“Count it all Joy”
Why do Christians sometimes tell people they should feel “joy” when they experience difficult times? What can that possibly mean? Is it intended as a form of encouragement? As a fatalistic acceptance of everything that happens to us? And what are the implications of this? What are the implications of this idea for mental health, for high-control religious environments, or for the range of feelings, emotions, and experiences that are considered legitimate within the faith community? In this episode, Dan tackles these questions.
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Hello and welcome to the series It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am your host.
As always, we are offered in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and thank them for their support.
Thank all of you for your support, for listening, for writing in.
Just to put this out there in case folks hear it, I'm a little bit under the weather, scratchy throat and that kind of thing, so I'll try to keep any disruptions from that to a minimum, but just want to let people know.
And coming back immediately after the Thanksgiving break, and so it's been a couple weeks, and want to thank everybody who was a part of the Denver event that we had on November 18th.
So many of you in person, so many people online, I think was around 600 people total.
It was a really great event, great speakers, great discussion, great questions from the audience, great opportunity to hang out with some of you after the event.
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With that in view, I'm thinking about we're right on the cusp of December here, holiday season for most Americans and certainly American Christians, the Christmas season, and I would specifically like to ask if folks have issues or topics or the sort of coded language or images or themes that you would like me to talk about in this series related to the holidays,
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Would love to hear from you and really value those insights.
On that note, though today's episode is not, you know, sort of a holiday episode, I do want to hit on a theme that people will hear a lot about this time of year, and it is the theme of joy.
And more specifically, it is the command or admonition to count the difficulties that we face as joy, to take joy from the difficulties that confront us, right?
This is an issue, as always, that has been raised by many of you.
I've gotten a lot of emails and contacts from folks.
I even had a discussion or two in Denver about this.
And what I'm interested in, what we're going to talk about for the next few minutes here, are the issues and the contradictions and the dangers that come with the command, and it often is given as a kind of command, to feel joy in the face of struggles or trials or tribulations that we face.
So let's dive in here, right?
And if we're thinking about Christian appeals to joy, there are a lot of references to joy in the Christian scriptures.
There are a lot of places that we could go and we could find those.
But when people think of this admonition, this command to be joyful, right?
And again, if you're not familiar with this kind of Christian culture, this kind of life, that whole idea can seem strange.
That you could command somebody to feel joyful, that you could tell them how they ought to feel in a particular situation, But that's precisely what we're talking about.
And what I want to do here is try to explain, again for those for whom that's just kind of a weird idea, some of that weirdness and where it comes from.
And when there is this admonition or this command to be joyful, to feel joy, What most folks typically have in mind is a passage from the New Testament book of James.
It's one of the shorter books in the New Testament, traditionally attributed to James, the brother of Jesus.
Most Bible scholars suggest that that's probably not who wrote it.
But it's at the very beginning of the book, James chapter 1, verses 2 through 4, it says this, My brothers and sisters, whenever you face various trials, consider it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
And let endurance complete its work, so that you may be complete and whole, lacking in nothing.
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