It's in the Code Ep 141: “Deconstructing Some ‘Core Teachings’”
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Partisans of high-control Christianity attempt to insulate their version of the Christian tradition from criticism by arguing that the questions and challenged posed by those experiencing faith deconstruction do not apply to the “core teachings” of the tradition. But even a cursory look at some of the most basic theological tenets of high-control Christianity show this not to be the case. In this episode, Dan looks at two of the “core teachings” within high-control Christianity to show hoe faith deconstruction does, indeed, fundamentally challenge high-control religion.
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Axis Mundi Sous-titrage ST'501 Welcome to It's in the Code.
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, and as always, I want to begin by saying thank you for supporting us, for listening.
Always so aware that as you listen to this, you could be doing something else, and so I want to thank you for your time.
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We couldn't do anything that we do without you, and this series in particular is driven by you, so I want to invite you now to reach out to me, Daniel Miller Swagg, DanielMillerSWAG at gmail.com.
Thoughts, feedback, comment on this and other episodes, ideas for upcoming episodes, upcoming series.
Got a lot of things that I'm working on.
Reading your emails as I am able.
But they do inform this series and they inform everything we do on It's in the Code.
So please keep those thoughts and ideas coming.
I look forward to hearing all of those.
Want to dive in here.
We're continuing an ongoing discussion that we're calling Who's Afraid of Deconstruction.
Basically looking at negative responses within high control Christianity to so-called faith deconstruction.
And again, these responses represent efforts on the part of those who practice high control religion.
It's their effort to gaslight those who are experiencing faith deconstruction.
It is their effort to discredit those people and the kinds of claims and concerns that they're raising.
And it is their effort, you know, really first and foremost, to insulate high control Christianity from the criticisms and critiques that they raise.
And we've been looking at a number of objections.
Last couple episodes, we've looked at the claim that deconstructive critiques don't get it, you know, the heart of high control Christianity at the core of the tradition.
We looked at what I called doctrinal love-bombing.
That's the effort of, like, sort of presenting the core teachings of the tradition in this really positive, affirming light to try to be like, you know, what could you possibly object to here?
Why would you deconstruct from this?
And so forth.
We then, last episode, moved into what I call debate and switch, which is, you know, the reason why people actually leave this tradition and deconstruct from it.
Is that that love-bombing presentation is never actually encountered.
That's not what people actually experience in the tradition.
That's why they leave.
This episode, I want to consider a final dimension of this claim that faith deconstruction doesn't get at the core teachings of the tradition.
And the way that I want to do this, I want to take a really quick look at just a couple of these supposedly core teachings as articulated within high-control Christianity.
What I want to do is I want to say this.
Look. Fine.
Let's take the church out of it.
The high-control institutions that I argue are always there mediating and speaking for God and so forth.
Fine, let's take that out.
Let's take away the argument that says, well, you know, the core doctrines are fine, but we're all sinful and fallen and we express them imperfectly and so on.
So your deconstructive critiques have some value for how the tradition is practiced, but they don't really cut to the tradition itself.
You're not really critical of Christianity as we practice it here.
And I want to basically take a look and say, no, actually it is.
You could put all that other stuff out and just look at the teachings, the understandings that are propounded within high-control Christianity.
And I want to be clear.
We're talking about high-control Christianity.
There are other Christian articulations of core Christian teachings and so forth.
I know that those are there.
I'm glad that those are there.
It's just not my aim to talk about those here.
You can look at those core teachings as propound and say, no, those core teachings are a real problem.
And in fact, deconstructive critiques and concerns cut right to the heart of those.
They are a threat to high control religion because they do cut to the core teachings.
And that's what I want to suggest.
And that also brings us to the point, again, that the reason faith deconstruction provokes the really sort of visceral response that it does from high control religionists...
is because it is a direct and explicit threat to the tradition, to their understanding of Christianity.
So let me just start with this.
I want to start by revisiting one of the points from the last episode.
And we noted that the core teaching, in the love-bombing phase, they'll talk about God graciously forgiving and unconditionally loving everybody and bringing humans back to himself and so forth.
