We’ve all had the experience of sitting around a Thanksgiving table sharing what we’re grateful or thankful for. But why do some people seem to demand that we feel grateful? Why do they demand that we express gratitude? And what role to these demands play in high-control religious contexts? What is harbored within these demands that can make us so uncomfortable? Dan dives into these issues in this week’s episode.
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I am your host, and I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, I want to thank everybody for tuning in and listening.
Throw this out there, previous episode, Lots and lots of responses to that.
Many affirmative, some critical, sort of stirred some things up.
So taking all that on board and taking a look at that, it may be, I don't know, maybe some things out of there to revisit.
So I just want to want to throw that out there.
And again, invite folks to share thoughts, reflections, series ideas.
You can reach me at Daniel Miller Swedge, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always love to hear from all of you and appreciate everybody so much who supports the work that we do.
I want to dive into today's topic.
As I record this, we are heading into the Thanksgiving holiday.
It'll be next week.
I'm going to have something a little bit different probably posted next Tuesday, so the last regular episode before the holiday as I spend that with my family.
But it got me thinking about this is not an episode about Thanksgiving per se, and that would be a bigger episode.
It'd be interesting to look at.
I find Thanksgiving to be this Really weird kind of quasi-religious American holiday wrapped up with lots of mythology and some real religious history and some kind of secularized religion and all that.
That would be an interesting topic, but that's not what we're going to talk about today.
But what did get me thinking about it is a tradition that probably most of us have experienced, right?
Where, you know, it's Thanksgiving Day, you're sitting around the table with friends and family doing that normal thing, and you do the thing where you share something that you're thankful for.
And I was thinking about this.
I'll be honest and say that's never been, like, my favorite tradition.
It always feels a little weird.
That's probably my own issue.
That'd be a different topic.
Maybe not for all of you.
Maybe more for, like, a therapist or something.
But what it got me thinking about was this idea of thankfulness, or specifically, as I think about sort of popular American religion and American Christianity, this notion of gratefulness.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
What I want to think about, what I want to talk about, and again, this is something that I've heard from lots of you, from listeners to this series, listeners to this episode.
It's also something that I've run into a lot with the clients, the trauma clients that I work with, and so forth.
But what I want to think about is the obligation to be grateful or the obligation to express gratitude or thankfulness.
And that's what I want to look at.
So I want to start with this.
I don't want to be misunderstood here.
So I want to begin by saying that there is real value to being purposeful and mindful about what we have, of expressing thanks to whatever, to whomever, to the universe, to God, to ourselves, whatever, right?
Expressing or feeling or sitting with gratitude and thankfulness For what we have, right?
I think there are positive benefits.
Real world benefits.
There are, you know, I think mental health benefits.
There are benefits to our bodies and our nervous systems.
To taking stock of the people and the things and the situations in our lives that we're grateful to have.
I'm very mindful of the fact that for most of us who, me sitting here, most of you listening to this, in the grand scope of things, in the scope of lots of people in the world in different places, we have a great deal to be thankful or grateful for.
And mental health experts and others will remind us that that kind of taking stock exercise, it can be a key component to cultivating a sense of contentment or acceptance in our life situation, to staying grounded, to not constantly experiencing a whole host of negative emotions and attitudes, etc.
And for those of us, and I am firmly in this category, it won't surprise you probably given the kinds of things we talk about every week, But for those of us who can tend to focus on the negative, right, who can tend to focus on what's not going right or what's not right with the world, taking time to acknowledge what is right and what we have to be thankful or grateful for, it's an important exercise, right?
So as uncomfortable as that sitting around the table sharing something we're thankful for is or maybe I see real value to it, okay?
And I say all of that to say I'm not trying to torpedo that.
I want to hear from everybody, but if I get emails from folks who are like, you know, my life changed when I started recognizing that I had the things that I wanted and hadn't known it before and so forth, I'm not trying to devalue any of that.
If you'll spend some time next week sharing things you're thankful for, fantastic.
If you have found, as I have, That acknowledging the positive aspects of your life can have real and tangible positive effects on your mood or your mental health?
Then great!
Fantastic!
I'm not trying to shoot that down.
