The Botched Reformation
You protest, like a good Protestant. You insist that Christian morality is the product of the Bible.
What is upright living and living a life pleasing to God? Aren’t those wide-open phrases? Generally, the consensus at any one time in history becomes what is meant by righteous living for those living in that time. There was a time when a woman wearing pants was a sinner. Not long ago mixed-race relationships were sinful in many places.
Change used to be rare. Consensus was easy. Vicarious thinking was the norm. It still is. If the Pastor believes it, it must be true. If Trump says so, it must be true. That is where most people get their moral compass.
The Reformers
The Reformers were critical thinkers, but they did not take their thinking far enough. They questioned the authority of the Roman Church. However, their analysis of their situation was limited.
The Reformers wanted to base their standards and ideals on the Bible. To do that, they reverse-engineered everything.
Their standards came first, adopted from godless, Dark Ages, psychopaths. Sadly they were later attributed to the Bible by the Reformers.
Breaking from the church’s leadership was the Reformer’s one deviation from the norm. Breaking from anything else was not an option. In a Reformer’s mind, sinners were people who deviated from all the norms and standards that had been laid out in their past.
They took those standards for granted. They had no idea where they came from or why. They had no clue about the devious reasons they had been established. They assumed they were timeless standards that had always existed. If it was fun or pleasurable it was evil. They did not have an alternative perspective. Their preaching of the Bible was filled with those assumptions.
Reform Scholars
Bible scholarship was primitive. Consider another primitive art of that era. Medicine was in its infancy. They drilled holes in people’s heads to let demons out. They plugged wounds with dung. They drained people’s blood to let “fire” escape their bodies. A great many times they killed their patients.
Look at their paintings. They reveal how they saw history. Apparently, armored, Spanish conquistadors were at the birth of Christ. Apparently, everyone was dressed in 14th-century clothing at the birth. Jesus was surrounded by the architecture of Middle Ages Europe.
People were totally clueless as to how ancient people in an alien land, dwelling in an inconceivable culture, lived one thousand four hundred years or more before they did.
The Reformers worked with the same misconceptions as the doctors and painters.
New vs Old Cosmology
Here is an example of what happens when you apply contemporary preconceptions to the Bible. Why don’t you speak the name of God in vain? Everybody knows it is because He wants people to attribute esteem to His name above all other names. It is never to be trivialized. That seems to be an obvious assumption, but it is just that. An assumption.
The real reason is the same as why the name of God is the tetragrammaton YHWH. It is to keep the name of God a secret.
You do not want an enemy to discover God’s sacred name. That knowledge will give him power.
If he knows the name, then your enemy can petition God to turn against you. When you go to war, God may give him the victory.
See what a little cultural perspective can do? The two understandings of the command are worlds apart. That begs the question, how do you apply an ancient, tribal, security protocol in this age? Good theology is hard work. Every passage is wrapped in its own history, context, and cosmology. If we assume that things were as they are today, we know nothing, completely miss the point, and waste our time spreading nonsense that was never meant to be part of God’s message. Often that nonsense serves devious people.
Tunnel Vision
The Reformer’s lack of knowledge made it easy for them to see what they wanted. They had their Dark Ages template. They did not know it had been forged in evil. The same unfounded accusations of guilt and shame the godless tyrants used also drove converts to the protestant church. As the prophet Roger Daltrey said, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
Sadly, toxic, Dark Ages ideas were validated by well-intentioned people. There seemed to be no reason to resist them. Nobody was sophisticated enough to understand what was being done. To compound the mess the Counter-Reformers reacted, and everyone was trying to outdo everyone with more stringent standards, making everyone more repressed, emotionally damaged, neurotic, and fearful. The toxic standards spread like wildfire scorching everyone. More than a grumpy disposition was passed down from the Dark Ages. It is now a shroud of oppressive smoke choking everyone touched by western culture.
This Is Serious
If this was about a few restraints people should respect it wouldn’t be worth writing about. You can not brush it aside that easily. Those standards severely injure vast numbers of people. Consequently, those people are harming others. Dark Ages morality was conceived to do that. It continues to do that. It can not be defended, and the last people that should try to defend it is Christians.
What would the world look like if people were not systemically repressed by their typical upbringing and forced to conform to survive? How much more would humanity have matured and fulfilled its potential? How much joy and peace would there be? Instead, astronomical amounts of time energy, attention, persecution, and effort have been wasted struggling with the wrong issues.
