IN TWO MINDS

Originally published in 'Third Way' Magazine (http://www.thirdway.org.uk/) at the end of 2004. Rachel is a member of YLGC.

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Evangelicals talk of “loving the sinner but hating the sin”, but psychologists have a rather different name for it. RACHEL HOLT offers an alternative perspective on the church’s internal strain over the gay issue.

IT WOULD be easy to assume, given last year’s blanket media coverage surrounding Gene Robinson and Jeffrey John, that gay Christians are usually male, Anglican and ordained. But in our experiences, both gay and straight come from all walks of life and align themselves with all sorts of churches. In evangelicalism especially, the conflict between being welcoming and being “Biblical” can be difficult for all concerned. Often, gay people will leave a succession of churches before they find one they are able to attend – or stop attending altogether.

As psychologists, both of us are interested in the interface between our Christian faith and insights from psychology. As Watts et al describe in the preface to their book Psychology for Christian Ministry , there is a human aspect to everything the church does, and psychology can help to clarify these human aspects. This is not to imply that faith can be explained by psychology, but instead that psychology can be helpful in describing and making sense of the ways in which people in churches act and react. This can be especially helpful in emotionally-charged areas such as how churches respond to gay people, where it can be difficult to make sense of and move forward from intense experiences and reactions.

Early in 2004 one of the authors, Rachel, started attending an evangelical Anglican church with her (female) partner. Here we focus on her experiences. The co-author, Robyn, is a straight friend who attends a liberal Anglican church elsewhere. Despite initiatives such as Accepting Evangelicals , it is commonly held in the Anglican and wider church today that a church’s stance on the so-called gay issue is the measure of its evangelical credentials. We explore the actions of the church by offering two different perspectives from psychology: cognitive dissonance and projection.

RACHEL’S STORY

My partner and I had recently moved to a new area, and sought out a church where we felt we could serve and grow. This church is a large, evangelical-moving-towards-charismatic church, where people alluded to something negative that happened three years ago, but no-one voiced what this was. They had never encountered ‘out’ gay Christians among the congregation. The vicar was in his late 30s, and had spent some time in a previous church supporting young gay Christians to be celibate, but had not previously met Christians living in a same-sex relationship.

The church was initially welcoming and seemed accepting of our relationship. This changed ten days later, after we had sent back a ‘yes we want to find out more about this church community’ welcome card. The vicar visited us to break the news that, although welcome in the church, our participation in church life would be severely restricted due to our living outside the will of God. He explained that the church had discussed ‘the gay issue’ the previous October, stating its stance that being what they described as ‘actively gay’ was outside God’s will. There had been tolerated dissent among the congregation over this position - the church was apparently willing to have pro-gay straight people participating fully in church life, but not pro-gay gay ones.

We were shaken and distressed by the visit, but decided to spend time finding out how this would impact on our membership of the church. All positions of leadership and ministry would be withheld from us, including any role involving being seen at the front of the church. After prayer and discussion, both with each other and with the vicar, we agreed to abide by the restrictions in order to continue at a church that we liked and felt called to be in. These discussions were, to some extent, difficult for the vicar as well as for us and he often looked worried when speaking with us.

Over the following months, the church and its leadership held meetings and discussions that we only found out about by accident, which further prevented our inclusion in church life. The vicar ‘outed’ us to people we didn’t know, and acted in ways he had explicitly said he would not do. It seemed that we were seen as a threat by the church, that we had chosen to go there in order to deliberately challenge their theology, rather than as people seeking God. We were eventually unable to join a home group, or even to ask people from the church 20s group we were attending to socialise. During this process the vicar switched repeatedly from being considerate and kind to being attacking and hurtful, while all the time looking under stress.

We met a mixed sex couple at the church, who had lived together outside marriage, one partner of whom had only recently become a Christian. The church welcomed and included them, in spite of believing they were also living outside the will of God, and this made us feel further marginalised.

Finally we left, feeling unable to trust anyone in the church. Reality seemed distorted to the extent that we were becoming quite paranoid, and we felt that we had been pushed to the very limits of our personhood. On trying to explain to people in the church that we had felt there was no place for us and so were leaving, we were assured that we had not found the church unwelcoming, as it is a welcoming church. This was alongside blame that we had chosen to go to a church where our lifestyle is clearly seen as outside God’s intention; that we had led others in the church to anguish as they tried to embrace us while condemning us; and that we had not let others know that we were struggling.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

The first psychological model within which these experiences can be considered comes from cognitive theory – a theory in which thoughts are emphasised. Cognitive theorists claim that people build internal understandings of the world, which are used to make sense of and interpret situations. Our interpretation of a situation determines how we feel and react. For example, walking down the street and seeing someone we think will attack us leads to one set of emotions and behaviours, whereas seeing someone we recognise as a friend leads to a very different set. Any inconsistency between that interpretation and our own or others’ behaviour will trigger a tendency to reinterpret the situation, in order to minimise the inconsistency.

Festinger suggested that a perceived inconsistency sets up an unpleasant internal state which he called cognitive dissonance, which people will try to reduce wherever possible. Strategies which are used to reduce cognitive dissonance include carefully managing which situations one is exposed to by seeking out information which is consistent with the existing belief, and avoiding information which disconfirms that belief.

In this church there was dissonance between their theological rejection of gay people as living outside God’s will, and their desire to live a Christian life of accepting, welcoming, and being in right relationship with others. It was very important for the church to hold onto the belief that it was welcoming, and so they tried to try to do this, while rejecting gay relationships, by initially offering a restricted relationship to the women.

