It's In the Code Ep. 60: The Distance Between the Head and the Heart
“Lots of people miss salvation by 18 inches—the distance between the head and the heart.” This (and statements like it) is a phrase that has long circulated within a particular kind of Christian subculture. But what does it mean? What does it mean to “believe” in God with your heart, instead of your head? And how does this language work as a mechanism of social control, beyond or beneath its surface meaning? Dan tackles these topics in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series in the podcast Straight White American Jesus, My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am, pretty obviously, your host.
Glad to be with you as always.
As always, I want to begin by thanking those of you who listen, those of you who give us feedback and communicate.
And let us know what you're thinking.
This series in particular, always soliciting your thoughts, opinions, interests.
And you can reach me at danielmillerswag, danielmillerswag at gmail.com.
The proviso always, I'm always behind on emails.
We learn to accept the limitations in ourselves.
And this is one of my limitations, is that I fall behind in emails.
But I do value them.
I read them, even if I don't have a chance to respond to everybody's email.
I try to respond to as many as I can.
But this series is driven by you, so please keep the ideas coming.
I'm really interested if there are thoughts or maybe sort of spin-off ideas from today's episode.
So let me know about what you think about that.
Let's dive in.
This past weekend, I'm recording this on a Tuesday, this past weekend was traveling some.
For reasons that I don't fully understand about myself, I spent some time listening to Christian radio.
Now, I do this from time to time, and it always drives me crazy.
I just find myself yelling at the radio and getting weird looks from other drivers.
I'm not sure exactly why I do it, but I do it, and so I did it this weekend and spent time yelling at the radio and so forth.
There was an idea that came up, and it's an idea that I've been thinking about for a while.
For some reason, it had been on my mind coming out of my own background in the evangelical world.
It's an issue that I've heard from clients with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery and the work that I do with them.
It's something I've heard about in emails, I've heard about in discussions, so I know that it's not unique to me.
But it was the idea that, or the line the person said, that quote, many people miss salvation by 18 inches, the distance between their head and their heart.
It's actually, you know, what I'm going to call this episode, Missing Salvation by 18 Inches.
And again, if you're outside of a certain kind of religious subculture, a certain kind of Christianity that speaks this way, it can be a really, really weird statement.
And certainly, if you've never been part of the Christian tradition, it may be a completely unintelligible statement.
But what it means Or what it expresses is the idea of what it means to be saved, or to be a Christian at all, within a certain kind of Christian understanding.
And it's the idea that it's to have a personal relationship with Jesus, right?
That it is another colloquialism, is it is to give your heart to Jesus.
And I've talked about this before, an episode a long time ago, but you can search it up I think it was called It's a Relationship, Not a Religion, or It's Not a Religion, It's a Relationship, that idea.
But what it communicates is a very effective kind of emotionally laden understanding of the Christian faith.
It's the idea that one has a personal encounter with God through Jesus of Nazareth.
And it also expresses a kind of judgment on, you know, supposed Christians, people who might call themselves Christian, might think of themselves as Christians, but they're not really Christians because their faith is based too much on kind of ritual observance.
This is the kind of the classic Conservative Protestant view of Catholics is that it's just about ritual, it's not enough about the heart.
Or that it's too theological, or abstract, or too heady.
They might say that one has a, quote, head knowledge of Christianity, but not a heart knowledge or a heart experience.
This is what it's trying to capture.
And in that regard, it expresses a strong sense of who real Christians are, right?
I've heard this.
I get emails from folks sometimes who are really confused because maybe they're Catholic, maybe they're mainline.
They go to a mainline Protestant church, sorry, Presbyterian church, Lutheran church, something like that, and they've got somebody in their life—I remember one person who emailed, I think it was a daughter-in-law—who said, oh, well, I mean, but you're not really a Christian.
And started using this language of relationship in the heart, and this listener was really sincerely confused and was like, what could it possibly mean to say I'm not a Christian if I've been like attending church my whole life and I believe certain things and so forth?