In last episode, we said that it's actually not quite how it works within high-control Christianity.
No, you have to accept that gift.
Receiving salvation or redemption from God is actually conditional on choosing to accept it.
And more than that, I also suggested that within the way that the tradition works, this acceptance takes the form of absolute submission to God.
It's not enough of just sort of acknowledging it or being like, oh, hey, thanks, God, you know, fist bump, let's move on.
It's absolute submission to God.
I don't want to rehash all of that.
Go back and listen to that episode if you haven't.
But what I want to do here is I want to sort of, as it were, hover over that point and take a closer look at the God who is worshipped within high-control Christianity.
When high-control Christians, when Uncle Ron, the partisan of high-control Christianity, talks about the God that he talks about, when he talks about the God of Christianity as he understands and practices it, Who or what is this God?
And one of the things to remember, and this is really important to me, is that high control Christianity argues that God is a perfect being in all ways.
Okay? The kind of medieval way of saying this is that God is a maximally perfect being.
And I think you can ask Uncle Ron, you could ask, you know, your pastor, you could ask your parents, you could ask anybody.
If you grew up in the tradition, you know that this is just sort of...
Largely an assumption, sometimes articulated explicitly, but the God is absolutely perfect.
God has no flaws.
That's part of what makes God God.
And that's going to be important.
Okay? Because what I want to do is I want to take a look and say, okay, so within high control Christianity, what is their vision of a perfect God?
What is this perfect God like?
And so the first thing to pick up here, tying in with that last episode, Is that the claim within high control Christianity is that this God, this maximally perfect God, demands, demands our worship and adoration.
And the justification, if anyone questions it, because that can sound ridiculous, and we're going to, you know, come back around to this point, but if we walk around in the world and somebody's like, I demand your worship, I demand adoration from you, we're like, sorry, that's like the quickest way not to get my adoration is to demand it.
And so if somebody were to question it and be like, why does God get to do that?
The answer is going to be that God is worthy of this worship and adoration.
God deserves it.
Adoration and worship are rightfully given to God.
And we could delve more into that, different theological traditions and how that's articulated and the Reformed tradition, capital R, Calvinistic theology in particular and so forth.
But let's just leave that there, this notion that God is worthy of this worship and adoration, because my question is this, and this is what I want us to think about.
What kind of dysfunctional, so-called perfect God is this?
How insecure is this supposedly perfect, all-powerful being?
I'm just going to say this.
One would think that maximal perfection Would include a kind of, let's say, perfect self-acceptance.
We all run around in the world trying to learn to accept ourselves, value ourselves, be content with who we are, recognize our intrinsic worth and value, and so forth.
If I'm maximally perfect, and I know that I'm perfect, where does the insecurity come from to demand that other people have to acknowledge that as well?
What kind of supposedly perfect, all-powerful being can't be content with being Perfect and all-powerful, but has to demand worship and obedience from finite beings, from sinful fallen beings who, according to the same tradition, are not worthy of offering that worship and obedience.
How weird is that idea?
What does that tell us about this insecure God who is supposedly perfect?
And let's go further than that, then.
Not only is this God insecure, How manipulative and narcissistic is an all-powerful, supposedly perfect being who could redeem all of humanity as a true act of unmerited love, who says that God is perfect love, God unconditionally loves every, not just human being, every element of creation, could literally, with less than the snap of a fingers, redeem it all, reconcile it all, could do that.
As a true act of unmerited love, one could argue an act of perfect love, but instead chooses not to.
Just because.
Because if somebody says to the high-control religionist, why would God choose not to do that?
That seems like that would be the good thing to do, the kind thing to do, the moral or ethical thing to do.
The high-control religionist will say, That there doesn't have to be a reason.
Or rather, more technically, God acts only from God's own will or volition.
The only reason why God does something is God.
Therefore, God's will is inscrutable.
It is essentially arbitrary.
That's your maximally perfect being.
