It's in the Code ep 145: “You’re Just Being Selfish”
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“You’re just being selfish.” This accusation represents both the last-ditch effort and the overarching them of the partisans of high-control Christianity to discredit faith deconstructionists. How does this accusation work? What are its aims? What do the partisans of high-control religion hope to gain by accusing their opponents of selfishness? And how does this accusation reveal the deep-seated efforts at control and coercion that lie at the heart of high-control Christianity? Join Dan as he explores these issues in this week’s episode.
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Axis Mundi As always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Your host, pleased to be with you.
As always, welcome any insights, thoughts, questions, feedback, ideas for new episodes, all of the above, anything and everything.
Please let me know what you're thinking.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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Diving in this week, we're continuing, we're actually concluding our discussion that we've been having for several episodes now on negative responses within high-control Christianity to so-called faith deconstruction.
And once again, these are responses that reflect efforts on the part of those who are the advocates of high-control religion.
These are their efforts to gaslight people who are undergoing faith deconstruction.
To discredit them.
And ultimately to insulate their high-control Christianity from the kinds of criticisms and questions and critiques that they bring to view.
So that's what we've been looking at.
And as I say, this will be the final episode in the series.
Going to start some new stuff next week, so please tune in for that.
And the topic this week is, I think it's interesting, the more I've been thinking about it and prepping for this.
On the one hand, it represents something of the kind of the nuclear option.
On the part of those who challenge faith deconstruction.
It's like the break the glass option for when all the other responses and denials of faith deconstruction fall short.
In this sense, it's the option of kind of last resort.
But on the other hand, it also represents an overarching sentiment that really hovers over the other responses that we've been considering for this long number of weeks.
And in many ways, in that regard, it's one of the most gaslighty responses.
We talk about gaslighting a lot, trying to get those who are undergoing faith deconstruction to doubt their own experiences, to doubt their own insights, to doubt their own intuitions.
And in some ways, this is very much a part of that.
And I think it also represents the devolution, the devolving of responses to faith deconstruction into what...
Just outright character assassination.
In other words, as we've discussed, a lot of these responses sometimes have a semblance of reasonableness or sophistication, and that's by design.
We've even talked about the one that basically says, well, you're just being unreasonable.
If you're not hearing what we're saying, if you're not coming along with us, you're just being unreasonable.
They'll position themselves as the reasonable ones.
This is the response where that really just falls away.
And in this sense, it marks a response that I think is born of desperation.
It goes back to that last resort sort of thing.
It also brings into view what remains carefully hidden in many of the other responses.
We've all had the experience where you're talking with somebody about something or arguing or maybe it's a conversation you've had a lot of times and it never goes anywhere and you've just never felt like the real issue has come out and then somebody blows up or they say something or whatever and you're like, yep, there it is.
There it is.
That's what's really going on.
This is that moment.
Okay?
And I think it also represents a culminating effort to discredit faith deconstructionists in the eyes of those that they might, you know, quote-unquote, lead astray.
In other words, as we've discussed, this dynamic that, well, if they're going to leave, if they're going to really call this into question and ultimately leave this high-control context, we're going to try to make sure they don't take anybody with them.
By fully discrediting them.
And I think that this is one of the sort of key moments in that.
And so what am I talking about here?
What I have in view is the accusation that you're just being selfish.
At the end of the day, you can give all the reasons you want, make it sound all fancy, like you're really concerned about this or that, or you're worried about, you know, social justice or the environment or LGBTQ people or whatever, but really you're just being selfish.
That's the accusation.
You're just selfish.
You've raised questions, if you're the deconstructor.
You've voiced your concerns.
You've navigated those dismissals.
This is what I mean when I talk about this as kind of a culminating nuclear option sort of thing.
You've gone, you've had those preliminary discussions.
You've said, well, what about this?
Or what about this verse that says that?
You've encountered these other responses.
They've tried to shut you down.
You've dealt with the self-doubt.
You've gone back and you've done more homework or read other sources or listened to other podcasts, whatever it is, and determined that, no, I think that this really is what I think.
I think I've got insights here that are worth listening to.
You've done all of that.
You've gone back and followed up.
And your concerns haven't been dispelled.
You're not going away.
Your faith deconstruction is still moving forward.
All the other responses that the advocates of high-control Christianity have thrown at you, they haven't worked, so they resort to this one.
You're just being selfish.
And there may be other phrases that capture the same sentiment here.
