When We Remake God in Our Own Image We Lose Him Entirely
America is not, on the whole, an atheist nation. Polling still shows large majorities professing belief in some kind of higher power. What it has become, however, is something arguably more dangerous than secularism — a culture that has refashioned God into a flattering reflection of itself, a deity so manageable, so endlessly affirming, and so reliably silent on inconvenient subjects that He can no longer command reverence from anyone. The question worth asking is whether such a god is even worth the prayers being directed at him.
That is precisely the question pastor and author Adam B. Dooley puts to his readers in a striking new essay at The Christian Post, titled “Are we inventing a fake God? Why reverence is dying.” Dooley revives a warning from the late theologian R.C. Sproul, who observed before his death in 2017 that the most urgent spiritual need of the age is for people to rediscover who God actually is. Nearly a decade later, the diagnosis has only sharpened. Few in the modern West openly reject God. Far more are content to invent a new one.
Dooley calls this tendency what it is — a quiet idolatry of preference, in which the living God of Scripture is shrunk down to a more manageable size. We prefer a deity who stays in the background, who shows up on cue, who treats us as the center of the universe, and who keeps his opinions to himself when ours run in another direction. This god takes marching orders. He does not give them.
Pastor Adam B. Dooley argues that modern Western culture is not rejecting God outright but reinventing Him into a smaller, tamer figure who poses no real demands.
Drawing on Isaiah 6, Dooley contrasts the contemporary preference for a domesticated deity with the biblical vision of a holy, untamed, sovereign Lord.
The seraphim of Isaiah’s vision did not chant “love” or “mercy,” though God is both — they chanted “Holy, holy, holy,” the attribute that defines His essence.
Modern American spirituality often reduces God to a life coach, co-pilot, or affirming friend, stripping away holiness in favor of comfort.
Without holiness there is no Gospel — the cross is meaningless if sin is merely a misunderstanding rather than a real offense against a real God.
The death of reverence is not just a theological problem but a civilizational one, with downstream effects on respect for institutions, authority, and truth.
Dooley points to Isaiah’s confession — “Woe is me, for I am ruined” — as the response holiness demands and the response modern religion is unwilling to make.
Many today demand affirmation and punish dissent, treating disagreement with their preferences as a moral offense.
The biblical answer is not a softer God but a sovereign One whose holiness makes grace meaningful in the first place.
The God of Isaiah 6 Has Not Changed
Dooley grounds his argument in Isaiah 6, the prophet’s vision of the Lord enthroned in unapproachable majesty while seraphim cried out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” The setting matters. King Uzziah had just died after more than half a century on the throne. Judah was anxious, uncertain, and politically unmoored. When the prophet looked up, he did not find a God pacing nervously or scrambling to keep pace with the news cycle. He found a God reigning, undisturbed, glorious, and entirely unimpressed with the panic below.
That picture alone should embarrass much of what passes for popular Christianity. The seraphim, Dooley notes, did not chant “love, love, love,” though God is love. They did not chant “merciful, merciful, merciful,” though He delights in mercy. They selected the single attribute that most completely captures who He is — holiness. The threefold repetition is no accident. It is the Hebrew way of saying that this attribute is supreme, definitive, and without rival.
The implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable. A God who is first and foremost holy cannot be reduced to the man upstairs, the cosmic therapist, or — that most unfortunate evangelical phrase — our co-pilot. He is not a mascot. He does not cheer our ambitions regardless of their direction. He is, in the language of Hebrews, a consuming fire.
The Therapeutic Deity Cannot Save
Sociologist Christian Smith famously diagnosed the religion of younger Americans as “moralistic therapeutic deism” — the belief that God exists, wants us to be nice, wants us to feel good about ourselves, and shows up only when we need something. That description was offered in 2005. Two decades later it reads less like a diagnosis and more like a settled creed across enormous swaths of American religious life, including denominations that still wear historic Christian labels.
The fruit is on full display. A megachurch pastor in Kansas City recently announced a congressional campaign on an openly pro-abortion platform. An Episcopal diocese in the American South just installed its first openly lesbian bishop. Entire denominations now treat the plain reading of Scripture as an embarrassment to be explained away. None of this would be possible if the God being worshipped were still recognized as the holy, untamed Lord of Isaiah’s vision. It is only possible because a different god — manageable, flattering, infinitely affirming — has quietly taken His place.
The trouble is that the therapeutic god of modern preference cannot do the one thing his worshippers actually need. He cannot forgive sin, because in his presence sin is not really sin. He cannot transform a life, because he has no standing to demand transformation. He cannot save, because there is nothing to be saved from. The cross becomes a sentimental decoration rather than the place where the wrath of a holy God was satisfied on behalf of guilty men.
The Psalmist Saw This Coming
Israel’s ancient temptation was not unbelief but reinvention, and the Lord addressed it directly through the psalmist. “These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes” (Psalm 50:21). The verse cuts to the bone. The God who has not spoken loudly on our timetable is not the same as a God who agrees with us. Silence is not endorsement. And the day will come when He sets the record straight.
That single line ought to send a shiver through any honest believer. The temptation to remake God in our image is not new, but the resources for doing so have multiplied — social media affirmation, niche theological subcultures, denominational decline, and a broader cultural reflex that treats personal preference as sacred and contradiction as cruelty.
Reverence Is the First Casualty and the First Necessity
Dooley closes with a piercing observation. The contemporary world does not lack opinions about God. What it lacks is reverence. Many laugh at the idea of holiness. Others rewrite reality wholesale, calling evil good and good evil. Still others demand affirmation as a precondition for civil discourse and punish any disagreement as bigotry.
This collapse of reverence does not stay neatly within the four walls of the church. A culture that cannot revere God will not long revere parents, teachers, magistrates, the unborn, the elderly, or the truth itself. The vertical disorder produces the horizontal one. The civilizational symptoms now dominating headlines — the contempt for institutions, the obliteration of basic categories like male and female, the casual cruelty of online life — are not unrelated to the disappearance of the holy from public imagination. They are its downstream consequences.
The remedy is not a softer God or a more attractive theology. The remedy is the recovery of the actual one. The Gospel of Isaiah 6 — and of the entire New Testament that flows from it — is that the God who is too holy to overlook sin loved sinners enough to bear it Himself. A burning coal from the altar touched the prophet’s lips and his guilt was taken away. Centuries later, the same fire of divine holiness was satisfied at a Roman cross, where Christ became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
That is not a god we invented. He could not have been invented. He is the One we have always needed, whether we knew it or not. And the first step back toward Him is the one Isaiah took when the throne came into view — the recognition that we are unclean, the willingness to say so out loud, and the courage to stop pretending we are doing Him a favor by showing up.