Better News — Intro

Introduction — Something Isn’t Right

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

TLDR;

My hope for this series is threefold:

1. To move towards healing of the trauma inflicted on myself and others by literalism in the myriad and complex ways in which it has occurred and to let those who are suffering know that they are not alone and they can escape and find a fuller, more meaningful, and happy life.
2. To convince those who are mired in the muck of literalism that what they believe and have been taught has actually caused tremendous harm to literally millions of people, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
3. To raise awareness to those who have had no visibility into the depths of literalism that this specific belief system is not benign and is in fact a malignant cancer that impacts millions of people and our society as a whole and does not deserve to be tolerated.

The series is winding and varies in style between academic and anecdotal. But in the midst of everything is a single golden thread:

The idea that a person is intrinsically flawed and is entirely incapable of overcoming those flaws, by theological necessity and sociological design, undermines human dignity and autonomy, and inflicts tangible, visceral, “real” harm, in the form of both physical and psychological trauma.

In The Beginning

For as long as I can remember, I have had a persistent and insidious voice telling me that I am a monster without God in my life. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s quiet. But, it’s long been a part of me. And sometimes it still is. Despite the fact that I left my old beliefs almost a decade ago, I still hear it… “You’re going to Hell, Forrest.” “You’re a bad person, Forrest.” “You’re a monster.” There is an intensity of oppression that comes as a result of an inner voice constantly undermining an individual’s positive self-perception that is difficult to articulate. If you have not had that experience, you are fortunate and I am happy that there are those among us that believe they are fundamentally good. I’d like to ask you to imagine for me, though. Imagine for a second that it was you who was hearing this in your mind, every day, for almost 4 decades:

• You’re a bad person at your core
• You’re a sinner
• You’re heart is evil
• You cannot do anything good on your own
• If you left your faith you would go to Hell and be punished forever

Each of these thoughts has been spoken to me by my inner voice. From the time I was a child. It was taught to me by my parents, my pastors, my Sunday School volunteers, my school teachers, my college professors. Eventually, I didn’t need anyone to teach me. Instead, I was the one doing the teaching. Repeating the cycle of trauma. What’s the phrase? “Hurt people, hurt people.” Yeah…that sounds about right.

Evangelicalism

If you’re reading this and you do not come from the background that I (and many others) did, this might seem crazy and outlandish to you. Rare and a part of some strange, small sect of religion that has but few adherents. I assure you, it is not. This belief that human beings are fundamentally “bad” is actually one of the most foundational beliefs in certain sects of Christianity. There are legion interpretations of the teachings of Jesus (there are, after all, thousands of Christian denominations) and I will not even attempt to cover them. Instead, I am going to focus on the one I am most familiar with; what most people would colloquially call “evangelical.”

Evangelicalism itself, when used in the way we use it in the United States, is not a specific sect of Christianity, it’s actually an umbrella term covering a huge variety of protestant Christian denominations. It’s rather difficult to define, but the best attempt that I’m aware of comes from David Bebbington, who is a professor of history at the University of Stirling and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He defined what came to be known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral. This definition says that there are four main components of evangelicalism:

• Biblicism — The Bible as highest authority
• Crucicentrism — Christ’s work of atonement is central
• Conversionism — Everyone needs to be converted
• Activism — The gospel is best represented through acts of service

So, the world I grew up in, which comprised the familial, educational, and social parts of my life, all reinforced these ideas. The Bible was the “word of god” and could not be questioned. Jesus saved me because I couldn’t save myself. Everyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus as their savior (in the way I understand it) needs to be converted. My acts of service are a demonstration that I’m a good Christian. There are many ways to interpret things and I am not arguing that every single self-identified christian would agree with what I’ve laid out above. Nor, even, every evangelical. I am arguing, however, that I am representative of a specific subtype of evangelicalism whose biblicism, crucicentrism, and conversionism takes total primacy in an individual’s life and that I am not an outlier, nor is this specific subtype rare or uncommon.

Who Am I?

