Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. James 1: 2-4
It is common for the Evangelical to hold the belief that suffering ultimately works to benefit the believer as the above excerpt from James exemplifies. As it also common to believe that a good part of this suffering comes as a result of faith in Christ (2 Timothy 3: 12.) This has led to the common martyr complex exhibited by many American Christians today which supposes the satanic, woke, leftist culture is what oppresses the average Christian. This myth persists giving sanction for the current political imperative for Christians to ‘take back’ the United States for God. Evangelical teaching, having come out of a long tradition of maintaining the institution of white supremacy (justifying hierarchy and segregation for economic gain and political stability,) has built a system of thought to protect the money-making institution (the church) itself by convincing the faithful that their suffering is the result of wicked people outside the church. Poppycock. The church itself is the oppressor. Here is my case…
To be human means we must face suffering. The ever-present question remains in how to morally face (and combat) suffering in ourselves and others. We categorize and separate, scapegoat, blame, shift, obfuscate, and divert the sources, relations, and domains of our suffering in attempts to avoid the pain and to save face. Politically, we can shift the blame towards the ‘others.’ Either directly or indirectly, we point the finger at brown people coming over the border, it’s those homosexuals, it’s in our tolerance of abortion, which brings ‘God’s Wrath’ to rain down upon our country. Really? Is that why we suffer? As I’ve heard in sermon after sermon, the not-so-faithful suffer for a myriad of different reasons which can be broadly summarized in not being faithful enough to God (i.e. what the church teaches about what God wants from us.) The church has built a system for explaining the suffering of those who support the church; either it blames the external wicked, satanic culture, the victim of abuse, or God Himself. The system of authoritarian hierarchy itself helps make this possible. The evangelical church will not examine itself—it’s descent into depravity is too far along.
I’ll say it again, I don’t (that is, no longer) believe God is an asshole. As well-meaning as it all well may be to the naive, evangelical teaching makes God out to be an asshole. Pure and simple. All the teaching about joy, suffering, and forgiveness masks and defers confronting the actual human evils, including what the ‘righteous’ teach and do themselves, which lead to suffering. How could the behavior of homosexuals whom you’ve never met have any relation to your suffering? Evangelicals do this because it’s easy. How many times have we heard high profile evangelical teachers talking about hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, economic downturns, and even declining SAT scores as God’s curse upon us for tolerating things like abortion and homosexuality? Hundreds? Thousands? For another example, the ‘Focus on the Family,’ purity culture teaching additionally places the fate of the nation upon the ‘purity’ of adolescent female bodies. I grieve this because I know people who have gravely hurt by this lie. I’ve forwarded this stuff personally because I honestly believed that is what good men do. I’m so ashamed I didn’t see through this sooner. People in the church have been shocked to hear that I would now speak against the beloved, ‘godly’ wisdom of Dr. James Dobson. (I was raised on the teachings of that man. Dobson worked under the eugenicist Paul Popenoe. Yep. Dobson just did a better job camouflaging the ‘fact’ that we need more submissive, properly ordered women to pump out more white babies.) How can such a powerful, hence blessed, and beloved ‘Christian’ industry be wrong about something so obvious and fundamental? Because we’ve been taught Dobson’s advice is ‘biblical’ and the evangelical culture enforces this belief. I remain the heretic for believing the ‘Focus on the Family’ stuff to be oppressive and evil. I cannot undo what I’ve done in parroting that shit. I can only try to change for the future.
(Did you know Russian conservative social scientists, not the religious leaders, adopted Dobson’s rhetoric as a means of convincing Russian [white] women [who had been taking advantage of newfound freedoms] that it was their obligation to be submissive baby factories? The Handmaid’s Tale is not that far off the reality of the length these people would go to ‘save’ us.)
Looking at the specks in every else’s eye, somebody must take the blame for our ‘decline;’ besides LGBTQ people and abortions, why not place the burden upon the weakness of teen girls to fend off the ‘Wild at Heart’ boys as well? We do and believe it’s biblical to maintain old ideas where women in general had little to no standing or rights. As I’ve heard in sermon after sermon, from one parishioner after another, we divert the causes of our suffering upon ethereal notions of ‘God’s Wrath’ upon the toleration of the ‘other’s sin;’ the blame descends even upon your own young women. The fact that you all believe God punishes the nation because you all do not adequately thump on (punish and shame) the vulnerable tells me you all believe God is an asshole. I’m guilty too.
