Predatory God: Challenging the Worlds We Inherit, Creating the Gods We Need, and Building the Future We Deserve

For readers of Jesus and John Wayne, a powerful investigation of Christianity, the inherited worlds we mistake for reality, and what it takes to build differently.

Jo Luehmann, a Colombian immigrant and ordained pastor, believed she had found a forever home in the evangelical church. Christianity gave her language for love and sacrifice, authority and belonging, suffering and redemption. Ministry was her entire life.

But the harder she worked to become the person she believed she should be, the less reality resembled what she had been taught to expect. She began to see how easily control could be called protection, obedience maturity, and self-erasure love. Eventually, she left.

Leaving changed what Jo believed. It did not undo how she had been formed. In Predatory God, she draws on memoir, psychology, theology, history, and systems thinking to examine how inherited worlds teach us what is good, dangerous, and required for belonging—and how people reproduce that logic even while consciously opposing it. Here, “God” is both a figure of faith and a grammar: a way of organizing power so completely that domination can become fluent in the language of goodness.

Neither an indictment of Christianity nor an argument in its defense, Predatory God finds no simple villains or heroes and does not exempt its author from the systems it examines. It asks what becomes possible when we recognize the worlds that formed us, decide what deserves to be carried forward, and build differently.