This isn't the only way to communicate this, I don't think, or to do the work that this phrase does, but this is the one that stands out to me.
You're just being selfish.
And this accusation does a lot of work for the partisans of high-control Christianity.
As you know, if you listen to this series, you listen to me, That's what I'm always interested in.
This was a phrase, mean, quote unquote, but like, what is it doing?
When people say this, what are they doing or what are they trying to do?
And one of the things it does is it masks, it masks, rather, that you're being selfish.
It masks the bad faith, the unreasonableness, the coercion, and the control of all the other responses we've considered.
The fact that you've persisted in your doubts and questions and concerns, the fact that they haven't gone away, that no matter how many times you've gone to the church leaders or the elder board or your parents or whomever and raised these questions, they haven't gone away, and you go back and you respond to what they say and you find additional evidence or whatever.
The fact that you've done all that, it is not taken as evidence that their responses weren't compelling.
It wasn't taken as evidence that they weren't acting in good faith.
It wasn't taken as evidence that high-control religion operates according to that bait-and-switch economy that we've talked about.
No.
When they say you're selfish, what they're saying is high-control Christianity is, once again, absolutely not the problem.
The problem isn't the religion.
It isn't the church.
It isn't the pastor.
It isn't the church elders.
It's not the core teachings.
Nope.
The problem is you.
The fact that you persist in your deconstruction shows that you are the real problem.
You were never going to be convinced by anything I, the pastor, could say or anything the elder board is going to say or your parents would say.
Nope, you were never going to be convinced.
You were never interested in the truth.
You were never even really concerned with the issues you said you were concerned with.
No, there's nothing anyone could have done to meet your demands because you were not acting in good faith.
Because why?
You are just fundamentally selfish.
You just want what you want.
This is about you and what you want, which in Christian terms means, of course, it's a sure sign of your sinfulness.
And the fact that you persist in your deconstruction is evidence that you were never going to be satisfied unless you got what you wanted, which means, it's translated into the high-control Christian terms again, you are blatantly unrepentant.
So the response works on that regard to mask all the dynamics we've considered so far.
It also marks what I'm thinking of really is this high point of gaslighting.
Again, we've talked about gaslighting a lot that's present sort of in all these responses.
But this is almost like a high watermark.
No matter what you do or say, it all really reduces to your selfishness.
Like anything you do or say can be dismissed on the grounds of masking your selfishness.
And even if you think that you believe these things.
It's really just selfishness.
You yourself don't know your own motives.
And if you're listening to this, you're like, how could that be possible?
I would just submit to you that if you grew up within this kind of religious context, or if you've been fully socialized into this kind of religious context, you'll know how this works.
Because that accusation that you don't even know why you're doing this shit.
Maybe you think you're concerned about queer folk.
Maybe you think you're concerned about social justice.
Maybe you think you're concerned just about doctrinal incoherence.
You think that those are your concerns, but actually, it's really just your selfishness coming out.
And if you grew up within this tradition...
That accusation can sow the seeds of real doubt.
Why?
Because you're coming out of a tradition that says, as a core teaching, that we continually deceive ourselves, that the human heart deceives us, that our innermost desires and intuitions are all sinful and fallen and not to be trusted.
We can't trust ourselves.
We can't trust our own perceptions.
We can't trust our intuitions.
So the accusation that even if you mean well, You're still acting out of selfishness.
That feels real.
And so we begin to doubt ourselves.
We begin to entertain the possibility that our conviction of the rightness of what we're doing is actually evidence that we're only feeding our own selfishness.
And this is where it just becomes, again, it's a game you can't win.
The more convinced you are...
Of your intuitions and feelings, the more that conviction becomes evidence that you're actually not right because the human heart deceives itself.
And so it is very possible for someone to begin to feel that maybe the defenders of high-control Christianity were right and that we are the ones who've been acting in bad faith, even though we didn't think we were, we weren't trying to, we didn't believe we were.
And in this dimension...
That response, that dismissal that says you're just being selfish, it represents the last-ditch effort of bringing faith deconstructions back into the fold.
If I can just convince you that even the stuff you're convicted of is evidence that you're actually wrong and acting selfishly, there's a chance, if I can get you to doubt yourself enough, I can bring you back into the fold.
But if that doesn't happen, if you, the faith deconstructor, if you persist, Then this accusation seeks to finish the work of discrediting you.
