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Making Excuses for God: What We Owe the People We Failed

Making Excuses for God: What We Owe the People We Failed

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 1:40 pm by Eric Scot English

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Making Excuses for God: What We Owe the People We Failed 2026-10-19T13:40:47-04:00 Eric Scot English

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On June 28th, R.L. Stollar posted what appears to be a suicide letter to his blog under the title “The End.” | Image courtesy of RLStoliar.com

Authors Note:

This article discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

On June 28th, R.L. Stollar posted what appears to be a suicide letter to his blog under the title “The End.” He was a theologian, a counselor, an author who wrote about child liberation theology, a former Patheos columnist and a survivor of childhood abuse. He cited depression, PTSD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, substance abuse, and a marriage ending as the things contributing to his decision. He says his decision was not impulsive. He also cited the current “American Hellscape” as a contributing factor. And then he wrote this:

“I have spent my whole life making excuses for a god who never raised a finger to spare me from being molested as a child or the lifelong consequences of that abuse. Those consequences have slowly but surely consumed everything in my life.”

I did not know Stollar personally. I cannot speak to his final hours or the full weight of what he carried. What I can say is that I recognize the pain and theology underneath that sentence — not a theology based on his training, but a theology that suffering teaches. The kind that gets formed not in classrooms but in years of waiting for a God who does not seem to come.

That theology is honest. And it is the kind of honesty that the American evangelical church has no idea what to do with.

The God Who Remains Abstract

I have written before about what I call evangelical idealism — the tendency to relate to God not as a living presence but as an abstraction. It is a concept held safely in the mind where it cannot be tested by anything as inconvenient as real life. In this framework, God becomes a theological idea rather than a force that actually intervenes, disrupts, or shows up in the middle of someone’s worst night.

The consequences of this kind of idealism are not merely intellectual. They are pastoral and lethal.

When God is primarily an idea, God’s people become idea-holders primarily. The suffering person in the pew becomes, at best, a theological problem to be solved — a test case for theodicy — and at worst, an inconvenience to the community’s carefully maintained sense that everything is fine. The stock answer gets deployed: God won’t give you more than you can bear. God has a plan. You just need more faith. These are not pastoral responses. There are ways to end a conversation that has made the room uncomfortable.

Stollar spent his life making excuses for a God who, in his own accounting, never raised a finger to spare him from abuse. That is not a faith crisis manufactured in a college philosophy class. That is a man who believed, who kept believing through molestation and its aftermath, through decades of mental illness, through a dissolving marriage, and who eventually ran out of reasons to keep making the case. What he deserved from the church was someone willing to sit in that darkness with him, without flinching or reaching for a quick theological fix. What he likely got, at various points in his life, was something much smaller.

The Cost of Playing It Safe

There is a specific kind of cruelty that operates through comfort. It does not announce itself as cruelty. It shows up as concern, as prayer, as “let us know if you need anything” — the offer extended with the sincere hope that no one will take it up. It is the cruelty of a community that has organized itself around comfort and calls that organization faithfulness.

Conservative evangelical culture has spent decades building walls around its people. Not walls against sin, as it claims, but walls against disruption — against the kind of encounter with suffering, doubt, or complexity that might destabilize the group’s sense of itself. Leaders insulate their congregations from hard questions. They preach certainty as virtue. They cultivate communities where admitting that you are not okay feels like a confession of spiritual failure. And the people who are not okay — the ones carrying what Stollar was carrying — learn very quickly that there is no safe place to set it down.

This is not incidental. It follows directly from the theological idealism at the center of so much evangelical culture. If God is primarily a set of doctrines to be defended, then doubt is a threat. If faith is primarily a posture of certainty, then struggle is a scandal. If the church exists mainly to preserve its own identity and influence, then the person who might expose the limits of that identity — the person in genuine crisis — becomes a problem to manage rather than a human being to accompany.

The ones who pay for this are not the leaders. They are not the people who built the system. The ones who pay are people like Stollar.

What Honest Faith Actually Requires

I have often found it harder to believe in God as a Christian than I imagine it would be as a skeptic. The skeptic has an intellectual problem with God’s existence. That is, in some ways, a cleaner problem. It can be argued, researched, resolved or not resolved on philosophical terms. But the problem that Stollar named is different. It is an existential problem — the problem of a person who believed and suffered anyway, who prayed and was not spared, who made excuses for God until he simply had no more to make.

That kind of suffering cannot be answered with an apologetics argument. It cannot be fixed with a small group or a sermon series on resilience. It requires the kind of faith that is willing to enter darkness without demanding that it resolve into light on a convenient timeline. It requires people who have done their own honest reckoning with pain and are therefore not terrified by someone else’s.

The uncomfortable truth is that this is precisely what Jesus models. Not triumphalism. Not certainty performed for the crowd. What the Gospels actually show is a person who moves toward the suffering, who touches the untouchable, who asks questions of the grieving rather than delivering speeches at them. The church that follows him should be the safest place on earth to fall apart. By and large, it is not.

A Different Kind of Accountability

I want to speak plainly to anyone in an evangelical congregation who has watched someone spiral and did not know what to say, and so said something small and moved on. That is not a personal failing you should carry alone. It is the product of a culture that trained you to treat suffering as a theological category rather than a human emergency. You were not given the tools. That is worth grieving, and worth changing.

But accountability still runs upward. The leaders who have built communities around comfort and called it Christianity, who have trained their people to prioritize the group’s sense of spiritual health over any individual’s actual crisis — those leaders bear weight here. Not legal weight. Moral weight. The kind that does not dissolve with a prayer or a statement of concern after the fact.

There are people in your congregation carrying what Stollar carried. Some of them are carrying it quietly because they learned, somewhere along the way, that the cost of honesty in your community is too high. The question is not whether your theology is orthodox. The question is whether your people know they can fall apart in front of you and still be held.

That is not a therapeutic question. It is a theological one. And the answer you give with your culture, week after week, is the one that counts.

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About Eric English

Eric is a rogue philosopher, theologian, author, podcaster and ninja. He is a father of three, husband of one, and a poet unto himself. Eric’s main areas of thinking are in philosophy (specifically, Soren Kierkegaard), theology (Narrative Perspectivism), and culture. Eric also hosts the podcast UNenlightenment. You can read more about the author here.

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