Is Man Basically Good?
I’ve gotten a lot of flack from liberals for not believing man is basically good. My experience has shown that a good portion of people are shitty when you need them most. Of course with all my pathologies I’m not one that generally attracts good people in the first place. Good people are like castles, they are generally moated and won’t let you in unless you have a lot to offer.
I think the battle verses good and evil is one each one has to fight within our selves. Most of us actually do OK so the statement that most people are good is true, but people extrapolate that to assume that man is basically good and that doesn’t hold water. This whole thing about abolishing the police is absolutely ridiculous. Five percent of the population commits 90% of the crime and these bad apples will run rampant should you dial back the policing of them.
I’m don’t hold a Calvinist view believing in total depravity but I understand that back in the olden days when you had a society that wasn’t so heavily policed you had to get people to behave and make their morality internal and the stick does a better job with that than the carrot. But I don’t think man is as good as modern psychology makes us out to be. I think that’s largely because psychology draws upon the experience of upper class people in developed countries who have generally been in a place of law and order and relative comfort.
The Opposite of a Christian
The opposite of a Christian is not an atheist, it is someone with mental illness.
Christianity posits that you can trust your inner voice, mental illness demonstrates that you can’t. People say “God” tells you things that are outside the scope of what you could come up with with rational thought alone, but so does mental illness. And it does so at a moment of weakness where you won’t be able to differentiate between the two (if there was even a way to tell in the first place). As for me the voice of God told me to drink urine, kill myself, and date women out of my league. Suffice it to say I stopped taking it seriously rather soon. Now I get it that people without mental illness and even people with mental illness can trust their inner voice and I’m happy for them but that doesn’t mean this is universal.
Mental illness often hinders your ability to project the idea you are actually a Christian to those around you. Lets be honest, Christianity is performance art and part of being successful at it is selling the idea you are in the faith to your peers. When your Christian peers stop believing you believe, even if you still believe, it drags it down as faith is more of communal property than our individualistic culture would like to admit. It is very hard to perform when you are dying inside. Some people put on a show while struggling mentally but eventually they just break down after being pushed to the limit and sometimes end up completely different people. That didn’t quite happen to me because I was never good at putting on a show but many people are because they like the affirmation a community offers in exchange for their performance.
People with mental illnesses often don’t “experience God” or if they do it’s toxic. This ties into the first point. A lot of Christians brought up in the church who struggle with depression pine for an experience of God that is promised but never comes. In churches (particularly ones that feature praise and worship) God is sold as an entity that you can have an emotional connection with. The problem is with mental illness the ability to “feel God’s presence” is impaired. But depressed people pine for this experience repeatedly and it just makes them cycle down. In some denominations despair is a sin but it is also what a depressed person feels routinely, so it’s tantamount to making the symptom of a disease a sin.
Those with mental illnesses’ lives rarely go according to “God’s plan”. “God’s plan” is a loaded term which means a person is promised a life of material and social prosperity or at minimum a dignified existence with troubles that are manageable. It’s no secret our American culture is obsessed with success, health, independence, money, and status. When you don’t possess these things you are treated worse by Christians and non Christians alike. Christians want people who suffer to concoct some kind of redemptive narrative so they don’t have to be exposed to senseless evil and chaos. For me losing one thing after another to mental illness there was an incredible amount of shame dealing with Christian peers.
Flat affect and negative symptoms challenge the notion of the soul. Some people with severe mental illnesses lose so much of them selves that it’s almost like some of them has died. This makes people but especially Christians uncomfortable because they have a dualistic view of humans that there is a soul that is impervious to condition of the anatomy. Modern science says the self resides in the brain and seeing severely mentally ill people this is shown to be true.
People with mental illnesses are often ostracized by the church. I was. It’s one thing to call someone a liar, it’s a whole other thing to intimate they are one with every thread of your being. The reasons I have listed above make Christians very uncomfortable with people with mental illnesses. For those who hold tightly to certain beliefs cognitive dissonance is experienced as psychic pain. On a more practical level people with mental illnesses often say things that are inappropriate or only have conversations that are suitable for one on one interaction as they don’t have much to make small talk over.
What you can do to help. Believe people with mental illness when they tell you how bad it is. Offer material support like rides and inclusion, you generally have to build rapport with people on the margins before you will make much headway with them ministering.
Imperative to Virtue and Hope
Religion has an imperative to virtue so when it tells you to hope it presupposes that there will be a supportive community rallying behind you.
