The previous episode explored how Christian churches, as well as other religious, non-profit, and volunteer organizations, exploit the idea of “having a servant’s heart,” or service or giving of one’s time and resources, for their own gain. In this episode, Dan considers how the idea of serving to the point of “suffering” elevates this abusive pattern within Christian organizations. Beginning with a discussion of the “suffering servant” idea in the Hebrew Bible, Dan traces how this idea of suffering has become part of the “source code” of Christianity, and why that matters for people today.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Merch: BUY OUR NEW Come and Take It and Election Affirmer ! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, pleased to be with everybody listening to this, and thanks as always to those of you who reach out with ideas for the podcast.
I welcome those.
And anything else you want to share with me, my email is danielmillerswag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Please keep the ideas for this series coming if you've got them.
Questions, comments, clarifications are always welcome.
As always, I respond to as many as I'm able to.
I know it's not all of them, but I do read them, do value them, and love the insights that people share.
Thank you to everybody who supports us just by listening, by suffering through the ads, those of you who support us financially.
We couldn't do it without you either, and perhaps especially.
So thank you for doing that.
I always know that wherever you are listening to this, whatever you're doing, you could be listening to something else.
And so we thank you for that.
Today's episode, I want to pick up on a topic that I talked about last episode, which was the theme of a servant's heart, having a servant's heart, what it means to serve, and so forth.
And I talked in that episode about how that language of a servant's heart is manipulated within religious organizations, specifically churches.
Those are the religious organizations I'm most familiar with.
But I also talked about how I think there's a pattern that is discernible also in other volunteer and nonprofit organizations as well, and that in a certain dimension, that's what a church is.
Almost all churches, I honestly can't really think of any exceptions, depend upon a huge amount of volunteer labor to do all the different kinds of things that they have to do, and they can take advantage of this.
But I also noted that this idea of being a servant or of serving others can also be connected with the idea of suffering.
And I want to tackle that idea in this episode.
I sort of introduced it in the last episode, promised to get back to it, and I want to pick that up in this episode.
And the reason why serving and suffering are linked in a lot of Christian thinking is because the idea of Jesus of Nazareth coming to serve, and we talked about that in the last episode, was also tied in with the idea that he suffered and died for human sins.
And part of the reason why this idea is so prevalent in Christian thought, and has been since the origins of Christian thought, Is that in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Isaiah makes reference to a figure that is going to be known as the Suffering Servant.
It's in Isaiah chapter 53.
It's the fourth of what are known as the Servant Songs in the book.
And the passage in question has been significant in both Christian and Jewish history.
And when I say that, I'm very well aware that Christianity emerges as a form of Judaism.
And so we talk about early Christianity, we are still talking about a form of Judaism that accepted Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.
So this was all occurring within a sort of a Jewish tradition of interpretation.
And this passage will be well known to many.
I'm not going to read all of Isaiah 53, but a few verses for those of you who might have grown up in the church or have heard this, or, you know, if you're one of those families that, you know, your grandma's generation went to church all the time and your mom or dad, maybe some of the time and you not so much.
You might still be familiar with this passage, and it reads this way.
It says, and I'm reading verses 3 through 7 for those who might be interested in looking it up.
Isaiah 53 said, He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity, and is one from whom others hide their faces.
He was despised and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.
Yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.
Upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
All we, like sheep, have gone astray.
We have turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted.
Yet he did not open his mouth, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and a sheep that before the shearer is silent.
So he did not open his mouth.
Could go on from there.
I'm not going to go on from there.
That's not the kind of podcast we have here.
But that's the figure, the figure of the suffering servant, somebody who says has borne our infirmities, somebody who was struck down and afflicted, who was wounded for our transgressions and so forth.
And interpretations of who this figure is or what it represents have varied across time among Jewish groups and early Christians and subsequent Christian groups as well.
And they've ranged from sort of corporate interpretations that this is about the nation of Israel as a whole or that what was called the Jewish remnant in the period of the exile.
But early Christians, early Jewish followers of Jesus of Nazareth, so those early Jewish folks who followed Jesus and believed that he was the promised Messiah, because that's how this passage was partly interpreted, is that this suffering figure was a messianic figure, a figure of somebody who would come and bring deliverance through this suffering.
Early Christians came to believe that Jesus was the suffering servant foretold in this passage, and this has become the normative Christian interpretation.
And the idea is that through his death, burial, and resurrection, Jesus suffered for us.
All that stuff about being crushed and suffering for our iniquities and taking on our punishment and all of that.
The idea is that through his death, burial, resurrection, Jesus suffered for us, for our sins, took on our punishment, and ultimately brought about our forgiveness.
And in the Christian New Testament, when the suffering of Christ is referenced, this passage is usually in the background.
So that's the idea.
Within the Christian tradition, the idea that Christ served others has therefore meant that it wasn't just that Jesus helped other people, that he healed people, that he demanded justice for the marginalized or oppressed, that he, depending on one's reading, sort of made statements against or in the context of Roman occupation and so forth.
