Ready.
The glory of God is [you] fully alive.
~ St. Iranaeus
Whatever today brings, you'll be ready!
~ the morning message on my Garmin watch
Are you ready? Are you capable? Are you strong? Evangelicalism would say no.
It was my coaching / counseling friend Jeff Williams who introduced me to the therapeutic concept of “learned helplessness” about a decade ago. The word picture he offered comes from research: Lab mice were baited with food on one side of their cage. However, when they went toward the food, the floor on that side of the cage was electrified, and they got a shock. After a few rounds of this discouraging impediment, they would no longer venture to the food, even after the current was turned off. They had effectively learned to be helpless, even when faced with dire consequences.
It’s a dark story… and a dark concept.
Learned helplessness in humans is all too common, and evangelicalism unwittingly plays into this destructive dynamic, both theologically and functionally. The result is men and women robbed of their glory and divine agency. I’m not just trying to throw evangelicalism under the bus; I’m trying to shed light on one of the many crippling dysfunctions of a religious system gone bad so that we can move toward the freedom that St. Paul said would be the hallmark of Christ-followers (Gal 5:1).
A damning origin story. We cannot overstate the damage perpetrated by an anthropology mired in corruption and alienation. The “church fathers” of the third to fifth centuries shaped the trajectory of the nascent belief systems within the early Christian communities. Not unlike the biblical authors, they were “inspired” by a variety of forces to include ego and cultural blinders in addition to the Holy Spirit; the results were predictably a blend of the divine and the human.
These early spiritual leaders often clashed, built alliances, and used their political clout to win the last word on theological dialogues that eventually hardened into the doctrinal assumptions we hold unquestioningly today. Such as Original Sin. Augustine’s construct laid the foundation (amplified later by Calvinism) for a pervasive learned helplessness that leaves humans fundamentally oriented toward evil and powerless to choose what is good. Hold this point.
An ignorant parenting philosophy. This broken theology was translated into evangelical pop psychology by no one more thoroughly than James Dobson, founder of the infamous Focus on the Family. With his endorsement, evangelical parents everywhere were taught to “break their children’s will” through abusive corporal punishment, crushing the healthy development of a child’s essential autonomy and crippling the arrival of their inner authority. Many spend a lifetime trying to recover from this fundamental failure to launch.
Dr. Lindsay Gibson unpacks this interplay between differentiation and dependence beautifully in this podcast on “Emotionally Mature Parenting.” The reliance upon spiritual authorities for direction in areas outside their professional competence is widespread in evangelical circles and led to a generation almost entirely lost to faith from the mid-70s through the mid-90s.
A destructive discipleship. The damage multiplies as young evangelicals enter the church to be “discipled” by authority figures who displace people’s essential connection with Christ and redirect them to the institution for over-simplified answers to enduring mysteries, truncating their formation in lieu of conformity. It’s like tearing open the butterfly’s chrysalis rather than letting it struggle to emerge in authentic beauty. The perhaps unintended but inevitable message is what was baked in from the beginning: You are not good. You are not trustworthy. You are not enough.
God cannot look at you except filtered through Jesus—he is good, you are not. Your agency is suspect if not downright corrupt—you must obey what you’re told. You cannot be trusted to hear God and comprehend what is true—you must rely upon church authorities to tell you what is true.
The result? Learned helplessness. Mice who cannot feed themselves. Humans who are not ready for anything except blind obedience. This is not the Good News, and it is responsible for what many of us are still recovering from.
finding our way home
How do we find our way home for this depth of brokenness perpetrated by those who were supposed to protect us? First a couple key symptoms: If you find yourself thrown irrationally into a chasm of shame over small failures, you need to explore the narratives I have just articulated. Conversely, if you find yourself emotionally numb, resistant to correction, or overcompensating with performance, these may also be the underlying narratives.
Here’s what we need to heal: a safe place to explore our developmental pathologies, soul friends who believe in us despite our malformations, and the courage to forgive, confess, and be loved into wholeness.
takeaway
You’re ready.