For a while it appeared that this may be successful, and there was agreement between the women and the vicar about the conditions of their inclusion in the church. However, the initial meeting with the vicar (which the women had experienced as rejecting) following an apparent welcome from the church, along with the conditionality of their relationship with the church, had made the women wary about whether this church was able to offer a genuine welcome. Meanwhile it appeared that the church worried that they were compromising their theology by showing some acceptance of a gay couple, and as a result the vicar held discussions with others in the congregation about this theology. When the women found out about the meetings, the secrecy surrounding them and the exclusion of the women from them was understood by them as further evidence that the church was unwelcoming.

The church was unable to reassess their view of themselves as a welcoming church in the light of the women’s experiences. To do so would have been in stark contrast to the welcome and inclusion that they sought to offer new people coming to the church, and so would have led to dissonance between how they believed a church should be, and how they were being.

The church’s strategy was to avoid information that would challenge their belief about being welcoming. Since maintaining any relationship with the women would lead to them hearing from the women that they were not feeling welcome, their approach was paradoxically to refuse any relationship with them. The church was able to make sense of this exclusion by maintaining that the women had forced them into a position where they had no other choice than to behave in this way, to enable them to uphold their theological beliefs about gay people.

Interestingly, the experiences of the mixed-sex couple show that this church does have resources within itself to manage cognitive dissonance in healthy ways. In that case, they maintained both their theology of relationships, and a genuine welcome. Their lack of using these strategies with the women is likely to be due to the heightened prominence of gay issues in the church at present.

PROJECTION OF EVIL

A second psychological model within which these experiences can be considered is from a psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic thinking understands human behaviour as a result of struggles and compromises between motives, drives, needs, and conflicts. The struggles are understood as occurring at different levels of awareness, including - importantly - at an unconscious level, where we are not aware of the forces behind our behaviour.

In psychoanalytic thinking, the self is seen as sometimes being unable to tolerate desires coming from within. These intolerable desires may be hostility, anger, or aggression, which become associated with anxiety as a result of previous punishment for displaying them. In the case of this church, the inability to speak about the negative thing that had happened previously, and the unshakeable insistence that it is welcoming, suggest that this may be happening on a corporate level. These desires cannot be wiped out because they are part of being human, but because of the anxiety they cause, the church is unable to accept them as their own. This may be as a result of spoken or unspoken understandings - for example it may be a church that acts as though faith in Jesus removes desires such as hostility, anger, aggression, etc. Alternately it might be thought that these sorts of desires are un-Christian.

The solution, according to psychoanalytic theory, is that the intolerable desires are unconsciously seen as external and attributed to someone else. According to this theory, there are desires which cannot be tolerated in all people, and so may be unconsciously projected onto others. However at an extreme if some desires cannot be tolerated at all, then all of those unacceptable feelings are unconsciously projected onto a ‘receptacle’ who is viewed as evil, while the church sees itself as good. The church then acts to destroy those in whom it now sees its own projections, to protect itself against evil.

Two young women, entering a new church, were met with a hierarchical community structured around participation upon permission. This was a context designed around those with power in the church choosing who to include and exclude with regard to church life, and therefore directing the church to see where to project and destroy its evil. In this church, as in society generally, a male and female relationship was viewed as the ideal way for adults to live, and deviations from this viewed as distortions outside of the will of God. A gay couple were therefore ideal to define as evil, and the ideal receptacle for projecting the church’s intolerable desires.

In order for anyone to continue acting as such a receptacle, it is important that they are not experienced as people by the church. If they manage to get to know people and for people to see them as they are – both good and bad – then it is no longer possible for them to be seen as evil, and so the church’s projections have to seek another target. This would be particularly risky for those with power or high-profile roles in the church, who may be next in line as receptacles for the projections. This gave motivation for powerful people in this church to make sure the women were unable to get to know other people in the church, by excluding them from opportunities to build relationships, whilst making them paralysed with worry about what they were or were not allowed to do. As long as they were not acknowledged or known as people, they served a valuable purpose for the church.

If the women in this account are understood as receptacles for projections, there are consequences of importance. Real damage is done to people when they are identified as sinful or evil and have to bear the feelings and desires that others put onto them. The emotions experienced when excluded and outcast are strong, and fundamentally affect our view of ourselves.

MOVING FORWARD

We hope that using models from psychology is valuable in making it easier and clearer to see solutions to difficulties within this situation. This was an experience which left the women crushed, and also caused some hurt to the church. So, how is it possible to move forward? Here are three suggestions:

1. Right relationship with each other and with God is important. A church’s actions that deny relationships with other people affect the members’ relationships with God. This church could consider whether and in what ways their relationship with God is being limited by their treatment of others.

2. The dissonance between theologies of sexuality and of welcome need not lead to getting rid of the people who prompt the dissonance. As shown by the mixed sex couple in this situation, this church is able to welcome those it perceives as living outside the will of God, at the same time as holding the theological position that such relationships be repented of and sanctified by marriage. They could explore how they were able to manage this, and why they were not able to with the women.

3. This church could explore explicitly its beliefs about the love of God in relation to whether Christians are pure and blameless. Individuals could start to become aware of their own desires, and the ways in which they project them onto others. They could come to tolerate and express their own shortcomings, in the knowledge that God sees and forgives.