Evangelicals.

(originally posted October 5, 2008)
Watched some on TV recently. They were all constantly talking about how happy they are, how full of joy, of peace, of happiness, of zeal for life they are, always, all the time. On and on they went.
Now, when anyone tells a counsellor that they are ALWAYS happy, we tend to figure that they are in denial. That they are kidding themselves. But these people could give a good reason for their constant joy. Whenever they have any problem, any problem at all, they simply give it to God. Then there is no reason to be unhappy, because God is taking away all their problems.
This is an entirely different sort of issue. When we encounter this therapeutically, we call this “splitting.” If a person has a part of themselves that they don’t like, because it is sad, or bad, or problematic in some way, one way to deal with it is to split it off, to disown it. To not accept that it is a part of you, of who you are. These evangelicals were not only able to split off those parts of themselves that would make them sad, or cause them problems, they could give all that unwanted stuff to God, and they’d never have to deal with it, because it was in God’s hands. And whatever He decided to do with it, that’s what would happen.
That struck me as a more than a refusal to acknowledge oneself as a whole person. There was a whole subtext of, “Here God, I don’t like this part of me, you can have it.” A kind of shortcut to perfection through lopping off anything that didn’t seem consistent with perfection. Isn’t that what this is? A kind of theological perfectionism? If you are sad, you must not have let Jesus into your heart enough?
My mother, who was a “good, Christian woman,” had a very strong, indomitable faith. She never lost faith, even in the hardest times, and she did see some very hard times. She believed one thing very strongly, and ingrained it in me so thoroughly, that it remains internalized as a core value to this day. She always taught me, “God helps those who help themselves.”
This was no cynical irony. She meant it literally. One does not give one’s problems to God. One prays to God to stand by one’s side, to give one strength to bear the burden, to do the work necessary to resolve the problem. One doesn’t disown and dismiss the things one doesn’t like about oneself. Face it, and work to make those parts of yourself you don’t like serve you in ways that enable you to be a good person. And she taught me that no one is perfect. Perfection is for God only. Accept yourself, and do your best with what you have.
That seems to me to be a much healthier, much more psychologically-whole approach to theology than that “happy, happy joy, joy” proposition.