It's in the Code Ep 135: “Why Do You Always Focus On the Negative?”
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“Why do you always focus on the negative?” “Why are you so negative all the time?” If you have posed hard questions about high-control religion, or if you have undergone (or are undergoing) “faith deconstruction,” it is a virtual guarantee that you have been confronted by questions like these. But why? Why is that questioning dismissed or judged as being “negative”? Why does honest questioning provoke such visceral negative reactions? How does all of this relate to the toxic positivity of high-control religion? Check out this week’s episode as Dan considers these questions.
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It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, And as always...
I am Dan Miller, your host, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be with you.
As always, invite your feedback, comments on this episode, on other episodes, on ideas for upcoming episodes, on just whatever it is you want to reach out about.
I'd love to hear from you.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
As I always say, I am behind on responses, but I value your comments so much.
Go through them, really working to lay out some future episodes.
And so if you've got ideas, feedback, comments, things that might be worth talking about in the supplemental episodes for subscribers, keep those coming.
Let me know.
And on that note, I want to thank all of you who do support us, especially our subscribers who keep us going and help us to do the things we're doing.
A lot of things going on in the world and in the U.S. at present that we talk about and focus on, and you help us do that.
So I just want to say thank you to all of you for that.
I want to dive in.
This episode may go a little long, not sure.
I'm never sure when I start these exactly how long they're going to be, but we'll see.
We're continuing in a new series that I'm calling Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
And last episode was the first.
Talking a little bit about what do we mean by this concept of faith deconstruction.
If you exist in certain circles or you've followed American religion and some of the movements, particularly within high-control American religion, evangelicalism, you might have come across this term, faith deconstruction.
Many of you listening, this is a term you would apply to yourselves.
It's a term I think I could apply to myself.
I left that tradition before that term for it was around, but I think the phenomenon is very much the same.
So we're continuing on looking at that issue and specifically the common rejections of or responses to those who undergo faith deconstruction, and specifically the ways in which those within those high-control religious contexts respond to people experiencing faith deconstruction or questioning those traditions in ways that try to shut that down and try to dismiss that.
And that's what we're going to be looking at.
And I want to open today's...
Episode with a sort of a personal anecdote.
All the topics we talk about on It's in the Code are pretty personal to me.
Those of you who know my background know that I also come out of this kind of religious tradition, and so the things I'm talking about are things that often sort of hit home for, you know, a lot of my adult life, having lived in that world.
But the themes in these episodes feel even more personal than most.
And so...
Those of a certain age, those of you listening, will remember the film Good Will Hunting.
It's one of my favorites, and I know that that dates me, but, you know, so be it.
And there's this scene in the movie where they're in Robin Williams' character's office.
Sean, I don't even remember what his last name is, but he's a counselor, and Will Hunting has to go to counseling because it's court-mandated and so forth.
And he's in his office looking at all of his books.
And Will Hunting makes some snide remarks about the books and about how people surround themselves with the wrong books and all this kind of stuff.
And Sean Williams' character asks about a Noam Chomsky text.
I think it was probably Manufacturing Consent.
And Will Hunting makes a comment about Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
And so for me, as first college student watching this film...
I'd never heard of Noam Chomsky, you know, living in the evangelical world I lived in.
I'd never heard of Howard Zinn, and these names sort of stuck with me.
And at some point, not in college, it was after, so this is, I've graduated, I am pastoring this, you know, small church with two pastors.
I'm the associate pastor in Seattle.
And at some point, I went out and I found Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, and I read it.
This was pretty early, relatively earlier in my tenure as the associate pastor of that small church.
And now it seems sort of silly, but when I read that book, it like blew my mind.
It was one of the first times that I had ever encountered what we might consider some of the darker dimensions of American history.
It's the first time I'd ever read that kind of historical examination of American history.
And what really caught my attention, sort of right at the beginning of the book, Zinn talks about...
For example, Christopher Columbus's correspondence to the Spanish Crown about the Native Americans he was encountering in the Americas and talks about what fine slaves they would make and so forth.
