Full Contact Christianity

I spent my first years in ministry helping a small group of people get out of a cult, and then several more years on the much trickier task of getting the cult out of the people. That work, and the subsequent times I’ve been called on to help people recover from cults, has given me an interesting look at how cults operate on their followers.

One of the central dynamics by which such cults flourish is the leader’s secret knowledge, his discernment of things too lofty for the hoi polloi, and especially of dire, dangerous threats too subtle for the hoi polloi to discern.

The dynamic proceeds thus: the congregant thinks Practice (or belief) X is innocuous, perhaps even helpful. The Dear Leader comes along and denounces Practice X, connecting it (by whatever dubious means) to Heresy Y. The People dutifully praise Dear Leader for his wisdom and are confirmed in their conviction that without Dear Leader and his subtle discernment, they would not be able to navigate their spiritual lives.

In the nature of the case, Practice X cannot be something obviously wrong. The people are already avoiding the things that are obviously wrong anyway. It brings no credit to Dear Leader’s discernment to denounce, say, devil worship. But suppose, in a rhetorically dazzling series of sermons titled “What Can Brown Do For Your Soul?”, Dear Leader connects UPS to a worldwide secret cabal of devil worshippers? Well, now you’ve got something. The poor congregants would never have known–why, they’ve been supporting devil worshippers with every Christmas package they send, without knowing it!

The whole point of the exercise is for Dear Leader to highlight a spiritual trap that the congregant would never have been able to discern, the better to demonstrate how much they all need Dear Leader and his spiritual insights. The intended effect of the exercise does not occur unless the People didn’t see the trap. And it works best of all when they couldn’t have seen the trap, because there is no trap to see.

As long as he can convince them after the fact that there is in fact a connection between Practice X and vilest heresy — using whatever rhetorical trickery is at his disposal — the trick works, and his authority is confirmed. The fewer other leaders agree with him, the more he is elevated above the common rabble of pastors — they are confused, clueless, or complicit in the sin themselves. And so betraying his close allies, whom he paints as compromised with various sins and false teachings he alone is able to discern, becomes one of the key ways in which a cult leader can consolidate control of his people.

It’s an ugly business, one that Christians should steer well clear of.

But the ugliest part is the way in which the same dynamic infiltrates groups (both conservative and progressive) that most of us wouldn’t consider cults, although we might allow as how they’re a bit sectarian. In this way, many churches groom their people, especially their young people, in habits of mind that make them easy pickings for cults later in life.

“In general, skin in the game comes with conflict of interest.”
-Nassim Taleb

I recently worked my way through Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game, a book-length treatment of asymmetries of risk, and it spends a pretty good chunk of text on the question of what’s gone wrong with our class of professional advice-givers. The key observation is pretty simple: a disinterested third party usually pays no penalty for giving bad advice. Therefore, disinterested third parties often give bad advice, because humans are just not as careful when they’re gambling with someone else’s money.

As a culture, we generally prefer that our advice-givers be disinterested third parties. The theory is that experts, a bit removed from the situation and unhampered by any conflicts of interest, will be able to view the situation “objectively,” and so give better advice. But in reality, we’ve created an entire “chattering class” of putative experts who do little else but serve up advice, the vast majority of which is utter crap. (Did you get anything good from the last “Six Ways To…” article you read? Me neither.) What’s gone wrong?

Think about it in terms of financial advice. If your financial adviser owns a big chunk of the stock he’s urging you to buy, then he’s no longer a disinterested third party. Perhaps he needs you to buy that stock to shore up his belief that he made a good investment; perhaps he is helping keep the stock in demand by having all his clients buy it; perhaps he is even in a “pump and dump” scheme. Because he’s involved, his advice is no longer “objective.” And so we will point an accusing finger–he has a conflict of interest.

But consider the alternative. Suppose he’s not at all invested in the stock he’s recommending to you? Suppose that no matter how much he tells you that it’s a great buy, definitely undervalued right now, etc…he hasn’t bought any himself, and doesn’t intend to. How does that look to you?

So these are our choices: either you take advice from someone who put his money where his mouth is, or you take advice from someone who didn’t, and has nothing to lose if his advice turns out to be disastrously wrong.

Me, I want the guy who’s buying the stock he recommends to me. If I’m taking the risk, I want him to be taking it too. In other words, he has skin in the game. Yeah, there’s potential conflict of interest, but that’s the cost of involvement. Those who have a stake in your success always have a potential conflict of interest.

Certain professions (psychotherapy, for example) have actually enshrined in law their suspicion of conflict of interest, prohibiting any form of “dual relationship.” (A dual relationship is any relationship where the therapist is not just the therapist, and the client is not just the client. If the client is also a friend, business associate, hairdresser, relative, student, employee, lover, etc., then it’s a dual relationship.) Of course, real relationships often naturally develop multiple facets. Your sister-in-law can be your hairdresser, your wife’s best friend, a member of your church. This kind of thing is very common in the real world. And actually, “dual” relationship isn’t a great term for it; there’s often more than two. It’s more like “multifaceted relationship,” or better, “natural relationship.”

The prohibition of dual relationships greatly limits the therapist’s ability to have skin in the game. A client’s failure is unlikely to affect the therapist’s life in any meaningful way; the therapist isn’t allowed to be invested or involved in the client’s life. (The prohibition also reveals a weakness in some therapies and some practitioners: when the efficacy of treatment depends on the client not knowing the therapist for real, what does that say about it?)

