What do Christians mean when they refer to their “personal testimonies”? What do they mean when they refer to “witnessing” to others? Why do some Christians emphasize “testifying”? This language can be confusing to religious outsiders. For “insiders” to this way of speaking, it provokes a wide range of emotional responses, ranging from hope and encouragement to feelings of guilt and anger. In this first of two linked episodes, Dan explores these issues and others, exploring the basic idea of “giving testimony” and the different uses of this language within Christian communities.
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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.
As always, delighted to be here sharing with all of you.
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We couldn't do this without you.
And as always, this series works because people contact me with ideas and thoughts and topics, and I welcome that.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I respond to as many emails as I'm able, but I do read them.
I value them.
There are often so many people sort of going through similar things or thinking about similar things, And it really is useful to see and helpful to bring things to mind.
So, I'd love to hear from you.
If you have thoughts about this episode, topics for future episodes, please keep those coming.
Before we dive in, one more thing to point out is just, what, about a week and a half or so, I think, the new SWADGE Seminar, Straight White American Jesus Seminar, hosted by Sarah Mosliner on Purity Culture, will be starting If that's something that you're interested in, take a look.
Our website is www.StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
You can find the information.
Take a look.
Check out her seminar, as I say all the time, because it is true.
Sarah is one of the foremost experts on purity culture, and not just the sort of dimension of purity culture related to gender and sexuality, but related to so many other things like race and contemporary Christian nationalism.
And different things in both the contemporary U.S.
and its history.
So, really encourage you to check that out if you get an opportunity, if that's something you'd be interested in.
Diving into the material for this episode, I want to talk about the idea of one's testimony or of giving a testimony, of having a powerful testimony, of testifying, etc.
And this would also tie into the language of quote-unquote witnessing to something.
Several people have brought this up over time.
Again, people who come from a background that speaks this way, and that can range from backgrounds where the notion of testifying is sort of really central, some African American traditions, charismatic traditions, to other forms of Christianity where it's maybe not as intense as that, but people talk about sharing their testimony or giving a testimonial and so forth.
So, ideas that people have with this, as well as, frankly, the idea that some people find this painful or difficult to think about.
And I encounter this in my coaching sessions.
I get ideas for this series not just through the emails I get, but often through the coaching work that I do.
Again, I'm a practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, working with folks dealing with religious trauma.
And this is a topic that comes up from them as well.
But as always, with so many of the terms we talk about in this series, there are also people who have encountered this kind of from the outside.
Somebody else has talked about their testimony or giving their testimony, or somebody contacted me a while back and said, you know, this person in my life asked if they could share their testimony with me.
And I was like, what the hell are you talking about?
What does that even mean?
So we're going to talk about that, and it's also been on my mind because I've read a couple memoirs recently of people coming out of conservative Christian circles that talk about this notion of testimony.
And it also has brought me up to what I think is a related topic.
I'm going to leave this related topic for the next episode, which is the idea of public confession.
I think there's a lot of overlap or a movement or a slide from the practice of testimony to the practice or even requirement for public confession.
And I'm going to take that on in the next episode.
So this is really the first of a kind of a two-part episode.
And we're going to start with this idea of testimony, and as we so often do, there's often kind of a gap between the sort of basic surface-level definition of testimony and what does it mean, and then the way that it actually works in Christian practice.
So if we start with the basic idea, this language of giving a testimony, of testifying, of having a testimonial, of witnessing to something, we can get the basic idea if we just think about what I think is probably for most of us the kind of most familiar sense of Testimony, which is to give testimony or to testify in a court case or something similar, is called upon to give testimony or to testify to something that they have seen or experienced.
They are a witness.
We say that they witnessed to it, and in kind of a, maybe a more archaic way of talking, we might say that they bear witness to what they have seen or experienced.
That's the basic idea, and it's the same idea within a particular kind of religious context as well.
One is to give a testimony to what?
To what God has done in their life, to their experience of what God has done.
One witnesses to the acts of God.
And again, in contemporary practice, and we'll come back to this, this is usually a pretty individual or personal affair, one's personal experience of what God has done.
But it's actually an idea that takes shape through a lot of the Hebrew Bible, in which God or the agents of God are often called upon to bear witness to or to testify to the ways that God has provided for the people or delivered them or etc.
