Many conservative Christians describe their “faith” as giving “purpose” or “meaning” to their life. What do they mean by this? And why does it does it feel to many that there’s more than a confession or description about their own spiritual life here? Why does it seem that this testimonial is aimed at others in a way the operates just below the surface? In this episode, Dan looks at these issues to crack the code of the “testimony” that one’s faith gives meaning and purpose to their life.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and as always, delighted to be here with all of you who might be listening to me.
I want to begin, as I do, by thanking all of you.
I've been getting just floods of emails lately, and really appreciate it, and some great topics upcoming, including the one for today, in this episode.
Responding to as many as I can.
Always so sorry that it takes a long time, and sometimes you hear from me long after you send any emails, and sometimes you don't hear from me at all, and again, do the best that I can.
Please know that I read them.
I value them.
And we'll keep them coming for this series.
Can't do it without you.
So, as you have ideas for the series, please continue to let me know.
Daniel Miller Swaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
And as always, thank all of you who listen, who suffer through the ads, who might donate to us on Patreon and other forms.
Can't do it without you, can't do it without your encouragement, and I always just want to acknowledge that.
So I want to dive in today and I want to hit a topic on an episode that maybe may seem a little more sort of philosophical or abstract at first.
I think it's going to link into a topic I think I want to pick up in the next episode.
But bear with me because it really does have some real-world impact, and this is part of what I think is sort of encoded within it.
And to lead into this, I did something the other day that I don't normally do.
I was driving around, I live in Massachusetts, I was in a more rural part of the state, kind of lost the radio station I was listening to, and I was scanning around, and it stopped, as it will probably in rural areas in most of the country, on a Christian radio station.
Which is to say a conservative Christian radio station, as most of them are.
And what I don't usually do is stop on those stations and listen.
But for some reason I did.
And there was an interview that was being conducted with a Christian, I'm not sure if this person was an author, minister, parachurch leader, I wasn't familiar with the person, I don't even know their name.
But part of what struck me was, it was like, I was jumping into the middle of this interview And there was a sense in which I felt like it could have been like almost any conservative Christian author, minister, parachurch leader saying the same sort of thing, because the focus was on what drew this person to Christianity, their story, what this kind of Christian would call their testimony, their account of how they become a Christian, what Christianity means to them, and so forth.
And this was the question of what kept this person, what drew this person to Christianity, what kept them there, And they gave an answer that for me, in my experience, and I think in the experience of lots of you, if you are coming out of a church background, will be pretty standard fair.
And if you don't come out of that kind of background, this is an answer that you might hear or you might encounter as you talk to others.
But basically the person said, among other things, that his faith, his understanding of belonging in Christianity, that his faith gave purpose and meaning to his life.
And this sense of finding purpose and meaning in Christianity was also accompanied, and again this is like just sort of standard fare for these accounts of somebody converting to Christianity or coming to this kind of Christianity and why they're there, It was accompanied by an account of how sort of empty and purposeless his life felt before becoming a Christian.
And again, if you're coming out of that kind of Christian tradition or you've engaged with those who do, you know this way of discussing the faith.
And I would argue that within sort of popular American evangelical Christianity, this is kind of a pillar of Christian self-understanding.
That is, your faith as they would describe it, your religion, it's not something that you do because you grew up in it.
It's not something you do because it provides community.
It's not something you do because you grew up in a part of the country where that's just what you do.
All of those things might be true.
But the big reason that you do it is because it provides meaning and purpose for your life.
And to flip this around, there's also a sense that if you identify or claim to be a Christian of some sort and it doesn't provide the meaning and purpose of your life, that there's something suspect about your faith, that your faith is not robust, it's not real, it's not significant.
This is, I think, Just as I say, a pillar within popular American evangelicalism.
And I want to say this, I don't begrudge them that, right?
Humans are a meaning-making species.
This is one of the things that we do, is we create meaning and purpose.
We identify meaning and purpose.
We invest Things with a kind of emotional value.
Many of us, we don't just enter into relationships to enter into them, we enter into them because we see them as purposive, as having a purpose, as having an end, as being inherently valuable.
We have found innumerable ways to make meaning and find value and to be good or just or whatever.
For billions of human beings across times and cultures, what we call religion Has been a component of this.
