It's in the Code Ep 136: “You Need to be Open to Other Perspectives”
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If someone is working through faith deconstruction, it’s a virtual guarantee that they will be confronted with this dismissal of their questions and critiques at some point. But what exactly is going on when a partisan of high-control Christianity says this? What response are they trying to bring about from the person deconstructing? And how is this response intended to insulate high-control religion from criticism and honest questioning? Join Dan this week for answers to these and other questions.
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I'm your host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and this is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
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DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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I want to dive into this week's episode.
We're continuing a series that I'm calling Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
And what we're looking at is how the partisans of high-control Christianity seek to dismiss and really to contain the threat posed by those who are, quote-unquote, deconstructing their faith.
And I introduced that term, faith deconstruction, and talked about that a little bit in a prior episode.
So if you had a chance to listen, maybe go take a listen to that in case you're not familiar with that term.
Or Google around, you'll find information on it.
And last episode, I considered the dismissive response that those who, you know, when somebody comes to their pastor or their parent or some other kind of, you know, religious authority in their life, that when they pose difficult or hard questions about high-control religion, the response is that they're being too negative.
They're focusing on the negative.
They always focus on the negative, that sort of thing.
I think that that represents, if we like, sort of a first response to those who are undergoing deconstruction.
You begin asking the questions.
You begin with giving voice to intuitions that you have that maybe there hasn't been a place for in those spaces.
You begin noticing things that make you uncomfortable and so on.
And you first give voice to these and it provokes that negative reaction.
You're always focusing on the negative.
If that's a sort of first response, the other responses we're going to be looking at in this episode and episodes to come are really the escalations in the high control response.
They are how this process continues to evolve, to develop, to get really more serious.
The responses sort of escalate in return.
And we're going to come up against a couple of themes over and over, and I want to just sort of foreground those here.
They've already come up, but I've been thinking about this, and it's worth sort of just noting them.
The first, again, we're talking about mechanisms of high-control religion.
That's the focus.
It's really the thing that we do in this series.
So it shouldn't be surprising that control and coercion are the aim of these different responses, and we're going to see that every week.
We're going to talk about one of these, and we're going to see how it aims to reassert or to assert the control dimension of high-control religion and how it seeks to coerce those within it into compliance.
And the second point is that most of these responses could be described as efforts at gaslighting, and I introduced that term in the prior episode.
But I wanted to say something about it because it's a term that a lot of people use, myself included, obviously, but it's worth pausing just to take stock of what we mean by that.
And so gaslighting names a form of really psychological manipulation that's aimed at making someone doubt the truth of their own perceptions or reality.
And because of that, it's typically understood as a form of emotional abuse, and it is a commonly utilized tool within high-control religion.
And as such, within those religious contexts, it becomes an example of religious abuse, of an abusive articulation of high-control religion.
And the aim of these responses is very much gaslighting.
It is to get those who are undergoing faith deconstruction to question their own doubts, to question their own questions, to question their own concerns, to question the evidence that they mount in support of those questions and concerns.
It is to get them to question their own perception and reality as it relates to high-control religion.
And so, as I say, these are two reoccurring themes, and really the idea is that the aim of these responses is to reassert and maintain religious control by means of gaslighting.
Gaslighting becomes the mechanism.
So, that's just something to keep an eye out for as we proceed through these, both in this episode.
The prior episode and the episodes to come.
So coming to the specific topic of this episode, we're looking at an escalation in the attacks on faith deconstruction.
And this is the accusation that you, that is the one deconstructing, you need to consider other perspectives.
And I describe this as an escalation because this isn't where the conflict with high-control religion starts.
If you're hearing this from your pastor, again, you need to consider other perspectives.
You need to consider alternative perspectives.
You need to open yourself up to some alternative viewpoints, something along those lines.
If you're hearing this from your pastor or from your parents or from Uncle Ron or from your partner or from your siblings, it means this is not your first discussion about the doubts and concerns you have concerning high-control religion.
This is an accusation that comes in later conversations.
This is an accusation that comes After you've been dismissed as too negative, or as being divisive, or maybe being unteachable, it's a whole other accusation that can come up within these contexts.
You're not teachable.
You're not opening to the teachings of the church.
This is a response that comes after you've begun to doubt your own questions and concerns and intuitions.
The gaslighting of, well, I guess you were never really that serious about your faith, or the gaslighting of, well, you know, you're always focusing on the negative.
Once that's begun to kind of take root and you have begun to question whether maybe that's true, maybe I am too negative, maybe I am only focusing on the negative, maybe my faith isn't sincere and whatever, this is where that question begins to come up.
