my people — and I love them deeply back. I love myself, too. I don't tie my value to anyone's judgment of me, including God's. I live with intention, making a real effort to live with integrity, in line with my values — and I feel good about who I am. No authority's sign-off required. Whether some invisible person loves me just isn't a thing I worry about. Any God worth his salt would love all of humanity anyway — and why would I care? His feelings about us are more his business. I'm not wringing my hands over the judgment of the Gods. Not anymore.

Mostly, this well-intentioned assertion of God's love reminds me of two things at once: the world I left behind, and how good I have it now.

It didn't used to be this way.

One of my earliest religious memories is my parents telling me how much Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother loved me — and not liking it. Another set of parents — invisible, somewhere else, the real ones. I remember thinking: no. You're my mom and dad.

The religion meant it literally. This life was a test, and the only way back to my real home was obedience — cheerful obedience, submission you were supposed to want. And God loved me more than any human ever could. More than my own parents.

Then came Abraham and Isaac. It might surprise my parents to hear it, but I remember being confused about why that was a good story — and afraid. Would mine do the same? Everything in front of me said they agreed with it. I don't think I truly believed they would. I was afraid they might. That was the lesson, taught to children as the model of faith.

All I wanted was to belong to my mom and dad — to really be seen and accepted by each of them.

A four-year-old doesn't want a memo about how the universe feels about him. He wants his dad to look up when he walks in. He wants his mom's face to brighten when she sees him.

And he wants to bring them everything — what he thinks, how he feels, what he's going through. What gets called disobedience is mostly a kid trying to have a voice: negotiating, pushing back, speaking his own thoughts and doubts. It isn't rebellion. It's the most beautiful — and, if you like, the most divine — part of him.

The job instead was: be worthy. Everyone teaching me the plan seemed to think it was wonderful — I remember it scaring me. What kind of thoughts are bad? What kind of feelings are bad? I felt guilty about my own mind before I could spell guilt. Sweet, submissive, Christ-like: acceptable. Anything else: withdrawal, or punishment.

That was the deal, from my earliest memories: God and my parents would always love me — that would never change. Belonging was another matter. I had to be found worthy, through obedience.

My parents were wonderful — they loved me, love me still. I never thought they'd throw me out. But the message that was delivered through them was bigger than anything that could happen in our house: disobedience meant forfeited blessings and a good dose of unhappiness in this life — and beyond that, none of us together in the next one. The ultimate penalty wasn't a spanking. It was expulsion from the family. Forever.

Nobody ever said the love was conditional. They didn't have to. They said belonging was. Out loud.

They weren't running the game. The game was running them. That's how compliance cultures work — and it's bigger than any one religion. Parents are expected to deliver their children's obedience up the chain, and the only tools the system hands them are the ones it uses on them: the carrot, the stick, and the threat of not belonging. There's no room in that structure for real dialogue, or for learning to navigate conflict — just hierarchy, authority, and compliance.

Love grows in one environment: two people letting themselves be known. A worthiness culture kills exactly that. When acceptance depends on staying acceptable, everybody hides their real self — their thoughts, feelings, doubts, beliefs, protests, vulnerabilities, desires, fears — at least the ones not deemed acceptable. Nobody gets known. Decades of church and family become masks meeting masks. It's a terribly lonely way to live, and almost nobody inside it can say why.

Then the same system offers the lonely its comfort: God loves you. It dug the hole. It sells you what fills it.

Somebody measured the filling — nineteen thousand people: treating God as a friend is a real lifeline for the socially disconnected, and close to nothing for people who already have people.

The meaning of God loves you runs inverse to the love arriving in your life right now. Where the room is full, it's decoration.

That's what makes me sad for the person saying it. The odds are they're lonely — disconnected from the very people they most desperately want to connect with. Their medicine is, unknowingly, their poison. And they'll never know, because it's likely all they've ever known.

Pews come with casseroles, and loneliness has plenty of diggers besides religion. But wherever acceptance is conditional, people are hidden from each other — and hidden people are lonely no matter how crowded the pew.

If the sentence is holding you up, I believe you. I'd only ask: how much is it substituting for being known by the people around you? And if you're the one saying it — whose job are you handing off?

Say I love you, you belong here no matter what, and you're on the hook — it has to survive the nose ring, the doubt, the kid who stops believing. Say God loves you and you're covered: love written as a check on somebody else's account, and if they don't feel it, that's a problem with their faith. Whatever happens inside that love, the love is never the thing that did it.

