Don’t Let Pathology Become Theology
A little late to the game as always with catching up on content yet my wife and I just finished Shiny Happy People. Truth be told, I didn’t watch the show 19 Kids and Counting and didn’t know a whole lot about Bill Gothard prior to the doc, although my wife did say she watched the show with her family (to be fair, I was homeschooled for a bit myself).
It is alarming the way in which authority is held as such a high barometer of importance in this culture and most high control religious environments. I see the parallels found in the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) that I observed listening to Rise and Fall of Mars Hill along with other docs around fundamentalist sects of religion that fairly quickly become cultish.
In all of these scenarios, the same kind of audience and the same kind of issues seem to present themselves; the “secular” world caused people pain, trauma, dysfunction, and brokenness. So, the solution? Coalesce to your own kind and try to bring others into your tribe of strictness and conformity found in a safer, more ordered religious context.
Pathology, rather than Scripture, becomes the way to make sense of one’s theology and how to live the spiritual life.
In my work delving into the spiritual trauma of clients (and based on my experience being adjacent to more high control religious settings), it’s uncanny how similar the felt sense of shame and identity struggles emerge over the course of our work. When brought up in settings where one’s sense of worth was placed entirely on performance and adherence to a long list of either/or presuppositions, the damage it causes either following through on these assertions until you fall due to spiritually performative burn out OR when eagerly yet apprehensively seeking to escape this setting is deep and troubling.
The whole house you were given, even its very foundation of unaddressed trauma of the familial system (often of parents and grandparents), crashes down on the children of these settings. Deconstruction then becomes the only alternative, not because of a lack of faith but primarily due to the fragility of that very faith handed down to them.
Rather than blaming the victims of broken religious settings, we ought to reinforce their efforts to claim religion for themselves.
Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature
This quote from Pete Scazzero summarizes it remarkably well. Long before you were explicitly taught God as Father, you were implicitly and explicitly taught your earthly father as father. Long before you were explicitly taught the Beloved nature you carry as a son or daughter of God, you were a son or daughter to your mother. Whether healthy or unhealthy, your framework for God is largely based on the family system you had no control over when you were born.
If there is no reckoning with the lenses, the trauma, the blessings, and the complexity of everything that is your family of origin, pathology will always inform your theology.
This is no shame and no dig; this is biological and rational. Although we can make choices toward healthy spirituality, there is no movement toward spiritual wholeness without a deep understanding of our spiritual unwholeness. While our mistakes, our brokenness, our darkness, and our flaws are things worth examining, refining, and improving, without meaningful exploration of the systems we’ve inherited, we can’t make spiritual gains.
In the Old Testament, God reveals to the nation (and sometimes leaders) of Israel about their need for repentance and change. Rather than calling on single individuals to get in line with the status quo, God regularly addresses the status quo and how corrupt it has become. By doing so, God is targeting the mental and emotional unwellness present in the whole system rather than shaming those struggling on the margins for not performing optimally.
Similarly, when doing the hard and grueling work of examining the contexts we were raised in, blessed by, and also burdened by, we actively work toward redeeming generations rather than further enabling the curse by shoving it under the rug beneath a shiny, happy veneer.
Simply put, we are not “dishonoring our parents” by unpacking the lenses on the world they gave us. Often times, the greatest honor we give to our elders is working toward reversing the generational damage that our parents, often in their own imperfect ways, were trying to dispel themselves.
When we heal our pathology, our theology too becomes healed. We are able to accept the love of God in the midst and even particularly in our shadow precisely because we’ve begun to accept our parents and the love they gave us, imperfect and broken as it was. By giving God our pathology, including our beleaguered prayers, our fuming laments, and our tear-soaked journal entries, we let the theology of who He is become flesh and bone through encounters with Christ and with Christ’s love in others. Scripture no longer exists as a thought; it becomes lived, felt, and held to as it was always meant to.