And that's the idea.
It's a kind of judgment on people who claim to be Christians but whose faith is viewed as shallow or superficial, or maybe they're just lukewarm Christians because they don't experience or express Christianity's relational terms.
It expresses the idea that a mere, as I say, understanding or head knowledge, as they might say, of Christianity is not enough to make one a real Christian, okay?
So, like I say, I talked about that some in that earlier episode.
It's not a religion, it's a relationship.
Go back, check that out, that idea we can pick up on what a, you know, a quote-unquote relationship is.
But what I want to think about in this episode is a little bit different from that, and that episode was a long time ago as well, so if there's some overlap, I think maybe it's worth revisiting.
What I want to look at is just how, excuse me, how kind of slippery this understanding and expression of Christianity really is.
What we're going to see, as we see so often in this series, is that the language operates as a means of social control within the Christian subcultures that use it.
It operates to regulate the lives and probably more importantly, the behavior of those within conservative Christian subculture.
Because even further than that, it operates to dictate the feelings, the very perceptions about reality, the way that people experience the world within that subculture.
So as we do sometimes, we talk a little bit about where this idea comes from.
It's straightforward enough.
This is kind of a historical reflection here.
But this idea of a kind of personal encounter with God through Jesus and so forth, it took shape as a reaction against complex theologies of formal academic institutions and church institutions and things like this.
You go back in Western history and you look at the Reformation, the Reformation itself was a kind of reaction against the institutionalized Catholic Church and Catholic teachings that they felt had gone too far from the teachings of the Bible and so forth.
But within Protestantism in particular, there were sub-movements that felt that mainstream Protestants hadn't gone far enough with this.
They were still too wrapped up in church institutions and formal theology and so forth.
And part of what happened is this focus on formal theology.
Most of you haven't studied theology.
I have.
I enjoy the study of theology.
It's not really something I do anymore.
But like I say, it's a really complicated intellectual discipline, and you've got to have a lot of Specialized training and a fairly strong aptitude for abstract thought and complex philosophical questions and so forth to be able to undertake that kind of theological reflection.
That's always been true, and it rendered these theologies mostly inaccessible to a public that was not only less educated, but oftentimes not literate, certainly by today's standards.
And one of the things that it did is that it ensured that only those with proper theological knowledge, that they were basically gatekeepers of the faith.
And that's exactly the thing that Protestants have been critical of for Catholics.
Protestants have said that Catholics and the priesthood and so forth sort of barred ordinary people from access to Christianity.
And so you had certain Protestants who said the same thing.
And so they emphasized an experiential, emotional, direct encounter with God as a response to this.
If you want the sort of real extreme of this in the contemporary world, it's Pentecostalism and charismatic Christian movements and so forth, and the emphasis of the activity of the Holy Spirit and so forth.
But what this did is it made the God of the Christian faith more accessible.
You could describe this as a kind of democratizing of religion.
It put control of religious institutions back into the hands of more ordinary religious people, and you got denominations like early Baptists or Methodists that rejected the formal theological training requirements of other denominations and would elevate just sort of individuals within the congregation who they believe were called to be the pastor and so forth.
That's what I mean by calling this a kind of democratizing of the tradition, okay?
Well, one of the things that that means is this form of Christianity has always been accompanied by suspicion of intellectuals and trained clerics.
It's a form of what we would call anti-clericalism.
So if you fast forward to the present, it's why the same Christian communities where this language tends to circulate, these are the modern inheritors of this impulse.
Those Christian traditions or Christian groups or Christian individuals, they're also the same ones that preach against the elite, that deny the legitimacy of scientific rationality, which plays out in all these sort of anti-vaccine or climate change denying ideologies and things like that.
They might reject the notion of expertise on any number of topics, including LGBTQ plus issues or race issues or things like this, that broad anti-intellectualism is a legacy of this kind of tradition, okay?
But there are also a couple other dimensions of this focus on feeling or emotion that I want to hit on.