At the risk of appearing to commit the fallacy of faulty generalization, allow me to highlight a few examples of why I think I am representative of this subtype:

• I attended church and Sunday school in this sect just about every week from childhood through college.
• I attended a private Christian school until 8th grade.
• I attended weekly youth group events and bible studies throughout junior high and high school.
• I went on multiple “mission trips” while in high school where we built homes for the poor in certain parts of Mexico.
• I was baptized at 13.
• My first job was in the kitchen at a Christian summer camp for 4 summers in high school.
• I decided to go into the ministry and attended a christian bible college, where I received a half tuition scholarship.
• My senior year in college, I was awarded the Founder’s award, which was the highest award available at the time and was intended for those who modeled what it meant to commit their lives to the ministry of Christ.
• I attended seminary after college where I earned a Master’s in Pastoral Care and Counseling.
• I worked as an Associate Pastor at the church I grew up in for 5 years, overseeing the junior high, high school, and college age groups, baptizing, performing weddings, and preaching a few times a year on Sunday.

While not every evangelical goes into the ministry, I would argue that the beliefs I held and taught while in ministry were received as “normal,” otherwise I would not have been hired or maintained my position as a minister. Taken together, I was a decent example of what it meant to be an evangelical christian. Or at the very least, the specific type of evangelical that I was.

I recognize that not every evangelical had the same experience that I did. I think this is crucial. Binary thinking (where life is viewed as either/or instead of a more dialectical both/and) is a deep-rooted and insidious thing. And it is embedded within the specific subset of evangelicalism that I was a part of. I was taught it. I lived it. I breathed it. But I have tried very hard, with lots of help from years of therapy, to understand that this type of thinking is not only unhelpful, but detrimental to my own healing. So, I will be as clear as I can be: the trauma I and others endured is not universal. Was it common? I think so. But it was not ubiquitous.

Literalism

With this understanding in mind, I would like to use a label to better articulate the subset of evangelicalism that is in focus here. Personally, I am not a fan of labels, inasmuch as we overload these terms and the specifics of what they represent become nebulous; however, they serve a useful purpose in society to quickly articulate much larger ideas. One label that you have probably heard of that is often used for this subtype of evangelicalism is fundamentalism. At its core, fundamentalism is a belief system that claims to hold to the “fundamentals” of the christian faith. I am opting to not use this label because, although accurate in terms of representing the belief system of this subtype, it reinforces the dogma of that subtype. What I mean by this is that an individual who claims to be a fundamentalist actually wants to be known as a fundamentalist because it reinforces to them that they are indeed setting themselves “apart from the world” and returning to a “truer” form of Christianity. I refuse to reinforce the belief system that continues to traumatize millions of people to this day. And it is millions.

As such, I’m going to refer to the subtype I was a part of as literalism. I was a literalist and I taught literalism. I think this is a particularly useful label as it communicates a few things. One, that an adherent to this subtype has a specific interpretation of the bible that reads every word and every verse as literally the word of god. There are many implications to this belief, which we will cover very soon. Two, it communicates a belief system that extends beyond evangelicalism and maybe even to secular society as well. Namely, a strict adherence to an individual’s interpretation of something sacred as the absolute truth. Three, it also negates the self-reinforcing dogma that comes with the fundamentalist label. Simply because an individual is a literalist, it does not make their belief system “truer.” For example, even a literalist would agree that certain stories in the bible are allegorical and ought not to be taken literally (e.g., the parable of Jesus where he is separating the sheep from the goats).

The point I am trying to make here, which may have been muddied in the mix of history and biography above, is that my belief that I was fundamentally bad, broken, and incapable of doing anything about it on my own was common amongst literalists and that it is not benign. It is, in fact, harmful. And this is exactly what I want to address in this series. Literalism fundamentally undermines our ability as human beings to live full and satisfying lives. We cannot flourish in the here and now while literalism is allowed to continue in the form that it does. This belief system has been tolerated under the premise that religious beliefs are protected under the US Constitution. I am arguing that this toleration of literalist evangelicalism must cease. The idea that a person is flawed and is incapable of overcoming those flaws, by theological necessity and sociological design, undermines human dignity and autonomy, and inflicts tangible, visceral, “real” harm, in the form of both physical and psychological trauma.

What’s Next

This series is broadly organized into two main divisions. The first division (series’ part 1 and 2) is a little bit of background on psychological needs and setting the theological framework that literalists operate in. The second division (series’ parts 3–9) is organized in, hopefully, a progression of theological “I” statements that logically lead to psychological “I” statements, which are diametrically opposed to the basic psychological needs of human beings. At the end of each part, I hope to offer alternative “I” statements that are more in line with what we understand to be necessary prerequisites for human flourishing.

