As I watched Alpha Course’s video about divine guidance, one fact sprang out at me above all others. Well, two facts. The first one was simple: Christians have no idea in the world how to tell what their god wants them to do. The second is that their god apparently has no grasp of priorities at all. But there’s a dark side to divine guidance, and it’s much darker than Christians seem to realize. Today, let’s explore that dark side—and see what it tells us about Christianity itself.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 10/21/2025. They’re both available now! Answering Alpha tag for the other posts in this series.)
SITUATION REPORT: The god who desperately wants to guide his followers, but somehow he can’t talk to them
In Alpha Course video #7, various Christians tell viewers about divine guidance, why it’s important, and how to interpret it for their lives.
At least, they try. Bless their cotton socks!
As we’ve seen repeatedly in this series so far, they really can’t tell us a single objective fact about this supposedly all-important need humans have. They also can’t offer us a single way to accurately detect it. They don’t even mention what to do with divine guidance that doesn’t fit into their desires or common-sense adulting.
Recently, we discussed this video (here). But there’s another side to divine guidance that I wanted to explore on its own. It’s one of those Christian claims—like miraculous escapes, Heaven, and magic healings—that seems innocuous on the surface, but hides an incredibly dark underbelly. That dark side only peeks out once we begin asking serious questions about it.
Alas for Alpha Course, that’s exactly what we’re going to do here.
Increasingly stupid and nonsensical ways of gaining a sense of divine guidance
The most obvious dark side of divine guidance lies in how impossible it is for sincere believers to discern it. Despite Jesus’ own insistence in John 10:27 that his flocks would always know his voice, almost 2000 years later those flocks still haven’t worked out any objective way to figure out what he wants.
Last time we met up, we talked about some of the different ways evangelicals try to guess at Jesus’ desires:
- Coincidences and portents
- Flipping a Bible open and latching onto the first Bible verse one sees there
- One’s own desires and inclinations
- Drawing one’s reactions to a Bible study
- Seeking advice from older Christians
In the Bible itself, we also find weird, obviously-pagan-derived practices like setting out a fleece at night, as we see in Judges 6, and asking Yahweh to make it wet or dry by morning. Or what Saint Peter and his fellow Apostles did in Acts 1:21-26: Holding a drawing (“casting lots”) to figure out who Jesus had chosen to replace Judas Iscariot.
If someone in any other religion talked about using these methods to figure out their gods’ wishes, evangelicals would condemn all of them as ickie sinful divination. When they themselves use these methods, they call it discernment—and that name change makes it all perfectly acceptable. In fact, they must use divination/discernment. Their god never speaks directly to them in any tangible way.
Does any of this sound like Christians have any clue how to tell if a message is coming from themselves, their god, or some pesky demon?
But there is a good side to this problem:
It’s really easy to fake divine guidance!
Christianese 101: Faking your very own divine guidance
The great news is that divine guidance is incredibly easy to fake. There’s literally no objective way for any Christian to mark any feeling, coincidence, or lightning bolt as being from any particular supernatural source. So you can use almost all of their methods of discernment to craft bespoke divine orders to do anything you like. Here’s how:
- Put a Bible verse on it. You’ll need to tether the fake divine guidance to a Bible verse. Be careful to use your group’s interpretation of it. Skip this step if you’re trying to do something really out of bounds for your group, like a woman aiming for a pastor job in a sexist denomination.
- Don’t go too out of bounds with visions. Dreams are a great way to frame divine guidance. Just keep the details sparse. Don’t depict supernatural realms like Heaven in ways your group won’t like. The lower status you are, the tamer the vision needs to be.
- Make sure you mention how much praying you’ve done. You need not have actually prayed at all, of course. But your group will feel more confident in the guidance claim if you tell them you definitely prayed a lot about it.
- Stress how much peace you feel about the guidance, especially if it runs counter to what your pastor or family members want you to do. If you’re at peace, then it must be Jesus.
- Hedge your bets. If you’re getting divine permission to start a business, for example, don’t claim that Jesus promised it would succeed. He often sets his followers up to fail. Instead, start small. For example: “Jesus told me in a dream to start a retro ice cream shop in Eugene, Oregon.”
You can also use existing discernment tropes to avoid or withdraw from unwanted situations. In fact, it’s even easier than manufacturing permission. You won’t need any Bible verses or visions here, though of course you should deploy them if you fear your rejection might be rejected.
- “I feel a check in my spirit about XYZ.” This Christianese implies Jesus pulled you back with a leash.
- “After much prayer, I feel Jesus is leading me elsewhere.” Again, prayer is the magic key that unlocks credibility.
See how easy it is? You can get into or out of whatever trouble you like by faking your marching orders! If you follow these simple rules, not a single person at church will be able to gainsay you.
Best of all, if you use these methods then you won’t run into the darker side of divine guidance.
Divine guidance has two sides
Mostly, Alpha Course presents divine guidance as sensible and parental in nature.
In the video, several Christians lament the dreadful mistakes they’ve made in their lives through ignoring that sort of guidance. They don’t specify exactly what mistakes these are, but they act like they acted with immaturity and shortsighted, mixed-up priorities. No, they need a cosmic daddy figure to tell them to eat their vegetables and not stay up too late. (Indeed, a great many Christians who want to be society’s Designated Adults use this exact paternalistic language to describe why they should have that power.)
