Break the Shame
It is totally possible to be raised within a grace-based system, and yet develop a performance-based sense of religion. Note that I don’t say “sense of faith,†because by definition performance is not faith. Faith is trust. And level of trust is not a measure of our performance, but of our relationship. God knows our difficulty with trusting, when so much in life is broken. He’s both capable and willing to earn our trust, much as we don’t deserve that grace. But that’s the point of grace.
What I’ve noticed among sola fide folk who get spiritually sick is that they add rules from outside the Bible. In our church, there is a sickness that exhibits excessive focus on the legal, physical, financial aspects of the church. I don’t really know if that’s a reason or a rationalization for the psychological coercion that I’ve witnessed. I do know that a previous pastor was informed that because his legal status is that of an employee, he was required to allow “the board†to treat him accordingly. “The board†has long been code for one individual’s ideas of what’s best.
And there has been a high level of verbal coding going on. “I think that would be a good idea†has meant, “You’d better do that, or you’re not meeting your obligations.†(What obligations? I’m not obligated to anyone. It’s a volunteer environment, stupid.) Code makes it easy for a manipulator to keep from getting nailed for his behaviour. You can’t really call him on what he’s actually said, because it sounds harmless and normal if you repeat the words back to yourself. Yet you know there was subtext to it. You have no way to demonstrate what was really meant, and if you try, you get portrayed as vindictive and irrational. A lot of code is given with body language and tone of voice, and that’s even harder to explain.
People learn code the hard way–you’re given the message, and of course you’re not going to get the code right away. When you fail to perform, you’re shamed, blamed or otherwise manipulated. This negative reinforcement teaches you how to read the code and perform to the underlying message rather than the surface words. At the same time, it’s reinforced that you’re substandard and basically a screw-up, because you didn’t naturally jump into the game. You come away feeling incapable, ungifted and broken.
How to break this nastiness? Well, I picked up a book called The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, by David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen. These guys are fabulous at explaining how sick systems operate.
One step we’re going to take is to share the book with others in the leadership who’ve been manipulated and coerced. At some point, another step will be to lend a copy of the book to the person causing the problem. One thing I noticed as I went through it is that our perpetrator has a lot of the symptoms of a person who’s been psychologically abused. This is a type of sickness that doesn’t come naturally to people. It’s learned. They are to be pitied.
But not in a way that lets the sickness take me down, too.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Thanks for this insight, and resolution. I have been such a victim of this very “game” in the church in the past, and I wish the book you mention, would have been available to me, then. There is a danger which is far too common in the body of Christ, to base one’s interpretation and evaluation of others on “legalism”. I learned the hard way, the effects of such abuse. I never viewed the abuser as having a “sickness”, but this post has helped me to consider this aspect of the behavior, which has calmed my anger and added the element of compassion to my healing process. I will be praying for the abuser’s heart to be open to correction.
Your Friend in Christ,
S.L. Hazzard (Sooze)