Dear Reader,
This week, while prepping for an event I’m speaking at on Thursday, I’ve found myself going down a rabbit hole in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a book he describes as his “literary investigation” of his experience in a Soviet labor camp in the early 20th century.
He recalls a story he’d been told about events between 1918-1920, years of deep deprivation and starvation. As the story goes, a number of condemned political prisoners weren’t shot (as was the normal practice) but were fed to animals in city zoos. He admits it was merely a rumor, but goes on to say that given the already-known brutality of the regime, the burden of proof should be on those who would say it didn’t happen.
How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years? Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn’t it expedient? That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.
It’s one of dozens — maybe hundreds — of examples of violence in Stalinist Russia recounted in the book, something that belongs more in The Hunger Games (no pun intended) than in an account of events of the 20th century, but the same could be said of violence in Nazi Germany or present-day North Korea and communist China. The question that haunts Solzhenitsyn is how these horrors could be committed by soldiers and citizens who went home to hold hands with their families and pray for meals, who kissed their children goodnight in their beds, or cared for aging parents.
It’s a question that haunts my own work. I find the abusive behavior of narcissistic leaders far more comprehensible than that of their supporters and enablers — those who knowingly and willingly supported or papered over their behavior.
One reason for that is my own experience and story. I was in a leadership system that began displaying symptoms of toxicity as early as 2005 or 2006, and I served there until 2015. My exit was painful, in part because of the despair I felt in being unable to disrupt that toxicity and in part because of my own direct experience of it. Like the condemned soldiers, dissidents were often fed to the bears, and when I try to comprehend my story, I often wonder if I was one of them. I’ve also wondered whom I may have fed to them in the years before. I’ve spent a great deal of energy trying to find out.
A common thread — different in both substance and scale — is the way “normals” could become numb to physical, social, and spiritual violence. Those who suffer spiritual abuse may not be literally fed to the bears, but their suffering certainly makes them vulnerable to diseases of despair that endanger their lives. Like the torturers and secret police of totalitarian regimes, those who exercise, reinforce, support, and enable spiritual abuse could walk out of a meeting marked by abusive, destructive words and drive to a hospital to sit and pray bedside with someone dying of cancer. That cognitive dissonance is critical to understand as we search for solutions to evangelicalism’s crisis of leadership.
Solzhenitsyn gets at this in The Gulag Archipelago, where he admits that, had he not ended up in the labor camp, he “had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner.” He continues:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
In other words, we can’t divide the world into good guys and bad guys, black hats and white hats. Reality is more complex and unsettling than that, and the capacity for the most disturbing violence we might observe in the world is present in our hearts.
Stalinist Russia woke that capacity through ideology — a theory of history that offered certainty about past, present, and future. According to them, humanity was on an inexorable march of progress, and its goal was a utopian society marked by economic and social equality. The promise of liberty on the other side of that achievement was so great that it could compel the weary, lonely hearts of Russians to act in monstrous ways.
Ideology of this sort is a product of modernity. It has its roots most directly in the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but it also broadly reflects the spirit of modernity in the way it thinks of history as ultimately comprehensible, the human being as a tool of the state, and destiny as something that can be discerned and pursued with absolute certainty. It doesn’t always aspire to totalitarian ends, though those governments — Stalinism, nazism, the modern-day governments of North Korea and China — are the most obvious examples.
Hannah Arendt spent much of her later years tracing out the way a totalitarian, ideological spirit spread in the decades after the Second World War, and I find it to be a compelling and frightening way to think about the operations of a spiritually abusive church. They offer a vision of the good life that requires total immersion in the community. Marriages, vocations, decisions about where to live, how many children to have, and what job to take are all influenced (if not dictated) by church leadership. They promise a happy and flourishing life when one submits to that vision and pursues it wholeheartedly, and those promises often extend far beyond the walls of the church and into redemptive promises about the surrounding community. They echo the eschatological promises of the scriptures, but there’s a particularity to them. They find unique expression in that church, and there’s a sense that they’ve figured something out that remains a mystery to everyone else. To be a member there is to be in on a secret, in on something special.
This vision and promise has its fullest expression in the leader at its center, a kind of übermensch that embodies the expectations that are set for others. Think Mark Driscoll — pure Christian testosterone — or Bill Hybels and his regular recitation of his origin story as a “business man” (in spite of spending his entire adult life in church ministry).