In ministerial ethics, we take exactly the opposite position. A good minister is fully embedded in the community. The people we minister to are also our dry cleaners, our auto mechanics, our grocers, our neighbors. That’s not just a thing that sometimes happens; it’s expected. (And would you really want a pastor that keeps professional distance, lives in a different community, and is uninvolved in the lives of the people he serves? I wouldn’t.)

We prize personal involvement. We understand that comes with complications. Real, multifaceted relationships can be hard. Developing a difficulty in one facet of the relationship automatically causes ripples in the other areas. You challenge your parishioner to confess his affair to his wife, and three days later–because he’s also your barber–he’s cutting your hair. Can be a bit awkward. It takes a huge amount of character to manage the potential conflicts of interest and inevitable complications that come with a real relationship that crosses multiple domains.

Moreover, doing your work surrounded by people who have all these different vantage points on your life is going to expose places where your personal integrity is lacking. That’s not a bug; that’s a feature. It’s hard to counsel a man to treat his wife better when he heard you fighting with your own wife last week in the grocery store parking lot. So treat your wife better. Duh.

Now please hear me, that doesn’t mean you can’t give advice on something unless you’re perfect at it. It does mean, though, that you can’t hide hypocrisy behind professional distance, like the addiction counselor who helps clients get off drugs while using an endless series of random hookups to cope with the stress of the job. You can’t be a hypocrite. You have to own your failings and be making honest effort to improve. Because your community will know if you’re not…and they won’t listen to you.

One of the reasons massage therapy fits so well into my life is that in massage, we take a very similar approach to multifaceted relationships. We know that healing happens in the context of relationship, and so we don’t shy away from doing healing work with people that we have real relationships with. We move cautiously, we communicate, we consider carefully whether we can do this healing work with this client at this time — and the answer might be no, for various reasons, but that’s another post — but we don’t automatically rule it out. In most settings, if you have integrity, use wisdom, and communicate well, having a real relationship with your client is not a drawback; it’s a force multiplier.

This approach in massage therapy is nearly inevitable, starting in school. There’s no way to simulate doing bodywork; you gotta actually work with a body. Having students practicing on each other and giving each other feedback is the only practical way to do that. So we start off in multifaceted relationships–at minimum we’re each other’s therapists and each other’s clients. Many of us also become friends, and some of us become business partners as well. We grow accustomed to navigating the difficulties of real relationships, and so we don’t need to hide behind professional distance later. It’s a rare massage therapist that doesn’t treat friends, neighbors, family members, and so on, which is a far more natural practice than artificially excluding them.

That doesn’t stop us from having integrity, doing what we say we will, and delivering a high-quality service. Much the opposite.

So, a propos of last month’s post on the pursuit of purity and its attendant hazards, Josh Harris–having first kissed dating goodbye–has now also kissed his marriage goodbye, followed by his Christianity. I wasn’t going to comment on all that, but then homeschool maven Michael Farris decided to do a dumb about it, and I’m not letting that one pass without comment.

Farris’ open letter, appearing as an op/ed column and posted on social media, is worth reading, if only as a bad example. Click the link and read it. Seriously. I’ll wait. It’ll take you less than 5 minutes.

Read it? Good. Let’s talk, because this is a study in what not to do, on a whole bunch of levels. First of all, remember, this kid grew up under Farris’ wing. Michael Farris knew Joshua, by his own admission considered him a friend and a brother. If it’s true that the kid was just running a set of formulas, and it was never any deeper than that, where was Farris’ head at, that he didn’t notice then?

I’ll tell you where: building a movement, pushing an agenda. Selling his own set of formulas. Farris says — now — that the courtship agenda they pushed together was never a formula, never a recipe for a happy marriage. I call bullshit, and he must think we all have really short memories. I was there, and that’s exactly the way it was promoted. We were all promised blissful marriages and great sex lives if only we avoided this and that before marriage. (And yeah, that was totally a lie, but that’s a post for another day.)

If Josh Harris is in trouble today — and he is — it’s in large part because he was made a willing tool of the adults around him, promoted to prominence far beyond what his maturity warranted, and used up. The Bible tells us not to promote neophytes to leadership—did we listen? No. Michael Farris least of all. When Josh was forced later in life to come to terms with the damage that he’d been complicit in doing, he seemed initially to be handling it fairly well. Now, though, he’s hit a serious crisis of faith, and he’s not handling it well. That’s on him.

But the fact that he got there to start with, that’s on us. Yes, us — the adults like Michael Farris who promoted a kid as a celebrity, the publishers who profited from it, and us, the ones who went to the conferences and bought the books and supported the celebrity culture that created this mess. Wasn’t for us, Christian celebrity culture wouldn’t be a thing, and Josh Harris would just be another person who had some pretty naive ideas about love and marriage when he was 21 years old. Didn’t we all?

If Joshua Harris ever believed in Jesus—and we have good reason to think he did—then he came into possession of eternal life at that moment. And eternal life is…what’s the word I’m looking for here…oh yeah. ETERNAL!!! As in, lasting forever. He has passed from death to life, and that’s a one-way street.

He can decide to take a nap on a slab in the morgue, but that doesn’t make him dead any more than sleeping in a garage would make him a car. It’s not healthy. It’s not good. And if he ends this life in that condition, he’ll enter heaven reeking of wood, hay, and stubble, saved yet so at through fire—but saved nonetheless.

But I’m praying for better. Josh Harris was honest enough to face the damage he did early in life. He was honest enough to recognize that some of the views he was coming to did not line up well with his Christianity. I’m praying he’ll stay true to that honesty and eventually come out with a clear head. He’ll look around at the husks the pigs are eating and long for home—and when that happens, his Father will run to meet him.

God has not given up on Joshua Harris. Michael Farris clearly has. You decide who you’d rather follow.