Has there been much talk from within the church about its own toleration of spiritual and sexual abuse, its active coverups of those crimes to maintain appearances, its toleration of lies in its pursuit of power? Not much that I’ve seen. Check out Wartburgwatch.com, the corruption in the church is massive. Those who do dare to question are ostracized as the problem. In addition to fostering a stable of largely silenced victims for sexual exploitation, the evangelical church is also completely submerged in a sea of lies to conceal its supremacist roots by gaslighting all attempts at revealing systemic racism. The church has concocted a theology of appearances. Its leaders either spout lies and hatred of the ‘others’ like Greg Locke and the like, or in milquetoast fashion, act as if there is nothing wrong.
People like Greg Locke are just plain assholes. People who follow leaders like Greg Locke are honest and bold enough to be the open and honest assholes they are. Bravo. Thank you for at least being open about it. Where it gets hazy is trying to determine if those pastors who pretend that there is nothing seriously wrong in the church by just continuing ‘business as usual’ are active concealers of the problem (a form of the word-of-the-year gaslighting,) or are truly innocent of the fact that the church has institutionalized systematic abuse and the obfuscation of the truth. It’s hard to tell. I was fooled for decades. Damn I feel stupid. Do I give those pastors who act like there is nothing wrong a break? After all, we are all subject to ‘truth’ formed through hundreds of years of conditioning to protect the institution itself, its power structures, and money flow. Let’s dig a little into the practical affect common Christian teaching and/or aphorisms has upon the psyches, beliefs, and practices among the faithful.
Forgiveness is a Christian absolute. In a recent sermon about the ‘Lordship of Christ,’ absolute obedience to that Lordship, substitute the church in as Christ’s surrogate, is imperative. Since Jesus Himself is not standing in front of us, the church practically acts as the authority. There is no practical way out of this since the church functions as an authoritarian structure which assumes to speak for Christ. Evil men and women, looking to make a buck, looking to molest and subjugate, are offered a culture in which the victims are endlessly admonished by ‘God’ to forgive whatever abuse they suffer. And if they don’t, heaven forbid, they will not be forgiven themselves. How often will it be their fault, an offense against ‘God,’ if they should sully the image of church should they reveal and/or confront the abuse openly? Very often. The abused are called to abide, forgive, and give 10% of their income to the ‘Lordship of Christ’ to keep supporting the institution of abuse.
Various coping mechanisms must be developed to maintain the facade. I recently heard a heartbreaking ‘testimony’ which revealed a long list of hurt and betrayals, being lied to, but that it ultimately led to the blessing of being where they are now. (As if they won’t get fucked again where they are now.) In evangelical theology, ‘everything happens for a reason.’ This puts God on the hook; again, God is an asshole. All the hurts dealt by the church, and all the hurts delivered by the ‘holier-than-thou’ men are given by God for the ultimate benefit of those so abused. Delicious, isn’t it? This institutional cannibalism will not change until it is seriously challenged.
Moreover, evangelicals teach that the experience of joy is not circumstantial. Again, how convenient for those in the power structure to abuse those under their charge? This mechanism is akin to and bolstered by the massive ‘health and wealth’ industry which supposes if you are not personally healthy and wealthy then your ‘faith’ must be lacking—there is something wrong with you and your relationship with God. It poisons everything. Likewise, the faithful are expected to feel joy, which is supposedly non-circumstantial and is a ‘fruit of the spirit’ (Galatians 5:22,) no matter what they may be experiencing. If you don’t feel ‘joy,’ there is something wrong with you and your relationship with God. Thus, the well-meaning appeal to joy acts as a command to feel joy no matter what. This acts as a mechanism to suppress confronting real evils and abuse within the church. And so, abuse flourishes and is protected.
