Losses in the Hospital
Part two in an exploration of MAGA negativity and Christian nationalism.
This is a continuation of an exploration of the intersection of MAGA, Christian nationalism, and a characteristic culture of saturated hatred that was begun over here.
This is a short post, part of a larger thread about MAGA, Christian nationalism, and right-wing negativity. My mother recently remarked that when she used to attend church, she was struck by the fact that people would sit in a room and listen to a message about self-abandoning love, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice, and then go outside and be comparatively monstrous to one another, just minutes later, while they were all trying to leave the church parking lot.
The irony is hard to ignore. It’s often said, including in a quote dubiously attributed to Gandhi, that Jesus the Christ is an admirable figure, but that Christians can be hard to take.
But should we really be surprised? In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus attends a dinner at the house of Matthew/Levi, and it’s said that many tax collectors and other “sinners” attended. Jesus is criticized for spending time with unworthy people. He replies, “I have not come for the righteous, but for the sick.”
It’s often said that the Church is not a country club for saints (though this is an interesting thing to think about), but that it’s a hospital for sinners. This is an unmistakable tenet of Christianity. Consider the passages above, and the parable of the “prodigal son” received joyously by his father after having degraded himself in the world. Christianity is designed to be a pathway of recovery. It is designed to receive people who are in need of spiritual treatment and, hopefully, to help them along to a better place.
I would assert that this desire to be healed is laudable. It’s not a degrading thing to want; it’s an elevating thing. I wish more people were that way.
But also, it’s not unreasonable to expect that many people who embrace Christianity won’t be saints. Churches can be nice places. But they can also be fraught, complicated places, crucibles of all sorts of human foible and error, as people mush together work their way to greater and greater levels of maturity. Also, churches are places where, almost inevitably, people are playing big. They’re going to take their fraught human selves and measure them, at least to some extent, against the most exalted archetype in human form that they can imagine. That’s likely to be intense, don’t you think? The experience is understood to have a crucifying aspect to it. It’s often called being on The Cross.
An important part of Christianity is this fundamental, open invitation for folks to engage with the messiness of being a human being in intense, absolute ways. A lot of thought has gone into how to make this process bearable, and kind, and healthy. Over time, many Christian traditions have gone a long way toward emphasizing that God loves us, that we can feel well and relatively whole even while being imperfect, and that it’s important to go gently in the process of working with the undesirable parts of ourselves. There are people who have been able to make very gracious forms out of Christian practice; there are many ways to bless the mess.
And, given that Christianity is a practice of transformation that is being undertaken by roughly thirty percent of the people on Earth, and by about seventy percent of the people in America — i.e., at that people in these numbers are attempting to follow one of the most exalted, archetypal exemplars of virtue in human history — it’s even easier to suppose that there are going to be large numbers of people who aren’t quite so good at it, who are somewhere in the process of learning to be more gracious, who still stumble over major flaws in themselves — in other words, who are fraught in the ways any of us might be inclined to see ourselves as fraught when we regard ourselves in the most critical light.
In some spiritual healing systems, mechanisms are put in place to focus the practitioner’s attention on their own work. In the various twelve-step recovery programs, a number of tropes have emerged to do this. “Keep one’s own side of the street clean.” “If you spot it, you got it.” “Don’t take inventory of another person.” And so on. And these are frequently reinforced.
These tropes contain embedded wisdom about the individuation process. They are implicitly aware that as we grow, we learn to locate ourselves more effectively in the world, to understand that our individual selves are different from, more small, partisan, and frumpy that the source consciousness at the ground of reality. They tropes are aware that maturity involves us expecting the world to orbit us less and less. They are also aware that we have a tendency to project parts of ourselves that are in shadow onto other people — to see in others that which is actually going on within us. This awareness is continually reinforced, and it creates a container that facilitates the growth of the individual.
Christianity has mechanisms like this, too. Most notably, in Matthew and Luke again, Jesus talks about taking care of the “log” in one’s own eye before attempting to address the “speck” in somebody else’s eye, and that the key to being forgiven is to forgive (actually a surprisingly insightful statement about the relationship between perception and transformation). The insight and the method of applying it is the same.
But I think, for one thing, far fewer Christians find themselves in the same kinds of practice groups advocating for that kind of accountability that folks do in recovery. Many more Christians are doing this work on their own, in their day-to-day lives, or in groups where the connection to more contemporary wells of wisdom are limited.
Also, it seems to me that Christianity has a great tendency to be self-iterative. This is in no small part, I think, because it hasn’t ever been fully translated into the modern world (which I tried to write about here). There is a devotional approach to Christianity which is mystically powerful, but which can’t be fully jibed with the historical-critical process, or even the general critical thinking of many people living today. But when you bring in those other aspects, something of the transcendental light tends to fade. The container becomes lifeless. As Paul VanderKlay has observed, churches tend to either become hubs of psychotherapy or social justice NGOs. They are critically conscious, but not quite what they set out to be spiritually.
Preserving the Christian tradition inclines many people to iterate the tradition. And in so doing, things get left out. There’s not a great reconciliation between Christianity and the later discovery of the Jungian process of individuation, for instance, and some Christian ideas about redemption can actually be infantilizing. There’s not a fully articulated sense that human consciousness progresses from mythic-literal perspectives into broader perspectives (as Jean Gebser observes), or that consciousness progresses from more ego-centric and ethnocentric authoritarian power dynamics into more inclusive, cooperative, world-centric and cosmo-centric ideologies (as is discussed in Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory). The Church makes progress in this direction, but the attachment to tradition has its effects. Also, some of the xenophobic, ethnocentric patterns of the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to assert and reassert themselves on practitioners. Tradition is a way to deepen spiritual encounter, but it can also work against the most enlightened thinking.
As a result, there can be some tendency for Christian approaches to open a somewhat deep conversation about the sanctification process without equipping the people who would undertake the process with all of the most effective wisdom to navigate it. And as I think about it, this is not inherent to Christianity alone. Twelve-step groups can become mired in regressive, fundamentalist thinking also, can stunt people’s growth through the iteration of dogma, can tell people resisting a stifling orthodoxy that they are making choices against their health when they may, in fact, be making choices toward their health. These dynamics can haunt any spiritual container, I would suppose.
So perhaps what makes the effect so pronounced in Christian groups is partly the fact that Christianity is so, so large, and that it has had such an official, institutionalized sway over the operations of so many cultures for such a long period of time. Certainly, I think it’s fair to say that the era of Christendom is ending in the West. And it’s easy to suppose that, eventually, there would be some in that camp who would not want to go down without a fight.
Here’s one way of look at it, I think: You have a hospital where folks are trying to heal spiritually. They should be focusing on their own work, but the hospital is so big that it’s hard to get the best advice in this direction. Add to it the fact that the hospital system used to be even larger but, due to a series of widespread moral lapses — some merely perceived and some unmistakably real — the whole hospital system is in a process of collapse. So folks in this hospital are feeling increasingly inclined to not only heal, but to take steps to administrate the hospital themselves.
What did anyone think was going to happen?
Again, none of this is to justify Christian nationalism. And nothing in it is intended to disparage the spiritual work of anyone at any stage in the journey.
But if we’re aiming not just to call out what seems to be wrong, but to understand it, this seems to me to be one of the key things to think about.
(Continues here.)