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Practitioners of high-control Christianity present the “core” teachings of the tradition as being about God’s unconditional love and acceptance of human beings. This is the “public-facing” presentation of high-control Christianity. But when we take a deeper look within high-control Christianity, we encounter a bait-and-switch. This accepting, affirming Christian vision is replaced by one focused on obligation structured around emotions like fear and guilt. How does this take place? And how does this serve the purposes of high-control Christianity? Take a listen to this week’s episode to find out!
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This series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased as always to be with you.
As always, I want to begin by thanking folks for listening, supporting us in the things that we do, especially the subscribers who help keep us going, keep doing the things we do, putting content out three times a week, coming up on a thousand episodes, I believe, in total content for Straight White American Jesus.
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So I want to dive in here.
We are continuing the series, our discussion, of negative responses within high-control Christianity to so-called faith deconstructionists, a series we're calling Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
And just again, by way of reminder, these are responses that represent efforts on the part of high-control religions practitioners, those who Who are part of high-control religion, who are defenders of it, who are the ones who articulate it, the ones who propound it, right?
Responses on their part to gaslight those undergoing faith deconstruction, to discredit them, and to insulate high-control Christianity from the criticisms and the critiques that they raise.
Again, those are sort of the three prongs that they want to do.
And what we're looking at, we looked at this last episode, we're going to continue with it this episode, and I think next episode as well, is the claim that deconstructed critiques don't get at the heart of high-control Christianity.
And what that means is, when somebody says this, is that they'll say, well, okay, the deconstructors might raise some valid points or some valid concerns.
But those really are about peripheral issues.
They're not the core teachings.
So you deconstructors who really think you're calling into question Christianity as high-control Christianity articulates it, you're not actually touching the core teaching.
And that's that effort to insulate high-control religion from critique.
In this case, by assuring us that its doctrinal essence, the core teachings, are immune to those criticisms.
And I suggested last episode that there are two broad movements in this response.
The first, and this is what we focused on last week, is what I call the doctrinal love bombing.
It's an articulation of the teachings of the tradition as focusing on unconditional love and acceptance and unmerited divine redemption and God accepts us no matter who we are, what we've done, and it's radically unconditional and so forth.
And I suggested there—I'm not going to repeat all of this, invite you if you haven't had a chance to listen to it, maybe pause this, go back, take a listen—but I suggested there that this is an incredibly attractive presentation of Christianity's teachings.
And I should say, there are Christians who actually articulate a view like that.
Not all Christianity is high-control Christianity, okay?
But I suggested that when you hear this from the high-control practitioners, yeah, it would be surprising.
Like, wow, that does sound like a really pretty great sort of Vision of religious life.
That sounds like a pretty great vision.
Like, I guess it would be surprising if droves of people were leaving a tradition that actually taught this.
And so that was sort of where we picked up is the love-bombing phase, that the first effort is to say, look, the teachings are great.
Like, why would you ever criticize this?
What kind of monster could possibly be opposed to this religious vision?
Well, that brings us to the second movement, okay?
And it comes into view if we revisit that question, if we consider this question, right?
If that love bombing presentation was accurate, why would so many people leave?
It would indeed be surprising.
If it was this beautiful religious vision, it would be surprising if that many people were leaving.
Why would so many people be traumatized by that articulation of Christianity?
And the gaslighting answer is that there simply is no good or legitimate reason.
This is the effort to discredit those who bring up The concerns of faith deconstruction.
Those people are selfish, or they're deluded, or they're just sinful, or they love the world too much, or whatever.
But I'm going to say this.
There's a more straightforward answer that doesn't involve gaslighting, and it's this.
In practice, when it comes to how the religion is actually carried out, that love-bombing theological vision is not at the heart of the teaching or practice of high-control Christianity.
That's why people leave.
So the question, why would so many people leave with that Christian vision, is because that Christian vision is a farce.
Okay? And to bring this into view again, I want to revisit some of the insights on the abusive nature of high control religion, again coming from the book When Religion Hurts You.
