TL;DR: What happens when Christianity turns Jesus into someone who primarily affirms who we already are? Using a recent sermon and the old “God is my copilot” slogan, I explore why the good news is more than “good job”—and why we might actually need a Savior, not a sidekick.

Subscribe now

Increasingly, within modern American Christianity, Jesus has come to be seen as a sidekick rather than a Savior—someone who affirms and celebrates us, but hardly challenges or shapes us, let alone saves us.

In this sense, the “good news” simply becomes “good job.”

In this piece, I’d like to examine the limits of such thinking, utilizing a sermon clip I encountered on social media and a ’90s-era bumper sticker slogan. Coming along with me on this conversation are Andrew Root’s books Churches and the Crisis of Decline and Evangelism in the Age of Despair, as well as Mildred Bangs Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love, as I ask this central question:

What happens when Jesus becomes a sidekick rather than a Savior?

A Sermon About a Trans God

Recently, I came across a clip shared on social media from a sermon given by an Episcopal priest. I’d rather not highlight the social media account because my intent here is not to shame or belittle the preacher, the Rev. Flourish Klink, but rather to quibble with some elements of Klink’s theology and seek to draw out broader implications for progressive Mainline churches.

Thanks to ChatGPT, I was able to find both the full video of the sermon from the church’s YouTube page, as well as the full text of the sermon provided on Klink’s website.

I’ll put links to the video and sermon text here: [VIDEO] & [SERMON TEXT]

Klink is an Episcopal priest who uses they/them pronouns and is currently Assistant Priest at Christ & Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. The sermon was delivered March 21, 2026, at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City during its Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience. I’ll mostly reference Klink by name rather than they/them simply for readability.

In the full sermon text, there are some interesting theological claims. While I’ll share some of them here, I want to reaffirm that my aim is not to belittle or mock Klink as a clergyperson, as I think the original social-media clip I first saw was attempting to do—and why I am not sharing it here—but rather to parse out some of the implications of what Klink claims.

The “headline” is this: Klink explicitly argues that God is nonbinary and trans and connects the Resurrection to transition.

“God is trans. It is not even a particularly convoluted theological statement to make.”

I found that statement a little confusing because, within the same sermon, Klink also asserts that “God is beyond human categorizations like gender” while then arguing that “God is non-binary,” which to me seems itself a human categorization.

Klink then argues that Mary “assigned a gender at birth” to Jesus. Klink also asserts that to deny that God is trans is to deny the divinity of Christ, which seems like a fairly significant leap to me.

Now, I’m going to stop here because my point in this blog isn’t really to argue with Klink’s interpretation, but rather Klink’s theology. And yes, for my purposes here, I am arguing that the assertion that God is trans is an interpretation that stems from Klink’s broader theological perspective.

And lest it seem that I am particularly seeking to pick on Klink, there are things in the sermon I would absolutely affirm—namely, that God cares for the downtrodden and abides with those who suffer.

Klink says:

“God promises us life, joy, beauty, dignity. God made us joyful and beautiful and authentic and wise.”

But Klink doesn’t leave it at that and, in fact, goes further. God does this “…because our God is trans.”

And this is where I would pause.

Must God Be Like Us to Love Us?

Let me say this first: I’m not particularly troubled by the idea that God is beyond human categorizations like sex and gender. Nor does the idea that “God is trans” itself cause shivers to go up my spine. As I’ve stated above, I feel like that statement is somewhat contradictory—but that’s not what I want to focus on.

Rather, what I want to take issue with is the idea that “God promises us life, joy, beauty, dignity. God made us joyful and beautiful and authentic and wise” because God is trans.

A question immediately comes to mind:

Must God share our identity in order to love us?

Perhaps this is where context is helpful. Again, this sermon was given during a Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine around the time of the Trans Day of Visibility, so context does matter. Klink is speaking these words as encouragement to a particular audience that likely included trans people, or at least those who know and love trans people.

But the more I sat with it, the more I kept coming back to a quote from Andrew Root:

“Religion does not want a living God—who is alive in speaking both a yes and a no—it wants an object to use of its own individual meaning making” (203).

I’ve often seen the statement “God is queer AF” within progressive Christian spaces. Again, I struggle to understand how this is not using human categorizations to define God, but perhaps this is my own shortcoming.

Nonetheless, to further my argument, let me use a far less controversial statement that has similarly been shared far and wide: “God is my copilot.”

