Of Course Church Will Hurt Us: Working Backwards is the Way Forward
Some Provisional Conclusions on the Traumatic Church Discourse
In this, the 5th installment on the church trauma discourse, we reach some provisional conclusions.1 This will be a subscriber-only installment.
Working Backwards: Revisiting the Sources of the Conflation of Harm and Abuse
In a previous installment, we talked about the various sources which have contributed to the concept creep in which all “ordinary harms” becomes described as abuses. Insofar as either ordinary harm or abuse can cause trauma, it was only a matter of time—absent the expectation that churches are comprised of sinners—that the worst and most grievous harms (abuses) would be the stand-in for more ordinary, and frequently unintended harms.
So, to start a provisional conclusion, I want to offer a preface: before we can begin to distinguish this distinction again, there must be a recovery of a doctrine of sin in churches, full stop. By this, I think I’ve been clear that I’m not interested in an ashes-and-worms kind of anthropology: God created you to share in that goodness that is God, and sin cannot destroy that deep logic. And it’s not helpful here to simply name sin as problem that Jesus fixes, some foil for the hero to overcome.
Sin is the damage to God’s world, the wound that festers and corrupts who we are meant to be, namely, being God’s creature all the way down. And so, the church is not a reprieve from this, but the hospital in which God’s grace works out our salvation in fear and trembling.
The popular discourse around church as a place of trauma stems backwards from not seeing church in this way—as a recovering body—though the material factors for the conflation are manifold. Let us begin to think backwards2, then, through the various ways in which the traumatic discourse gained traction gives us a sense of what a way home might look like.
Anxiety, Religion, and Change Revisited
Central to the confusion from this angle is the manner in which any and all anxiety about the self becomes a call for self-defense. For some, there is great need for trepidation here: children absorb things in profound ways, and the way in which adults intend for children to absorb them is rarely how it happens.3 As such, we have to recover—alongside a doctrine of sin—a practice of the pardon of Christ. As a Baptist, we don’t go for formalized liturgy. Yes, I know: it’s all liturgy whether we name it that or not—the sermon always always always goes near the end, and the children’s message is between the third and fourth hymn.
But to regularly, as a congregation, have a time where we not only acknowledge our sin, but have someone pronounce God’s forgiveness to you is a powerful thing. It is not enough to have me remind myself: I’ve got a terrible memory, physically and spiritually speaking. And to have another give those words to me, words which I need to hear, that you have been forgiven in the name of Jesus Christ go and sin no more—these are the most powerful words I can think of. They cut the Gordian knot of our self-judgment by placing us in a colony of sinners who are being forgiven, because this is who God is: slow to anger, longsuffering and patient.
Feeling-as-Thinking Revisited
The basis for conflation was laid long ago when the affections were given a more centrally navigating role in terms of our cognitive processes. I’m not calling here for a Stoic posture, in which fate is accepted in more detached kind of way—you should react when you lose something you love, because it means that you cared in some way about that thing! But when the emotions become not only an index that something you care about has been harmed, but also supposed to tell us that our care about it is properly ordered, the emotions are being asked to do too much.
In the midst of the harm is not the time to do this revisiting work: when you’re in pain, it’s not the time to try to understand it. That work has to happen over time, and in a manner which allows us to reflect on what has happened. This is a skill which will require some time to develop: we are now a people who conflate the intellect with the emotions, and allow empathy to be an argument unto itself, as opposed to recognizing the way in which emotions and intellect are companions. A long term recovery will involve something along the line of asking people to stay with disagreements even when they feel hot about it, to develop the capacity to feel something and to turn it over before running.
Technological Spread Revisited
BUT IT DOESN’T HELP US that our modality of online life doesn’t do that hardly at all. Algorithmic media works on the basis of reinforcing inflammatory, entertaining, or otherwise dopamine-rewarding kinds of thinking: the more feeling, the more attention you get. Again, not shocking that our online habits reinforce bad thinking habits: the more time you spend online, the more that the thinking-feeling elision is reinforced, and we’re off to the races.