And that, to me, the God who could do all that, just chooses not to arbitrarily, that feels more like Thanos from Marvel.
Than any reasonable vision of a morally perfect being.
Remember Thanos was like, let's just get rid of half of everybody who's ever lived.
Let's just wipe half of everything out.
Arbitrarily, that's more what it sounds like than a notion of maximal perfection.
He sounds like a supervillain.
Now, the high control religionist is ready with an answer.
Okay? Because they'll say, well, none of this is a moral imperfection of God, because God is worthy, again, of this worship and obedience.
Because God deserves it, because God is worthy of it, it's not narcissistic or weird or whatever that God demands it.
And there you start feeling like you're just spinning your wheels in the mud.
You're just going around in circles.
But here's what I want us to think about, because we're not stupid.
And if you don't allow yourself to be gaslit at that point, we can feel how weak this justification is.
This justification is, well, what makes it so it's not just arbitrary or mean or whatever is that God is worthy of this worship, so it's okay for God to make these demands.
Okay? I want us to think about an example that we're probably all familiar with.
I want to think about the concept of leadership.
Maybe it's leadership on a team, a sports team, a work team, whatever.
Leadership in a work environment, the head of a company or something like that, whatever it is, take the concept of leadership.
And I think all of us will have been in some context where we have to go along with somebody.
We have to follow somebody who's in charge, who's the boss, whatever.
But I think that we all know that being in charge or having authority is not the same thing as being a leader.
I think we all know intuitively that somebody who has to appeal to their authority to get people to follow them, Isn't really a leader.
The effective leader is the person that can inspire people to follow them because of the vision that they have or charisma or whatever.
Not somebody who has to say, you have to follow me because I'm the leader.
It's not a positional authority thing.
So people follow true leaders because they're worth following, not because they threaten to punish anyone who doesn't.
Like, yeah, we can be on a team or part of some working group or something and they say, you know what, if you're not at the next Zoom meeting and we can't confirm that you're there, it's going to be putting your personnel file or you're going to be, I don't know, whatever the penalty is, you're going to get a penalty.
And so we're there because we're going to get a penalty if we don't.
We know that that's not leadership.
Okay? We know that when things devolve to the level of threats, that's a breakdown of leadership, not an exercise of it.
Why do I bring that up?
Because I think that that's an analogy for this way of thinking about God within high-control Christianity.
If that God was really worthy of worship, he wouldn't need to threaten people with punishment and damnation to get it.
You want to convince me that your God is worth following?
That your God is worth my adoration?
That your God is worth my worship?
Take away the threat of punishment, and then let's see if we follow that God.
Let's see if that happens.
So you want a God who's really worthy of worship?
Take away the penalties.
Take away the fear.
Take away the coercion.
Hell, take away the high-control religious structures that compel all of this, as we talked about last week.
Take all that away, and then see if your God is worthy of worship.
If your God is worth worshiping, people will worship that God.
And if they don't, maybe that God's not worth worshiping.
So, That's my point to that response.
When they say, well, it's not bad for God to do this because, you know, he's worth worshiping.
I'm like, how do we know that?
It's all built on coercion and threats.
Because to my mind, a perfect, all-powerful being with the power to heal humanity would do it just because it's a good thing to do.
That's what a maximally, morally perfect being would do, is just heal human beings and humanity because that's a good thing to do.
Not to demand recognition, not to do it out of such insecurity that he threatens to eternally punish anybody who doesn't acknowledge how great he is, just because it's a good thing to do.
The high-control religionist God is an authoritarian, insecure narcissist.
That is the God at the heart of high-control religion.
So when deconstructionists come along challenging authoritarian But there's one more defensive move that they'll make here.
If you've ever had a discussion like this with any of those partisans of high-control religion, you already know what the response is going to be.
And this is what they'll say.
They'll say something like, well, God is God and we're only finite, so we can't judge what perfection might be.
If I look at it and say, that doesn't seem like a very perfect God, they'll say, well, you know, you're using your finite human judgment of perfection.
We're not qualified to judge what divine perfection would be.