All of that's there, but Christians have held, typically, that that's not all Jesus did when he served.
To say that he served also meant that he served to the point of suffering and dying for others.
Okay?
And this is really significant for a lot of reasons, but here are a couple of the big ones.
The first is that this interpretation of Jesus and his life and the Isaiah 53 passage, they place suffering and really suffering as a result of violence.
They place suffering and violence at the heart of the Christian message.
That's the first one.
It's fundamental.
It's written in.
It's part of, let's say, the source code of Christian thought, that suffering and violence are an integral part of the Christian message.
And sort of following from that, the second big thing it means is that it means that the very idea of imitating Christ, of being Christ-like, right, in service of him, of serving others like Christ did, often carries with it the idea of serving even to the point of suffering.
Which means, again, that we call it the source code.
It's in the code, in the source code of most forms of Christianity, that suffering is something to be valorized or celebrated or even sought out.
There has been the idea, and it's more prominent in some times and historical periods and places than others, it's not consistent, but there's been the idea that Christians are called to experience suffering.
That this is a part of being a good Christian.
So how's this played out?
Why this whole sort of theology lesson of the suffering servant and why we think of Jesus this way and so forth?
Well, the reason is that this valorizing of suffering, this placing of suffering at the center of Christian identity, plays out in popular Christian life in a lot of ways.
And I do want to give the caveat here that there are Christian traditions and lines of Christian thought that reject this valorization, okay?
But the dominant forms of Christianity have placed this sort of front and center.
One of the ways that this has played out, okay?
It's played out a lot of ways in different Christian groups.
One of the ways that it is played out is a denial of the reality or the significance or the tragedy of the suffering we experience.
And we've already explored this.
So if you're curious about that, go back and look at an episode, I believe from November of 2022, called Counted All Joy, right?
And there we talked about this idea of a sort of denial of suffering because of this notion that we should count it all joy when we suffer.
Why?
Because we're being Christ-like and so forth.
So this episode sort of dovetails with that as I go back and look at the episodes that we've done.
So that's...
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's one reality, but here I want to look at something different, and I want to build on the theme that we looked at in the last episode about the idea of having a servant's heart, okay?
And we noted the ways that this emphasis can devolve into a license on the part of churches and, again, other non-profits and volunteer organizations, right, to overwork and to make excessive demands of volunteers and lay people, even their own staff.
And in this context, The valorizing of suffering acts to intensify those demands that are placed on individuals to serve the church, okay?
So you come along to me, maybe I'm the pastor of the church, maybe I'm a board of elders, maybe I'm just, you know, a devout friend of yours in the congregation, whatever, and you come along and you tell me that giving of your time is cutting into your family life or your leisure time?
Well, I mean, that's how it should be.
You're called to suffer for Christ.
Or you come and you tell me that, you know, you're trying to support the church financially, but you're giving so much of your money, or you just don't have that much money to start with, and you can't make ends meet.
Well, that's how it should be.
You're called to suffer for Christ.
You feel unappreciated for all that time and money and resources that you're giving to the church.
You feel like it's a second or third job and nobody values it as such.
Well, that's how it should be.
You're called to suffer for Christ.
You're facing repercussions at your job because you're spending three weeks every summer on a mission or service trip overseas and taking more vacation time than you're supposed to or using all your sick days or whatever, and your bosses are starting to come down on you.
Well, you know, that's how it should be.
You're called to suffer for Christ.
What happens is that instead of serving as evidence against churches abusing those upon whose mostly unpaid labor they depend, the pain and the suffering and the negative consequences of those service demands becomes evidence in favor of those demands. the pain and the suffering and the negative consequences of And we can understand the perverse logic.
It was a sense in which the more painful it is, the more of a sacrifice it is.
And we've talked about the theme of sacrifice on this podcast.
The more it makes you suffer, the more righteous it is, the better it is that you are doing it.
So in a perverse way, increased suffering is the ideal because it's a demonstration of greater devotion to God.
And again, we've talked about this in the context of, say, personal suffering or tragedies in one's life.
Here, I'm looking again at this theme of the way that churches make use of the people in their congregations, right?
Increased suffering is the ideal because it's a demonstration of greater devotion to God.
And this is where I think the abuse of the servant's heart idea within Christian context goes beyond that of other nonprofit or volunteer organizations.
So last week I talked about this.
I said that this, in my view, is not unique to churches.
This sense of preying on people's sense of purpose.
People's sense of mission, their sense of calling for whatever it is that they're doing, right?
Whether it's for a religious reason or whether it's a secular reason, it could even be an anti-religious organization.
Whatever it is, preying on that sense of calling as a way of extracting more from them than they would otherwise give, and more than is frankly healthy or good for them to give.
And I said, I don't think this is unique to churches, and it's not.
But here's the difference, right?