So it's not surprising that you would have this language from somebody reflecting on their faith, reflecting on their form of Christianity, and saying that the reason that they hold to that or one of the things that drew them to it was it provided meaning or purpose.
We should expect that.
And I have no problem, in principle, with Christians self-understanding their faith is serving as a basis of meaning for them.
That's not the criticism.
I'm not here to judge the experience of this person on the radio.
I'm not here to judge the experience of anybody who could say, you know, honestly and with integrity and so forth, that what brought me to the tradition, what keeps me here, is it provides meaning or purpose or value for my life.
It's my source of value.
It's my source of meaning.
Maybe it's my source of morality.
Whatever.
Great.
Cool.
Good for you.
No problem.
So why am I talking about it here, right?
Why am I bringing it into this series that focuses on the sort of codes, the encoded language that is written into so much of American religion and Christianity?
Why am I bringing it up here, looking at these things that are written into the DNA, into the code of that kind of Christian tradition in general?
The reason I'm bringing it up is that when Christians like the one I heard on the radio or the pastors who preach sermons on this topic, and I can tell you when I was an evangelical pastor, I preached sermons about this, about the meaning and value and purpose that we gain by being Christians and so forth.
Or when you encounter your friends or family members who say this, maybe it's your Uncle Ron, maybe it's somebody else, whatever.
When Christians like the one I heard on the radio talk about Christianity providing meaning for them, they are not just making a statement about themselves.
Rather, the statement is an expression of an exclusive kind of religion, and with that, a judgment on everyone who is not a Christian, and not even just everybody's not a Christian, everybody's not a Christian the way that they are, who's not a Christian like them.
And that, for me, is where this comes in.
And this isn't just me, this is another one of these topics that I have heard about From many of you of the language of meaning or purpose, we talked in an episode a long time ago now about Jesus providing, you know, having a meaning for your life or a purpose for your life and so forth.
This is a little bit different than this.
This is—it's related to that, but it's a little bit different, right?
It's a little bit bigger.
And I've had people ask me or say to me, man, when I hear somebody say that, when I hear somebody say, well, it gave me meaning and purpose and value, I feel myself getting really worked up, or I feel something, I feel uncomfortable, or I feel angry, or I feel hurt, and I don't understand exactly why.
Like, why do I get worked up when they tell me what they experience in their religion?
And this is what I think is going on, okay?
For popular conservative Christians, when they express the meaning that they find in their faith, that meaning is related to their understanding of what religion is, of what Christianity is.
And on their view, religion is not just about meaning.
We are not religious as people just to find meaning, or to create meaning, or to make sense of the world.
That's something that religion does for us, but for them that's not the purpose of religion.
Rather, religion is about truth.
And it's about the truth about salvation, right?
For this kind of Christian, human beings exist in a state of separation from God, and because of this we stand condemned to eternal condemnation, eternal punishment, and it is only through the truth of recognizing that Christianity can save us, that God can save us through Christ, it is only that truth Which means, I think most of us understand, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably understand, that for conservative Christians, everyone who isn't a conservative Christian is condemned to eternal damnation.
those terms is true, and all other religions are false.
Which means, I think most of us understand, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably understand, that for conservative Christians, everyone who isn't a conservative Christian is condemned to eternal damnation.
Everyone is condemned.
So when the person on the radio or other conservative Christians talk about finding meaning or purpose in their religion, it's against this backdrop.
A A commonplace association with this is, well, I find meaning and purpose because this is the true religion, because I have found salvation.
And that means that outside of my experience, there can be no meaning or purpose or even value or ethics and so forth, right?
That is where I think This phrase rubs up against so many in an uncomfortable way, right?
It's that implicit sense of judgment, that implicit condemnation that it's not just a statement about their faith, it's a statement about your lack of faith, or your faith being wrong, or something like that.
And this is something that I'm not just making up.
I'm not just reading into this.
I have heard this in more conversations with conservative Christians I could possibly recount.
I have had so many conversations in my life with people who have said, well, you know, if you're not a Christian, you really don't have meaning or purpose in your life.
You may think that you do, but you're deluded, or you're deceived, or there's this sense that everybody else is living in a kind of quiet despair and meaninglessness, a kind of existential angst because they're not really Christians or something like that.
I have heard it in sermons.
I have preached it myself in a kind of former life.
