A Better Pastoral Understanding of Anxiety Part 4 of 4
Wrapping up this research paper on Philippians
Socializing Figures Teach Emotions
Another framework for understanding emotion, and the work Paul is doing with emotion, is that of emotional regimes. Ian Y.S. Jew uses the idea of emotional regime to look at the social function of emotion in Philippians. Emotional regime overlaps significantly with Mesquita’s work on socially constructed emotion while using different vocabulary. An emotional regime is a social reality created by authority figures, hierarchy, teaching, imitation, and ritual.[1] Religious emotional regimes help shape and regulate the emotional lives of the members of the religious group. The function of an emotional regime is to help “those within the group not only to cope with everyday demands of life but also to navigate its transitions and crises. Religious emotional regimes can therefor inculcate long-lasting moods and motivations, and provide anchorage for meaning, moral identity, and choice-making.”[2]
Jew calls the “community leaders, religious teachers, or even parents” who teach, model, and enforce normative emotions for the group “human authorities.”[3] I call them socializing figures, drawing from Mesquita’s phrase “socializing emotion.” Parents and other socializing figures like teachers play a vital role in socializing new humans into the emotions of their culture. Socializing figures teach children emotion words in relation to everyday situations. This builds the child’s bank of incidents that make up their emotion concepts in a way that will help them become members of society who fit in.[4]
Jew says Paul serves as a human authority in this sense, and his “strategy is the putting in place of an emotional program in which a symbolically mediated emotional ordering operates to guide and also reinforce the emotions notes that are to be sounded in line with the eschatalogical framework that is seen to govern all of life and human existence.”[5] Paul uses his letters as a primary tool of this emotional shaping, along with prayer for the believers and sending messengers—such as Timothy and Epaphroditus in Philippians.[6]
Barrett also writes about the importance of socializing figures in teaching emotion concepts. People co-construct emotions[7] by observing each other, predicting, and perceiving each other’s emotions.[8] When parents or teachers teach children emotion concepts, she writes, “you are doing more than communicating. You are creating reality for these kids—social reality. You’re handing them tools to regulate their body budget, to make meaning of their sensations and act on them, to communicate how they feel, and to influence others more effectively.”[9]
In the same way that Paul is a socializing figure for the Philippians through his letters, so are modern pastors and Christian leaders for their followers. Every leader is creating an emotional regime in their religious culture whether they realize it or not.
The Meaning and Translation of Anxiety Today
In common usage in the US today, anxiety can be an emotion or a mental illness. It can also be a combination of the two—an emotional experience or emotional state impacted by struggles with mental health.[10] It’s often thought of in connection with panic-attack-like symptoms, such as “tingling hands, unprovoked sweating, lightheadedness, and shortness of breath.”[11] Today’s Christians come into church carrying their secular cultural understanding (their emotional regime, if you will) of anxiety, so these are the definitions they hear when preachers say, “anxiety is a sin.”
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