And I also want to pick up later on a sort of code switch that comes out, because here we're getting into the sort of code part of this.
What does this do?
What is this code for, this language of head and heart?
So, on the one hand, this language of the distance between the head and the heart and the need for the heart in salvation It expresses the idea that Christianity is not simply a matter of belief for these Christians, okay?
And we've said this on the podcast for years, that people, Americans and Westerners generally, tend to talk about religion in terms of belief, and that's a mistake because you miss a lot of things about religion if you think of it primarily or only in terms of belief.
For this form of Christianity, being a Christian is just about believing certain things, It's about feeling certain things.
It's about feeling the world in a certain way, of perceiving it in a certain way.
It's about having the feelings at the level of our bodies about a range of things.
And when I say feelings, I don't just mean a sort of shallow notion of emotions.
I mean the way that, you know, your stomach clenches up at certain things, or you feel your chest getting tight, or your heart is racing.
That kind of feeling about certain things.
About having the quote-unquote right feelings at the level of our bodies about all kinds of things.
It's about having the right feelings, and please understand if you could see me right now, the word right is in scare quotes every time, okay?
Having the right feelings about gender and sexuality.
Having the right feelings about issues like abortion.
Having the right feelings about people of different ethnicities and how they ought to relate to each other.
Having the right feelings about people of different religions.
Having the right feelings about things like sexual purity and not having sex until you're married and so forth.
Having the right feelings about newer culture war issues like opposition to vaccines or masking mandates during COVID or things like that.
It's about how we feel in the world at a visceral level that becomes hardwired in our bodies.
That's what that language is about.
And that's why Christians who use this language, who feel it to be true, for whom it is in their view a true description of their life to say that they have given their heart, quote-unquote, to Jesus, that it's about a relationship and so forth, that's why they are so vehement in their social and religious and political views.
It's because it's not just about belief.
It's about feelings like disgust or hatred or love or desire.
And those feelings are taken as a sign of the legitimacy or the truth that one has a quote-unquote relationship with Jesus.
To feel the wrong way is to call into question whether one's a Christian at all.
If you don't love the right people or if you don't hate the right things, If particular social realities like queer identity or abortion, if they don't create the right feelings in you, feelings of hate, feelings of disgust, feelings of shame, if those feelings don't accompany that, this is evidence that you might not be a real Christian after all.
That's how significant this is.
This is the code, right?
Is that to be a real Christian is to feel the right things on a gut level, okay?
And so if we view it from on this axis, let's call it right, this axis of the head and heart language, you can see how powerful this way of talking can be as a mechanism of social control.
If you can get people to accept your judgments about them at the level of what they feel, if you can get people to cede the authority to you, to rewire their bodies, to make them feel certain things, If you can attain the power to leverage their fundamental embodied intuitions, that's a recipe for seriously effective social control.
But here's the code switch, or even the contradiction, at the center of this language about a faith of heart and feeling.
And it's because for all the talk of the heart, individual relationship with Jesus, feelings and so forth, the idea of belief still never goes away.
It's always like the underside of this haunting it.
It's a trump card that can be played when it needs to be played.
And let me explain what I mean by this, okay?
Because this was brought home to me when I was an evangelical pastor and it contributed to me ultimately leaving evangelicalism, to my disillusionment with the movement.
At that time, and we're talking about a lot of years ago now, okay?
At that time, I accepted the idea that a kind of personal encounter with God, effected through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, was at the heart of quote-unquote salvation.
Whatever salvation was, it was about this kind of personal encounter with God and placing trust in God and whatever.
And my view was that the role of the church, the role of the Christian message, and so forth, was to facilitate that kind of encounter.
But here's the conclusion I drew from that.
Then that meant for me, and it still does, if I think about it this way.
I'm not so concerned about this encounter with God stuff, but I think the logic still holds.
If that encounter was central, then so much of the rest of what I had been taught was central to Christianity and Christian identity became secondary.
Why?
Because one could have that encounter, so I thought, and hold a range of political views.