If you have any familiarity with the Hebrew Bible, you'll know That one of the ways that the God of the Hebrew Bible often tries to show their faithfulness or power is by recounting historical acts of deliverance and so forth, and so someone is called to bear witness to or to testify to the acts of God.
And within the early Christian community, which of course was predominantly Jewish, this idea sort of persists and evolves to where the earliest followers of Jesus went out to, quote, witness to what God had done or revealed through the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
They would give testimony to the fact that for them, Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah, that Jesus of Nazareth had brought salvation, that Jesus of Nazareth had been resurrected from the dead, and so forth.
So that's the basic idea that links this familiar concept to us of witnessing to something or being a witness to something, of having seen something and testifying to it, to the kind of religious context out of which it emerges.
And that basic idea, that kind of fundamental biblical idea, carries forward into many contemporary Christian communities, you know, with some shifts.
And of course, there's a long history to this, right, that we don't have time to get into in this episode.
But with this idea in contemporary practice, one often has one's, quote, personal testimony.
And within a certain kind of Christian tradition, this is just sort of Very common parlance.
One's personal testimony.
People might even ask to share, you know, tell me your testimony.
Or in the strange world that is, like the dating world within the evangelical American subculture, this can be a way of sort of getting to really know somebody or showing that you're interested in them if you ask about their testimony.
One's testimony, one's personal testimony, is the story of how God has worked in that person's life and the changes that God has wrought in their life and so forth.
Evangelizing to others, what a certain kind of Christian will describe as sharing their faith with others, it's often described colloquially as witnessing.
I witnessed to him, or we need to go witnessing, or I need to get better at witnessing.
What does that mean?
Well, it means the idea of sharing their own salvation experience with somebody As a means of trying to get them to become Christian, you quote-unquote witness to them.
They mean this, you bear witness to them of your salvation experience as a part of trying to bring them to the same kind of salvation experience.
And in some, again, more kind of charismatic, maybe Pentecostal church traditions, to testify could also mean to share a message one believes they've received from God.
And this would relate it to the notion of the word, of having a word, of having received a word that one is called to share.
We did an episode on that a while back.
I invite you to go back and check it out, the episode on the Word.
But this idea of a testimony takes shape within some Christian traditions where it becomes a very kind of regularized practice.
That is, testimonies might be a regular occurrence.
There may be a part of regular Sunday services where people are invited to share their testimony publicly, to come up and testify to, if not their salvation experience and how they became a Christian, which is what a testimony really is.
It's a story of how one becomes a Christian.
But maybe to testify, quote-unquote, to what God has been doing in their life recently or something like that, there may be invited speakers, guest speakers, who are there to share their testimony with the congregation.
It becomes a very regular part of Christian practice and sort of Christian experience.
And not all Christians think or speak in precisely this way.
The whole idea of testimony, of giving one's testimony, of having a testimony to give, involves a sort of vivid sense of God's active engagement in one's life.
This way of speaking arises within Christian communities that have a strong sense that God is an active agent in our lives.
God is not something distant or apart from us, but an active force that moves in our lives at present.
It's from within communities that tend to emphasize the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in individuals' lives.
They tend to emphasize the very personal experiential aspects of Christian religious expression, that their faith, as they would describe it, their Christian faith, is very much about a kind of ongoing experience of or encounter with God, often to such an extent that having this kind of vibrant ongoing experience of God is a sign of sort of one's spiritual health.
If one is not regularly sort of experiencing God in this way, it's a cause for concern.
So this way of speaking, this way of articulating the faith, the role of this kind of notion of a personal testimony in the faith, It's less common within more formal or liturgical Christian traditions that don't place as much emphasis on this kind of transformative, personal, and dynamic aspect of the Christian faith.
Traditions that focus more on social transformation than individual salvation will tend not to speak in this way.
So this tends to come to these very sort of personalistic, individualistic conceptions or articulations of the Christian tradition.
But we can see that there's this link between this very traditional biblical sense of bearing testimony to something, of witnessing to something, and the contemporary practice.
One's testimony, it's very personal and individual in nature, but it is essentially the story of what God has done and continues to do in one's life.