Modern psychology tells you not to lose hope but for different reasons. When there is no hope that means there needs to be structural changes in one’s environment to restore hope. Psychology is all about not making anyone lift a finger to help so there is no imperative to virtue built in.
You no doubt can’t turn away from the news. The younger generation has lost hope and now know those on top have no qualms about us dying of COVID as long as they can squeeze more productivity out of us. Bernie was our only hope and he got run out of town really fast.
They hate people who think for them selves. You know the world is really fucked up when you have to believe in woo to have hope. Well some of us can’t believe in woo, it doesn’t stick because it’s not real. Some people can suds up their emotions and build an elaborate fantasy world with all kinds of magical things but many of us cannot. We have the internet. We can pull out our phone and research any truth claim you send our way.
Modern Psychology and Men
It is heartbreaking to see the rise of deaths of despair by men without college degrees who just can’t hack it in our modern system. Psychology claims to have the solution and I think it can be of limited help but there is something intractable about men’s problems which it can’t fully address:
Men are planners so calls to live in the moment to beat back despair don’t work well. Psychologists say focus on the now, the dot on the timeline and glean everything positive and calming from the dot. But it’s inborn in men to be scanning the horizon, taking in the whole timeline. If the whole timeline brings about fear and despair then that’s what men are going to feel. Traditional western religion focused on the whole timeline being redemptive (as there was heaven in the end and everything would be made new) as opposed to pop culture Buddhism which focuses on concentrating only on the present moment. Men worked better with a timeline that brought about hope but the prosperity gospel has seeped into modern Christianity so much so that if you don’t have money (like a lot of these men dying of despair) then you aren’t welcome to the church anymore.
Self love manifests itself differently in men than it does in women. For men self love is the tip of the iceberg while dignity is the larger mass that you don’t see. Men love themselves when they live a life that warrants it. A life where they possess dignified work. Dignified work is a load bearing post in a man’s psyche. Take this out and the whole edifice comes crashing down. Modern psychology likes to psychologize men’s situations, for example saying loser men aren’t getting dates because they don’t have “self confidence”. Well duh, of course they don’t have self love because their self love is tied to their dignity and a man does not possess innate worth aside from what he brings to the table. Men receive mixed messages from culture about this which just makes navigating the world more tricky. Men dying of despair often don’t have jobs that provide a living wage and as a result lose everything else.
When men talk about their problems it is often less cathartic. This is because a lot of men’s depression manifests itself as anger so when you exhume it it’s like opening up a Pandora’s Box. When men open up they often make an emotional mess which people around them are often not equipped or even willing to deal with. Therapists can help with this but the most important thing is the rapport with them rather than the type of therapy being used. However, men often need hours of just being with people before they open up, they often can’t do so on cue. That’s partially why men get a lot out of hunting and fishing, just being on the lake with a buddy cracking open a beer and shooting the breeze.
Men need father figures. No therapist, app, or book can replace this. Men have unique needs just like women and they need strong mature male mentors to look up to and emulate. If one is lucky they had a good or good enough relationship with their father. It is heartbreaking that so many boys are growing up without a father, all they have is their mother and modern psychology. Research has shown that boys that grow up without a father do much worse in life than women that do so and this is one of the reasons men are falling behind women on almost every metric. The gospel of the atomized individual is a lie, for males without fathers and even males with them it is important to find more mature male role models that will invest in them. This is easier said than done because modern psychology has told everyone to put them selves first and people shouldn’t selflessly invest in others. But the current system isn’t working out for men and the deaths of despair attest to this.
Advice for Christians Evangelizing Millennials
If you are trying to get people to be Christian the first thing I would say is do a gut check.
How much are you willing to be inconvenienced in order to reach people? This is because none of the easy things people do to evangelize (like going on TV) work any more. You might draw a small crowd but they generally won’t stick. The things that really reach people are inconveniencing to say the least, especially in a culture where the threshold where people feel put upon has been receding. The evangelism work itself is much less rewarding because it’s not like you can do a puppet show with an altar call and a bunch of people will give their life to Christ. It’s more like ministering to Muslims where you spend years building relationships and maybe one or two people think about coming to the faith. You want racial diversity but do you want it bad enough to buy and put in a window unit air conditioner for a poor minority youth struggling with anger issues? You want to be inter generational but do you want it bad enough to invite a different young family or single to your home once per month. You want to be welcoming to singles who are past their twenties but do you want it bad enough to bring them into your life so you don’t reject them with the chestnut “I’m too busy” excuse but instead they become part of your busy or relaxation? It is important to make an honest and unflattering self assessment as to how much you are willing to sacrifice to bring about the things you say you value. When you inconvenience yourself in the name of your values your life will become less comfortable but will be more meaningful.