But, right, there it is, the but.
Everybody who listens to me knows that that but is coming.
I also have some real concerns about appeals to thankfulness or gratefulness, especially as they relate to religion.
And more specifically, I have issues with those who would sort of constantly enjoin us to be thankful or grateful, and especially those who essentially, like, demand acknowledgement of gratefulness or thankfulness from us, okay?
Because I think there's a very, very thin, fine line between staying grounded and recognizing the real beneficial elements of our lives and crossing that line into denying or trivializing or minimizing the very real, legitimately problematic dimensions of our lives.
And where do we draw that line?
I don't exactly know.
How can we make sure that we're not crossing that line?
I wish I knew.
It's something that I can tell you very honestly and openly I am working on with myself.
I don't know.
I don't know the magic answer to that, okay?
But what I do know is this, is that too often demands that we acknowledge thanks or we express gratefulness, they aim at exactly that, right?
Their aim is to minimize our needs, To minimize the problems in our lives, to minimize the issues confronting us as a society, and so forth.
Too often, that's the work that demands for gratefulness or thankfulness do, right?
And even worse, I think, rather than just trivializing those things, I think that they can legitimize those things.
I think that demands for gratefulness or thankfulness can make us not just not focus on those things, but we can take them as somehow Beneficial as somehow okay because things could be worse, essentially, is what it takes on.
And I think we all have some sense, some intuitive sense, of the different forms that those dismissals can take.
And I think that they range from the well-meaning but misguided to the obviously manipulative and coercive.
If you had sort of a continuum, on one end you've got the people who mean well, But I think they're misguided.
And on the other end, you've got people who are really explicit, I think, have explicit aims to do these things.
So let's dive into this.
I want to decode these calls for gratefulness or for thankfulness.
And let's start with that, let's say the softer version, the well-meaning but misguided person.
This is the person in your life who, when you share struggles or things that you're dealing with, it's that person that always listens.
They probably care about you.
They may be somebody you care about deeply, but their response always starts with the sentence that says, well, at least, and then followed by something that could be worse.
So it's like, no matter what you state or what you're wrestling with, They will always say, oh, well, it's too bad.
But, you know, at least it's not, you know, this or this or this.
Essentially, it could be worse.
OK?
And I think we all have at least one of those people in our lives.
I don't think that they mean to devalue what we're saying or feeling, but that's the effect, okay?
And I think that those well-meaning people, they can develop that habit from a lot of places, right?
It can be just a level of sort of personal discomfort with, you know, talking about uncomfortable emotions or things like that.
It could be because that's how they were brought up, lots of reasons.
But one of the sources, I think, can be religion.
And often, and here I'm reflecting on my own experience, I'm reflecting on that of my clients, I'm reflecting on my experience as an evangelical pastor once upon a time, I'm reflecting on my experience as somebody who studies religion and theology and so forth.
Right?
I think that often this habit, it expresses a history of participating in a religious context that demands that we appreciate all that we have as gifts from God.
They're not just good luck, they're not results of our work, they are gifts from God.
And I think it reflects a long history within the Christian tradition.
It's a line of thinking that essentially says that we, as sinful fallen human beings, we deserve perdition and suffering.
It's a line of thinking probably most famously articulated in what emerges as Protestantism and especially the Reformed tradition, right?
That our natural deserts, what we most naturally deserve as humans, we deserve suffering.
We deserve torment.
We deserve condemnation.
And so the fact that we experience anything other than that is grace.
It's a radical gift from God.
So to focus on those negative things is to implicitly fail to acknowledge the goodness of God.
Right?
We are compelled to be grateful and to express gratefulness for and recognition of what God has given us.
And so if we focus on the challenges in life or the negative things that we're feeling or experiencing, we are somehow denying God.
So if it feels like, despite being well-intended, This response is dismissive and trivializing when somebody says, oh, that's too bad, but you know, at least you can be grateful that, you know, whatever.
It could be worse.
When it feels like that's dismissive and trivializing as a response, it's because it is.
And when it comes out of a Christian context, I think that this is explicit.
It reflects a theology that explicitly dismisses the reality or significance of our struggles or our sufferings, etc.