In ejecting evangelical theology, I’ve never been happier. I no longer, honestly, believe God is an asshole. All the man-made inventions which turned Him into one are falling away. The dysfunctional appeals to joy under the uncertainty of being in ‘right relationship’ with God have given way to relaxation and acceptance of my uncertain state in the universe. The evangelical formula for salvation doesn’t make any biblical sense anyway. Such a formulation, typified in the sinner’s prayer, is self-centered as it serves as a protective spell against the threat of eternal conscious torment. Hence, faith de-centers. If I face oblivion, so be it. Although there will be no me to be thankful then (whenever and whatever then is,) I will be thankful now for my life now. I simply do not believe the church’s threat of eternal conscious torment to obey its dictates to hence endure its abusive teaching on everything else.
Forgiveness is not something to be demanded. Forgiveness is not absolute. Those evangelicals who would argue with me on this point, I would point to the evangelical doctrine of eternal conscious torment—God doesn’t forgive them (and perhaps me) to painfully suffer His hatred forever for offending Him. God thus forever becomes the vindictive victim.
Forgiveness is much more dynamic than that. With evangelical teaching as forgiveness becoming an absolute, the onus for ‘fixing’ a separation of relationship due to an offense lies upon the victim. I agree that I cannot ‘work’ my way to heaven—no argument there. Such an approach to works would be self-centered anyway. I’ve done things to hurt people, I’m sorry, but it is done and there is nothing I can do to change that. There is no formula to ‘fix’ any wrong which has already been done. That is the law of action in the flow of time. So, in an absolute sense there is no absolution. My offenses may be forgiven but I have no right to demand that they be. If the faithful are, in effect, commanded to forgive unconditionally then the predators, the abusers, those who do not count the little people as being fully human worthy of equal consideration, are given the freedom to act without a check upon their abuses. This is fundamentally evil and is the environment evangelicalism currently offers.
A healthier, more balanced approach to forgiveness is that if one is truly penitent, he or she would not appeal to the supposed universal demand for forgiveness to be let off the hook. The offender would, in a better world, desire to alleviate the suffering of the person offended but would not want to add to that suffering with any demands for forgiveness or even the acceptance of their own presence if that should add to the hurt. Expressing sorrow could be cathartic to the victim but if such sorrow is indeed taken to be genuine it must be given and accepted in an atmosphere of freedom. The command to offer absolute forgiveness under threat destroys the environment of freedom so that true healing can occur. Force, fear, and threat destroy love. Yet the evangelical views the call to absolute forgiveness to be the very essence of expressed love; in this we have a major disagreement.
If the penitent one is truly sorry, in the circumstances of victim’s refusal to acknowledge the offender’s apology, the penitent’s obligations regardless of acceptance ought to shift towards the whole human race to do the work required to not offend/hurt others in the future. That is all we can do. This better leads to equality amongst humans who harm each other. Peace can only come through equality and equal recognition, else there is only subjugation, submission, and oppression. Forgiveness then can be freely given, without coercion, as there would be no force of threat to punishment by the ultimate authority in the universe if one should fail to yield to their supposed obligation. Abusers would no longer have the freedom to do as they do and be let off the hook; it would be their choice to yield to the dignity and humanity of others—or to not.
Likewise, with the typical evangelical teaching to experience joy as a fruit of the spirit, the faithful adherence to command to joy is not free to experience the full range of human emotions which naturally come in response to care, solidarity, or abuse. As it stands now, citing case after case, the victims of those higher up the chain of authority are commanded to feel joy no matter what is being done to them. This is sick and alienating. Did your pastor, husband, father, mother do something awful to you? Why can’t you be more forgiving? I’ve heard this time, after time, after time. The parishioners themselves will tear into and shame into submission anyone who would dare make an accusation against a beloved holy figure. It happens all the time. In evangelical thought as practically applied, forgiveness functions within, and according to, the chain of hierarchy. As a personal example, the one who hurt me the most is higher up the chain of authority and has made it abundantly clear that she has no obligation to acknowledge the ways in which she gravely hurt me and my children. On the contrary, the command to forgiveness has been weaponized against me, under threat of eternal damnation by God Himself, that I should bend the knee to beg her forgiveness for not meeting my obligations as a son—to endure ongoing belittlement and shaming which in her twisted mind would lead to my betterment (and salvation) if would just submit. For decades I lived under this threat, of not submitting adequately to God’s command, as it served as a platform for decades of abuse. Brainwashed, I honestly thought that God was an asshole who required that I forgive whatever abuses I suffered through the words and actions of mom. I’ve now lived 5 free years away from her by rejecting that fucked up evangelical teaching. This is yet another reason why I’ve never been happier.
