Imagine trying to pray and finding yourself wondering whether anybody is listening. It’s an honest question. But if you’ve been taught that God inspects your thoughts for signs of insufficient faith, you now have to apologize for the doubt before you can do anything useful with it.

God heard you wondering whether God could hear you. Good luck sorting that out before bedtime.

That’s the version of God I want to look at next in The Gods We Inherited. We’ve considered the ruler and the owner. The watcher doesn’t even need you to misbehave. Having a thought can be enough.

There’s something deeply comforting about the possibility that we are understood beyond what we can explain. When someone’s grieving, “God knows” might mean they don’t have to produce a coherent prayer. When someone’s ashamed, it might mean the whole story is known, including the parts nobody bothered to ask about.

I have no interest in taking that away. But “God knows” can also be delivered with the unmistakable suggestion that you’re in trouble.

Same two words. Very different God.

Psalm 139 gives us plenty to wrestle with. The speaker describes God knowing their thoughts and being present wherever they go, including darkness and death. There’s language of being held and guided. There’s also a stretch where the speaker wants God to kill the wicked, followed by an invitation to examine the speaker’s own heart. It’s a prayer with some things going on.

I can find comfort in it without pretending every line is comforting. What concerns me is taking its language of intimate knowledge and teaching people that their minds are being searched for violations. You can call that divine care, but the person afraid to admit a question may experience it rather differently.

The watcher can make running and controlling a religious community considerably easier. People learn to check themselves even when nobody else is around. They worry about their anger before asking whether they were mistreated. They question their motives for leaving before asking whether the church has given them good reasons to go.

Meanwhile, the person who taught them all this may regard questions about their own conduct as an attack on the ministry. Apparently, God has excellent visibility into your private thoughts but could use some assistance locating the church’s financial records.

Not every belief in an all-knowing God produces that arrangement. But when it does, we should be willing to question the theology helping it along. A church that demands access to people’s inner lives ought to be particularly open about how its leaders exercise power.

There’s a political question here, too. How readily do we accept monitoring when somebody promises it’s for our protection? Sometimes gathering information is necessary. That doesn’t settle who gets watched, who can see the information, or what prevents its misuse. Calling constant inspection loving in one setting shouldn’t make us less curious about it in another.

In Genesis 16, Hagar recognizes God as the one who sees her after she flees Sarai’s mistreatment. The story also has a deeply troubling instruction to return and submit. I’m not going to tidy that up, and I certainly wouldn’t offer it as advice to someone escaping abuse. But Hagar’s recognition still matters: her suffering has been noticed.

That’s something I want our theology to make room for. Being seen can mean somebody finally takes your pain seriously. It doesn’t have to mean somebody finally caught you.

And no, this doesn’t get us out of examining ourselves. I need to notice when I’m cultivating resentment or finding excuses for cruelty. But there’s a difference between facing something honestly and treating every unwanted thought as a confession. A passing thought and a decision to harm somebody deserve different responses.

If God knows us as deeply as we say, surely that understanding includes the difference. We don’t have to turn our minds into interrogation rooms to become more responsible people. Sometimes we need enough trust to admit what’s going on in there.

I’d rather people could bring an honest doubt to prayer than spend the whole time apologizing for God having overheard it.