WHEN FAITH BECOMES SUBSTANCE: PART ONE
Photo courtesy of the author.
My students tumble into class chattering excitedly about an awesome worship service. They talk about how ‘Spirit-filled’ that one moment was; how they know God is real because they felt compelled to cry or raise their hands in a packed auditorium stoked by electric guitars, professional lighting, and a hunky white dude ‘pouring out’ his heart. Their own hearts are burning as they envision a romantic life on the mission field, saving souls for Jesus. I can’t shake the foreboding that washes over me. When I ask if I would experience just as authentic a sign of God’s presence by lighting up a joint, they squirm in their seats. Why is following the way of Jesus Christ so much like searching for a dopamine hit?
I have only to walk around campus to encounter more revelations. At the hands of their Christian families, my students endure physical violence, the use of siblings as informers, financial manipulation that withholds in order to enforce, and control of things as small as tank top straps and as large as fields of study. They are inured to demeaning reactivity or degrading comments codified as good Christian parenting or difficult but necessary pastoral decisions. And always, always, they maintain the rule to save face, to protect those in charge. They know to keep problems secret, pretend things are terrific, ensure that if any story of real pain is told it must quickly find a happy ending where God intervenes to remove uncertainty, struggle, or loss. These strategies preserve a cocoon of comfortability at the expense of authenticity. How do spiritual highs so quickly become means of controlling others?
***
Thanks to my communities of origin and early pastoral experience, I’ve long held season tickets to the production “Alcoholism: Jacking Up Everyone Within Reach.” Several times, I’ve been upgraded to a front-row seat, watching as relationships I held dear irreparably deteriorated while my own efforts to fix or escape the situation just increased my agony.
My life experience prompted attempts to become an expert in addiction – or at least in its controversies. I have read just about all the books. I know the catch phrases, the factors, and the debates. It’s a disease; it’s a habit. It’s a coping mechanism; it’s genetic. After enough growth, someone may no longer need restrictions; the compulsions will never completely go away. The outline shifts, requiring nimble adaptations. One thing seems certain: addiction is a wily beast, and searching for a one-size-fits-all cure merely entrenches its patterns.
These demons belong to me, too. I am an academic theologian and clergywoman, and I know the acrid taste of addiction as it oxidizes what I love. I know how the search for control in a world hellbent on burning itself down will seize any means possible. Using substances is one method; co-dependent enabling or manipulating offers a more socially acceptable path. But perhaps the most deceptive form is using faith as a substance.
What does this assertion mean? I know how it looks and feels more than I know how to precisely define my terms. This seems fitting for a problem so mired in our feelings. It’s easier to reach for a bottle or an ice cream tub or to click ‘add to cart’ than it is to have that hard conversation with someone we love—or with ourselves. It’s simpler to wheedle others than to acknowledge the yawning abyss of loneliness or fear swirling around one’s core; faster to slap a spiritualizing band-aid over the gaping wounds organized religion inflicts upon its children than to admit that our houses of worship are built by oppression. It isn’t the bottle or the ice cream that is really the problem, nor is every turn to them a sign of addiction. It’s when we always numb out our feelings with our substance of choice, when we use in order to dodge all vulnerability and responsibility, when we need ever-greater amounts to sustain the relief, when we disappear from our lives for the sake of our hit. Our means of controlling our painful, unpredictable world begins to control us. We lie or obfuscate to avoid this cold truth, which only deepens our shame and entrapment. And oftentimes our loved ones play along: they control others so we can escape, they lie or obfuscate on our behalf, they compress themselves until they, too, are controlled by our substance. This becomes their hit, their means of control. Yet removing one substance often just makes room for other, less taboo ones. Our impulse to control distressing feelings remains. We trade oxycontin for the social capital of “being in recovery.” We leave behind the booze but end up chained to the office. We exit our former spirituality in favor of the newest morality code we are convinced will save us from the world’s chaos. Under it all, the originating pain festers.
Like I said, I know how it feels. As I plan the week’s intercessory prayers I will offer on behalf of the church and the world, my bones gnaw with a hunger that cannot be sated. I start to get the mushy-green way I do when I cannot fix everything for everyone but believe I should. So I wring absolution out of the rubrics that beg God to take away memories that haunt or terrors that menace. At work, I struggle to witness to what is good and what is true and why there seems to be such a distance between them. So I diagram christological formulae and trace the grooves forming in my mind as I transfer my anguish into obsession over correctness.
It all goes down so cool and smooth, settling over my raw and prickly edges with a clean finality. When an extended family member calls me, convinced that her son’s admittance to rehab is a sign she hasn’t prayed enough, I sense the hand of terror seizing heavy at her throat, because I feel that same grip settle around my neck each time I interact with my relative who still uses, every moment I worry about the state of the universe. That’s how I recognize its shadowy form lurking behind my enthused students, beckoning seductively. I, too, am driven by helplessness in the face of wounds much bigger than I, even if that makes me a martyr or a scapegoat for others’ projections or the star of the show. I may not be hiding vodka under my bed, but I, too, am a user.
***
I come by religious addiction naturally. I was raised in a Christian home, sent to Christian schools. My childhood is marked by a singing blue songbook, sermons railing against the evils of this world, and summer VBS memorizing Bible passages as sweat trickles down my neck alongside my worries already at age six that I was not cool or thin enough. I am a veteran of flannelgraph Sunday School lessons, lectures on being a good girl, and by age seven asking questions about biblical inconsistencies or oddities deemed too out of bounds for discussion. Mission trips give way to Bible studies and youth Sunday sermons and eventually elaborate presentations on how to beat secular worldviews, prove evolution wrong, and learn to love a God who predestines some and hates others merely by the luck of their draw.
I can do all of this surprisingly well. My early call to ordination is remarkable only because it lands on the wrong kid, or perhaps my parents misread the instructions when they produced another girl instead of a boy. Later on, in a charismatic evangelical community playing with liturgy like a child should never play with fire, I discover that my background primes me to welcome the pressure of always feeling there is more I can do to get holy or extra sins I should confess. Lenten restrictions are no trouble, late-night prayer watches earn the badge of true faith. The power in fasting dwindles if I drink broth. Until I have a nervous breakdown under the strain of always submitting to my boyfriend, I adopt restrictive gender roles that promise relief from the pricking call to ministry. I chase lengthy introspection in small groups where the hands laid on me and oil anointings and prophetic words will finally, fully, set all to rights. I feel pleasure in upholding the one and only right way to worship. I accept exclusion when I do not measure up. I want everything to be right so badly that if it will tip God’s hands on the scales, I will gladly self-destruct. These, too, are addictive modes, careening me from user to enabler to hero and back again. Is it the denomination? My genes? My trauma-haunted childhood chalking out patterns that I cannot help but keep re-embroidering? Some toxic interplay of it all?
