For example, I recently read of a person who died that she was now “sleeping in Jesus.” I get it, but I don’t like it. Looking at that literally, it’s (a.) creepy and (b.) impossible, as if one regressed Benjamin Button-style to reimplant as an embryo on someone’s uterus. The phrase I think was meant was that she was “sleeping in Jesus’ arms,” which to me is a lot more peaceful and sensible (in a metaphorical way, anyway), the way many would like to imagine falling asleep and awakening.

Yet the prepositional disturbance that is “in Jesus” is prevalent in much religious rhetoric: meant to calm and assuage, it instead sounds eery and mindless. Take, for example, the following phrases:

Victory in Jesus: Would you ever say “Victory in Napoleon” or “Victory in George W. Bush”? Probably not, and not just because the latter was a dismal failure. “Victory over death through faith in Jesus” would perhaps be more accurate, so why not say it? Does the shortcut help anyone not already persuaded to understand?

Joy in Jesus: this is just incomplete. Joy in Jesus’…what? Life? Death? Sacrifice? Pick your object. Or better yet, rephrase your sentence: “Jesus gives me joy.”

New life in Jesus: Again, creepy, suggestive of pregnancy. Rephrase.

Of course, the problem with clarifying your rhetoric so that it makes sense grammatically and to a constituency less familiar with traditional religious verbiage is that you may end up making yourself less clear to the constituency that is educated “in Jesus.”

Well, to plagiarize that one singer, no one said it would be easy.