What has driven bad teaching on emotions in the church? I think it might actually be AN EMOTION!
Fear.
We construct our emotions from the building blocks of our experiences, sensations, language, and culture. Powerful people we look up to, like religious leaders, can teach misinformation that affects the emotions we construct.
The Magicians television show had a storyline in which the human-magician characters set out on a quest for seven golden keys to unlock the source of magic. The first key is hidden on a remote island with a small population living in terror of a monster. (Episode Heroes and Morons)
When Eliot, a magician, arrives with companions in search of the key, the villagers warn him that the monster will be coming soon to try to kill them all, as it does every few days. But don’t fear, a villager assures them, because the local priest, Father Poe, is praying to prepare for the attack.
The priest steps out of his cabin, wearing the first golden key around his neck. Eliot asks for the key to fulfill the quest, but the priest says he cannot give it away, because it is the only thing protecting the people on the island.
A giant dragon-shape of swirling black smoke appears—a Shadow Bat—and the villagers pull Eliot and his companions into a cabin with them.
They watch through a crack as Father Poe drops to his knees and mutters an incantation, holding the key above his head to ward off the creature. The Shadow Bat dissipates.
The villagers emerge to find Father Poe slumped and coughing and the villager who welcomed Eliot dead on the ground. Deep gouges mar the man’s body.
As the villagers grieve, with the priest’s comfort and encouragement, Eliot’s companions pull him aside. They tell him that the wounds are not consistent with those from a Shadow Bat—the man’s injuries came from a human weapon.
Eliot confronts Father Poe, demanding that Poe summon the Shadow Bat. When the creature swoops down, the villagers duck, but the priest does not. Eliot takes the key, and the creature vanishes.
Eliot explains that the key uses illusion magic to generate an image of what the bearer fears the most. Exposing Poe’s motivation, Eliot asks the villagers:
“How many of you have died at the hands of your priest to make him your uncontested leader and hero?”
The magicians take the key for their quest and leave the priest in the hands of the people for punishment.
The story of a clergyman who creates an illusion of fear to control others, setting himself up as the source of safety and truth, caused a prickle down the back of my neck. I recognized the similarities between Father Poe and the many Christian pastors, writers, and leaders who spoke into my developing years, crafting a dangerous monster in my mind, a spectre only they and their truth could save me from: my emotions.
My emotions, they told me, would swirl into my soul like inky clouds distorting truth and reason, with demonic wings and claws waiting to attack me as soon as I stepped out from under the church’s protective authority. Out there, I would be led astray from God and devoured. Even worse than the many threats from outside, like Rock Music or Evolution, Emotion was the threat lurking inside me.
Even as a child and teen, I earnestly desired to obey God, so I bought into the illusion magic wholesale, systematically repressing my emotions. I evangelized the message to others, like the villager who welcomed Eliot. Don’t worry, I proselytized, the men of God will protect you too! Just stay inside the bounds of fundamentalism and trust the truth of Scripture over your deceptive emotions, and you’ll be safe just like us.
Many of my peers—those who grew up in Christian families and/or Christian youth groups and churches in the American Evangelical tradition in the 80s and 90s—are struggling with their emotional health now in their late 20s, 30s, and early 40s. I’m 41, born in 1981. I experienced delayed adolescence and individuation from my family, emotional repression leading to an emotional breakdown, undiagnosed mental illness, and long-term abuse leading to Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). (More of my story is in a previous post.) This is the story of many of my friends as well. Our parents were well-meaning. They were generally attentive parents (though some were neglectful, emotionally if not physically), faithful Christians, regular churchgoers, people who wanted the best for their children’s lives. They tried to be loving. They wanted to parent with godly discipline. They wanted their children to believe in God and stay in church.
With all this good intention, how did I and my friends end up emotionally ill, emotionally stunted, needing professional counseling and trauma therapy, barely hanging on to the faith that our parents tried so hard to impart to us? Some have walked away from church and faith entirely, too disillusioned or devastated to stay. Others, and I’m in this group, have deconstructed the faith we were handed and reconstructed a spiritual life that finally feels life-giving instead of lifesucking.
Some have continued practicing the American Evangelicalism their parents passed on to them, but as I look at them, I worry, because it appears to take a lot of effort and repression to stay where they are, to keep believing the magic. I’ve seen enough Millennial Christians hit an emotional crisis that led to a spiritual crisis that I have a growing concern for this demographic.
Our parents’ generation isn’t exempt from the negative effects of the anti-emotional concepts they taught us. Many of my friends who have had emotional-and-spiritual awakenings lament that our parents have not learned to handle their emotions well and now suffer emotional ill-health themselves.
The American conservative Christian approach to emotions over the past 70+ years has been a fear-based illusion that has consolidated power and control in the hands of church leaders and popular speakers. Leaders have feared for themselves and their people.
Some of the fear came not from pastoral care but from a desire for pastoral control. In the 15 years I’ve been studying spiritual abuse and abuse cover-ups in churches, I’ve seen that some leaders fear losing control of people. They fear that if people trusted and listened to their emotions, they would experience true fear of their abusive leaders and would follow that wise, self-preserving instinct to get out.
American conservative evangelical Christian leaders built off of each other’s work to form a culture that taught Christian parents, who taught their children, to fear emotions instead of understanding them. To repress emotions instead of exploring them. To shut up emotions instead of listening to them. And the church today is suffering, full of emotionally stunted Christians who pursue spiritual growth but are dragged down and limited by their emotional immaturity. The idea that emotions will lead us away from God is not actually a Biblical concept. In fact, it robs our discipleship of a vital component that could enhance our faithfulness.
Next week, I will show you one of the most influential sources of the teaching that you can’t trust your emotions. Stick around to find out what it is!
If this was helpful to you, would you forward it to a few friends? Thank you!
-Becky