And in there, I took this from last time, it talks about one of the phases in an abusive relationship, including an abusive relationship with a religious organization or institution or practice, is the love bombing phase.
And that's what we've been talking about, the phase that basically like really tries to sell itself to you, tries to sell you on the tradition.
But that's followed by what the book calls the tension building phase.
And this is the phase in which the high control religious organization or community starts exercising greater pressures on individuals to conform to their standards or their practices or their teachings.
You start getting the pressure to conform, the pressure to comply, And this is where I identify what I'm calling in this episode the bait-and-switch dimension of high-control Christianity.
Okay? Because the Christian teachings presented in that love-bombing phase, they're not about control or coercion.
There's no control or coercion going.
There's just unmitigated, absolutely unconditional love and acceptance.
And within high-control religion, when that vision is put forward, that love-bombing vision, that's about bringing people in.
It's about selling the tradition.
It's about making the tradition look attractive to outsiders.
It's about if it needs to be, you know, gaslighting and discrediting.
When somebody feels uneasy, you say, gosh, the teachings of the tradition or this, you know, God accepts you unconditionally.
Like, so what's your problem with that?
Why are you upset about that?
That's what it's about.
But once people are in the tradition, and this includes people who are born into that tradition, who grow up with that tradition, Once people are in, you have to keep them in if you're a practitioner of high-control religion.
You've got to hold on to them.
And what that means is you have to create a need for your high-control religion itself.
High-control religion does not exist to save others.
It doesn't exist to help others.
It exists to replicate its own existence.
It's about power and coercion and control, and to have power and coercion and control, you have to make sure that those mechanisms of power, coercion, and control replicate themselves.
And that's what this is part of.
And this is not unique to high-control religion.
This is a dynamic of any system fundamentally structured around social control.
So how does this play out in high-control religion?
What is the bait-and-switch?
First and most fundamentally, It turns out that the supposedly unconditional love offered by God within that love bombing presentation, turns out it's not so unconditional after all.
And this is true at a number of points, so we're gonna get more into the actual doctrinal considerations in next week's episode.
But the most basic idea is this, is that people have to submit themselves to this offer of salvation.
God doesn't just save.
God's unconditional grace is not that God loves and cares about everybody so much that He has saved them.
It's that He has made salvation possible.
God has made an offer of salvation, and people must submit themselves to this offer.
God requires that they accept and acknowledge this offer of salvation.
And that may not sound so bad.
Okay? And we're going to dive into this more deeply next episode, what I think this says about the God of high-control religion.
But let's just say maybe that doesn't sound so bad.
In fact, it's often presented as a defense of human autonomy.
God respects our free will, He respects our autonomy, He wants us to choose to be in a relationship with Him, and so on and so forth.
But what comes into view is that the consequences for not making that choice are ridiculous.
Eternal condemnation, even for those who have never had the opportunity to make this choice.
The classical Krishna doctrine is eternal conscious torment.
You will be tortured for all of eternity if you don't accept the supposedly unconditional offer of salvation.
Okay? Bye.
So, one has to accept God's, quote, free offer of salvation.
It starts to feel not so free.
It starts to feel coercive.
Again, we're going to get into that more next episode.
But let's let that go, okay?
Let's say that that isn't such a big deal.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that people do hear the Christian message, that they do have the opportunity to respond, that they do in fact respond and accept that free gift, okay?
Why would I suggest that this remains a problematic conception within high-control Christianity?
Here's why.
Because it's at this point that the partisans of high-control religion insert themselves as the necessary means of responding to God.
In other words, To effectively respond to God, to accept that offer, we need High Control Religion.
If you've listened to this series for long, you know that for me, this is one of the defining features of High Control Religion.
One of its defining features is that its practitioners routinely insert themselves as the mediators and spokespersons for God.
So high-control Christianity consistently and always operates by insisting that its leaders, its institutions, its practices are the necessary means of encountering or knowing about or meeting the demands of God.
High-control religion becomes indispensable.
It is the means of attaining knowledge or salvation through God.