So that's the well-intentioned, but I think this religious component can be turned way up.
We can turn the volume up on this, and we can experience Not just, you know, the person who sort of blunts the force of what we're feeling.
We can experience demands to feel grateful or to express our gratitude explicitly.
And this is often given in particular religious contexts, right?
It's a sign of faith.
A sign of our commitment to God to be able to and be willing to express gratefulness in the face of the negative things we're experiencing, right?
To focus on what we do have or what is going well as gifts from God and these other things as something to not be caught up in.
And I've experienced this, folks, right?
I've experienced it personally.
I've experienced it directed at me.
I've heard from many of you who have experienced it.
I get emails about this topic.
This is a topic I didn't just come up with.
I've heard from you.
I work with a lot of clients who experience this, and I'm ashamed to admit that I probably did this, this very same thing, participated in this practice during my time as an evangelical pastor.
So, concrete examples of this, right?
I've encountered people who have chronic illnesses.
Or they're diagnosed with cancer or something, something terrible, sometimes something fatal, something terminal, but they are constantly told by pastors and spiritual advisors that they need to recognize and express gratitude for the things that aren't wrong.
That they need to not focus on those negatives, they need to focus on and set those aside and focus on the positive things.
They're essentially told that they have a lack of faith if they dwell, quote-unquote, on what's wrong.
I've talked to people who've lost a loved one, they've lost a parent, they've lost a child, they've lost a partner.
And after some, you know, kind of obligatory period of grieving, they're basically told that they need to set that aside, they need to pull themselves together, and they need to be grateful for the family members that they still have, right?
That if they don't start expressing that gratitude and thankfulness, they are somehow not living up to their Christian obligations.
These are the people who dismiss the social justice concerns of a movement like the Black Lives Matter movement.
Because they, quote unquote, black people, because they need to be grateful for the fact that society is not as bad now as it was in 1860.
And I hear from a lot of you, I know you've had those conversations with people.
I don't know what they're complaining about.
They just need to be grateful that society has come so far and quit blaming everybody for things and so on.
It's the person who's in an emotionally or verbally abusive relationship, and instead of being told to get out and to take care of themselves, they are told that they should be grateful that it's not physically abusive.
Well, you know it's bad, that's hard, I know that, but hey, at least he's not hitting you.
Right?
And we could expand this list.
We could go on and on and on.
And so all of these cases, for me, are cases where there's an admonition to be grateful that explicitly works to minimize, trivialize, or simply dismiss the hard realities that people — individual people, but entire groups of people, whatever — that people confront.
This is where the idea of expressing gratitude or being grateful, to me, crosses the line into something pathological and coercive.
And within high-control religious environments, I think these appeals — and again, they're often not appeals, they're often commands, they're demands that are put on us, right?
If we are to be people of faith, we have to express gratitude, we have to be thankful, we have to not only feel these things, we need to confess and profess them.
Within high-control religious environments, these demands operate to preserve existing power structures, They operate to evade hard questions about the things that we believe and the practices we participate in and what we imagine God to be, how we imagine ourselves and so forth.
They are used to preserve existing leadership structures and make sure that those in charge remain in charge and so forth.
And I think it's these kinds of considerations that they're there for me, why this notion of, well, you know, at least you can be grateful that No matter how sincere or well-intentioned, it's why they always raise my hackles.
It's why even people who mean well, who say that, who are just trying to be quote-unquote positive or look at the bright side or whatever, it's why it really, really rubs me the wrong way.
And I think that those, even those well-intentioned examples, I think they feed into this broad framework.
I've kind of suggested that these aren't always explicitly religious, but I do think that those examples that aren't explicitly religious, I think they express a kind of religious code from a more broadly religious cultural past.
I think that they continue to express a way of thinking that was common in a time when more Christians were, or I should say, when more Americans did identify as Christian.
When a certain kind So, let me sort of wrap all these things up.
I want to address a couple responses that I know I'm going to get, and I welcome them.
Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Welcome the thoughts, welcome the feedback, welcome the interaction, okay?
But here are a couple points that I want to sort of clarify.
Again, to reiterate, I want to be clear.