Part 1 will be a brief overview of the development of our understanding of psychological needs. The field of psychology is relatively new, but we have learned a great deal in a short amount of time. While not exhaustive, the overview provided will touch on some of the major schools of psychology, how they have built on top of one another, culminating in our current, empirically based, understanding of what human beings need from a psychological perspective in order to have the motivation to flourish.

Part 2 will offer a brief overview of the biblical framework that literalists operate in. This is a bit tricky because there is no such thing as a “systematic theology” of evangelicalism, of which literalism is a subtype. This is due to the fact that evangelicalism isn’t an organized belief system, rather an umbrella term used as a label for a variety of different denominations and non-denominations that fit within the Bebbington Quadrilateral, which we discussed above. This part will cover evangelical bibliology and serve as the foundation for how a person could come to the theological “I” statements that I will present in the second part of the series.

The second division, with parts 3 through 5, will focus on the Bible. Part 3 will kick us off with the theological “I” statement of the literalist belief about the bible generally. As mentioned in the Quadrilateral, the Bible is the single source of truth for all evangelicals. It is where we must begin for everything else since all other evangelical beliefs are derived from this one. This has many different implications that I’ll discuss, each of which leads to a few different traumatic psychological “I” statements. This part will focus exclusively on the implications for the self, which will segue into part 4 where we will discuss the implications of these beliefs for the person’s relationships with others.

Parts 5 and 6 will deal with the literalist belief of sin. These are critical parts as they represent the idea that every human being is born sinful and incapable of saving themselves. Part 6 will focus on the implications of this belief on the self and how it completely undermines virtually every psychological need a person has. Part 7 will focus on the belief that all of our sins are known by an omnipotent god and are even “written down in the book of life” so that on the day of judgment all of our words and actions can be seen and judged. The obvious ramification here is that even our innermost thoughts, those things every human being thinks and hides from the world, will eventually be seen by all, undermining our innate need for privacy, as well as creating a culture of shame.

Part 7 will discuss the belief that it is only Christ who can save us from sin. As mentioned in the Quadrilateral, the salvific work of Christ is central to evangelical belief. It is supposed to be the central message of Christianity (the gospel or “good news”), but as will be established in parts 5 and 6, the prerequisite belief to this is that a person needs saving in the first place, which undermines our basic psychological needs. This is also where the title of the series comes from, Better News. If it is “good news” that Jesus saves, then the better news is that no one actually needs saving in the first place. You are good and beautiful just as you are.

Part 8 will round out the second division of the series with the evangelical belief that this earth is not their true home. There are a myriad of implications to this belief that I will discuss, including climate change denial, pro-Israel sentiment, and christian nationalism. This literalist belief undermines not only basic psychological needs for the self but basic needs for a democratic society to function. This is why we see our democracy under threat with the breaking down of the separation of church and state and attempts to create an evangelical specific theocracy.

Better News

The proclaimed message of evangelicalism is that Jesus saves. It’s called the gospel, coming from the Greek word euangelion, or good news. It is supposed to be good news that Jesus came to atone for our sins, so that we could have eternal life. This good news comes at the cost of undermining every basic psychological need that humans have in order to live full and happy lives, here and now. Literalism claims the good news is that we are slaves to sin, incapable to save ourselves and set apart from the rest of the world, but there is hope in Jesus. There is better news.

You and I and everyone we know doesn’t need to be saved. We are not bad and broken from birth. We are not sinners to our core. We are not incapable of doing good, apart from the work of Jesus. We are good and right and beautiful exactly as we are. Do we make mistakes? Yes. Does that make us fundamentally flawed? I don’t think so. We are capable and competent to achieve what we set our minds to. We are free to live the lives we want to live, to reach for the stars and fulfill our dreams. We are a part of the larger family of the human race. There is no “us” vs “them.” There is only us, a united humanity, all free, and capable, and can relate to one another in life-affirming and loving ways. These three needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are found across culture and age and gender. And it is those needs we will turn to first and examine how we came to understand them over a century of psychological research and development.

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