And of course, Zinn situates this within the teachings of the Catholic Church about basically being able to claim areas where Christians didn't already live and all this kind of stuff.
Stuff that I now know that I think is much more common currency than maybe it did then.
But for me, it was new.
And I, like I say, it blew my mind.
And I remember talking with my pastor and boss.
This weird role that he was in is both supposedly my pastor, spiritual advisor, whatever.
He's also my boss.
And I wasn't trying to pick a fight.
I wasn't trying to cause trouble.
I wasn't trying to start an argument.
We were just talking.
And I told him some of the things that I was discovering in that text that I'd never encountered before.
And I was just, you know, I was...
Disturbed by it.
I was excited by it.
I was intrigued by it.
And what I wasn't ready for and really caught me off guard was the immediate and visceral negative reaction that it provoked in him.
I mean, he just sort of jumped on me in this discussion.
He accused me of swallowing revisionist history.
He accused me of being out to discredit Christianity, all this stuff.
And then he said this, and this is the focus of today's episode, okay?
He said, why do you always focus on the negative?
Or why do you have to focus on the negative all the time?
You know, something along those lines.
Why do you always focus on the negative?
And the idea was that in emphasizing what I was emphasizing and asking the questions I was asking, I was unduly focusing on the negative as it related to the Christian tradition and to Christian history.
So, as it turns out, the Zen stuff was the tip of the iceberg for me.
Learning the facts behind Christian history and American history and sort of Western history led me to radically reconfigure my understanding of the Christian tradition and my place within it.
All of that played a central role in my own exit from conservative, high-control religion.
But in subsequent discussions, like this was not the last time that this happened by any means.
Over and over and over in discussions with people, whether it was my pastor, whether it was other people who sort of resisted these kinds of questions or the realizations that I was having.
It could be colleagues in seminary.
It could be other pastors or authority figures.
I was routinely attacked and dismissed for focusing on the negative, right?
And the reason I tell this story...
It's because it illustrates one of the common responses to those who are questioning and deconstructing from their Christian faith.
The accusation that faith deconstruction only focuses on the negative, that it overlooks positive dimensions or elements, and that it's unnecessarily negative.
And as with the other topics we'll be exploring in this series, I've had opportunity to talk with a lot of other people about this.
I've talked with clients that I work with as a coach.
I've heard from a lot of listeners.
I've talked to many of you in person at our events.
I've read your emails.
We've talked in other places.
I've had, I don't know how many informal conversations about this with people over the years, but over and over and over I've encountered people who have had exactly this experience.
This experience is not just my experience.
And it often begins, for the people who are on the receiving end of this, With sincere questions or concerns about, again, church history or the effects of church practices or contemporary scandals in the church or whatever, all the sex scandals, but whether it's Catholic or whether it's in the Southern Baptist Convention or wherever, that's another context in the contemporary church where this happens.
People who are just asking real questions, and like me, they are not met with honest or even open responses.
Dismissive responses.
In my case, my pastor would get to the point where every time we would have a discussion that he didn't like or that I would raise questions that he couldn't answer, he would simply threaten to fire me.
Like, I don't know how much more high control you get in your religious articulation.
He would just basically say, if you don't start being quiet about this, we're going to fire you.
You won't be the pastor anymore.
Okay?
And so what I want to consider for the next few minutes is what is going on with this response?
Like, why is this response so common?
What is going on when somebody responds this way?
And one of the things that I'm always interested with these kinds of things is why does this response tend to be so emotionally loaded?
So those are the overarching questions that I want to look at.
And within that frame, the frame of those overarching questions, there are really two expressions of this response.
I've talked a little bit about the one that was embodied in my pastor.
We're going to come back to that and hear that response.
But I also want to consider the more seemingly innocuous, knee-jerk reaction you might encounter among regular churchgoers.
Maybe the churchgoers who they don't have as much background or they don't have authority over you or something like that.
This is the person that you might have a conversation with who isn't necessarily adversarial in their response, or at least not explicitly.
As I say, it's probably not a formal church leader.