Because while they all prey on that sense of mission, I think Christian churches are different in that they have this kind of source code.
They run on a source code built around the idea of suffering a service.
It's not sort of incidental to what they do.
It's not tangential for them to claim it.
It's a central component of their kind of organizational identity.
Which means that churches take many of the same dynamics as other volunteer or nonprofit organizations, but they intensify those dynamics.
And this, in my view, is something that happens a lot.
People talk about this, you know, with me a lot about sort of religion and culture and things like this, religion and pop culture.
You know, how is Christian apocalypticism different than other kind of, you know, thinking that divides the world into, you know, us versus them and kind of cosmic battles and so forth?
Or how are the demands that Christians make in different ways, you know, really more intense than demands of, say, you know, political leaders or others?
And my answer is always that what Christianity does, and Christianity is not unique in this, other religions can do this, though they don't all, is by inscribing that as a sort of divine ideal.
It just ups the ante.
It turns up the volume on all of those things to literally the highest degree.
And that's what happens here.
And again, as we talked about last week, it's a ripe recipe for exploiting people within religious organizations or religious groups.
And this is one of those topics that I'll be honest, the first time that somebody suggested to me talking about this, I thought, well, you know, I get it.
It's a real thing.
It happens in churches.
When I was a pastor, I was very wary and cognizant of this.
I tried, I don't know if I succeeded, but I tried not to take advantage of my parishioners.
I tried not to take for granted that, I don't know, just because somebody was an accountant and what they did, that they should be doing the church books for free.
Or that just because somebody was a handy person around the house doing things or even doing it for a living, that they should be giving their labor on weekends to fix things around the church or whatever.
I tried not to do that.
I was familiar with this dynamic, but I don't think I realized how widespread and pervasive and significant it is.
And when I started to hear from people who would email me and say, I think you should talk about this, I was like, yeah, maybe, but I'm just not sure it's a problem lots of people are familiar with.
But then I started the coaching work.
Again, I'm a trauma resolution coach with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
Put in my plug for them.
I love the center and what they do.
If these episodes or other things in your life are raising that question for you of how to deal with religious trauma, I encourage you to reach out to the center and the coaches there.
But I started talking with folks, and this was a theme that came up a lot, like a lot of people for whom this was a central part of what they struggle with, of why they left the church, of why they started faith deconstruction, whatever was this notion.
I became more and more aware that it really was widespread and pervasive.
And I think it feeds into broader American issues with a culture of work and so forth.
But this was a really central idea, and so it's why I wanted to dive into it, in case you're somebody, and maybe you are unfamiliar with this, you're like, well, that sounds kind of interesting, but is this something that really hits people?
It is.
It's one of the primary reasons that I've heard from people why They left the church or left Christianity was this sense that they were obligated to constantly be giving money or time or effort or whatever it was.
And I see this playing out in a couple ways.
This will kind of close us out on this topic.
The ongoing effects of this, I find those who tell me that they're unable to kind of commit to anything.
They have trouble committing in relationships.
They have trouble committing to friends.
They have trouble committing to organizations because they've kind of become hardwired at this point to avoid those kinds of commitments, meaningful commitments, because it turns into something where they just give of themselves until they're depleted.
And they don't know how to how to sort of draw those lines and they just can't commit to something anymore.
And on the opposite extreme are those who can't say no, who feel like they are constantly falling prey to people who try to take more from them.
They're drawn into toxic relationships or manipulative contexts because they can't draw those boundaries.
And it's because of growing up in this religious context that programmed them to constantly be giving of themselves, again, to the point of exhaustion, to the point of suffering, to the point of sacrifice.
So this is another piece of it.
So these two pieces of this notion of a servant's heart, one is this constantly giving of yourself and the church sort of manipulating or taking advantage of that.
This sort of feeds on it and says, here's what it looks like when it's tied in with this notion of giving to the point of suffering, where you get sort of, as it were, no ceiling to that.
There's no upper limit to how much the church can demand from you.
There's a third element to this, and I'm going to get into this in the next episode.
And this is how This valorization of suffering can be picked up and utilized and weaponized by those who are not suffering to paradoxically or in a very Orwellian kind of way claim greater rights, greater privileges, greater social power in the name of a suffering that doesn't exist, but that they know how to appeal to because again it's in the source code of their Christian faith.
We're going to pick that up in the next episode.
Before I go, though, I should say this.
I am going to be gone for a couple weeks, so that next episode will be dropping here in probably three weeks after this one.
Brad, my co-host slash producer, will have some material that'll be available in the next couple weeks.
I will be on a trip to Greece.
Never been there.
Had the opportunity to go, and I'm going to take a break for a couple weeks and do that.
But I look forward to talking to everybody when I get back.
I will still be checking email and doing things like that.
As always, thank you for listening.
Keep the ideas coming.
Keep the feedback coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Would love to hear from anybody.
As always, thank you for listening and be well until we meet again.