God Is My Copilot

While the prevalence of “God is my copilot” bumper stickers has greatly decreased since the late ’90s or early 2000s—I recently wondered with my kids why the prevalence of bumper stickers in general has declined so much—the idea of “God is my copilot” gets at what I’m trying to say here.

If God is my copilot, I’m still the pilot.

(For what it’s worth, I do remember hearing critiques of this logic even back then.)

And increasingly, within modern American Christianity, we do not want a Savior. We simply want a sidekick—someone who affirms who I am and what I’m about rather than someone who rescues and redeems me from my own brokenness.

And this is not simply a progressive problem. “God is my copilot” certainly wasn’t a slogan born out of progressive Mainline Christianity. The broader temptation is to make God into someone who accompanies and affirms the life and identity I have already chosen for myself.

Talking about the divine-human interaction, Wynkoop writes:

“if God is limited by man’s experience, something is said about God that puts an impossible limitation on Him in the Christian view” (224).

And this is why I increasingly struggle with “I am enough” language being used within many Mainline church contexts.

If “I am enough” means I am already everything I need to be, I certainly do not need a Savior. At most, I need someone who encourages me and supports me in the struggle. I need a sidekick, a good friend maybe, but certainly not someone who will challenge and confront me or call me to account.

(Perhaps there is also a lesson here for modern friendships and relationships.)

Here again, Wynkoop is helpful as she notes the danger in a philosophical perspective that assumes:

“man is a projection of Deity, or the finite projection of Deity, or the finite experience of Deity…Every man is a spar of the divine nature. He is a ‘lost’ fragment of God whose ‘salvation’ consists in merging again into God” (224).

We Need a Savior

This is not to say that God does not deeply love us and seek reconciliation with us. A beloved passage tells us that God takes extraordinary efforts on our behalf.

As we read in John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

There are a couple of interesting things there, but most importantly for my argument, Jesus makes clear that what humans need is not a sidekick, but a Savior.

We need rescuing from something.

And I think the larger conversation with Nicodemus makes the point even clearer. Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness, and Christ’s invitation to him is not simply, “You’re fine as you are.”

Rather Jesus tells him: “You must be born again.”

In Root’s Evangelism in the Age of Despair, Root notes how EASY it is to find “friends,” those who will support us when things are good. But when life really hits the skids, a sad-face emoji may be all that can be counted on—real life actions are just too much.

God, however, is a minister—something Root writes about in Faith Formation in a Secular Age—and we evangelize not by telling someone they are fine and good, or even merely that God affirms them for who they are, but rather that in the midst of their pain, suffering, challenge, and brokenness, God is with them seeking to bring rescue (my words).

One other thing I want to highlight from Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus is that Christ’s invitation to Nicodemus is the same as it is to you and me, regardless of our gender or sexuality: be born again.

And that invitation is not dependent upon God sharing our own gender or sexuality.

God loves trans people not because God must first be trans, but because God is love.

And if I may add this: If I don’t share someone’s identity—or insist that God does—can I still share good news with them, or anyone else?

I believe I have good news to share with every person I meet, not in and of myself, and especially not because God is like them, but precisely because God loves them, I can proclaim the good news to them; “God forgives you, and God is here for you—whoever you are.”

Good News or “Good Job”?

Perhaps I’m out of bounds here, but increasingly I see within some expressions of progressive Christianity—which I think Klink’s sermon illustrates—a theological move toward telling people, “You’re all good, and Jesus is here to affirm that within you.”

Again, Jesus becomes a sidekick, but not a Savior.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, people are like, “Nah man, I’m good.”

Increasingly, I’m convinced of this: people aren’t looking for someone to tell them they are special. They want someone to tell them they are loved and forgiven.

And you want to know what the real good news is?

If I may be so bold, it’s not simply “God made us who we are.”

It’s that God loves us in our brokenness—and comes to rescue and redeem us, no matter who we are. That is as true for me as it is for Klink or anyone else.1

A sidekick affirms the story I’m already telling about myself.

A Savior loves me enough to enter my pain and brokenness, speaks a gracious yes and no to me, rescues me, and transforms me.

I’m not sure if this is the best wording here. I don’t mean to say that trans people need to be redeemed from their identity anymore than I need to be redeemed of mine. But rather that we are all in need of rescue and redemption.

When Jesus Becomes a Sidekick Rather Than a…