This could be when you're having these discussions and you're raising these kinds of issues or concerns with a family member or a friend or a romantic partner, someone who knows and cares about you.
And this is the response of someone that is well-intentioned.
And I think that this is an important point.
This can be a well-intentioned response.
If you've listened to these episodes, you've listened to the work that I do, you know that one of my points is that often...
The fact that a response is well-intentioned doesn't make it good, doesn't make it positive, doesn't militate against the fact that it is in fact a response of high-control religion and so forth.
And this is one of those, okay?
This is a response that is well-intentioned, but it still expresses and reinforces the structure of high-control religion.
So what do I have in mind?
This is the person who hears what you say.
They hear you raise those questions.
They hear you, you know, maybe you've read a book like Howard Zinn, and you're like, I'm learning all this stuff about history, and I kind of don't know what to do about that.
It's making me rethink some things.
And they hear what you say, and then they respond to something along these lines.
Well, that may be true, but it's also true that, and they essentially kind of offer a counterpoint.
Or they say something, wow, yeah, I mean, you're right, that's bad, but at least it isn't.
And then they fill in the thing with something that could be even worse.
And what I think this represents is what we might call the toxic positivity of high-control religion.
This is like the softest expression of this dynamic that you will get when you quote-unquote focus on the negative.
It's the response from somebody who I think often does not intend to be dismissive or critical.
But it's an expression of somebody who is so uncomfortable with the idea of whatever it is that you're bringing up, whatever quote-unquote negative historical fact or reflection on contemporary practice or question about beliefs, they're so uncomfortable with that that they have to shut it down.
It's the knee-jerk reaction.
They have to try to insulate themselves from confronting those uncomfortable realities and the feelings of that stirring up in them.
And so they try to shut that down, and that's where it takes the shape of the toxic positivity.
And again, these are people who I believe are often responding in good faith.
I've had those conversations with these people as well.
I've had conversations with somebody, and I'll talk about them being dismissive or trivializing the kinds of things that people are bringing up to them or that I'm bringing up to them, and they're literally shocked and surprised by that.
They're not intending to be dismissive or trivializing.
but they are.
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And I think that that's the point.
Because when someone responds in this way, somebody who is well-intentioned, somebody who does care about you, somebody who is not being adversarial, when they respond this way, when this kind of response is their automatic knee-jerk reaction, the reason is that they have internalized the mechanisms of high-control religion.
It actively denies the reality of uncomfortable or unpleasant truths about anything that is supposed to come from God.
So, that includes the church.
That includes the teaching of the church.
That includes the practices of the church.
That includes, you know, the church's stance on contemporary political issues, what have you.
It denies the reality of any uncomfortable or unpleasant truths.
So within the framework of a movement like contemporary Christian nationalism, that also includes things related to American history or the development of Western civilization.
It's why we can't talk about race or histories of slavery or anything like that anymore.
They're simply denied.
So high-control religion shapes the individuals who exist within it according to a fundamentally reality-denying vision.
Everything that comes from God is good.
It is positive.
And so when you focus on the negative, you are not just denying positivity.
You are sort of challenging God.
It is a sin not to recognize the goodness of everything that is supposed to come from God.
So to focus on the negative, quote-unquote, is to challenge the idea that reality reflects a divine order.
It is to challenge God and what is presented within this framework oftentimes as a quote-unquote sort of Christian worldview.
And so people who are shaped and socialized within this framework, regular people, the regular people in your life, I'm not talking about the religious elites.
I'm not talking about people with theological training or education.
I'm not talking about people with the proverbial axe to grind and preserving the tradition.
I don't know, just regular grassroots people growing up in these traditions are conditioned to always focus on the positive and to deny or dismiss the reality or significance of the negative.
And this is what is expressed to me, even when people are caring and well-intentioned, but they respond with this dismissive, well, yeah, but it could be worse, or at least it's not this, or it's also true that the church did this or that or the other.
And once again, just as sort of a side thing here, this illustrates why I say all the time that religion is not primarily or solely about beliefs.
High-control religion doesn't just dictate a set of quote-unquote beliefs, a set of ideas you hold in your head.
