Cognitive Dissonance and the Religious Siege Mentality
Another long one on religion. Feel free to skip to the fiction. I won’t be offended.
This is perhaps obvious, but Christians strike me as being in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance. It’s like this: the Bible says that the Christian message is for the underdog, the weak. It stands apart from secular governance. It was intended to be an outsider outfit.
And yet, for going on 1700 years (actually, it’ll be exactly 1700 years of legal Christianity in 2013, fact fans), it hasn’t. Some flavour of Christianity, has, since the passing of the Edict of Milan, been to some extent allied with or in control of the governing power structures of the world’s nations. And yet, the Christian message, whatever the hell you think it might be, is defined as neither for the proud, nor the rich, nor the comfortable.
So that’s me stuffed, then.
And this is why so many of those Christians - particularly certain groups of Protestants - live in this state of cognitive dissonance. Take the Religious Right in the USA. Now, if you accept that this weird, wealth-grabbing, sex-obsessed nationalist folk-religion is actually Christian, it’s blindingly obvious how severe this is.
That Religious Right they have there is completely in bed with the most powerful government on Earth. It has a multi-million dollar1 publishing industry behind it. It has TV channels. It has record labels. It has this vast swathe of the internet. There are few voices as loud, strident or inescapable as the voice of the American Religious Right.
And yet, this voice continually reminds everyone how it’s actually on the margins. It claims that it’s a beleaguered minority, a faithful remnant beset on all sides by the hostile forces of the world.
See, your American Religious Right folks know that the Bible says that if you’re a Christian, you should expect to be persecuted, made an outcast, marginalised. They know that the Christians are the weak, the poor, the underdog.
Dimly recognising somewhere in the subconscious that they really need to find some persecution to be proper Christians, what they do is they internalise it, create persecution where none exists, and blame any opposition (and also critique, for that matter), no matter how insignificant or justified, on the vast array of spiritual forces that aren’t actually opposed to them.
It’s their only recourse. They fool themselves — and it’s an amazing, staggering piece of self-deception — that they’re endangered, that they’re under attack from an Almost Overwhelming Force of Evil.
They’re not alone. Here in the UK, you have ultra-conservative student organisation UCCF, of whom I have written at length before. Amazingly, they’re the second largest and most active student organisation in the UK2 after the NUS itself, and yet, they can still claim that they’re being persecuted because, oh, they go out of their way to exclude people who wouldn’t want to join anyway and Student Unions take the hump. Tell you what, lads — go hang out with some Christians in Myanmar, or Bhutan, or Armenia, or Saudi Arabia, or Palestine, or North Korea and then tell me you’re being persecuted3.
Or the people in huge upper middle-class white megachurches like Holy Trinity Brompton: people giving quantity surveyors and solicitors on comfortable salaries a bit of a ribbing because they’ve done the Alpha Course and started being all Christian does not ever constitute persecution.
Of course, the issue is, if we’re not poor and marginalised, what are we doing wrong? Do we go out of our way to become marginalised? Do we do something radical and give all our stuff away and live in a community like that one in Sheffield? Do we give it all up and risk our lives — perhaps even losing them — ministering to people far away who do not know us or care for us?
Maybe we do. Maybe Christendom is so bankrupt that it’s our only alternative.
So that’s me stuffed, then.
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Footnotes:
1 Worth, oh, absolutely hundreds of pounds Sterling, if the way the exchange rate is moving is anything to go by. Don’t mind me. I’m just a bit bitter because my biggest client pays me in dollar cheques, and they’re increasingly approaching the value of the bog roll in my loo.
2 Which says more about the mind-crushing apathy of Students These Days, really. Keh, listen to me. I’m sounding more and more like a miserable old sod every day.
3 Yeah, yeah, I hear you say, but you would say that, because you’re not a fan of that UCCF there and anything you say about them is going to be sour grapes. Which is a fair comment, but it’s not like they’re ever going to care? I mean, when was the last time UCCF did dialogue? Trick question: they haven’t.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 pm
I work for UCCF. Anything you’d like to dialogue with me?
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I think this is maybe the wrong post for stuff like that, given mention of UCCF was really only a side point to the main attraction. Also, given a fair few years of past experience, I suspect we work to different definitions of “dialogue”.
So. Do you people Google mentions of UCCF every day or something? But no, because Google doesn’t have this post yet.
So am I on some special list of sites that UCCF people watch?