If you persist in your convictions and ultimately you leave, you take leave of high-control Christianity, you walk away, they're just going to label you as selfish.
What does that do?
It marks you as a sinner, and so the other people in the church, you know, they're going to say, well, you know, we tried to listen to Dan.
We did.
We tried to meet him halfway.
We tried to understand his point of view.
But, you know, really, nothing we did seemed to be enough.
And we really just realized that as much as it saddens us to say it, he's just being selfish.
He's just in a place right now where he's not ready to recognize or acknowledge that.
And when he is, we're here.
But right now, that's just not something he's ready to recognize or acknowledge or repent of.
So, you become the cautionary tale.
To the other people in the church.
You become the one that runs the risk of losing community and all the other things that we've talked about.
So, you should leave the community, and we're going to do everything we can to discredit you, to make sure that you stay away, and to make sure that those who see you doing that, they don't see somebody acting in triumph, they don't see somebody raising good concerns.
They see somebody who's a cautionary tale.
What happens if you don't bring your own selfishness into line?
Okay?
Now, a few more things to say here.
None of that analysis will be surprising if you've been listening to this series and the other episodes that we've talked about.
It's all par for the course, and it's just sort of with the volume turned up.
I'm mixing metaphors here.
I don't know how you turn the volume up on a golf course, but, you know, it's just more of the same but kind of louder or more intense.
But there's a real dark dimension to this that I also want to bring out, because I think maybe it's not evident to everyone.
It wasn't evident to me for a long time, and I talk with folks who don't sort of see it at first either.
So what is it?
This response represents the expression and the culmination of one of the most abusive dimensions of high-control Christianity.
This is an abusive response, and it relates directly to this issue of gaslighting.
But the way that it relates to is it shows how deeply embedded this dimension is within high-control Christianity.
It is, as it were, it is in the code of high-control Christianity.
And one of the reasons, and I noted this a couple minutes ago, one of the reasons that this gaslighting dimension of this response and other responses is so effective is that high-control Christianity actually conditions its adherents to be gaslit.
It conditions them.
To effectively be able to be convinced that they can't trust their own insights and so forth, the gaslighting dimension is written into its core theological teachings.
And again, as a reminder, what are some of those?
A core doctrine within high-control Christianity is that human beings are fallen, and that can mean a lot of things in different articulations of Christianity, but what that means is that they are inherently sinful and naturally incapable of good, and a component of this is self-deception.
We do not recognize our sinfulness and fallenness.
We do not recognize that our hearts are deceptive.
And the add-on to this is that if we do follow our natural inclinations and impulses, they can only lead us away from God.
They can only lead to negativity.
They can only lead us out of what God's desire for us is.
So we are taught and fundamentally conditioned, for many of us, from birth forward in our most formative years, We are taught to believe, and more importantly, to feel in our bodies and all the physiological responses that are how emotions take root.
We are conditioned to believe and to feel that our intuitions, our doubts, our desires, that all of those things cannot be trusted.
In fact, often within this framework, the very nature of desire is such that you say, I really want that, I really desire that.
If we naturally, quote-unquote, desire something, it's almost certain that it's something we shouldn't desire or pursue.
This is a tradition built on a concept of self-denial.
We fundamentally cannot trust ourselves.
And this is another reason why we're supposed to place ourselves under the authority and guidance of those who operate within high-control religion, is because we can't trust ourselves, so we need to put ourselves under the direction and the discipleship and the tutelage of people Who we can trust.
And there are, in my mind, there are a lot of problems with this theological vision of the human condition.
A lot of problems.
It is not one that I accept.
But one of the most pertinent and evident has really come into view for me in my coaching work, in my work as a trauma resolution coach with people processing religious trauma.
That's one of the places where this has really stood out to me.
And it highlights a crucially abusive dimension of high-control Christianity.
And here's what this looks like.
Many of those who have left high-control religion, who no longer accept its teachings or recognize the authority of its practitioners, they still struggle with this inability to trust their own insights and desires and intuitions.
I talk with people all the time, and I'll tell you, I've dealt with this myself and still do at times.
People have trouble even discerning what their desires are.
Because they're so conditioned to deny them on the grounds of not being selfish.
They are so conditioned to not even acknowledge their own desires that they often can't tell you what they are.
They are so conditioned to distrust their own desire as something that will invariably lead them astray that they literally don't know how to discern what they desire.
And for many of those people who can, who can come to the point of being able to say, no, I think this is what I want.