It tends not to have the kind of corporate element that it had in early Christianity and the Jewish tradition, but still this element of God's ongoing work and transformation or deliverance.
So it tends to be very personal and individual, but it also tends to be very regularized.
And here we might talk about testimony as a genre, because it also tends to have a public or a communal dimension.
Just the language of testimony, just the idea that when somebody says, tell me your testimony, or I'd love to hear your testimony, or would you be willing to share your testimony?
The fact that somebody can ask that question, and you're supposed to know what that means, right?
Do you have a sense of what's involved in that, tells us That the testimony has sort of defining features.
There's a sort of a regular pattern to it.
And so there's a public or communal dimension.
People are regularly called to publicly share that story.
It is intended to demonstrate the love and power and care of God.
It is intended to encourage others.
The idea is that those maybe who are Christians who are struggling in different ways, and this is again Christian language, they are struggling with sins or temptations of different kinds.
Or maybe those who are not Christians, but with the idea that your testimony will move them toward their own faith decision or their own experience of Christ.
So with this framework, despite the individual or personal nature of testimony, it also tends to be a highly stylized discourse.
It's like there are sort of like genre markers of a testimony.
One of them is that typically the worse an individual was before becoming a Christian, the more powerful or effective the testimony is.
There's a sense that you want not just a story of how God saved somebody, but a powerful story.
And so the testimonies that resonate the most, the people who are asked to share their testimony a lot, are those who typically can tell a story of having been really, really bad or bad off Before they became Christians, so people who maybe lived the very quote-unquote sinful life or people dependence, substance dependence or abuse often figures here.
Sex figures here, right?
Basically, the further you were away from this kind of Christian ideal of what your life should be like, the more powerful or effective the testimony is because it shows how much work God had to do in your life.
Which then following from that, a testimony, a sort of second genre marker is that a testimony should show sort of a clear moment of conversion.
And the more abrupt this is, the more this makes Mark sort of a night and day shift.
The better.
There shouldn't be any ambiguity about how one became a Christian, or when this happened, or how.
It should be very, very clear and powerful, often described as happening in kind of sudden and unforeseen ways.
And then finally, reflecting from this, both this notion of how sinful or fallen you were before, and then this radical transformation, It should be a story of an ongoing transformation, not just something that happened once, but something that is ongoing.
There should be a clear sense of what your life was like before this transformative experience and after.
And while individuals in a testimony may talk about, you know, having ongoing struggles, you know, I still struggle with this or that, or I still have temptations around this or that, this should only go so far.
There should be no doubt that God's transforming power was effective.
If you give too many signs of what Christians might call backsliding, it's going to raise questions about whether or not you really had the transformative experience you describe or not, and maybe, in extreme cases, about whether or not you're really a Christian.
If you're still really struggling with those things that God is supposed to have delivered you from, your faith might come into question.
So there can be a kind of pressure on individuals to have a powerful testimony.
I remember my own experience of having what we would call sort of a boring testimony, meaning that before I became a Christian, I was a good kid.
I didn't drink, I didn't party, I didn't smoke.
I didn't have lots of sexual encounters with girls.
I grew up in a stable household.
I had a kind of boring testimony.
God didn't have to save me from that much.
And so I didn't have the kind of testimony that pastors and others would sort of constantly be calling upon people to share.
It kind of created a sense of pressure to almost sensationalize one's testimonial experience.
And I think all of this, the stylized nature of testimony, the fact that you're supposed to not just tell this story, but to tell it in a particular way.
And like any other story, it should have a certain plot and a certain structure.
This pressure that could arise to sort of sensationalize one's testimony, all of that can come together so that in practice, the testimony plays a lot of different roles.
It can absolutely be encouraging or edifying to others.
Some people do have incredibly powerful stories of transformation that they attribute to God, and it can be very moving.
It can be a way of strengthening one's own faith as one sort of rehearses or reminds oneself of what they think God has done in their life in the past.
It can play those kind of laudatory roles, but it can also be really damaging and coercive.
And again, in my coaching practice with the Center, The Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
This is the side of it that I see a lot.
There's the irony that the pressure to have a kind of powerful testimony can lead to fabrication.