I hear about it in your emails on this topic.
I have talked about it with numerous ex-evangelicals, as they are known, and many of you I know will identify with that.
I've worked through it with clients in my coaching work who hear this.
It's the idea that only conservative Christianity can provide meaning or purpose or value or ethics because only conservative Christianity is true.
And I'll flip it around and say, for conservative Christians, this works the other way.
For them, if there can be true meaning or purpose or value or ethics or whatever outside of Christianity as they understand it, that's a threat to the truth or authenticity of that religious tradition, right?
They have a big stake In the argument that they have meaning or purpose and that nobody else does.
And I think this is why that kind of language provokes the response that it does.
I think this is why when I'm driving down the road and I'm hearing this radio interview with somebody I don't know anything about, talking about the meaning and purpose and value and so forth that they find in their faith, I find myself getting frustrated and worked up.
It's because they're not just reporting on their own experience.
Right?
And I think that that's the key.
And among those who are not conservative Christians, it provokes that range of responses.
Anger, it's something I feel, a kind of bemusement or maybe confusion for those who are not familiar with that tradition, who live their life in some other way but feel that they do have meaning and purpose and value and so forth.
But also, and this again reflects the experience that I have talking with so many of you and hearing it in the emails and encountering it in my coaching work and so forth, Is that for many who grew up within these contexts but now find themselves sort of on the outside, this kind of language can lead to a sense of despondence, right?
Real questions about whether or not they can find meaning or purpose or value.
Because for many who leave these religious traditions, or for whom these religious traditions just don't kind of stick, they really struggle with this.
They have internalized this message that this is the site of meaning or value, and if you leave it, You're going to lead a life of desperation.
You are entering into an existence of meaninglessness and valuelessness.
And I think they really struggle with this.
So the apparently self-directed claim about their faith serving as a source of meaning is very much a statement of judgment about everybody else.
It operates as another code.
And this is something we have to understand.
To those on the inside, and to many of us on the outside as well, it communicates a great deal more than it would appear on the surface.
And here's how it does this, right?
It's the kind of thing that when somebody says, Oh, I find meaning and value and whatever in my faith and somebody gets upset or maybe they say, well, I don't, I disagree with your faith or this or that or whatever.
They'll say what?
Like, I don't understand why you're getting defensive.
I'm just telling you what my faith means to me.
There's no reason for you to get upset.
Or now the language will be, oh, they're trying to cancel me.
I'm just sharing how I feel and I'm being canceled.
Or, or this is they're, they're somehow denying my religious liberty because all I was doing is, is professing what it is that I believe.
And I get all upset.
It shows there's this culture that And for some conservative Christians, this may be true.
They may well just be sharing what it is that they feel and experience in their tradition.
But here's the key for me is that this notion of professing or proclaiming this purpose and meaning that one finds in your faith, it's not just telling you what their faith means to them, for many others.
This kind of language, the implications of it, it's not incidental.
For many Christian leaders, I would say for almost all, say, evangelical pastors, for parachurch leaders, for millions of ordinary Christians, this language is not about simply expressing one's own religious understanding.
It's part of an explicit strategy of conversion.
It's intended as a kind of conversation starter.
This is the language that will be used to aid in discussions of the aim of converting non-Christians.
And this was driven home to me recently.
I was reading through a book I recommended to others called God's Ex-Girlfriend.
It's a memoir, as the subtitle says, a memoir about loving and leaving the evangelical Jesus by Gloria Beth Amadeo.
And she talks in this book about being really, really involved with a well-known college-based—it's like chapters on different college campuses—evangelical parachurch organization
The aim of which was to, you know, win people to the Christian faith, to convert people, and she talks about learning these explicit evangelistic strategies to get into conversations with people, to try to bring them to a place of winning them over to conversion.
I had that same experience, not with the same parachurch organization, but I was taught how to try to use your own account, not just as your own account of religion or spirituality, but as a way to try to convert others.
And the reason you want to convert them, of course, as I said, is because whoever they are, if they're not a Christian like you are, They're not saved.
They don't have the truth.
Their lives don't have meaning and purpose and so forth.
That judgment is implicit in that, and we were taught how to leverage that judgment in really subtle ways to try to bring people over to our way of thinking, to our expression of Christianity, to our understanding of the faith.