The universal and absolute call to joy and forgiveness says little, if nothing, of alleviating suffering. Rather, the teaching serves up a fatalistic command to accept suffering and be happy about it. Your kid has cancer? It’s not really a tragedy, it is ultimately a gift from God for everyone’s benefit. Again, God is implicated as an asshole which then must be covered for. Steven Pinker wrote a book, Better Angels of our Nature, which compiles hundreds of years of data to dispel the myth of the ‘good ol’ days.’ He makes abundant case that despite whatever FoxNews says about crime and the ever-present ‘Crisis at the Border!’ things are progressively (an evil word, I know) getting more healthy, prosperous, and far less violent. (No thanks to the right-wing assholes openly calling for the violent overthrow of our government with no shame or fear of reprisal from the electorate.) The primary reason given for this significant advancement is the better treatment of children. Because children are named, cared for, and educated, and the ‘godly’ doctrine of beating the shit out of your kids because they are pissing you off (sanctify it all you want, but this is how it often practiced—as it was with me) are being increasing rejected, subsequent generations are becoming kinder, more accepting of difference, and are less violent. This is making a better world.
What makes a better world is not the acceptance of suffering, but the active quest to eliminate it. Kindness tends to beget kindness. Cruelty tends to beget cruelty, reprisal, or cowardice. The acceptance of suffering leads us to believe those less fortunate than us likely ought to remain in that condition for their own betterment—perhaps serving as an incentive for them to reach out to God. We would not have to then consider our role in the actual physical betterment of their situation lest we interfere with their spiritual development according to God’s will. This is where this teaching can and does lead towards the belief in (white Christian) supremacy. If we were to take the teaching of suffering leading to our betterment to its logical end, then indeed ‘that which does not kill me only makes me stronger.’ A cruel world would remain where only the strongest survive in a violent world of desperate scarcity as it has been for thousands of years. All the work of scientists, doctors, and engineers to grow more food, to produce more energy to fuel technological advancement, to develop vaccines, medicine, surgical techniques, and diagnostic machines would be stifled by the notion that God intends us to joyfully suffer for own betterment. We live in such a world where even the most ardent fundamentalist must cherry-pick the scriptures to deal with the dissonance created by our collective prosperity created by people trying to make a better world.
The cherry-picking to support the sorting process continues as unreflective evangelical teachers parrot the party line concerning joy and suffering. To end on a positive note, I believe it would be better to regard James’ (if it was indeed James, the brother of Jesus) teaching within its original context—advice to a community that did not have the social power to better its situation. That teaching is fatalistic and if taken as an absolute would leave little incentive to work towards making a better world for everyone. I’ll repeat, EVERYONE. Do not teach people to accept suffering. Teach them to work to overcome it. Teach people that it is okay, normal, rational, human to experience sadness, anger, indignation, grief in the face of suffering and abuse. Do not teach people to mask themselves lest they be regarded as being less-than-spiritually okay because they do not have joy—a fruit of the spirit. The common teaching concerning joy has led to the church being not only being the most segregated hour of the week but also the most masked. Teach them to seek justice, not some appearance of an emotion to save face.
Teach them that they are not obligated to automatically forgive. ALL PEOPLE, no matter the race, color, sex, preference, relation, ethnicity, abilities, religion, etc. are equal in every way no matter how we see their relation to God. There is no legitimate hierarchy of persons. Teach people to live this. This creates a culture in which justice is sought; appearances are not the concern. (Answer honestly, was Jesus concerned with appearances?) Predators would have a much harder time working their damage in such an environment where every human being was being actively protected regardless of how things may appear. Let everyone feel loved by offering that protection no matter what with no shame of sullying the name of the church should abuse occur and be revealed. Let air get to the wounds. It is about time we stop weaponizing joy and forgiveness.
Amen