Evangelicalism is a language I know how to speak. It was my whole world as a teen and a college student.

Recently, I felt nostalgic and listened to some of the music from those formative years of my faith. I was stunned by the number of “I’s” and “me’s” in the lyrics. Weren’t these songs supposed to be about God, or at least the Church’s communal worship of Jesus?

I thought about one of the most popular songs from my youth group– Christy Nockle’s “Grace Flows Down.” The chorus of the song is simply this:

“It covers me
It covers me
It covers me
And it covers me.”

The “me” in each line is held for a long time– disproportionately long compared to the other components of the song.

These songs highlight the emphasis of the self that runs rampant in evangelical theology. It is as if everything God does is either to, for or through me. God can’t do God’s work in the world unless I say yes to it. 

To be good enough for God to use, I must make myself as pure and righteous as possible. “Don’t drink, don’t chew and don’t go with folks who do.” But running parallel to the focus on the “righteous” self runs the seemingly antithetical evangelical belief that we need to minimize ourselves as much as possible.

This belief proposes that Jesus died because of my sins, so I must atone by recognizing I am nothing more than a broken sinner. I have to apologize–over and over again– for putting Jesus on the cross. 

Jesus is the only reason God can stand to look at me. I can’t even love myself because God’s the only one worthy of love. I’m nothing but filthy rags and only God can make me clean.

Do you see what’s happening here? Even when evangelicals try to “minimize” themselves, it’s still all about them.

With self-righteousness in one hand and shame in the other, evangelicalism creates a self-centered ideology where everything is all about me– spiritual narcissism at its finest.

This prop-up/ tear-down paradox in evangelicalism isn’t a modern invention. Medieval saints believed similarly and exercised those beliefs through self-vilification. Effectively, this practice sought to enable the saints to sanctify themselves by either overcoming sickness (thought to be symbolic of the evil and depravity of the world) or by joining Christ in suffering.

By lowering themselves, they believed they became more like Christ (which I’d argue is a self-elevation). The tamest of these actions involved eating out of the same plate as lepers or eating lice.

Angela of Foligno and her contemporaries performed the most radical of these actions. One account shows that she and a friend went to wash the sores of a leper. When they finished washing his sores, they drank the water with which they cleaned him– for, according to Angela, he was Christ, and the water was Communion. 

The record of the account shows no indication of how the leper felt. 

Was he thankful they came to wash him? Isolated because they saw Christ, but not him? Disgusted that they used his body without his consent just so they could have a “spiritual” experience? 

Or maybe he was simply resigned to the fact that he was not a person in their eyes.

The lepers they served were only a means to an end for Angela of Foligno and the others who engaged in this act of self-vilification. The lepers weren’t people with complex needs, thoughts, or dreams. They were simply a God-provided avenue through which Angela could have her own personal experience with Jesus. 

That mentality is the crux of evangelicalism.

I’m the story’s protagonist and God is reduced to my super-powered sidekick. Whenever God uses those powers, it’s to help grow or strengthen me so I can avoid temptation. 

The people I interact with are only the means through which God initiates those tests or Christ’s presence. Like the lepers were to Angela, those people are all means to an end in my life narrative. 

Perhaps a more honest chorus for that Christy Nockles song would be “It’s all about me.” 

As I’ve grown in my faith, I’ve had to come to terms with how I harmed people by de-subjectifying them through my evangelical lens. How will I ever repent enough for treating people like objects? And how do I go about it in a way that doesn’t keep me in the center of things?

In an interview about her New York Times best-selling book “Educated,” Tara Westover (who escaped an abusive home in the Mormon tradition) said that she had to learn to forgive herself for who she was so that she could be empathetic to people who reminded her of who she used to be. Phew. That’ll preach.

If we are to have any hope of reaching across the theological aisle to help our evangelical siblings move beyond this self-centered theology, we can’t allow our misgivings with evangelicalism to blind us to their subjectivity either. As Audre Lorde said, “You can’t dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.”

We can’t pull people out of conservative evangelical fundamentalism if the strategy of fundamentalism is our roadmap. The rigidity of liberal fundamentalism is just as damning as conservative fundamentalism and just as harmful. 

I don’t want to subject anyone to that. The way we move forward is by honoring the subjectivity of each person and meeting them where they are.

To be clear, that’s not the same as catering to or enabling their spiritual narcissism. They don’t need to be coddled.

Rather, it’s offering an invitation for evangelicals to honestly examine who their theology (or perhaps idolatry) is actually about. By doing this, we introduce them to the discipline of repentance, which can end the spiritual narcissism of evangelicalism. 

Repentance isn’t about the guilt or shame that is the lifeblood of evangelical theology. Instead, repentance is about owning your mistakes, apologizing, then learning and doing better.

From that perspective, a discipleship of repentance offers space for folks who have done the hard work of deconstructing their faith to offer mentorship to those who are on the precipice of questioning evangelicalism. It is relationship-centered and meets people where they are.

Through this discipleship, we share with them stories of people harmed by evangelical theology and show them the damage it has caused in our society. Perhaps this discipleship looks like us following Ananias’ footsteps and cleaning the gunk out of Paul’s eyes.

That’s what discipleship is meant to be, isn’t it? A commitment to doing life together and as a result, becoming more like Christ in the process? 

That sounds like church to me. If the church hopes to be a place of welcome and healing, we must stop using others– no matter who– as the means to our own ends. 

“It’s all about we” doesn’t quite have the same lyricism as “It covers me,” but genuine kin-dom work isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about the real, messy work of relationships and these relationships are going to get a lot messier before they get better.

Even so, I’ll take that over a nice-sounding song any time.