The differences between these ideological expressions of Christianity and the real thing can be seen in the centrality of an individual to community formation, a commitment to certainty, and a highly prescriptive way of life. I think it’s hard to overestimate the power of certainty in such a community. It’s a helluva drug, and the predominantly behavioral and doctrinal emphases of our evangelical churches make life and the future appear manageable in a complex world.
Consider, then, what happens when you encounter something that could fracture your sense of certainty and destiny. Maybe it’s an accusation of abuse inside the church, or it’s an experience with a pastor that reflects profoundly disordered character. Acknowledging the reality of that encounter would immediately destabilize the foundation on which you’ve built your entire life. Most likely, in such a community, you’ve seen what happened to others who disrupted the sense of utopia.
You face a choice then: Do you step into the vortex, shattering your sense of certainty and belonging? Or do you feed dissidents to the bears and go home, kissing your children on the forehead as you tuck them in?
As Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, ideology works on the soul because it promises people who suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and “mass loneliness” a purpose and a future. This is perhaps the most terrifying truth of ideology — it preys on our vulnerability.
Leaders at the core of these movements may have any one of a thousand motivations, from material to spiritual to pathological. But they wouldn’t succeed if the story they told us about past, present, and future didn’t strike a chord in lonely minds and imaginations.
When we think about how the church might emerge from this season of polarization and this time of reckoning with abuse and failure, we have to consider how totalizing explanations have created the permission structure of all manner of evil. We also have to be cautious not to replace one demon with another, embracing some other ideological explanation for the church’s redemption and renewal — another phenomenon I see running amok.
I know some hear criticism of certainty and get twitchy, wondering when I’ll start talking about open theism or some other forbidden idea. I’m not terribly interested in any of that, to tell the truth, but I am utterly captivated by the final chapters of the book of Job, where God’s response to Job’s search for meaning-making is confronted by the mystery of God and the wonder of creation. Job is humbled — humbled as in hummus or earth. He is drawn low and practically made speechless. He’s also satisfied.
Human beings crave meaning. We love stories because we want to find ourselves drawn up in them. Those are good impulses. But it’s also good to be brought to places where our capacity for meaning-making stops, where words fail, where certainty crumbles and we find ourselves confronted by what we can only rightly name “the mystery of God.” I wonder to what extent we’ve lost our sense of that goodness. G.K. Chesterton once said, “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
I wonder how much of our present moment is the result of acting like the logician, and if maybe the wounded and broken church we see around us is, in fact, the logician’s headache. Perhaps, by embracing the limits of a poet’s imagination, we might begin to heal.
VARIA
As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m speaking later this week at an off-the-record event for pastors and church leaders on the subject of church and pastoral health. I’m looking forward to it, and I’m anticipating some good newsletter fodder from the conversations.
We’ve got a new CT project in the works, coming in October. It’s not a serialized narrative podcast (yet— news on that down the line) but something fun nonetheless. More on that soon.
Speaking of which, the Epilogue of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is still in progress. Nearly ready. Keep an eye out. Someday I’ll tell the whole saga of the making of this adventure.
Lastly, I spent some time this week with the fine folks at Love Thy Neighborhood, working on some team-building enneagram stuff. They’re terrific at what they do, and I was blown away by the experience — and that in spite of the fact that I’ve known Jesse Eubanks for 24 years or so and one would think that after that long, the ability to impress would cease.
Two reads that I found worthwhile: First, L.M. Sacasas has an excellent piece on the “attention economy” on his Substack, The Convivial Society. I’ve followed Sacasas’ work on technology for a long time and he’s an unparalleled thinker on how these artifacts affect our lives.
Second, David French’s newsletter about men was terrific on Sunday. I was halfway in progress on a newsletter about similar issues, but he said it far better than I could.
COLTS RANT
Not sure what to say exactly. I only saw highlights on Red Zone (can we talk about how stupid NFL broadcast restrictions are?) and read a little afterwards. The same issues remain. The O-Line looks so bad (Quentin can’t do it alone), Jonathan Taylor is getting the living heck beat out of him, and the whole situation is putting immense pressure on Matt Ryan to make things happen… which isn’t going great.
But hey, they won right? I should be happy, I suppose, but mostly I’m still depressed.
When I hear someone so positive about one way to live your life, I run. The Holy Spirit speaks to each of us in a way we can understand, but not everybody else would. I take great comfort in the mystery of God because it means there is so much more he can reveal to me. Thank you for a thought provoking blog.
This is so well done, Mike. I don't know what else to say about it other than I'm sharing it widely.