Jesus called. He wants his phone back.

Can we please have a moratorium on people claiming God told them to do things, K thanks.

Given my entire life has been defined by a special phone call my father received from The Lord, I have some thoughts about Speaker of the House/Insurrection and Hairspray Enthusiast Mike Johnson claiming God told him “very clearly” his ascension to office was a “Red Sea moment” like Moses.

You may need a basic Sunday School education, as well as some knowledge of American political history to get this joke. Trust me, this is hysterical.

Calling is a freaking big deal in American evangelical Christianity. And it’s not enough just to be guided by a generic Christian calling to love God and serve others where you happen to find yourself. Noooo. That is some weak sauce.

Because you are so very special, and also American—you might even say you’re exceptional—you might be the lucky winner a Very Special Calling, with its own after school special and everything. That’s right. You could be called—and likely are being called, just be quiet for a sec—to GO and DO¹ and ALL CAPS VERB something really awesome, like maybe steal children from Haiti or practice medicine in Africa with only a home school diploma. As everyone knows, the best callings involve international travel, non-white babies living in poverty, a 4-wheel-drive vehicle, and some cargo pants. Maybe a monkey or a snake. Yeah, monkeys and snakes make the stories better, add one of those.

(Side note: my mother literally slapped a monkey once. True story. And a good one, right? Like you want to hear that, admit it. Too bad, I have other things to say today.)

Or maybe it involves an epic, heroic struggle to save America, God’s indispensable nation, from the Satanic liberals and heathens through political power and subculture institution-building.

OK, I’m being mean, again, shame on me, again. There are of course many pure-hearted people who pursue what they perceive as spiritual callings and even hold positions of leadership that are noble and beneficial to the world. But American Christianity’s rugged-adventure-REI notion of calling has a hard time imagining that this kind of thing can play out right here and now, in one’s own life, just as it is.

(Ooh, sidenote/epiphany: A CHRISTIAN REI. You get all the cool outdoorsy gear with Bible verses on it. You can have that idea, it’s free.)

I regret to inform you that this is a real book. That many evangelicals LOVE.

American Christians seem uninspired by the sacred ordinary of a universal Christian calling. They want over-the-top, epic, Hollywood action, and a great missionary story is the church version of that. If they can’t or won’t go themselves, then they will live vicariously through their missionary heroes. That was the world I grew up in. We were the athletes who represented Christendom in the Olympics while everyone else plays pick up basketball in their driveways.

In many ways, our concept of calling is a pretty modern, Western one,² the result of an overabundance of choice that simply doesn't exist for most of the world's or history's people. I imagine even the most devoutly Christian nomadic herders in northern Kenya spend no more time trying to discern God's exact plan for their lives than they do what to eat for dinner. For those blessed/cursed with such an extensive menu of options, deciding what to do with your life can be daunting, but also exciting. In either case, the idea that you can hear directly from God about that is comforting and invigorating.

The thing is, at least in my experience, it’s never clear how you know God is speaking to you. He actually doesn’t use a phone, although some people claim to hear an audible voice. Calling is not just really wanting to do something, for instance. I grew up being told to doubt and question my “selfish” desires in many cases. Calling is definitely more than that. In fact, the best calling stories are those in which the person starts out actively NOT wanting to do the thing. It makes the eventual “submission to The Lord” more impressive and inspiring.

To repeat a story I’ve told before—one of my earliest run-ins with calling is instructive of the weight evangelicals give it without interrogating much. I was 10, and I wanted to follow my older sister to boarding school. Our family lived in a small Kenyan town, and I attended a local primary school that was absolutely fine. I wasn’t unhappy, I learned things, I had fun. But my older sister was too old to go there and had no other appealing options. So she went to a boarding school a few hours away, run by an American evangelical mission. And I missed her. She was my best friend, and I missed her.

It was doubtful my parents were going to let me go by request. I had to enlist Jesus. Now, I could have just gone to my parents and plainly stated that God had called me to go, that on its own usually convinces people. But it's better if you have some connective tissue in there. A vision, a strange coincidence, a Bible verse. On the latter front, there was a school of thought in evangelicalism back then that the Bible could literally be used as a Magic 8 ball (it effectively still is, just not as explicitly). You asked God to give you guidance, then you propped the Bible up on its spine and let it fall open. With eyes shut tightly, you plopped your finger on the page, and where ever it landed, that was the word God had for you. I decided this was the way to go. It was as good an exposition of calling as I had found at the time. It was even one of several methods my dad used to determine whether he should become a missionary, so I guess that’s where I got it.

I got out my Bible and let the Christian magic happen. I closed my eyes and put my finger on the page. The first few attempts were confusing: “The rock badger is unclean to you because it chews the cud even though its hoof is not divided.” Weird. What is a rock badger? They have hooves? What? I tried again.

“Then because of the dire straits to which you will be reduced when your enemy besieges you, you will eat your own children, the flesh of your sons and daughters whom the Lord has given you.” Well, that’s just disturbing. Hopefully my parents aren’t going to eat me anytime soon. Next.