But there’s a whole other side to divine guidance. We find it in the in-between realm of personal desires: Who Christians should marry, what business decisions they should make, where they should live, and more. And here, we find another dark side to divine guidance: Christians talking about divine guidance that they really didn’t want to hear.
When it comes to personal desires, Jesus is always on board with the Alpha Course crew. He always wants what they want. If Nigel wants to move from the UK to France, then Jesus will set up all kinds of weird coincidences to get him there (Alpha Course #7 at 13:48)! If Paul Cowley wants to do something nice for his dad, Jesus makes a way for him to upgrade his dad’s train ticket (Alpha Course #7 at 4:07)!
Ain’t Jesus a pal!
Unwanted divine guidance: One dark side to the belief
But what about the Christians who talk about getting divine guidance that they really, truly do not want to obey?
Unwelcome divine demands seem far more common for women than for men, particularly around marriage. When I was Pentecostal, I only married my Evil Ex Biff because I genuinely thought Jesus wanted me to do that. It was a disastrous marriage, one that I regretted before the honeymoon even ended. But I stuck with it and tried to work things out because I thought that marriage was a divine order—and so did every single religious leader I had.
We find similar stories online—like on The Pearl Sisters Blog, where one Christian tells another to break up with her beloved boyfriend to get the husband Jesus wanted her to have. And, of course, the night before I married Biff another guy from church called me to tell me Jesus actually wanted me to marry him instead!
A surprising amount of advice proliferates in evangelical spaces to warn young women that Jesus absolutely doesn’t set marriages up. It often takes the form of admonishment, as we see in a 2015 blog post from Gary Thomas and a 2024 post from AGW Ministries. Even Alpha Course #7 itself comes down against the idea of divinely-arranged marriages (at 17:19).
It’s as if evangelicals are all saying “Haha! Oh, you silly women! It’s impossible for Jesus to set you up with someone you don’t want to marry! He would never!” But that jesting flies in the face of evangelical beliefs about Jesus.
Though some of their leaders say otherwise, all too many of them think he personally arranges every single aspect of their lives. So yes, obviously Jesus arranges the marriages he wants for his children. If he’s willing to dictate the kind of car they buy and whether or not they should wait for a delayed pizza, then it’d be weird of him not to meddle in their romantic relationships as well. So evangelicals definitely dispense advice about listening to Jesus’ orders about marriage—no matter how unattracted you feel.
A Presbyterian pastor, Victoria Curtiss, wrote in 2018 that she didn’t “blame Ananias” at all for not wanting to obey Yahweh in Acts 9. She took for granted that her followers had all gone through similar reluctance to obey divine guidance. She’s probably correct there.
I often see similar reluctance discussed in Christian spaces (like in this 2023 Reddit thread and this 2025 post from The Set-Apart Walk). Other Christians chide their peers for ignoring unwanted divine guidance, as Scot Bellavia does at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics.
The other dark side: Getting set up to fail
I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard Christians claim they got a sign to do something, did it, and it didn’t turn out the way they wanted.
All too often, Christians obey Jesus’ commands—only to fail utterly. There’s a distinct survivorship bias in how Christians discuss unwanted divine guidance. You can see it in glaring colors in that Christian Forums post asking how people had met their spouses. I didn’t see a single one saying their divinely-ordained marriages had failed or were miserable. Nobody wants to say they mis-heard Jesus somehow. But we also know Christians divorce at least as often as anyone else.
In 2015, a variety of Republicans claimed Jesus had told them to run for President. None of them even won their party’s nomination.
In the 1990s, Biff claimed Jesus had told him to move to Japan. Yes, folks. Jesus had personally assured him that he’d become a huge evangelism success there (as well as getting rich!). Obviously, neither happened. We limped home after our money and visas ran out.
(See related tag about our Japan adventure: Exiting Far East.)
The pastors of almost every church claim that Jesus commanded them to start their church. But according to the vice president of research and planning for the National Council of Churches, 100,000 American churches will close over “the next several years.”
So either Christians mishear their god constantly, or he just likes to see them fail.
Divine guidance functions best as a leisure sport for the privileged
By far the very darkest side of divine guidance is the one Christians don’t ever discuss:
Their god’s apparent priorities.
The Christian god cares enormously, it seems, about nudging someone to upgrade a train ticket. He cares enough about his followers to set up a huge complicated series of coincidences to help one of them move to France. But somehow, he doesn’t care enough to get potential abuse victims—many of them children—away from predatory ministers. Or, dare I say, enough to get those ministers out of ministry entirely. His divine guidance doesn’t keep his followers from endless trouble, nor get them all out of it.
What a skewed set of priorities! If I were an omnimax god, I’d make sure no children were ever molested—especially by my own priests!
Epicurus nailed it: If this god were real, he’d have to be spectacularly stupid, catastrophically evil, or weak beyond compare. There are no other ways around how divine guidance looks in the real world.
No, divine guidance is a game best suited to the privileged. They have the luxury to dream of relocating to a new place—or having a choice of partners to marry, colleges to attend, causes to support, and jobs to select.
The poor desperately want such choices, but they won’t get many choices at all. They must pray instead for any scraps they can get.
Their god doesn’t care. Like Santa, Jesus gives the most expensive toys to the rich kids.
NEXT UP: Harsh times breed easy games. See you soon! <3
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Endnote
Ubi Dubium wrote a great post a few years back that relates to today’s topic: The Problem of Sincerity.
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