I left ten years ago. Most people went quiet. The few who've said anything reach for the same sentence: I hope someday you know God loves you. Not one believer has said: Ben, I know you're a good person, and I'm not worried about you. The system doesn't issue that sentence. It couldn't — not to me, not in ten years — because it would make their judgment of me the one that matters, and that was never allowed. Their acceptance was never theirs to give. The most the system licenses is the relay: God loves you — but he doesn't approve. So I can't either. It's a mechanism of control. It stops people from knowing, accepting — and therefore loving — each other fully. It's a crying shame.

But love was never mysterious. It's getting to know each other, and accepting what you find. It's belonging that survives disagreement. And love and acceptance aren't really two things — I love you, but I don't like you isn't love. It's judgment and expulsion.

You don't have to settle any theology. If God's love is real, it costs nothing to also love people where they can see it. If it isn't, loving people where they can see it is all there ever was. Look up when the kid walks in. Tell the one who stopped believing that they belong at your table — the one you can actually set.

My kids aren't taught to fear a hell or a judgment. They're good without the threats — good now, as they are. Fear and coercion have no place in our home — not anymore. So they tell me things. I'm their dad. They're my kids. They're free agents — and I love that I get to actually know them, instead of control them. Nothing they could think or feel or become puts their seat at the table up for review.

Suzy and I and the kids work at this — at not performing for each other. The deal at our house runs the other way: this is a safe place for your own thoughts and feelings — everyone has them; the only question is whether they get to see daylight. I can disagree with you, and I will never withdraw from you. I'll sit beside you when it's uncomfortable. I won't withhold love, or acceptance, or belonging, to coerce you. Just open, honest dialogue that respects you as an equal — no matter what.

I want my kids to know I love and accept them. But what I want even more is for them to know it, enjoy it — and not need it, because they love and accept themselves. It hurts when someone you love withdraws or disapproves; that's human. But nobody should tie their sense of value to my judgment of them — not even my kids. I don't want them sitting alone in a room somewhere, trying to feel loved by someone they can't see. Go love the people you're with. And if your room has emptied — rooms do — it can be refilled with the living. Mine emptied once. It filled back up. Feel all of it — it's hard, it's beautiful, and it's real.

And I'm not writing this as the parent who figured it out. I slip back into the old patterns constantly — with the kids, especially with Suzy. It's hard to break a language that's been passed down to all of us, for thousands of years, by authoritarian systems. But I keep working at it, because life is so much better on this side. I wish the people I love could experience it too.

And if loving and accepting the people in your life just as they are — your kids, your spouse, your siblings, the friend who walked away from the faith — sounds uncomfortable, even dangerous, ask yourself why. My bet: you sense a loss of control. What if my acceptance means they won't do what I think is best for them? See that? Control. Love was used as a weapon on you, and you learned to use it the same way, without ever thinking of it as a weapon. To you it's a tool for getting people to do the right thing. For their own good. (Yes, I see it — now I'm the one guessing at what's inside you. Take it from somebody who lived it — a guess, not a verdict.)

But it isn't love. It's coercion. And it breeds what it fears — resentment, distance, kids who hide — until the person on the receiving end needs the lifeline. Well. At least God loves me.

If that's you — still inside, mask on — the mask doesn't protect the love. It replaces it. Hand one true thing to a safe person, and find out what it feels like to be loved and accepted by someone right in front of you.

We have new patterns now, and we know they work better — if you can let go of fearing what you can't see and start loving what's right in front of you. You felt the old way was wrong as a child — I'd bet on it. The us-and-them felt wrong. The threats of not belonging felt wrong. The punishments felt wrong. That child still knows the way. Give that part of you the love it always wanted — and give everyone else the same. Not a love that refuses to see or learn what it doesn't want to know. No fear in it, no coercion. It isn't easy. It's just far more satisfying than telling each other somebody else loves you.

I'd rather someone tell me they love and accept me. That's all any of us have ever wanted — most of all from our parents, or whoever raised us. Then from our families, our friends, our communities. And not the lip service of love. What we want most is to be seen — safe to share everything we think and feel, and still be accepted for who we are. When we don't get it, we go looking. As children, it's an invisible friend. As adults, it's a deity. I don't mean that as a knock on any gods that may exist — it's just a real mechanism, and it runs on what's missing.

Maybe Jesus was even pointing at this when he kept redirecting his followers' eyes from the sky to each other — love one another; whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. God as the beggar. God as the person sitting across from you. If that's what he meant, then the instruction was never tell each other God loves you. It was love one another — in person.

I've never felt more love in my life than since I left the religion that claimed to be all about love. I belong as me now. Nobody's trying to change or police anybody — no weird mind games — so we actually get to know each other. I'm not waiting on the verdict of an invisible parental unit that parents in a way I flat out disagree with. My kids walk in and I look up. The room is full. Home was never somewhere else.

If you love somebody, sign your own name to it. It costs more.

Stop waiting for the gods to love and accept us. Let's do it for each other — now, in this life.