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’” BINGO. BOOM. Pay dirt. My name’s not Abram, but other than that, this is the definitive word. Leave your father’s house and go to the land. Doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Armed with the Word of the Lord, I went to my parents to pitch the idea. “Mom and Dad, I know we planned for me to go to Mt. Kenya Academy for another few years,” I began. “But I have received a word from the Lord. God has told me he wants me to go to boarding school.”

“Is that right,” said my mom skeptically. This was her initial response to my Dad’s calling, incidentally.

“Yes, that is right. I prayed and asked God for guidance, and he gave me this verse.” I handed my open Bible over to my dad and pointed to the verse. I did not mention that this was actually the third Word I had gotten and had opted against eating rock badgers or my own children.

“Well, how about that,” Dad said. “It does say that pretty clearly.”

And that was that. God said it, we believed it, and that settled it. I went to boarding school at a young age, which was absolutely NOT the right decision, I think my parents would now agree.

This notion of calling can obviously short-circuit a more rigorous and informed decision process, but as my little 10-year-old self demonstrated, it’s also ripe for manipulation. There was no way for my dad to know I had NOT been called. He himself had followed a pretty extreme path based on this exact belief and even this very method. Of course, I did not mention that I had kept fishing for the verse I wanted. I lied to him. I manipulated his faith. Now, I was a child, and honestly, it was not my job to make life-altering decisions of this consequence for myself. And of course, I was mimicking a belief system that had been given to me.

And I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Mike Johnson and any number of evangelicals out there are doing the same. Certainly they can do the same, very, very easily. This notion of calling—of hearing directly from the Lord—is one of the many, many cultural factors that make evangelicals supremely susceptible to unscrupulous leaders, conspiracy theories, and a lack of critical thought.

I mean, how perfect to have millions of people spiritually and intellectually primed to give enormous weight to a source of information that can’t ever be verified due to its inherent subjectivity? It’s an abuser’s dream, as if cooked up in an evil lab.

Of course, there are some limits and parameters to evangelical belief in calling. If you are a woman, for instance, you cannot be called to preach in many evangelical cultures. Any woman who claims this calling—and frankly a lot of women, just generally—has some hearing problems. If you are a man and feel called to marry a man, you have been captured by Satan. I felt “called” to get a divorce from my first husband, and that really, really didn’t fly. So it depends WHO is hearing from the Lord and WHAT he is telling them. Here’s where it gets really tricky and circular and you can’t overthink it or your brain will hurt—The folks who get to determine appropriate discernment of calling have been called to their positions, according to them.

So do I think there is nothing to calling? I mean, in western society, we all have many choices to make, how do we know we are on a good path?

I do believe in calling, but as with so many things in evangelicalism, it’s been overly spiritualized and made into another kind of idol. I believe all of us, whether we are religious or not, are gifted with certain talents and traits, guided by passions and joys, and nudged along by the unexpected twists and turns of our lives and the people we meet along the way. And what we want—as long as it is an expression of love of self and others, not of fear or loathing—IS instructive. Desire is not necessarily a bad thing. Ego is not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly it’s unavoidable, it just needs to be kept on a leash.

Calling is indeed sacred. The discovery and living out of our true, healthy selves through relationship, vocation, service, or even the most unsexy of chores, is beautiful and miraculous, the conduit through which we add to the force field of love that surrounds us and connects us and holds us up. But I don’t think calling is as crassly mysterious as it’s so often made out to be. That’s like cramming the sublime beauty and quiet of a winter storm into a snow globe. Calling is both more mundane and more extraordinary than that, like birth or death itself.

Perhaps your life takes you to amazing places to do astounding things. Perhaps you do acquire wealth, power, and status. That’s fine. But it doesn’t make your calling any more spiritual and meaningful. It also doesn’t put it any further beyond questioning or render it any less ripe for a misguided turn toward narcissistic rot. When any of us become captured by our own calling, taken with our own sense of grandeur or importance, brainwashed by our own righteousness, what may have started out fueled by love can become more destructive than salutary.

Jesus—or God or the universe or however you want to conceive of it—is calling. But he’s speaking through the entirety of your human experience, not via some kind of special iPhone that only some of us get.

Or worse, that some of us create for ourselves.

1. This is of course rooted in the Great Commission, in which Jesus tells his disciples to “go into all the world and make disciples.” The term “Great Commission” was not even coined until the 16th century, and the hyper-active evangelical notion of it is very American, intertwined with notions of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny.

2. My sense that this kind of calling was peculiarly American/Western was confirmed by Mekdes Haddis, an Ethiopian American author and missions consultant who tries to teach westerners who really want to go be extraordinary in another country how to maybe calm down, or at least be less offensive in their attempts to save the world. “How about… living out your faith and flourishing and confronting your own sin,” she asks. “None of that comes into play.” Because it’s BORING, MEKDES, DUH.