This is what I desire in my life or my relationship or whatever.
That recognition will come with crippling guilt and anxiety.
Why?
Because it's been hardwired.
If desire is bad, you embody all those responses that we have, those negative emotional responses like guilt and anxiety, so every time they can acknowledge a desire or want, they feel guilty for it.
And then, on top of all of that, clients struggle with trusting their judgment and intuitions.
Maybe they can name what they want.
Maybe they're trying to make a judgment about what they should do or how they proceed.
Maybe they've got a good intuition of what the right path forward is, but they don't think they can trust it.
And this bleeds into every aspect of their lives.
And it certainly affects the big decisions, career decisions, job moves, relationships, etc.
So again, even if people have a sense of what they want to do, of what feels right, of what their gut is telling them, all those ways we might describe that, they second and triple-guess their choices worried.
That they can't trust their instincts or intuition.
And they're just frozen.
I talk to so many people who are stuck because they can't trust themselves to find a way forward.
And so they're unable to trust their own intuitions and instincts, and because they rejected the religious authorities who make the decisions for them, they get frozen.
And this is something that sticks to a lot of people long after they've left high-control Christianity, long after they've consciously abandoned those beliefs and teachings.
And here's the point.
This is why I find this so pernicious.
This is part of why I'm such a critic of high-control religion.
There are lots of reasons, but this is a big one.
Is that none of these effects are incidental or peripheral to high-control Christianity.
They are the nearly inevitable consequences.
Of some of its most central theological affirmations.
And folks, for me, when I say that a heart, a component at the center of high-control religion is bad theology, this is why.
If your theology screws people up, if your theology destroys their mental health, if your theology destroys and wrecks their lives, it's bad theology.
And these consequences are nearly inevitable coming out of this theology.
And they are reinforced by leaders of high-control religion because they are the mechanisms of control and coercion.
Part of the reason you need me as the pastor, or you need the elder board, or you need me as the spiritual authority is precisely because you can't trust your own judgments.
You are not capable of making your own decisions.
You need me to discern what that is.
It makes me indispensable for you.
So people who are socialized into high-control Christianity are programmed not to be able to identify with and affirm their own desires.
They are programmed not to trust their intuitions and instincts, which forces them to cede control to religious authorities.
And the incapacity to exercise their agency is such that not only do they cede that authority, they often feel tremendous relief in handing that authority to somebody else.
It's so pernicious, and it is a highly effective mechanism of control and coercion.
So this dimension of high-control Christianity and its dismissal of faith deconstruction, it represents a really, really coercive and abusive dimension of high-control religion that scars even the people who leave it long after they've left.
You're just selfish.
That's the response.
These are the effects.
As I say, this is the last episode in this series, and we've considered a lot of different negative responses to faith deconstruction that the partisans of high-control Christianity put forward.
It's not an exhaustive list.
It's not a complete list.
I know I've gotten emails from folks with additional ideas, and I think they're worth looking at.
We could do that sort of ad infinitum.
I hope during our next supplement, if some of those come in, maybe those are some things we can talk about there.
And I'm also aware that every topic we discuss could receive more time than we're able to give it.
But I hope that the series has shown just some of the ways, some of the common mechanisms and dynamics involved in trying to counter so-called faith deconstruction.
And again, regardless of the specific form it takes, the aims are the same.
They are to insulate high-control Christianity from criticism.
They are to try to gaslight those undergoing faith deconstruction so that they will remain within the high-control fold.
And if that doesn't work, if they do leave, they are aimed to discredit them to such an extent that others won't follow them out the door.
Those are the aims.
I need to wrap this up, and I want to say again, thank you for listening.
And again, if you have other thoughts or comments on this series, we don't have to be done.
We'll be down to the episodes in this series, but it's certainly things that can come up in the supplemental episode as I get a chance to respond to folks'emails, all those kinds of things.
So please, keep the comments coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller S. We're going to pick up a new series starting next episode on this theme that Brad has talked about some, right?
Empathy.
But we're going to be looking at a book.
We're going to be looking at a book that claims to highlight the features of what they call toxic empathy and keep us all from being led astray.
This was a book recommended to me for treatment and it's in the code by a colleague.
So thank you to them.
They know who they are.
But I think it's a book a lot of other people have mentioned to me, and we're going to spend some time.
We're going to spend some time going through it.
I'm reading the book, so you don't have to.
So tune in for that.
In the meantime, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.