And I just want to, as a side note here, getting you to question your own intuitions, your own fundamental senses of what's right, what's wrong, what's permissible, what's not, getting you to question your intuition is one of the primary mechanisms operative within high-control Christianity.
So it's only after that's begun to take root that this accusation takes shape.
Because here's sort of why.
You begin asking those questions.
You begin posing difficult problems or, I don't know, interpretations of Bible passages or whatever, and you are dismissed and you're told that you're just being too negative, you focus on the negative all the time, that maybe your faith isn't serious and whatever, and this forces you to take some other steps.
Because of that dismissal, because of the self-doubt that has been planted within you, you've gone out and you've looked for resources that can answer your questions or address your concerns or support your intuitions.
You've gone out and you've learned about how the Bible was actually composed, the history of its composition.
You've looked—we kind of talked about this as an example before—you've looked at the history of Christian practice and teaching or the racial history of Christianity in America or whatever it is.
You have gone out and you have met and you've talked with people in communities that are traditionally judged and marginalized by high-control religion, like people in the LGBTQ plus community, for example.
Related to that, you've looked at accounts and experiences, and maybe you've had your own experiences of sexuality and gender that are very different from the perspectives you grew up with.
And we could expand that list almost indefinitely.
All the ways that you have gone out and said, am I being too negative?
Am I just not a person of good faith?
I don't know.
I don't feel like I'm just being negative.
You've gone out and you've actually sought the answers.
And that's the point.
You've gone out and you've done some homework.
And you've got the receipts now for why you think the things that you think.
And now you're coming back to engage those partisans, a high-control religion, whoever they are.
You're coming back to talk to your pastor.
You're coming back to talk to Uncle Ron.
You're coming back to talk with your parents.
You're coming back to talk.
And this is the context of that response.
After all of that has gone on, and that's why I describe it as an escalation, you've put some time and some effort and some work into this, and that's the context.
Because you've come back to try to show that you're not just being negative.
You've come back and you're trying to show that your intuitions were worth listening to.
You're coming back and you're trying to show that there is actual evidence that your concerns or questions were not only well-founded, But right.
You're ready to be heard, and you are ready to be taken seriously.
And so you come, and you open up that discussion, and instead of being heard, instead of encountering any meaningful engagement, you hit a new wall.
This new wall of dismissal and gaslighting.
This response that says, well...
You need to open yourself to some alternative perspectives.
You need to consider some other perspectives.
Instead of honest engagement, instead of honest discussion, instead of real consideration, the work you've done is dismissed.
And that's what happens.
Well, that's all interesting.
It's all fine and good that you think you found this, but you need to open yourself up to some other perspectives.
It's a dismissal.
But the important thing here, the illuminating thing here is how It's dismissed.
Because it is dismissed on the grounds that you're being too narrow in what you consider.
And there's a lot of rhetorical work going on when we're told that we need to, quote, consider other perspectives.
And there are, of course, other ways that this general point can be articulated.
You know, well, of course, if you listen to that perspective, that's what you'd hear.
But if you consider other perspectives, you'll hear something different.
Or, well, I guess that sounds convincing, but if you consider other perspectives, you'll see that it really isn't as convincing as you think.
And again, we could spin out elaborations of that all night, okay?
The dismissal comes in the form of an accusation that the work you've done is tainted because it is narrow or limited or biased in some way.
And that's the important point.
Because in articulating it that way, there's a counterclaim that is being leveled here.
The partisan of high-control religion is dismissing what you are saying, they are dismissing the claims you're putting forward, and they are making a counterclaim.
They are saying that you are rejecting or questioning your faith because you've allowed yourself to be taken in with a biased, narrow perspective.
And in bringing that limited perspective into the discussion, there's a sense in which...
You're not being fair or reasonable.
You need to open yourself to some other alternatives.
You're really not very open to differences of opinion.
You're really not open to opinions that differ from your own.
You're not being reasonable.
You're not being fair.
And when the advocate of religion responds this way, what they're doing is positioning themselves as the ones who are reasonable and fair.
And that is the key rhetorical work here.
What they're saying is that they are the ones who've listened to other perspectives and weighed the evidence.
They're the ones who are reasonable and fair and are open to hearing other things, and that's why they hold the positions that they do.
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And there's a really specific Christian tonality to this.
It's when the would-be deconstructor, the person questioning the faith or asking hard questions about their faith and high-control religion, it's the idea that they are abandoning religious truth because they've listened to the biased, limited, and ideologically driven perspectives of the world.
That sinful, fallen, secular world.
They have closed themselves off.
To viewpoints that are not the narrow views of the world.
So that's the rhetorical positioning.