And so when somebody says, well, hey, I'm just sharing what I think.
I'm not telling you what to believe.
I'm not trying to judge your beliefs and so forth.
I think the analogy is the person who makes the sexist or racist or homophobic or whatever it is, who makes that kind of comment.
And then when they're called out on it, they dismiss it as a joke.
Hey, so don't get so worked up.
You're being too sensitive.
It was just a joke.
Jeez, lay off, you know?
Except, it wasn't.
You know it wasn't.
They know it wasn't.
The truth of what was there is like just sitting there in the space between you in this way that's like an open secret because of the way it was expressed.
That's how this is for me.
When that person's on the Christian radio, yes, they're trying to edify other Christians and so forth.
But the aim of that, very explicitly and very often, again, among Christian leaders and Christian radio and so forth, is to get the rest of us to recognize that their way is the only way.
So for so, so, so many conservative Christians, that language about meaning or purpose, it's more than a statement.
Of what they feel, or why they identify with the Christian tradition.
It involves a lot more than that, and that is where it gets under my skin.
And that is, I think, where it gets under the skin of so many of you, even when we can't sort of identify that.
Because what I'm highlighting here, what I'm trying to get at, is that so often this apparently descriptive statement, this statement that seems pretty innocuous, pretty innocent, It represents a kind of set of implicit claims about who they are and who we are, and it's incredibly manipulative.
It is incredibly coercive.
I will take the people who will come at me and say, I want to talk to you about my faith and try to see if you'll join me in it.
Much more straightforwardly than I will those who I feel like are trying to sort of manipulate or coerce me or play on my own insecurities and fears and plant the idea that, well, maybe the reason that I have those is because I'm not really a Christian or whatever.
That's what I think goes on in this language.
That's what I think is the code.
I think it's the code that's communicated to each other when they speak this way.
But I think it's also in the code of that language in that it implies a judgment on everybody who isn't that, and it so often comes with it.
I think that for many conservative Christians, the ones for whom this probably doesn't operate as an explicit strategy, I think it is true that this is where they find their meaning or their purpose or their value.
I think that for many who do, It's probably inconceivable that one could find authentic meaning or value or purpose in life outside of the Christian faith as they understand it.
But that lack of empathic imagination, that lack of empathy, that inability to talk to others and to hear others and to enter into their stories and hear and see the value and the worth that they find in their lives in other ways?
That is weaponized.
And it's used against non-Christians.
It shifts from, this is how I find meaning and value, and I can't really imagine doing it any other way, so tell me your story.
Tell me how you find meaning and value.
Let's expand our horizons together.
Instead of that, it is weaponized to, well, hey, churchgoer, this is the center of your sort of existence, the way you understand yourself.
You can't imagine living without it, so imagine what all those people out there feel, how empty and valueless their lives are.
That's the mechanism at work here, and again, I think that's what I hear from so many of you.
And I've had lots of people reach out and say, this really drives me nuts.
I don't know what it is about it.
People even feel guilty.
They'll say, this person in my life or my pastor or whatever is just talking about their faith, and I get really angry and I don't understand why when they say these things.
That's what I think is going on, right?
Again, it's just false.
That's the other piece of this.
That's the part that really, I think, also adds to this.
I don't think that most people in the history of the world have run around feeling that life is valueless or meaningless and so forth.
Again, we find meaning and value, create it, uncover it, it comes to us, whatever language you want, from lots of different sources.
But within a particular form of conservative Christianity, that's not enough.
And in fact, that's the threat.
And so it turns manipulative.
It's weaponized.
And that's what I think.
I know it's what makes me angry.
It's what hurts me when I hear this language.
It's why when I'm driving around listening to the radio, I end up like talking to myself and having imaginary conversations with the host.
But I think it's at work in many of the emails that you've sent me.
I know that it's something that people struggle with in the coaching practice, as I say.
I need to wind this down.
I just invite you, if you have other thoughts or comments about this topic, please let me know.
Daniel Miller Swedge at gmail.com.
And certainly other topics and themes.
Let me know.
As I say, I'm going to pick up on some of where I think this goes a little bit in the next episode as well.
But until then, once again, thank you for your support.
Thank you for your encouragement.
Thank you for listening.
We can't do it without you.
And please be well until we meet again in this virtual format.