It shapes the very emotions and social perceptions of those people who grow up within it.
So when you encounter this kind of dismissive response from a well-intentioned friend or family member or colleague, it's likely that they literally cannot see the negative evidence you set before them.
It's like a blank spot in their field of vision.
They don't have...
A conceptual or perceptual space for it.
And this is what renders this form of positivity toxic.
This is what is fundamentally reality denying about this form of positivity.
It functions to shape individuals in a way that serves the interests of high-control religion.
This is how high-control religion duplicates itself and perpetuates its structures and its practices over time.
So this dimension of toxic positivity, this dimension of high-control religion, it's something that I really, I think, was not fully aware of until I met and started working with so many clients in my coaching practice who were dealing with the negative legacies of this and would talk about the demand for toxic positivity.
And it stems from their own religious communities, it stems from their own families.
So that's the first kind of response.
We could say a lot more about that.
Toxic positivity is not limited to religious people.
It's not limited to the church.
It doesn't have to come from high-control religion.
There are other forms of it.
We could go into all of that.
I welcome your insights, thoughts.
Tell me more about this.
Let me know if you want to hear more about this.
We could talk more about it.
But for now, just to say, that's like one of the ways in which...
The you focus on the negative all the time response works to try to shut down the questioning and the work of those who are deconstructing their faith or who are undergoing faith deconstruction.
If that's the response among the well-intentioned and those who are engaging us in good faith, the other response, the kind of response embodied in my pastor's reaction, illustrates something really different.
It's on the other end of the spectrum.
This is the response of somebody who is not acting in good faith.
And this is a theme you're going to hear in these episodes.
I talked about it last episode.
I'm talking about it here.
We're going to talk about it moving forward.
Though when people respond in these ways, they are not typically acting in good faith.
What they mean is not what they're actually saying.
And what they say is not really what they're concerned about.
They're not acting in good faith.
My pastor's response and what it illustrates is the response of somebody who consciously or not...
This is the perpetuator of high-control religion, not just somebody who grew up within it or is shaped within it or has been socialized into it.
This is somebody who keeps the structure going.
This is somebody who recognizes on a visceral level that this kind of questioning is a threat to high-control religion.
And their visceral, seemingly disproportionate responses are due to this perception of threat.
And I think that this is important to recognize.
This is what I didn't know and understand at the time.
Is that it provoked such a strong response, caught me completely off guard.
And I've talked again to, I don't know how many people over the years have the same experience, and it just completely throws people, because they're just asking questions, and all of a sudden they've got something like jumping down their throat or really coming at them hard.
And it can be really distressing.
And it's because of a perception of threat.
So what is that threat?
What is it that they are perceiving, especially when those of us asking the questions, I wasn't attacking my pastor.
I wasn't attacking our church.
I wasn't attacking the Christian tradition as I understood it.
Yeah, what happened is I basically triggered a defensive fight response in my pastor.
And so here's what I think is going on.
To question past assurances about Christianity or the church or Christian teachings.
And for me, you know, historical study was such a part of this.
It was so much about the past kind of things.
To question those past assurances is also to question present assurances.
If we acknowledge that Christianity was wrong in the past, if we acknowledge that Christians and Christian leaders and Christian traditions and Christian institutions committed atrocities in the past,
If we acknowledge that they taught different doctrines as divine truth, the conceptions of what the truth coming from God is, have changed over time, then we open ourselves to the possibility that this is happening now.
If we recognize that the church or Christianity or Christians were wrong in the past, it means they could be wrong now.
It means that we could be wrong now.
When we open ourselves to that kind of questioning, We open ourselves to the possibility that the Church teaches falsehoods as truth now.
We can't leave it safely in the past.
We open ourselves to the possibility that the Church is committing atrocities now.
There's no way to insulate the present from the past.
If we recognize, for example, how differently the supposedly inerrant Bible has been understood across time, And if you listen to this, you know I did a whole series on the concept of biblical inerrancy and why I don't think it works.
I invite you to go back, take a listen to that.