I really, really, really, really want to emphasize this because it's that counterclaim that matters.
It's that positioning of the religious adherent as the person who is actually open to other views, who is actually being reasonable, who is actually being fair.
That's what's clear.
And that is the gaslighting.
That is where the gaslighting operates.
Because it could be described as ironic that the partisan of high-control religion—and how is high-control religion maintained?
It is maintained by creating a subculture which is carefully insulated from challenging or alternative perspectives.
Whether that's through appeals to inerrancy, whether it's through homeschooling kids, or having private Christian schools, or the whole subculture of Christian publishing and media and everything else.
You create this bubble that people can live within that explicitly marginalizes and silences alternative perspectives.
So it's that person, it's that person who exists within that bubble who then accuses the person deconstructing their faith of not being open to other perspectives.
And on any kind of objective or outside perspective...
It's obvious that this is exactly backwards.
It is obvious and clear that the person who is asking the questions, the person who is challenging high-control religion, they are the one who has been exposed to other perspectives.
And that's why this is gaslighting and not just irony.
Because the person who says this, Uncle Ron or your pastor, remember?
Again, they know it.
They feel it.
It is a threat to them precisely because they know that if they actually open themselves to other perspectives, their claims can't hold up.
The practices and beliefs of high-control religion won't hold up.
And so the person whose entire religious subculture is built by denying the legitimacy of other perspectives dismisses the one Who questions that subculture on the basis of other perspectives by saying that they are the ones who are closed off to alternative perspectives in exactly the way that the religion person is.
It's a direct reversal.
And that is the gaslighting.
It is intended to make the person raising the questions, the person who's done their homework, the person who has listened to other perspectives, question that and be like, well, gosh, I mean, really, have I? Have I been too narrow?
Am I not listening to other perspectives?
Am I not hearing what other people have to say?
And you should know, this rhetorical move isn't limited to discussions of faith deconstruction.
This has been the go-to move in right-wing, including right-wing Christian, climate denial for decades.
The claim that climate science, whenever they say, God, the vast majority...
Almost everybody in the climate science community holds these views or believes that global warming is, number one, occurring, and number two, is caused primarily by humans and so forth.
And what do you get?
You get the dismissal of that on the grounds that these scientists aren't looking at alternative perspectives.
And again, it's gaslighting.
It's an accusation that ignores the entire process of peer review, of study replication, of data analysis, the whole thing.
That the entire system is built on looking at competing perspectives and determining which ones are the best explanation.
It's a gaslighting move that has been used successfully by those same Christians for decades, and they turn it and they apply it to the person who is deconstructing their faith.
Because accusations that faith deconstructors are acting in bad faith, that they're the ones who aren't actually to counter evidence, It's also a stock move in Christian apologetics, that is, in attempts by Christians to defend their faith.
Christian apologists, and if you read apologetics, if you engage apologists, they routinely accuse non-Christians and critics of religion of not being open to counter-evidence.
They will tell you that you are actually narrowing your view, that you're not really open to counter-evidence, that you're not acting rationally, that you're not acting in good faith, and so forth.
And they will do this, again, positioning themselves as the rational actor, positioning themselves as the one who's reasonable, positioning themselves as the one who's open to honest discussion and so forth, all while they hold on to particular theological tenets, typically the inerrancy of the Bible.
and this is why I spent an entire series looking at the doctrine of inerrancy and why it doesn't work, because it's a central linchpin, perhaps the central linchpin in the ideology of high control Christianity, they will dogmatically hold to the inerrancy of the Bible and never call it into question, they will dogmatically hold to the inerrancy of the Bible and never call it into question, never allow you
So they simply have this magic book that they can cite left and center, all the while telling you or anybody who challenges them, you're the one who's narrowing your views.
So what this does, this rhetorical move, it reinforces high By making it so that any perspective other than what that religion advances is itself suspect, it locks in on one very specific religious perspective is valid through the contradictory assertion that that one perspective is somehow the other quote-unquote perspective.
Though when it says you need to listen to other perspectives, what they mean is you need to listen to and accept the teachings of high-control religion.
So once again, when someone questioning high-control religion is told that they need to be, quote, open to other perspectives, that's not a response that's given to good faith.
That's what makes it gaslighting.
It's not an honest response.
It's not a response of somebody really engaging.
It is a response of somebody, again, trying to shut them down and move them from where they are.
It's an effort to make the deconstructor doubt the legitimacy of their own questions and their doubts.
As well as whatever alternative perspectives they've actually encountered.
And the aim, again, is control.
Like the other negative responses to faith deconstruction, one of the aims of this is to try to bring the person asking those questions or mounting that counter-evidence, it's trying to bring them back into the fold.