It's a version of the old statement that, you know, God's ways are not our ways.
That God is so far above us and so different from us and so far beyond us that we cannot understand God.
And I've talked about that version, that argument before in this series.
But it's intended as the ultimate move to insulate God from critique.
God is so far beyond our understanding that we can't judge God.
So if we say that God is a maximally perfect being, we can't pass judgments on what that is.
But there are some issues with this.
First of all, if we can't know about God, you can't say God's a maximally perfect being.
You can't apply the term.
But second of all, and this is my response.
And I've had this discussion more times than I can tell you with high control religionists.
You make your living, you people who drive high control religion, you make your living claiming that you do in fact know what God's ways are.
That's your whole basis and argument for everything that you do is that you speak for God.
You know what God wants.
So when you suddenly claim that we can't know that, for me, that's a sure sign.
That we are on to an issue that is a real threat.
When your last move is to suddenly say, hey, me, high control religionist, who spends all of my time speaking for God, I'm now going to say God's ways are so far beyond us that we just, yeah, we can't.
We can't know what God wants.
It's a sure sign that those criticisms are reaching close to home.
The second point, though, is this, and it's related to the first one, but the second is this.
God is supposed to be the source of our understanding of things like perfection and moral goodness and so forth, right?
On the theist's argument, the high-control religionist argument. We've talked about this before.
The argument, for example, that you can't have morality without God.
You can't be ethical if you're not a religious or Christian person.
God is the source of our knowledge of what is right and wrong and perfect and so forth.
If that's the truth, then our fundamental intuitions about perfection and goodness and justice, they tell us there's a problem with that vision of God.
When our most fundamental sense of healing, that can't be right, that can't be just, that can't be what a God who's perfect would do, we should listen to that on Christian grounds.
Because on Christian grounds, the reason we know that is because of God in the first place.
So, those are the ways that some of the partisans of high-control religion will try to counter this sense.
And the point is this.
Faith deconstruction undercuts, among a lot of other things, it undercuts the vision of the insecure, narcissistic God who's at the absolute center of the high-control Christian vision of reality.
It's not peripheral.
It's not a sort of side thing.
It's not something that's just articulated by some people who don't understand the tradition.
This is a core teaching, a core doctrine of the tradition.
Okay? So that's the first one.
You've got the narcissistic, authoritarian God who's right at the center of the tradition, and that is hit by faith deconstruction.
I want to press further.
I want to look at one other issue.
Okay? And that is talking about, not only is this God narcissistic, this God's also a masochist.
The masochistic God whose narcissistic gratification requires the suffering of others.
It's not enough for this narcissistic God to not just save or redeem everybody out of an actual grace and love or to demand recognition.
No, that God chooses to punish anybody who doesn't accept that salvation.
To punish everybody, folks, who doesn't ever even hear about that salvation.
And not only that, not only is this insecure God so masochistic that he has to punish everybody who doesn't choose to accept his love, He's going to punish them for all eternity.
And in case that wasn't abhorrent enough, almost everybody within high-control Christianity will hold that this punishment takes the form of eternal conscious torment.
When they talk about hell, spending eternity in hell, it is an eternity of experiencing conscious torment.
So that's right, folks.
The all-loving, perfect being Chooses to torture most human beings for all of eternity if they don't choose to adore and love him.
And that is a core teaching of high control Christianity.
The whole reason we need salvation, the whole reason we have to accept the supposedly free gift of God is to be saved from this eternal fate.
If you grew up within high control Christianity, you knew this teaching.
If you are listening to this and you didn't grow up in that tradition, Maybe you know people who did, but you just have this sort of popular awareness of what we're calling high control religion.
You probably know this teaching because it is so central to this Christian vision.
And this teaching is so normalized.
It is so central and normalized within high control Christianity that its abhorrent nature is often masked until you look at it from the outside.
I cannot tell you how many times I have talked to people who have left high control Christianity.
And have said, you know, essentially that it's only in retrospect, when they got some distance from that tradition, that they sort of looked back, as it were, at teachings like this, and they were like, oh my goodness, this is like a terrible, terrible teaching.