The Crisis
Let’s be clear about psychological repression. Don’t get it confused with depression, suppression, or oppression. Consider food for example. A person with a healthy attitude toward food will nourish themselves.
A clinically depressed person may not feel like eating but they know they should. They might try.
A suppressed person will be discreet and unobtrusive because someone might take offense or criticize their food choices.
An oppressed person wants to eat but someone else controls their food supply.
A person with a repressed need for food won’t feel hungry — ever. They will starve to death surrounded by all the food they could eat.
Displacement
They will likely feel they need something other than food. They will likely try a lot of things to satisfy their mysterious need. They might even settle on a replacement, like video games, drugs, or something as odd as compulsively collecting litter off the street. That is called displacement. Their subconscious mind forbids them to consider food to meet their real need. Food is not typically an issue, although it can be if it was once central to a trauma or a stressful, ongoing issue. Displacement is far more common than most realize because it can look like regular behavior, but there is always a cost to someone.
Here is where issues typically begin in our culture. Being sexually oppressed is bad enough. Ask every miserable, tortured, harassed, high school kid whose sex drive is being controlled by shaming, guilt, judgment, threats of stigmatization, and marginalization. Many are threatened and emotionally bullied by their peers as a means of manipulation (slut shaming) when they have done nothing to deserve their reputation. Parents and their church feel free to harass them. That is damaging and sad considering there are healthy alternatives.
What happens when oppression becomes repression?
Children are easily repressed. That happens when the person is shamed, judged, punished, threatened, bullied, rejected, and/or alienated to the point they become overwhelmed and traumatized. They might take their life. More likely, they feel so overwhelmed that they give in, repress their needs, and conform.
How Do People Become Emotionally Repressed?
A cheerful, happy child may face someone’s wrath because of their boisterous laughter. They might be punished. They could be locked in a dark basement. If the experience is overwhelming, they will be traumatized. To make sure it does not happen again their subconscious will repress the emotions that make them laugh.
Sadly, the child may not ever be able to laugh freely again. The fear of the consequence is too great. Just the urge to laugh may trigger trauma and odd behavior. That part of their humanity is lost, and can not be recovered without serious intervention.
Repression doesn’t always happen so dramatically. People take it upon themselves to repress their needs to conform to their family, social standards, and religious obligations. It is no less harmful if conforming requires becoming oblivious to a normal, healthy need.
Children, by nature, are compelled to conform. The possibility of being shunned is traumatizing. They depend on caretakers for survival. They repress to ensure they are accepted and cared for.
When natural, healthy, good, God-given, core, human nature is repressed people go into a slow-burning crisis that will likely last a lifetime.
Repression is emotionally debilitating. Repressed people will be angry and act out. Repressed people don’t even know what they are angry about. Ironically, it is too repressed. They can be rebellious. They will be moody, bitchy, hostile, and pick fights. They might be very confrontational. They might have trouble fitting in. They are the reason for a lot of domestic abuse and violence.
If they don’t act out they turn their anger inward. Depression is unexpressed anger. It festers. Consider how many chronically depressed people you have known. Many self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Typically they are angry people. They just don’t know it.
Repressed people often become compulsive. They insist there is nothing wrong with their fixations as they seek substitutes for their real needs. To name a few, repression can manifest in workaholism, an incessant need for attention, out-of-control spending and materialism, obsessive grooming, compulsive tidiness, compulsive helpfulness, food addiction, or the need to own dozens of cats, shoes, cars, or other trivial items. Some of this sounds good, but it is compulsive. They are not their own person.
Repression Creates a Vicious Cycle
Repressed people are generally emotionally unavailable to others including their children. They will either be distant or needy and smothering. They often reverse roles and expect their children to nurture and coddle them. Detached or needy, either way, they are oblivious to their children’s needs. They will lash out at their children for having good needs they subconsciously deny themselves.
Children need emotional nourishment. Families become dysfunctional when Mom, Dad, or primary caretakers are unavailable because they are too caught up in their drugs, work, anger, cats, or self-absorption. Their children repress their personal needs. They grow up emotionally unavailable. It becomes a vicious cycle. An army of repressed parents spawns a greater army of emotionally neglected and repressed kids who will repeat the ugly cycle — again and again, and again. Parents wonder where they went wrong.
