Take the Shield of Faith
This series is exploring the similarities of the methods used by evangelicals to form Christians to the reform thought tactics used by Communism to brainwash subjects. With that in mind, we reconsider Paul’s language of spiritual forces found in Ephesians and how that may have been a recognition of the sorts of psychologically manipulative tactics that wicked people use to gain control. Paul encouraged us to put on the “Armor of God” as a defense against these forces of wickedness, so I am lining up each thought reform tactic with a piece of the armor.
This is part four. Read Introduction to this series here, part one here, part two here, and part three here.
“Wives submit to your husbands.” There’s a disturbing scene in the Netflix documentary, Death of a Pastor’s Wife, which dramatizes Mica Miller writing verses like this in her journal.
Mica was in an abusive marriage and these verses served as boundaries on her behavior and restrictions on her agency and autonomy.
How many times have you tried to have a nuanced conversation with someone only to have them drop a Bible verse as a trump card and appear unable to move beyond it?
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” (Lifton, p. 429)
When I was a little girl in Sunday school, we were rewarded every week for memorizing Bible verses. I don’t remember any of them now, but I don’t think this was necessarily a harmful practice.
Then, in high school, the verses we memorized were meant to help us fight temptation, like Jesus did in the wilderness.
I spent more than twenty years as a professional youth minister. I found this to be a typical formation method found in curriculum and in small group and retreat settings. This model works by training young people to stop their minds from entertaining impure thoughts by filling them with simple Bible verses.
Generations of youth group kids have been taught that the Bible is a collection of thought ending cliches.
In fundamentalist circles, intellectualism - critical thinking - is viewed as a threat to faith, but when I listen to people who have walked away from church, and when I read the works of those deconstructing their faith, a common theme that I’ve found is that it was their faith that protected them, their faith in a God that was not represented in what they experienced in church.
It isn’t faith that’s lost, it’s certainty.
Paul encouraged us to “take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.”
What does that mean for us?
Let us think of thought-terminating cliches as some of those “arrows of the evil one,” seeking to remove our agency and autonomy.
But what is faith?
The writer of Hebrews defined faith as ”…the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)
What is our faith in? Where we place our faith matters.
Have we placed our faith in government, in a political party, or an individual?
If we say we believe in God, what does that mean? Which God?
Is our God confined to an ancient text? Or is our God living and working in the world today?
What is that God doing?
Do we believe in a God who is good?
Do we believe in a God of love who seeks reconciliation with humanity?
Or do we believe in a God of wrath who seeks to destroy humanity?
Do we believe that the cross and resurrection represent victory over sin (evil) and death?
Or do we believe that the cross acts as a shield protecting us from an angry and vengeful God?
What if the God of wrath is not the same God as the God of love? What if the God of wrath isn’t really God? What if the God of wrath is actually the absence of God?
What if this is the conversation that the Bible invites us into?
What if the Bible is not supposed to be the end of the conversation, but the beginning?
Asking questions like these is how we break free from thought terminating ideas which can be scary; what if the fundamentalists are right? What if we ask these questions and lose our faith?
Faith is what we find when we leave certainty behind, when we find there are no simple answers, and we learn to make peace with mystery and the flaming arrows of thought-terminating cliches (and verses) fall to the ground.
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