How much do you really value good? Good and evil have become more convenient in this modern age. It is very easy to sit in air conditioned rooms and virtue signal. It’s also easy to consume and spread hate on social media. It’s easy to be a culture warrior and picking a hill to die on based on some hot button issue such as LGBT inclusion. But while God is easy, good is very difficult. And good doesn’t make the news cycle and does not garner you (a most likely lonely person) attention and validation. It’s counter cultural in a world that is leeching virtue. Nonetheless people are drawn to it. Not just people who enjoy praise and worship smoke machines but hardened atheists who absolutely hate religion and wouldn’t be caught dead in a church. The slow burn of goodness doesn’t make quick converts but it does make ones that are more likely to stick. Millennials are living in a very philosophically materialist time (which the internet fans into flame) and have a very difficult time believing in anything supernatural. Goodness bypasses these filters the way other things of the faith do not.
What am I doing to foster digital community. Millennials and Generation Z live on the internet and while they do prize real life interaction a lot of their spaces involve a combination of the two. You may have to create a private Facebook group or a Discord chat server to compliment your real life space. This isn’t easy as it sounds because you will need to have someone with technological social skills moderate said forum so things don’t get out of hand. A lot of the time people who live most of their lives online get left out of church communities because there isn’t any social online outreach. Some people are so geographically isolated and have so many things different about them that they aren’t accepted in any real life community so online community is their lifeblood.
Am I going to offer transportation? This is basically a yes or no question. Do I value including others in the church community enough to give rides to church and small group functions to people who need them?
What are you actually saving people from? The Evangelical answer is hell obviously but that begs the question what is hell? Kids in cages? Crippling anxiety (which a high percentage of generation Z students suffer from). It is said the younger generation is less afraid of hell because they don’t believe in the supernatural but it might also be because of the hell they have actually been through. They need to be saved from the evil around as well as the evil inside of them. The night nurse at the mental ward is much more of their salvation than a decision at church camp. Love might not win in any absolute sense but it definitely wins people to the faith. But it’s difficult and painful so people generally settle for niceness. It’s also important to frame sin as something that often makes those around you suffer rather than denigrating people with the idea that they have “inherited guilt”. When you can draft a clear, personal statement of what you are actually saving people from it will help you redouble your efforts in the right way.
Tips for Improving Diversity
As an individual with a visible physical disability (some visual impairment) who has some autistic spectrum tendencies (though not diagnosed) I am an outcast most places I go. I am trying to improve myself to be less of one but here are some tips for groups that want to improve their diversity.
Designate a point person to welcome and include people who are on the periphery. This can be someone who has social skills and some connection to the core members of the group. If you are trying to reach marginalized groups it helps if this person is a member of said group but that is not imperative. If one person in the group is making those on the periphery feel welcome that will help these folks to open up and build connections with some of the other members. The analogy is like plastic wrap, the first tear is the hardest.
Follow up online with new members. This may mean talking with them on Slack or Discord or a similar service. If you built rapport with them they can start speaking more freely. Also if they show you their writing or projects pay attention. People who are marginalized tend to self sabotage by clamming up in groups they feel they don’t belong. This has happened to me frequently. So keep in mind the people you see may have a lot more to contribute to the group than they appear to due to this.
Be aware of structural barriers. I once saw a faith based conference where people were grousing about how the group attending wasn’t diverse enough. It cost $150. Lots of marginalized groups are also low income and often don’t have cars. They may not be able to get to or afford what you have to offer. Mitigating this can be difficult and inconvenient but you must decide how much you are willing to sacrifice in order to become more diverse.
Be kind. The world is becoming an increasingly cruel place. This hurts the people without power the most because they can’t counter bad actors. The more of an asshole you are the more racist/sexist/homophobic/ablest actions you are going to perform even if you yourself harbor no ill will toward minorities. The problem with kindness and virtue is that it’s “caught not taught” so even if you know the right thing to do in your head, you usually end up aping what you see in your surroundings.
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