It is trying to make them doubt themselves enough that they will bring themselves back under the authority of those in religious leadership.
That they will come back into The high-control religion that they're questioning.
But the aim is also to discredit them.
And so if that discrediting works, if the gaslighting works, and they say, wow, okay, my bad.
I guess I was reading the wrong stuff.
I was talking to the wrong people.
I should have opened myself to other views.
And they sort of come back into the fold.
Fine.
But if they don't, if they do persist in their questioning...
If they choose to leave their high-control religious context because of all the reasons you would leave high-control religion, or if they're forced out of it because they no longer adhere to it, they are presented to everyone else as unreasonable.
The reason that they left is because they weren't reasonable.
They weren't open to teaching.
You know, they just thought they knew everything, and every time you tried to share an alternative view, they would just shut you down.
It's this complete mirror play.
Where the high-control religionist accuses the person questioning them of exactly what it is that they do all the time, shutting down questioning, not allowing other perspectives, not acting in good faith.
And so what they do is they discredit them.
So fine, they're going to leave, but we discredit them so that everybody else who's around them, who knows them, who sees them, sees them as the cautionary tale and doesn't follow suit.
And all throughout, So this becomes one of the mechanisms for masking the control focus of high-control religion.
We, the leaders, we're not the leaders because we're about control.
We're the leaders because we're reasonable.
We're the leaders because we're open people.
We're the leaders because, you know, we've had the time, we've been to seminary, we've been to Bible college, and we've had a chance to really weigh the evidence.
We've looked at those other perspectives and found that this is the right one so you can trust us, masking the fact that they actually operate through control and coercion.
With this response, with the responses we've talked about before, the responses we'll be talking about, these are all responses that I have experienced on a lot of levels.
I encountered it during my own process of leaving high control evangelicalism.
I was told that I was too negative.
Talked about that last week.
I would come with counter evidence and that would be dismissed or I'd be told that I wasn't listening to alternative views, that I was closed off to other ideas.
All the while, all I was doing was studying other views.
But I also work with clients in my religious trauma coaching work.
I work with clients who encounter this response and they struggle with the gaslighting.
They question themselves.
The gaslighting works on them.
I've also had countless informal conversations with other people who've had this experience.
This is an experience that if you move around in the world of those experiencing faith deconstruction, it's an experience many people have had.
And I also had the experience, and many of the people I talked to have the experience, of finding themselves on the defensive.
You do all this work.
You find this information.
You try to back up what you're saying with facts.
You try to see if...
Your intuitions and concerns are well-founded and you think that they are.
And you go into this conversation with somebody and you're so confident and you're so ready and you're so optimistic.
And it's like all of a sudden you find yourself doubting yourself or you're on the defensive.
You're being attacked for being unreasonable and not looking at evidence.
And oftentimes people leave these conversations and it's like, what the hell just happened?
Like, how did that happen?
I felt so good going into the conversation.
I came out doubting everything that I thought.
Or where did that conversation go wrong?
What I'm trying to highlight here is that this is the mechanism, one of the key mechanisms through which that conversation goes wrong.
That dismissal and gaslighting of saying, well, you need to be open to other alternatives.
I'm glad that you went and you read that stuff.
And of course, I'm glad that you've been talking to other people, but you really need to make yourself open to some other alternatives.
It's like it trivializes everything you does, excuse me, everything you did.
It's like them patting you on the head and being like, you know, isn't that cute?
That was a cute effort.
It's good that you went and did those things.
But if you grow up a little bit and learn how complex this is and look at some other perspectives, I think you'll see it differently.
And folks, it works.
It worked on me for a long time.
It works on others.
Again, I talk to people all the time and hear this.
All those people who say, I don't know what happened in that conversation, but suddenly I doubted everything.
This is why.
That's what I think is going on in the response when somebody says, you need to be open to other perspectives.
You need to open yourself to some alternative perspectives.
As always, we could talk about this longer.
We're out of time.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us in the different things that we do.
Thank you for supporting me.
Thank you for the ideas, the feedback, the comments.
Thank you to subscribers for coming into the Discord and adding your ideas.
Thank you for emailing me, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, with ideas and comments.
Keep them coming.
I want to hear more of these.
If you are somebody who would say, I've experienced faith deconstruction, this is something I've been going through, and you've had responses that you've heard, responses that you maybe want to think about, you want to share with others, you want to sort of unpack, let me know.
As always, other topics, other episodes, responses to other series, all the feedback is welcome.
I circle back around to things.
A lot of it makes it into our supplemental episodes.
Got new episode series that I'm developing right now, so ideas for those are welcome.
