Does God Accept You As You Are?

Rene Girard, Part VI — If Acceptance Is an Excuse to Stagnate, Then the Answer Is ‘No’

Articles in the Rene Girard series:

Part I — Ancient Memes & Modern ‘Lawfare’

Part II — Simple Things Replicate; Complex Things Grow

Part III — Antivirus Mindware

Part IV — ♪♫ ‘We Built This City …’ ♪♫

Part V — Jesus Christ, Memelord?

Part VI — Does God Accept You As You Are? [YOU ARE HERE!]

Part VII (Series Finale!) — Christmas: More Than ‘Wonder & Awe’

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

I’ve said plenty of controversial things on podcasts — including on my own Sunday Buffet show — but maybe none as provocative as the one I’ll delve into today.

When last I wrote about the dangers of emotion-driven, imitative messaging found in society, I suggested that individuals must be willing to grow out of those destructive cycles.

This “mimetic cycles” framing originates with Rene Girard, especially as found in the French anthropologist’s book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. I discussed Girard’s book and how his analysis influenced my own thinking, during my most recent visit to the “History Homos” podcast (listen at Spotify, Rokfin, Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, and here on Substack).

For the full list of my interviews, click the image or this caption.

I had offered a parable of sorts to hosts Scott Lizard Abrams and William From England, about Jesus using simple ideas that replicate easily — memes! — but only as a means to more exploration, never to keep people occupied in the shallow, meme-level ruminations.

And then I gave the aforementioned controversial, provocative statement:

Satan accepts you as you are. Jesus says, repent and grow. So whenever I hear someone say, “God accepts me as I am,” I think, “No, He doesn’t.”

After I expanded on my click-bait comment, William From England remarked:

Ninety percent of the churchgoers listening to this probably go to a church where the pastor or whoever it is says, “God accepts you the way you are.”

Yep. And that’s why I have some more explaining to do here!

‘Just the Way You Are’

Billy Joel’s first Top 10 song in the U.S. was 1977’s jazzy “Just the Way You Are,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned him two Grammys in 1978.

The soft-rock feel of the melody, harmony and rhythm underpin lyrics of comfortable sentimentality. The speaker in the song tries to assure his love interest that superficial attempts to get attention (fashion, hairstyle, contrived cleverness in conversation) aren’t necessary to win and keep his affection.

While it’s good to have a relationship not based on shallow fads, the song also expresses a desire for a comfort that’s overly complacent: “I need to know that you will always be / The same old someone that I knew.”

That’s a problem.

Acceptance feels good. But, at what cost?

Humans don’t flourish as time capsules.

Like the world we live in, we are meant to change. Hopefully we change for the better, but that’s no guarantee.

For most of human history, as Girard posited, people have grown older biologically, but struggled to mature psychologically beyond the envious, rivalrous, violence-marred cycles of meme-level existence. Religions and social orders — which have almost always been connected — celebrated imposed order and control, to the chagrin of anarchist/voluntarist folks.

Girard sees this growth-stunting trap as the work of evil; in Christian/Gospel parlance, the work of Satan.

This primitive mode of behavior is still with humanity today. In some ways, it’s worse now. Since mimetic cycles fester in the desire for social validation — acceptance! — above all else, modern electronic “connections” can exacerbate the pathological outsourcing of ethics and critical thinking, and scale-up the feedback loop of worthiness or unworthiness in the eyes of others.¹

A frozen waterfall. Photo by Max LaRochelle on Unsplash

Love without stagnation

The message of Jesus in the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) is the notable exception Girard found when studying cultures and civilizations. Jesus knows people need to grow, to develop, to mature, to explore. He teaches the right kind of dynamic living, including motivations and aims.

And Jesus knows that any meaningful change needs the cooperation and consent of a person’s mind and heart.

In Matthew and Mark, the first words Jesus speaks in His public ministry are a call to repentance — a movement to re-orient the parts of the self that morally miss the mark — rather than acceptance of what people are doing (Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:14-15).

Jesus’ first quoted words of public ministry in Luke are of the confrontational variety in Nazareth, where the townsfolk reciprocate (and escalate!) Jesus’ criticisms by trying to throw Him off a cliff (Luke 4:16-30).

John opens his account of Jesus’ public preaching with a trip to Jerusalem, in which Jesus does the opposite of accepting the crooked “money-changers” in the Temple (John 2:13-25).

To the extent that acceptance is an excuse to be static, stagnant, and satisfied — to avoid good growth — with whatever feelings of external validation one has stoked, then it is Satan, not the God revealed in the person of Jesus in the Gospels, who accepts you as you are.

God does much better than acceptance; God genuinely loves the dynamic, fully alive, being-and-becoming you.

Do you love yourself enough to respond to the invitation to grow out of the acceptance-adoring, mimetic mess?

Is my argument … acceptable?

Sound off in the Comments about anything that strikes your fancy from today’s topics.

Do you like this series on Rene Girard and memes? I think I have one more installment of the meta-topic, and it’s probably going to be my Christmas present to everyone (Christmas is a Wednesday this year; yes, I intend to publish a Wednesday Wakeup article on Christmas!).

Also, I’m mulling some premium content in 2025. On that note … May I suggest, either my book and/or a paid Substack subscription makes a great gift for yourself or a loved one! They’re also a wonderful gift to me, for which I’m grateful, as I devote more resources to my writing and podcasting 🙏

Let me know your thoughts below …

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1. And, yes, I realize that I wrote this paragraph on an internet-connected device, to be accessed by readers via other such devices. Hopefully, I’m using this tool for more good than not.