One could have that encounter and believe in the reality of evolution or of modern scientific findings, in the reality of sexual and gender diversity.
One could have a range of opinions on the morality of abortion and so forth.
One could have that encounter without believing that the Bible was infallible or inerrant or literally true or without having to understand complex things like the doctrine of the Trinity or, you know, does God experience time or not or whatever.
So, in other words, I came to hold the conviction that this understanding of what Christianity was, which was supposed to be the heart of evangelicalism, it freed us not only from sin or from being lost, was not only religiously significant, but it also freed us from the control of increasingly narrow church teachings and practices as well.
This, for me, was the logic of this conception of faith, I really thought.
That if all of this is true, then we ought to be able to be a diverse Christian body with different political views and different social views and so forth, if we have this common experience of encounter with God at the core.
Okay?
And then I made the mistake of saying this to people, or articulating this view, and this is when the real motivation behind that language, the motivation of social control, came into stark view for me.
Because as soon as I used This supposed core evangelical commitment to push back on the practices of evangelicalism, suddenly the centrality of belief was brought out.
Suddenly the head mattered more than the heart.
So it turns out that when the heart challenged evangelical practice, the head suddenly reappeared.
It turns out that the feeling or the experience or the relationship with God wasn't enough by itself.
One also had to believe particular things about the Bible, or about the nature of God, or about God's quote-unquote design for human sexuality and gender, about race and ethnicity, and so forth.
It also meant that religious authorities We're still just that.
They were authorities.
And this was the code switch.
And this is how it works, this language of the distance between the head and the heart.
In practice, the coded language of the heart is used to shape people on a fundamental visceral level.
But if the social control that that shaping sort of makes possible, if that social control slips, Then appeals to the head, to normative beliefs and external structures of authority, they all come flowing back in.
So this is what I mean when I say it's a slippery phrase because it can be used either way or abandoned or limited as needs be to control people within the church who make this profession.
So, missing salvation by 18 inches, the distance between the head and the heart.
I heard it in sermons.
I heard it on the radio this weekend.
I have heard it from other listeners.
We hear it in, I think, language that captures the same idea, all this language about relationship and feeling and so forth, even if it's not phrased in exactly the same way.
It is a nice pithy way of expressing the distinctiveness of a certain kind of Christianity, and that's how I heard it.
It was oftentimes in the midst of, you know, an evangelistic call trying to get people to convert to Christianity and saying, lots of people will miss salvation by 18 inches and so forth.
But it does more than that.
It provides the leverage for policing the actions and the beliefs and the very feelings and perceptions of professing Christians.
It also provides the means of judging and dismissing any alternative experiences of the world, even or especially those of different kinds of Christians.
That's part of what happened to me.
People ask all the time, why don't more progressive evangelicals change the tradition?
Because they find themselves in the position that I was in, where you're just basically not read, so to speak, as an evangelical anymore.
You're suddenly out of the movement.
Right?
And if you don't think this is the case, I'm going to close with this.
Try it out next time someone drops this kind of language on you, about it being about a relationship, or it's not about head knowledge, it's about the heart, or whatever.
And see how they respond to this.
You say, you know what?
I feel like my relationship with God is good.
I feel like I have encountered God.
I feel like I have a good relationship.
And I accept LGBTQ plus people.
I'm an election affirmer.
I don't believe the Bible is literally true, and none of that seems to hinder my relationship with God, and that's what Christianity is about.
So that might mean that all those things are okay.
They're going to respond, and I put money on the table on this, they will respond by saying that it's impossible to have a right relationship with God.
It's impossible to have your quote-unquote heart right if any of those other things are also true.
That'll be the response.
That's the mechanism of social control at work.
Need to wind this up.
Again, I want to thank everybody for listening.
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Thank all of you who go through the ads and listen to those to support us.
As we say, we are an indie show.
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Three episodes a week, content drops three times a week.
I appreciate all of you.
Please keep the ideas coming, and as always, be well until we meet again.