People will like literally make up stories of what their life was like before or the transformations that they've experienced to make it more sensational.
I think even more commonly though, the stylized nature of testimony, the expectation of what one's faith experience should be like, the sense that there's a very normative sense of not just what it is to be a Christian, but how one should have become a Christian, what one's ongoing experience should be like, this opens up all kinds of problems.
It can lead to a reluctance or a discouragement from being open and honest about difficulties that people continue to face, even within their Christian life.
And I talk to people all the time, and this is a common theme that maybe you've encountered in your life.
There will be other people that you will have heard from if you hear this kind of language, this common theme of not being able to really share what they were feeling.
Partly because it doesn't fit into the narrative of what their testimony is supposed to be like.
Related to this, while there are struggles, quote-unquote, that people can have, there's kind of a hierarchy of these.
If somebody says, you know, I've converted and I had this great tremendous experience and I still, you know, work on my Christian walk, as they might describe it, every day, I really struggle with, you know, swearing too much.
Or I struggle with, you know, having negative thoughts about people I don't like or whatever.
Everybody will nod their heads and be sympathetic, but if somebody says that they still struggle, quote-unquote, with gender identity, or with sexuality, or with just having sex, this will be frowned upon, right?
Sins, quote-unquote, and I want to be clear, I do not consider anything related to sexual identity or gender identity a sin.
But the Christian contexts in which this language of testimony is most likely to take shape do.
And so if somebody can't tell a story of having been transformed in certain ways, of still struggling with certain sins, they are going to be viewed as suspect.
So even within well-meaning context, the stylized nature of testimonies can lead to people denying what they feel, repressing real struggles that they have.
It can lead to mental health issues.
It can contribute to denial or repression of sexual gender and identity.
It can make it so that Difficult questions are not posed to church authorities and church structures, and this is where it goes from beyond just, you know, this can be problematic, say, from a mental health perspective, to this leads to active coercion and high control religious environments.
is when the stylized nature of testimony is used to sort of reinforce the authority of church leaders or the church as an institution itself in such a way to make sure that some things remain comfortably private or out of sight.
We just deny the reality of them entirely, right?
If we don't talk about say, people continuing to have a same-sex attraction or to identify with a gender that's different than what they were assigned at birth, we don't have to face up to questions of whether or not those are things we as a church ought to be accepting of.
We can keep closeted people closeted.
We can keep uncomfortable things like, say, spousal abuse, we can keep it quiet because that's not going to be part of the testimony that's shared in public in front of the church.
And so on.
So the language and appeal to testimony too easily becomes a mechanism of religious control.
And this is particularly true when we go from not just testifying to what God has done, but testifying, excuse me, testifying to ways that we may fail to live up to divine standards.
And this is where it can bleed into the topic of sort of public confession, of having to share publicly ways in which we are not meeting up to what God wants us to do.
And that's where we're going to go in the next episode.
So I feel like I'm sort of leaving this hanging because it is a first part of two episodes here, but really the idea that I want to stay with is this notion of testimony.
It's intended on the most sort of face value definition of it.
It's a testimony, an account of what God has done in one's life and sharing that and witnessing to that and so forth to show the transformative power of God and basically to kind of be like, here's why you should be a Christian.
You experience this salvation and so forth.
It's intended to encourage and edify others, and it often does that.
But it can very often also lead into these other sort of problematic, even coercive practices and experiences.
And again, these are what I hear from with my clients, people who felt co-opted.
They felt coerced.
They felt that they could never really be honest, despite the fact that they were supposed to stand up in front of the congregation and share their personal experience.
That there was an expectation that there were elements of your personal experience that were absolutely not to be shared with others, including struggles or doubts or fears.
So that's sort of the downside.
So this language of testimony can be strange.
It can play a lot of roles, like so many things we talk about, and we're going to explore this more in the next episode.
Again, we'll get into this idea of public confession as it relates to testimony.
As always, I want to conclude by saying again, thank you for listening.
You could be doing something right now that you could be doing instead of listening to this.
So thank you so much.
Thank you for the support.
Again, Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller SWAJ.
Always want to hear from listeners.
Please keep the comments and questions and feedback coming.
I respond to as many as I can.
And again, until we meet again in this digital format, please be well.