But if we recognize how differently the Bible that's supposed to be inerrant and unchanging has been understood over time, we open ourselves to the possibility that we're misinterpreting or misunderstanding it now.
And this doesn't have to be focused on the past.
The same thing can happen...
When people start taking a serious look at, for example, the violence in the Bible, Bible stories that they really like, and they start saying, whoa, but hold on, if that happened now, we'd call that genocide.
What do we do with that?
Or they start comparing the teachings of different Christian denominations at present, or the different positions that denominations have on things like LGBTQ inclusion, or movements like Black Lives Matter, or what have you.
The same thing happens.
The recognition of change and difference And past mistakes can't simply be isolated or insulated from contemporary articulations of high-control religion, and so they are a threat.
And I think that that's what provokes this visceral response.
One of the things this brings up for me, a counselor once said to me, and I share this all the time, you've probably heard me say this before, But it literally changed my life.
It was one of the most sort of, you know, again, one of these insights that to me now seems very clear, but at the time was new and really just changed everything for me.
But a counselor once said to me that anger is a secondary emotion.
So it's important to understand what primary emotions are operating under it.
And when honest questions or concerns about the church, when somebody says, wow, like it turns out like lots of churches have been hiding pastors who are like, you know, Committing sexual assault.
Like, what do we do with that?
What does that mean?
Or, oh, it turns out that, you know, this passage in the Bible wasn't always read this way or whatever.
When honest questions or concerns about the church provoke those visceral, angry responses, I think the primary emotion under those is fear.
My pastor was terrified.
I recognize now how much his exercise of authority and coercion came out of insecurity and fear.
Why?
Because, again, to question the church in any time or context is implicitly, sometimes explicitly, to question its operation and its teachings here and now, wherever we are.
Which means that to question that is a challenge to claims of authority and control of high-control religion in the present.
And that is something that terrifies those who operate within high-control religion, especially those who benefit the most from the structures of high-control religion.
And there's good reason to fear this.
In my own case, for example, my recognition of changing understandings of the Bible contributed to my rejections of biblical inerrancy.
And among other things, I remember sitting around and thinking and being like, wow, like Christian views about slavery and race have really changed over time.
And Christians have used the Bible in all these ways in the past that now we wouldn't and I wouldn't have and the Christians I was around wouldn't.
And I had to start actively thinking like, oh, well, like, could we be doing the same thing about LGBTQ people?
Could we be wrong about all of that?
Could we be wrong about what we think about things like, I don't know, women in ministry and different things like that?
Those are the kinds of questions that it opened up.
I was very aware that questioning the past opened up a questioning of the present.
And for me, it moved me out of that tradition.
There is a reason why those who benefit from and perpetuate high-control religion fear that kind of questioning.
So when honest and sincere questioning comes up and...
When an honest and sincere search for truth and for facts is thrown back at somebody as quote-unquote negativity, this is why.
It's because it is a direct threat to the structure and authority and coercive practices of high-control religion.
Which also means, and I'll close with this, that when those within high-control religion accuse you of always focusing on the negative, Why do you focus on the negative all the time?
When you provoke that reaction, you can wear that like a badge of honor because it means you're on the right track because you are, in fact, challenging the structures of high-control religion and bringing them into view.
Because that's the other thing that that visceral negative reaction does is it sort of brings out into the open just how coercive and how based in fear high-control religion is.
I've got to wrap this up.
Again, thank you for listening.
Thank you for being here.
I would love to hear your feedback on this.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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Always love hearing from you all so much.
Let me know what you think about this, and let me know.
know, I've got other topics coming up in this series, but if you've had these conversations, if you as somebody who, you know, is undergoing what we call faith deconstruction, or you've had those hard questions or whatever, and you have been shut down by religious leaders or people in your life or whatever, if you've and you have been shut down by religious leaders or people in your life or whatever, if you've had things thrown out at you because of the questions you're asking, because of undergoing faith deconstruction, if
and you're willing to share that with me, please do.
I would love to hear these.
I know that there will be ones that I haven't thought of.
Thank you for listening.
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