There are perfectly valid mental health-related reasons to focus on what is positive in our lives and not to spiral out focusing only on negatives.
And I have spent time in counseling, working with a counselor, on learning to do exactly that, on sort of not spinning out into everything that's wrong, but grabbing a hold of some of those things that are positive.
Again, I don't know where the line between that sort of legitimate, let's say, therapeutic appeal is and where it becomes problematic.
And maybe it's different for every person.
Maybe it's different for every context.
I don't know.
I wish I did.
But again, I'm not trying to say that there's never a valid reason or context for doing this.
There are.
That's not what I'm attacking.
The second thing I want to think about is this, because I know that I'm going to hear from people who tell me I'm being too hard on religion, or I'm being too hard on evangelicalism, I'm being too hard on conservative Christianity, whatever.
It'll be the person who says, you know, Dan, what you describe is obviously bad, but that's not all Christians.
It's not really a part of the Christian faith.
It's problematic pastors, it's individuals who are bad, etc., etc., and you're painting with too broad a brush.
Okay?
I hear that a lot.
Here's my response, okay?
Number one, yes, there are absolutely forms of Christianity that don't think about God in these ways.
There are ways of being religious, Christian or otherwise, that don't dismiss the negative realities of human existence.
There are ways of being a Christian that take seriously the complexities of human existence and don't just try to pretend that they don't exist or live in some notion where we deny present reality because someday we'll live in heaven and everything will be good, so nothing now really matters or whatever.
There are forms of Christian faith that aren't that.
I'm not talking about all Christians everywhere, okay?
But for a huge swath of popular American Christianity, I'm going to hold this and say this is the theology.
It is part of the code of that tradition.
It's not just bad actors, it's not just bad preaching, right?
Within a huge swath of popular American religious life, God gets all the credit for everything that's good, humans take all the blame for everything that's bad, and any suggestion that there are real questions to be asked about that is taken as a lack of faith.
I have lived it.
I have experienced it.
I've had that logic turned on me.
There have been times in my life when I turned that logic on others.
That is the code of a certain, a very particular, but very prominent, kind of conservative, especially Protestant theology in America.
So when people preach that, or say that, or the pastor tells somebody they need to focus more on the gifts they have from God than what they think they need elsewhere, or what they've lost or whatever, my argument is—and I'm going to stand by this—it is not a departure from that theology, it is an expression of it.
You can't fix it with just kinder, gentler preaching.
You can't fix it with just efforts to make your church more seeker-sensitive or more connected to pop culture or something.
You have to rewrite the theological code.
That means you need a different Christian theology, if that's what you're in the market for, Or you need to walk away from that kind of Christianity, whatever it is.
This is part of why I left evangelicalism.
Again, these are not abstract things for me.
I'm not just some ivory tower scholar picking on American religion.
This is part of my own sort of experience and journey with this.
I say it all the time.
I'll say it again.
Bad theology hurts people.
This is bad theology, and just because it is widespread and common doesn't make it good theology.
I think that's a fallacy that a lot of people have about high-control religions or the kinds of things we talk about in this series, is that because these views are so common, because this theology is so pervasive within American religious communities, That must make it okay.
It doesn't.
It's not okay.
It's bad theology.
That's where I'm at.
Okay?
So, maybe the next time somebody tells you, well, you know, at least you can be grateful that this or this or this didn't happen.
Maybe that's always bugged you.
You don't know why.
Maybe now you do.
Maybe it's worth communicating to somebody the unintended effects when they say that.
And certainly the next time you hear a pastor or, you know, stand up and preach a sermon about how Americans just need to be more grateful about everything as it is, maybe it's time to think again.
As always, thank you all for supporting us.
We are self-funded.
We do this on our own.
We cannot do it without you.
Thank all the patrons, all of you who listen to the ads.
Keep the ideas coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, S-W-A-J, at gmail.com.
Working through those.
I am in the teeth of the academic semester right now, but life's about to get a little bit easier here over the next few weeks, and really looking forward to sort of catching up with some of you.
I have been doing some of that.
Value so much what you say, including the disagreements.
I listen to them.
I read them.
I take them on board.
I don't always get a chance to respond as fully as I would like, but I really do appreciate it.
