It's in the Code Ep 137: “You’re Confusing Christians With Christianity”
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“You’re confusing Christians with Christianity.” This is another response that those undergoing “faith deconstruction” often receive when engaging with the partisans of high-control religion. This response reflects widespread cultural understandings of religion, so it has a ring of plausibility. But is it? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan discusses why this response is not only implausible, but is weaponized by the partisans of high-control religion to coerce and control those who would challenge it.
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It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you.
And as always, I want to thank everybody who's listening, those of you who support us in so many ways.
Those of you who listen, those of you who reach out, I always, always welcome your feedback.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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Keep the ideas coming.
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Today's episode is coming directly from...
An email sent in by a listener who thought that this was another idea for this current series, and they were right.
So we're going to take a look at that.
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We're continuing our series, Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
A series that looks at basically religious dismissals of so-called faith deconstruction, the dismissals and the accusations that come from those who are partisans of high-control American Christianity.
And to just reiterate, these are all responses that are aimed at deconstructing, excuse me, of discrediting deconstruction.
And at the same time of insulating high-control religion from its effects.
Those are sort of the dual aims.
And they all represent different attempts to gaslight those experiencing deconstruction.
The idea is to get those who are posing questions or voicing concerns or who have critiques to doubt their own fundamental intuitions, to doubt their own experiences, to question their own doubts, to question the evidence that they're finding.
Okay?
And as I say, today's episode comes out from listeners who have reflections on earlier episodes and things to add.
And so, shout out to Ryan and Neil, two listeners who really led me to the ideas that we're going to be talking about today.
And the topic I have today is basically the accusation that you're confusing Christians with Christianity.
Okay?
What does that phrase mean?
You're confusing Christians with Christianity.
That is, you deconstruct, you do something, you bring up something from Christian history, you bring up some interpretation of the Bible, whatever it is, and you start voicing and saying, I've got real concerns about this tradition because of these things.
And somebody says, well, yeah, okay, but you're confusing Christians with Christianity.
You're equating Christianity with the practice of Christians.
And so what does that mean?
Well, on the most basic level, it's an accusation that when they challenge...
Or when you challenge, when you raise questions, when the deconstructor challenges the structures, the teachings, the practices of Christianity, they come along and say, I don't know if I buy into this tradition anymore because of these reasons.
They're told, well, okay, like maybe there's some validity to that, but you're confusing the actions and attitudes of beliefs of individual Christians with the religion itself.
You're dismissing the whole religion because of the practice of what its practitioners do.
And it's basically the idea that their criticisms and concerns and counter-evidence and all of that, that they don't really address Christianity as a tradition.
They don't hit the tradition, only those practices of particular Christians or groups of Christians.
And I think the dual effects or efforts to gaslight are apparent here.
First, again, it's an effort to discredit the deconstructors.
You're confused.
At best, you're confused.
You're painting with too broad a brush.
Or worse, you're intentionally malicious.
You know that you're just taking the practices of some and applying it to the practices of everybody and attacking the entire tradition.
And it's also that effort to insulate high-control religion by suggesting that the criticisms and concerns and evidence and all that sort of stuff...
That it doesn't really hit the religion at all.
And I think this move to insulate the tradition is really evident here.
Everything you're saying, it misses Christianity.
It doesn't hit the tradition itself.
Even if the things you were saying were valid, they still wouldn't actually apply to the religion of Christianity.
They would only apply to some people.
They would only apply to the individuals who practice that religion.
This could sound like a reasonable critique to a lot of people.
And I've had discussions in which people say something very much like this, not deconstructors, not arguments with people about deconstruction, but just in the classroom with students, out in the world talking with people.
I've had discussions in which people say something that essentially goes, well, it's not Christianity I have a problem with, it's the Christians, or something like that.
And so it can sound intuitive, but I think there's a real problem with this response.
I'm calling it a form of gaslighting.
I'm saying that it's a mistake to take it seriously.
Why?
Well, to illustrate this, I want to think about a simple exercise that I do with students in some of my classes.
I will ask them...
You know, if I wanted to go out and examine religion, put religion in quotes here.
I'm interested in religion.
I'm a scholar of religion.
I want to go out and look at religion.
Where would I go?
And I solicit responses from students, and I'll get a lot of responses that say things like, go to the church down the street, or there's this church building I drive by, or back home where I live, there's an Islamic center.
You could go there, or the friend's meeting house just down the hill from my college.
Maybe go there.
Or some will say, you know, you should look inside yourself.
Or they'll point to the mindfulness center down the road or whatever it is.
So I get lots of responses, and I always respond to those by saying this.
Say, well, hold on, but I'm not looking for examples or illustrations of religion.
I'm not looking for Lutherans or Congregationalists or Muslims or mindfulness practitioners or even the inner life of a particular individual, whether it's myself or somebody else.
I'm looking for religion itself.
And then, of course, the students are caught up short because they have nothing to point to.
And here's the point.
There is no religion, quote-unquote, apart from the individuals, the concrete histories, the practices, the institutions, and all those other things that embody religion.
