My church, the United Methodist Church, but perhaps more generally American Christians, have been playing anxiety whack’a-mole for many decades now. I was out of the country for a couple of decades, but from what I can see the moles that have popped up in our Christian arcade are: LGBTQ inclusion, Biblical Authority, preserving the orthodox faith, adhering to church law, changing worship styles, mega-churches, millennials, the church growth movement, and many others.
These are real issues and challenges. They simply aren’t the real source of our very palpable anxiety. They pop up and dare us to whack them down, but when and if we do that anxiety simply pops up somewhere else. And we haven’t really addressed them either.
Seeing this I see a classic problem describe by family systems analysis: Free floating anxiety that settles out on different people and issues. These then become the third corner of a triangle and excuse those who are anxious about their relationship from addressing the actual cause of anxiety.
If we look beyond the triangles created with these presenting causes there a real source of anxiety. That source is nicely chronicled (and a chronicle is the way one usually identifies the real source of anxiety) in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is the anxiety that comes from knowing that we as Christians can choose not to be Christian, that we who believe in a transcendent God can choose not to believe. This choice is ever before us and between us. We can each choose to leave the long standing relationship we have all relied on.
It isn’t just between us as Christians. It is between us and the society in which we so long had a privileged role. Knowing that our social and cultural home can choose to do without us creates group anxiety in every affected religious group.
The easiest way to cope with this anxiety is for all those involved to focus on a group, usually that which is most vulnerable, that all can agree is the cause of the anxiety. If any significant number of us agree on that choice of the source of our anxiety we have a classic case of triangulation and a temporary source of unity. We've created a new mole to be whacked.
Among the current objects for this triangulation are LGBTQ persons. At the last General Conference we managed to all agree that LGBTQ people are somehow the source of our anxiety both within the church and between the church and society. Whether we want what is called full inclusion, or whether we want strict boundaries on behavior we agree that their presence that is making us anxious and that if we can just decide what to do about them, positively or negatively, our anxiety will go away.
It won’t. And it does put vulnerable people who are just trying to live their lives as good Christians in the terrible position of being held responsible for resolving anxiety they had no part in creating. Triangulation is fundamentally unfair and usually harmful.
There is a healthy way of dealing with anxiety, and I think we find it in many and maybe even most Christian congregations. True, they have their own internal cases of family system whack’a-moles. This is true of any family. But in my experience those congregations that focus on carrying out their mission are not anxious. Because day by day they are deciding both that they are believers together and that they are an important part of the life of their community. They are directly addressing the underlying cause of Christian anxiety rather than triangulating on someone else or some particular issue.
Which isn’t easy when the whack’a-moles are continually being pushed up to taunt us on Facebook, and the denominational blogs, and in the news, and sometimes even in meetings and conferences. And they are tempting. Whack’a-mole survives as a long standing arcade game because it is actually entertaining. It excites our minds. It makes us feel active, engaged, and sometimes even successful and accomplished. Boom! Mole whacked. And . . .
The anxiety returns. As it will until we admit and address it directly through our concrete actions affirming our belief in God and engaging the community of which we are a part with the Gospel.
And in the meantime? Let’s leave real people, people who can be hurt, out of it; especially LBGTQ persons, but also millennials and any other collection of actual humans that can be hurt by our whack’a-mole mallets whether lingual or legal.
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