High-control religion operates by making itself And this is the dynamic that we find at work When
we look at how the idea of quote-unquote responding to God's free offer of love actually occurs.
Because it turns out, again without fail in high control religion, it turns out that responding to God is not merely acceptance of something that is freely given.
It is instead and requires a whole life lived in submission to God.
Christian freedom So, God's free, unmerited gift, God's free, unmerited love, God's unconditional love, winds up not being free or unmerited at all.
Rather, the unconditional love is conditioned on our full acceptance of God's authority and our ability to uphold a whole range of obligations and to shape our lives in a way that is held to be acceptable to God.
And of course, who defines what acceptability before God is?
High control religion does.
So this is where the really insidious and abusive nature of high control religion comes into its own in a number of ways.
Okay, so the first piece is this.
First, everything we know about what is required to do this What God demands of us, the consequences of failing to live up to those demands, and so on, everything we know comes from the practitioners of high-control religion themselves.
They're the ones telling us this.
Yes, they will point to the Bible.
Yes, they might point to Christian tradition.
Yes, they will point to church teachings.
It's always them doing the pointing.
It's them reading the Bible.
It's them interpreting and mediating that information to us.
So invariably, They and their institutions and their practices grounded in their authority are absolutely central.
One cannot meet the standards of God without the mechanisms of high control religion.
It is inserted there and present all the time.
So that's the first sort of dimension to this.
The second one is this.
The level of control exercised here is absolutely comprehensive.
It's totalizing.
Again, High control religion claims its status as the mediator between God and human beings, and God, because God is God, God has a comprehensive claim on the totality of an individual's life, which means that as the mechanism of attaining to God, high control religion makes that same comprehensive claim.
And what do I mean by comprehensive?
Again, if you've listened to me for years at this point, You know where I'm going with this.
It's the idea that religion is not simply about belief.
It's about emotions, and when we're supposed to feel particular emotions and when we're not.
It's about whom we are supposed to love, whom we are allowed to love, and who we are supposed to oppose and hate and take as a threat.
It's about what we can and cannot do with our bodies in any number of ways, everything from purity culture And regulating sexuality to, you know, sort of other issues of morality and different kinds of things is a totalizing vision of the human life.
So when we talk about control, it's not just about believing the right things.
It's about feeling the right things, doing the right things, having the right kind of body in the world engaged in the right way.
It's absolutely comprehensive.
So we have to submit ourselves to God, we only know what that means because of the dictates of high control religion, and it affects every impact, or impacts rather, every aspect of our life.
And then third, tied in with this, just to cap it all off, the authority of high control religion is reinforced because we're playing a game we cannot win.
So again, it turns out that divine acceptance isn't something that's simply given, we have to maintain it.
By living a life of thoroughgoing obedience and submission, constantly in fear that if we don't measure up to that standard, we will lose that divine status or that divine favor.
But, and here's the key, because human beings are sinful and fallen, we cannot maintain that relationship adequately.
We are called to a standard.
A standard is demanded of us that the tradition itself says we cannot meet.
So we stand to receive all kinds of punishment and negative consequences if we don't meet the standards of God, and yet it is impossible to meet the standards of God.
Well, what does that mean for high-control religion?
It means that we are continually dependent on it.
We are continually, perpetually dependent on the practices and the leaders and the institutions of high-control Christianity to rectify a situation we can't address on our own.
So that dependence becomes perpetual.
So this role of mediation, this role of claiming to stand between human beings and God, again, this is where, as I say, the insidious and abusive nature of high-control religion comes in, in all of these ways.
When I work with religious trauma clients, clients who are recovering from the traumatic effects of high-control religion, that's who I'm working with, one of the questions that is posed to them It's about the emotions that are evoked for them when they think about religion or the divine and so forth.
And the answers are really telling.
The answers are almost always emotions like guilt, shame, fear, anger, anxiety.
I'm not sure anxiety fits as an emotion but the state of just being anxious all the time.
Those are the emotions.
Within You can talk to people who grew up in these traditions.