Seriously. It took two hours for you to find this blog. No one’s even linked it so far. Stats tell me that I have maybe sixty regular readers worldwide, most of whom I know (admittedly, I get brief spikes to about two hundred when better-known blogs link me). And this has happened before, although to be fair, last time it took a couple weeks. Indulge me. I’m curious as to how on Earth you found me.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:59 pm
The really scary part of all this is the word ‘dialogue’ being used as a verb.
July 23rd, 2007 at 3:32 am
American-style Evangelical Christianity really should be considered another religion, at least as far as Mormonism and the JW’s, etc. are considered other religions. For a sola-scriptura, religion-of-the-book type, and one that’s willing to reject science, reason, or anything else having to do with the world as most people know it, so many haven’t ever read more than the passages served up by their pastors, or the read them with eyes glazed over, like I did when I was a Fundie. That’s not just cognitive dissonance, that’s creedal dissonance.
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:44 am
“The really scary part of all this is the word ‘dialogue’ being used as a verb.”
So I looked and found to my relief that I didn’t, it was just PeterD that did that.
I hate using nouns as verbs. In the immortal verbs of Calvin (no, not that one, the other one), verbing weirds language.
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:46 am
I’m sorry to make mistake regarding the verb. I am myself a stickler for grammar and on a crusade to prevent over-use of the exclamation mark.
You can stop any UCCF-related paranoia. I just happened to surf on in following a chain of links on a wet Sunday afternoon in Lancaster.
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:54 am
You can stop any UCCF-related paranoia.
That’s an order, is it?
Seriously, though, yeah, coincidences are perfectly understandable. You must understand, however, that it’s not the first time it’s happened, and hence my confusion was somewhat justified.
July 23rd, 2007 at 9:32 am
Forget the tribal UCCF/SCM stuff, your original question is very interesting. Do Christians live in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance? Yes. It’s long and painful and makes us feel wretched and useless, because we’re not the people we’d like to be. We’re all engaged in one form of idolatory or another. The religious right has its form of idolatory, we have ours.
PS. You’re not the ‘proud, rich and comfortable’. You’re a freelance writer living in Swansea. :) But even the earliest church was made up of slaves and slave owners, wasn’t it?
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:04 am
You’re not the ‘proud, rich and comfortable’. You’re a freelance writer living in Swansea.
Well, I’m not rich. But that’s only by Western standards. By world standards, I’m fabulously wealthy.
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Sure. But I don’t think that means that God has a problem with you, unless your life is based around your possessions.
July 23rd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Isn’t it? Then why haven’t I sold everything and gone back to India?
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Tell you what, lads — go hang out with some Christians in Myanmar, or Bhutan, or Armenia, or Saudi Arabia, or Palestine, or North Korea and then tell me you’re being persecuted.
I’ll have to read up on some of your examples… isn’t Armenaia a majority Christian country? Or do you mean the territory in which Armenians have in the past lived, rather than the territory of the modern state of Armenia?
I’m not sure that Palestinian Christians are *that* oppressed, or at least not that oppressed as Christians (as opposed to just being oppressed as Palestinians, which is a bit different). I think there is more than no tension between them and non-Christian Palestinians, but it’s fairly small beer (I think… I was going to do academic research on this and then drifted off to another topic).
July 24th, 2007 at 4:23 am
[...] a Christian from Wales, asks, why does The Religious Right in the US squeal so loudly about being persecuted when in reality they are “completely in bed with the most [...]
July 24th, 2007 at 7:22 am
DV/Ian: You’re right about Armenia, I think. I was thinking of the Armenians I know who ended up seeking asylum here, who are actually from Iran. As for the Palestinians, well. Tomorrow I’m going to be interviewing this Palestinian Christian peace activist (this chap, in fact: http://kroc.nd.edu/alumni/zoughbi.shtml ), so I’ll ask him.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I’ve just linked this post and developed a few additional thoughts.
July 27th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
I’m from the far right wing American Christian movement. Want to dialogue?
Just kidding.
My wife and I just bought a new house. I spent part of the time as we agonized over the idea wondering to myself - and God - whether it is appropriate for a Christian to own a 2,000 square foot house.
The bad news is I fear that it isn’t. I’m sure it is better if the house is used in some way to minister or engage in ministry of some sort.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
[...] thoughts emerged after reading a couple of interesting posts here and here. Please don’t blame these fine folks for my ramblings. I’m not entirely sure how they [...]