So what I tell my students and listeners, if you're a long-time listener, you've heard me say this.
I've said it on the podcast.
I've said it probably in this series.
Religions are What their adherents do.
In other words, it's a fallacy to try to detach religion, quote unquote, from all of those concrete, this-worldly expressions of it.
Religions just are all of those concrete things.
That's all they are.
There's no higher essence or reality to religion beyond its embodiment.
And this is really different, this understanding that I'm putting forward, this idea of what the word religion refers to, that it's a kind of abstraction.
It's really different from, I think, at least two ways that people typically talk about religion.
And these ways of talking are so common that they'll be familiar to almost anybody who's listening.
But they, I think importantly, they express a confusion about religion.
They express a mistaken way of thinking about religion.
And once we see this, I think we'll be able to see why this response to people deconstructing is so problematic, okay?
So the first common way of talking about religion, as if religion was like an agent that does things in the world.
It's as if religion was a person, okay?
So it's the thing that says, well, Christianity teaches X. You know, Christianity teaches that Jesus was divine.
Hinduism, quote-unquote, holds that why?
Hinduism talks about a cycle of rebirth, and that you want to escape the cycle of rebirth.
That's what Hinduism holds.
The Islamic tradition believes that Muhammad is the highest and final prophet of Allah, or whatever it is, okay?
We could multiply examples indefinitely.
But when people talk like this, They treat religions as if they themselves, as if the religions themselves were agents or people who do things in the world.
As if the religion teaches things.
As if the religion holds things.
As if the religion believes things.
As if the religion does things.
But religious traditions don't do anything.
Their adherents do.
Christians and Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and whomever else teach things and hold things and believe things, Christianity and Hinduism and Islam and Sikhism do not.
So speaking of the traditions as a whole in this way is really just a shorthand for speaking about all those concrete dimensions of the religions as they have taken shape in the world.
Their adherents, their institutions, their scriptures, etc.
Again, it means there's no such thing as any religion.
Doing things, or as a social agent, religions are what their adherents do, and nothing more.
And the second common way of speaking about religion is on the model of genus and species.
Okay, and this way of speaking follows as a basic model, you know, taken from biology.
So, for example, you have the genus Canis, right, or dogs, canines, and then a particular species or breeds of dogs.
You might have German shepherds, or you might have Great Danes, or you might have Italian greyhounds, my favorite.
Or you might have Rottweilers or whatever.
And the idea is that religion is a genus with different species like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, what have you.
But just as it would be a mistake to try to find the abstract Canis out in the world, again, if you were to tell somebody, go find me the genus Canis, and they would come back with a bunch of examples of dog breeds, and you'd say, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want Italian Greyhounds or St. Bernard's or Great Danes.
I want canine.
That's what I want.
And you realize that this is a mistake.
There are only concrete dogs.
The category, the genus, is useful as a way of organizing.
But that's all it is.
It is not a thing.
It's just an abstraction that we have developed to make sense of things.
And that is how religion works, the word religion, the concept of religion, in terms of religions.
So here's the point.
Christianity is nothing but Christians and the institutions they create and the scriptures they write and interpret and the teachings they promulgate and so forth.
That's all that Christianity is and has ever been and can ever be.
So the idea that somebody is misplacing their critique by critiquing the, quote, religion itself When they're really just looking at the practices or the institutions or the scriptures or the interpretations of scriptures or whatever, is completely misleading.
because that's all the religion is, are those things that they are critiquing.
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So why does this matter if we're talking about faith deconstruction?
It's a kind of a fairly opaque academic discussion about the nature of religion.
Why does it matter for this?
It matters because this response on the part of high-control religious practitioners, that you say you're critical of Christianity, but you're really just critical of practices and Christians and so forth.
You're confused in what you're doing.
It weaponizes.
This conceptual confusion.
That's what it does.
It takes it and it deploys it as a kind of weapon.
When advocates of high-control religion say that someone is confusing their critique of Christians with a critique of Christian religion itself, they are saying that Christianity itself escapes the criticisms that are leveled against it.
They are abstracting away to something that has no real existence, no concrete reality.
To try to protect Christianity from the criticisms are leveled against it.
And this is an evasive maneuver.
And here's why.
You can apply it no matter what critique is ever brought forward.
No matter what critique is leveled, they can always say, well, that's a critique of those people, or that denomination, or that particular church, or that particular pastor.
But it doesn't apply to true Christianity.
Christianity itself, apart from any human expression of it, it doesn't apply to real Christianity.
And I just invite you to think about, if you've had these discussions, how many examples this can apply to.
Or if you look out in the world, you know, whether it's, let's say, something really awful, like clergy sex abuse.
And somebody says, I've just had it with this tradition.
I'm tired of hearing these stories about clergy sex abuse and widespread cover-ups and so forth.
And somebody says, well, you know, those are individual pastors.
It's not the tradition.
And you'd point out and be like, well, yeah, but look how pervasive it is.