So let's just take a quick look at that.
I know we're running short on time.
We've got to move fast here.
But let's just, first of all, set aside the whole torture element of this, the torture-porn nature of this god.
A God who glorifies himself somehow in other people experiencing torment for all of eternity.
Let's just even set that aside.
Let's just think about how disproportionate this punishment is.
There is literally nothing an individual could do in one finite lifetime that could warrant an eternal punishment.
It is so disproportionate there is literally no analogy to it.
If somebody shoplifted a stick of gum as a child, And was tortured for the rest of their human life until they died as punishment for stealing that stick of gum?
It would not even come close to approximating the abhorrence of a doctrine that says you will be tortured forever.
For all of eternity.
It cuts against any fundamental notions of propriety or equity or justice.
And again, from a supposedly morally perfect being, Who is supposed to be the source of our own conceptions of morality and fairness, the God of justice and mercy and so forth.
This is the vision of that God.
And it's also worth thinking about the fact that this, as a core teaching, is presented to children.
You tell kids this.
I mean, think about all the things that happened with kids growing up and needing to feel safe and affirmed and develop a sense of identity.
Healthy attachments and all that sort of stuff, and what do you tell them?
You're so sinful and depraved and fallen that what you deserve is eternal, conscious torment, and that is what the all-powerful, supposedly perfect God of the universe will do to you if you don't do everything he says.
That's your model of moral perfection?
God, if we raised our kids that way and anything, if we threatened our kids that way, you'd have health and human services on you.
But we turn it into a teaching about God.
They are condemned to eternal pain and torment if they don't worship and acknowledge God and if they don't do it in the right way.
Now, we can play this game forever.
I could go episode after episode after episode talking about core teachings within high-control Christianity and how bad they are and how, yes, faith deconstruction absolutely hits at the core of the tradition.
And I invite you, reach out to me.
Let me know if there are others.
This is not a theology podcast.
We are not going to go through every teaching in a high-control religion, but I welcome your thoughts on this.
Okay? The point is this.
We could expand the list of core doctrines almost endlessly and keep diving into ways in which abuse and control and coercion are written into the teachings of high-control Christianity.
And the reason that the practices and actions of high control religionists are often so coercive and damaging is that they follow from the core teachings of this Christian vision.
They are not an aberration.
They are an expression of it.
And I'm hoping that consideration of just a couple of these, the narcissism of that God of high control religion, the masochistic nature and disproportionate impulse,...of eternal conscious torment within this tradition.
I'm hoping that just those couple doctrines illustrate this point.
Partisans of high control religion will try to convince you that the issues raised within faith deconstruction don't get at the core of the tradition.
Again, that's how they try to insulate their articulation of Christianity from critique.
But in my view, we don't have to reflect very hard or very long.
We don't have to decode much.
For us to see that if we look past the love bombing and we look past even the way the tradition is actually practiced, we look to those core teachings, we can see that deconstructionist critique cuts to the heart of the religious vision within high-control Christianity.
And once again, to repeat, this is why the efforts to counter and discredit those insights come so forcefully and so fast from the partisans of high-control religion.
Faith deconstruction absolutely cuts to the heart of high-control Christianity, and it is nothing but gaslighting and an effort to preserve that vision, that high-control vision.
It is nothing other than that when people come at you with the argument that this is somehow not really getting at the tradition.
We need to wrap this up.
Again, I can't thank you enough for listening, subscribers in particular.
If you are not a subscriber and that's something you'd be willing to consider doing, I'd ask you to do so.
Again, welcome your insights, your thoughts on the topics we're talking about today, other topics, this series, other series, prior series.
Just tell me how you're doing.
You want to argue with me, whatever it is, I want to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swagg, danielmillerswagg at gmail.com.
If you're a subscriber and have access to the Discord, you can also drop things in there and I poke around from time to time and sort of sweep some things up.
Look forward to hearing from all of you.
In the meantime, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.
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My name is Dr. Gillian Frank.
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