You can talk to many times people within these traditions if they are honest and they will talk about struggling with guilt and shame all the time.
A constant anxiety of what?
Of not meeting up to that standard.
And folks, that's not accidental.
Once high control religion pulls its bait and switch, once it shifts from the love-bombing vision of like, Absolute, unconditional love, you couldn't do anything to deserve it and you don't have to because God accepts you as you are, on and on and on.
Once you shift from that to the obligations that adherence have to it, to all the things you have to do constantly to try to attain to this status, to try to merit this unmerited love, these are the emotions that it works to bring about in its adherence.
High control religion thrives on guilt and shame and fear and anxiety.
Those are what keep people glued to it.
These are the emotions that drive people back to high-control religion.
Because the claim within high-control religion is that only it can provide the means of addressing those emotions and blunting their force.
If you feel guilty, it's not because of us.
It's because you're failing to meet up to divine standards.
But hey, it's okay because here we are to help you do that.
We can help you reset.
We can help you learn how.
We can operate forgiveness.
We can do all of those kinds of things.
We can help blunt that force.
The trick, of course, and here we're into a supreme level of gaslighting, is that it's the high-control religion that initiates these emotions in the first place.
It's the high-control religion that makes it so that anger and guilt and anxiety and fear are core religious emotions and then promises to make them go away Never for good.
Never in such a way that your dependence on high-control religion would be called into question.
Excuse me.
The careful cultivation of these emotions is in the code of high-control Christianity.
It is written in.
It is what it does.
So, circle back around.
If we're assessing the claim that opponents of faith deconstruction make, we're assessing the claim That the deconstructionist critique of high control religion doesn't get at the core teachings of the tradition?
It's just completely false.
The Love Barmy articulation of core Christian teachings never actually plays out within high control Christianity.
Those are not the core teachings.
And you want to have a conversation with somebody within that model, that's what you have to understand.
And regular, just Grassroots people in those traditions, they may come at you with that love-bombing statement of what the tradition is about.
Uncle Ron may come to you with this notion of, well, this is what the Christian tradition teaches, and really think that that's what he thinks, but it doesn't take much work to show that unconditional love not so unconditional.
When they're presented this way, when the practitioners of high control religion say, oh, here it is, and they come at you with that doctrinal love-bombing, It's like a corrupt accountant who cooks the books.
It's the person who has like one set of spreadsheets that they, I don't know, they send into the IRS or the auditors.
They got the real books in a safe in the back back room and they are not the same.
That's how it is with high control religion.
And what the experience of faith deconstruction often does is to bring that into light.
It brings into light the cooked books versus the real books.
The real doctrines as they play out in practice versus There's more to say here.
There are more things that opponents of faith deconstruction can do to try to preserve the core teachings of the tradition from critique.
We're going to pick that up in the next episode.
Because somebody can still say, with this, they could still respond and say, well, yeah, okay, but that's the, you know, that's the human articulation of the truth.
And yes, it's skewed and humans are sinful and fallen.
But the true, pristine teachings of Christianity, as high-control religion understands it, are still preserved from those critiques.
We're going to revisit that next episode.
We're going to look at just a few of the core, central teachings of the Christianity of high-control religion to show the deconstructionist critique absolutely goes to the core of that tradition.
That's why it's such a threat.
Please join me then.
In the meantime, again, thank you for listening.
Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you for supporting us in all the different ways that you do, to the subscribers in particular.
If you are not a subscriber and that's something that you would consider doing, I'd ask you to do so.
As always, please, feedback, comments, new ideas, let me know.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Value your insights, feedback, comments, ideas so much.
Please keep them coming, and please be well until we get a chance to talk again.
The term Bible Belt conjures images of all-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you that the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment?
What if I told you that like any other belt, The Bible Belt is filled with holes that lead to unexpected places, where pastors and deacons and volunteer ministers demand equality and representation for gay couples, single moms, and anyone trying to get to the ballot box.
My name is Dr. Gillian Frank, and my new limited series podcast, Red State Religions, explores the persistence of liberal religious values and progressive politics in so-called red states.
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