And look at how it relates to particular teachings and so forth.
And you'll still just get the same thing.
And that's not really that.
It's not really about the tradition.
It's this way of preserving the tradition.
And this is the trick.
This is what makes it more than just a conceptual mistake.
This is what makes it a weapon that is used to maintain the structures of high-control religion.
Because there is no Christianity as such, because the true or authentic or pure Christianity to which they're appealing isn't really a thing, because there only ever are practitioners and the effects of practitioners, the long-term effects of practitioners are long-standing institutions, bodies of teachings, texts that are taken to be scriptural, and so forth.
What this maneuver actually does is insulates the practitioners and structures of high-control religion itself.
That's what it's actually aimed at doing.
It's not about preserving quote-unquote Christianity.
It's about preserving their embodiment of Christianity.
When the practitioner of high-control religion says, well, you're misplacing your critique.
What you're doing is you're taking a critique.
Of some Christians who are doing their best, but they're sinful, and they're fallen, and they embody the tradition imperfectly, and you're applying that critique to the tradition itself.
That's not fair.
That's not right.
That's a mistake.
What they are actually doing is defending themselves.
It is always their embodiment, their interpretation, their practices, their teachings, their scriptures that they are defending.
When they claim to be defending, Christianity, when they claim to be protecting Christianity, they are protecting themselves.
It isn't, quote-unquote, Christianity they're preserving.
It is their high-control practices and institutions and social structures that they are insulating.
They're not really saying, your critique is misplaced because it doesn't actually apply to Christianity as such.
What they are actually saying is, your critique is misplaced.
Because it doesn't apply to us.
They are trying to protect themselves from critique, and the reason that they're doing that, the way they're able to do that, is that there is no such thing as just, quote-unquote, Christianity.
And when they accuse somebody of critiquing Christians, they never mean themselves.
You come with the criticisms.
You come with the critiques.
You come with the questions.
You come with the counter-evidence.
And when they say, well, yeah, that might apply to some Christians, but not the tradition, they never mean themselves.
You never hear them say, well, yeah, you're right, that applies to me.
I guess I need to embody the tradition differently.
If that was the response within high-control religion, and that response was widespread, and we're also going to talk in upcoming episodes about why that's not the response you're going to get, but if that was the response within high-control religion, you wouldn't have faith deconstruction, folks.
Or let me restate that.
You might have some people leaving the tradition.
It doesn't work for them.
It doesn't make sense to them, whatever.
But not in the way that you do where massive numbers of people are questioning these traditions because the traditions could change and modify and adapt and respond to those criticisms.
But that's not what most people who are experiencing deconstruction bump up against.
Instead, it's this evasive maneuver to, again, discredit what they're doing.
And to preserve the people they're talking to from criticism.
That is the aim.
When somebody says, well, you say you're critiquing Christianity, you're not really critical of Christianity, you're critical of what some Christians do.
What they mean is, you're not really critical of me.
You're not critical of my church.
You're not critical of my interpretation.
Mine is insulated.
It isn't really what you're aiming at.
Even if it absolutely is.
That's what makes it a defensive response.
So, to kind of sum all this up, the accusation that the person experiencing deconstruction is improperly equating, you know, Christianity with the practice of particular Christians, again, it can have a ring of plausibility.
It reflects, as I say, these common ways of talking about religion, and these are ways that lots of people talk about religion.
Just people out in the world, you have regular discussions with people.
Nothing to do with faith deconstruction.
People who aren't even religious, these are common ways of thinking about religion.
That's why they can have a ring of plausibility.
And it's that ring of plausibility, which I've tried to show, it doesn't hold up.
I think those ways of talking about religion, they're fine.
They're fine.
As a kind of shorthand or a way of talking about concrete things, if we recognize...
That it's a shorthand.
If we recognize that we're sort of abstracting, if we recognize that we are putting an organizational structure into social reality, and we can't reify it and turn it into something real, it's not.
But once we recognize that that's all that is, we can recognize why that way of talking, and its plausibility, and the fact that it's common among popular discussions of religion, we can understand why it becomes such an effective defense.
On the part of partisans of high-control religion.
But what we have to recognize, what I'm trying to show is, like all the other responses we've seen and all the responses we'll be looking at, it represents a form of gaslighting intended to protect and preserve high-control religion.
That is the aim.
That is what I mean when I say they take what is a kind of intuitive-sounding way of thinking about religion, a common way of thinking about religion, and weaponizing it.
And like all the other responses in defense of high-control religion, the aim is coercion and control.
The aim is, again, the preservation and protection of high-control religion itself.
I want to thank you for listening.
Got to wrap this up, but I don't want to do that without, again, thanking all of you.
Thank you for your support, feedback, comments.
They are always welcome.
Comments about these episodes.
I respond to a lot of those and take a lot of those in our supplemental episodes now.
So keep those coming.
Ideas for upcoming episodes.
Your stories.
I love the stories that people are willing to share when they talk about the real and concrete and experiential ways that these responses have played out for them.
