I wrote a note that said, "If we're out to help people live into the Kingdom we'll act and approach life and ministry in radically different ways than if we're out to prevent mistakes (sinful acts)."
I've done a ton of thinking about the moralism of my holiness experience in recent years. I'm convinced, despite the good intentions of our parents, that my generation received a pretty crappy, harmful version of the gospel that's largely contributed to the extreme die-off in participation in the Church from people 35 or so and younger. In fact, part of the reason I haven't written and posted here as regularly is that I'm trying to spend my writing time writing something more substantial to address both those problems and their victims.
I don't use the words "trauma" and "victim" lightly, especially because I know how much it hurts those responsible. Our pastors and parents really did have the best of intentions, but, as my note indicates, they were perhaps more concerned with keeping us from making mistakes than actually teaching us how to live into the Kingdom of God.
A big part of holiness theology is the absence of intentional sin. It's often explained in the negative, though, with language about avoiding sin or being free from sin - which is elucidated in ways that neither the speaker of the hearer can fully comprehend. I prefer the more positive explanation of holiness: that we are partnering with God's Holy Spirit to grow into an ever-increasing Christ-likeness. We avoid and find freedom from sin only in that we're closer to the people God created us to be today than we were yesterday. This avoids the dangerous territory of "perfection" language that's been so troublesome in the past.
That notion of perfection has led us to pursue a mistake-free life. As a result, us grown-up evangelical kids were handed a faith that was primarily fear-based. Activity X, Y, and Z bring you perilously close to sin, so we'll avoid them altogether as way of safeguarding your purity.
Practically, that's not a terrible approach. I believe there are lots of problems I avoided because I just never had the opportunity to be exposed to them. The issue, though, is that, try as one might, you can't avoid everything and the avoidance itself creates problems later in life, especially when it comes to things that have a proper context for engagement.
This shows up most clearly when it comes to sex. Linda Kay Klein's book, Pure, does a bang up job of illustrating the real problems caused by the evangelical purity culture that largely demonized sex. You can replace "sex" with anything considered sinful (although, frankly, it was mostly sex) and you'll get a good picture of the kind of faith we were given.
Beyond any of the practical realities, though, this desire to avoid mistakes really stems from a terrible theology of salvation. We can say something different with our words all we want, but both us and our parents had (and may still have) the notion that if you let one cuss word slip out and get hit by a car before you apologize to Jesus, you're destined for an eternity in torturous hell.
This is the root of that obsession with purity (and not just the sexual kind). Our parents were so afraid we'd lose our salvation if we made mistakes they didn't help us navigate and make decisions about how we'd engage the world. We just got taught, with a heavy dose of fear, to avoid anything that might remotely be sinful.
Shoot, the word "shit" isn't sinful. It's crude, for sure, and it might make someone uncomfortable or offended in certain situations, which certainly wouldn't be considered virtuous. I don't fault any parent for trying to keep those words out of their child's regular vocabulary.
For many of us, though, that meant also avoided slightly less crude words like "crap" or, in some cases even "poop." You'd never really know what substitute words were acceptable in a given household; you might get scolded for saying "shoot" instead of "shit" because "we all know which word you were thinking," despite the fact that we'd been so scared out of saying something like "shit" we'd never, in a million years, even think it.
You get the overkill. If you're reading this blog, you've probably lived it.
All that to say, perhaps our job as pastors and parents isn't to keep our kids from mistakes, but to help them learn what it means to live into the Kingdom of God. Boundaries with no context teach nothing. If your kid doesn't know why they were sent to their room, all you've done is damage your kid.
I cringe even writing these things, because I was so formed in the "avoid mistake" culture that it feels almost sinful just to argue for a different approach. That's the residual effect that doesn't do any of us any good.
You know what, I'd rather my daughter not have sex before she's married. I think that's a healthier, more productive, less risky path in life, but I'm also not so naive to think that path will leave her with less sexual dysfunction than the alternative. It's really not about action at all, but the intentionality and control we have over the actions we take. Do you know why you use the words you use? Do you know how they affect you and the people around you? Do you have control over the words that come out of your mouth? How do you feel about the answers to those questions? What kind of person do you want to be with regards to language or sexuality or politics or violence?
I didn't really confront those questions until well into college, when I was secure enough in my independence to even realize I had choices.
When I did, I had very few tools by which to even approach issues I could've been dealing with earlier.
I get that our parents didn't want to reveal our independence to us at an age when we might abuse it; it's a natural protective instinct. We want to spare our kids the mistakes of our own lives. What we often fail to realize, though, is that there is no age when we won't abuse our freedom.
The process of navigating ethical and moral waters is necessary for maturity. Some of us simply matured much later because of the sheltered environment we inhabited. Others never matured, because they lack the tools to even make choices, resorting either to indulgence or repression.
The truly tragic result of this misbegotten perspective is that faith became a hindrance to understanding freedom and ethics, rather than a foundation. God, Christianity, and the Bible serve as a barrier to engaging the practical issues of life rather than a guide. So many people feel they lack purpose and direction in life, that they're missing the moral tether faith is supposed to provide - and I suspect more of those people grew up in Church than not.
The defining revelation of my life is: if God is love and a perfect love drives out all fear (both direct Biblical statements), then things which make us afraid are not from God. We cannot be afraid, even of sin, even for the salvation of our children, because that fear itself prevents the grace and love and power of God's good news from transforming both our lives and theirs. We must instill in our children not a fear of sin or an avoidance of mistakes, but a profound trust in the grace of God to redeem the sin in our lives and make us - more and more each day - into the people God created us to be.
The freedom to sin empowers us to reject it; the fear of sin empowers it to control our lives. I think, by and large, we received the latter when we needed the former and it's incredibly difficult to pass on something different to the next generation. They don't need help knowing who not to be, but it's really hard knowing who we should be and even harder to become that person. That should be the focus of our life and ministry.
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