We spend more time online because flesh and blood people will typically not tolerate the elision well; when a student in my class feels strongly about something, the natural follow-up is to ask “Why”? But online, it’s just speaking your truth. I’ll let John Cusack do my talking for me at this point. Unwinding this means taking a real stock of our enmeshment in online media, and learning to converse in tense and frequently awkward ways with disagreeable humans who are filtered out of your algorithimic stream.4 Churches--and the world at large--are full of weirdos that likewise think I'm the weirdo: the world is weird and we've got to get used to that again.
The Power of Suffering Revisited
If proliferated narratives of suffering, via media of various forms, have had the unintended consequence of valorizing suffering as the way in which we gain attention or worth in an attention economy, it’s worth asking how we thread this needle: how to we attend to the wounded while not valorizing woundedness? The key is not, I think, to negate “ordinary harm”, but to distinguish it: to name the way in which the harm happened gives an indicator of what kind of repair needs to happen.
But the theological key here is, like with sin, to say that suffering and damage is not the first or best word about you: it is an inextricable word, to be sure, but it’s not what brought you into existence, nor a cause for Christ’s death and resurrection5, nor what the Spirit makes alive in you. And honestly, it’s what’s the most interesting thing about you either. The sooner we start treating abuse and damage as the abberation that it is, and not something to celebrate, build church programming around, or flatten in trite statements (“Well, we’re all wounded in our own way”), the better.6
The Impossibility of Use Revisited
Augustine, we saw, spoke quite freely of the need for people to either enjoy things or use things, and people, he thought, were what we “used”, in the sense that we should not treat people as inviolable beings who were capable of self-direction. We all need to have those from outside ourselves assisting and directing us toward Jesus, because what are we doing in church if not that? I live in a part of Texas that is drowning in a niceness culture which means that any confrontation will be incendiary. We must recover a vision of the church as recovering sinners who are accountable to and for each other. We are, quite literally, in this together or not at all.
In offering pardon, in instructing one another, in praying with and for one another, we are embarking on a venture which means that we care for one another, and in that care, there will be harm that comes. It will be the overstepped word, the unintended bad advice, the zeal without wisdom, the proclamation without listening. But if we are to be a church which cares for the health and growth of its members, this will happen, however unintentionally and gracelessly. And for this, I will have to offer pardon and to be pardoned.
On we go. Together.
For Christians, aren’t all conclusions provisional? We are living in time in faith, moving toward the culmination of all things in God, and as Hebrews 11 shocks us with, the saints who lived faithfully didn’t get what they were hoping for, that only together with us might they be made perfect. I take that to mean, among other things, that you don’t always get what you want, and that some questions remain riddles which are teased out for quite a long time, in no small part because God is using those ongoing puzzles to bind the whole of the church together over time. It’s not enough to have geniuses: you need a community that can worship and ask the Lord together how long we have to sing this song.
C.S. Lewis has a great bit about sin, that repentance is not simply setting off on a new path, for that would mean that we’re lost in the woods and just becoming more lost. Repentance means tracing back our lostness to the place that it began, and starting a new path there. Likewise, I think we have to work at unwinding some of the ways in which the confusion happened.
My nuances are often lost on my children, which means I retreat into teaching emerging adults.
They’re filtered out, by design, because you tell the algorithm what you want to see and what you don’t by the choices you make. Ergo, the people you’d rather not engage with you don’t see because that’s what you’ve told the algorithm. The takeaway is this: when you complain about seeing weird or lecherous ads, it’s because you’ve been telling the Internet that’s what you’re interested in seeing based on other data points: the Internet is more of a mirror than we realize.
Here, I’m following a line of thinking about the incarnation which proposes that, even in a counter-factual world in which the Fall never happened, the incarnation still would, but as the image of God in the world who would lead us more fully into our still-restored relation to God, the icon of the living God among us. This helps us to see that Christ’s atonement for sin is not the thing itself: it is the thing Christ does to enable the better thing—that we are restored into the image of God.
See the first installment where we saw that making this move of claiming that all damage is of the same variety is part of how we got into this mess.