We ought not support toxic behavior
In January I went to California to visit a friend. She is from Jasper, Ark., and is a law professor at University of California, Davis. I flew into Sacramento on a Sunday. She picked me up at the airport then, being the good small-town Southern girls we are whose mamas raised us right, we went straight to church.
Her church is Westminster Presbyterian. It sits across from the state capitol in a beautiful old Franciscan Mission-style building with a Byzantine sanctuary dome. I followed her in, and she reminded me of me, shaking hands and hugging people. I picked up a bulletin. We sat together on a pew about a third of the way back from the altar.
There was a choir in robes, a grand piano, a hand bell group, and a diverse crowd. It was about as full as the United Methodist church in Ozark where I semi-regularly visit; not packed, but a decent-sized gathering. Quite a few old people.
Church is where I’ve spent more of my life besides school and home, so despite my skepticism I tend to feel comfortable there.
I love church music. I didn’t know the hymns, but that didn’t keep me from singing.
The scripture reading was from the Old Testament book of Jonah. The story of the man who ran away from God and got swallowed by a giant fish has captivated me ever since I was a kid. I remember my parents reading it to me, and Sunday School and VBS lessons in which it came alive.
Old Testament stories are epic: Noah and the Ark, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, Baby Moses, David and Goliath, Queen Esther, Ruth, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Given higher importance alongside fairy tales, Mother Goose rhymes, Winnie the Pooh, Frog and Toad, Beatrix Potter’s tales, Dr. Seuss, and Little Golden Books, the stories from our family’s big red Bible Story Book laid the foundation for my life.
When the pastor started by proposing we should never give up on people, I thought, “Here we go. I’m 2,000 miles away from home and about to hear a sermon I could preach in my sleep.” It is not an exaggeration to say I have heard hundreds of sermons about Jonah.
They are all basically the same: God tells Jonah to go warn the people of Nineveh that they need to repent and turn to God. Jonah doesn’t want to, so he boards a ship going the opposite direction. God sends a storm; Jonah is thrown overboard, and God dispatches a fish to eat him and then spit him out onto dry land. He heads to Nineveh where the people listen and are saved. Then Jonah gets mad because the Ninevites didn’t deserve mercy.
God uses a hot sun, shade tree, and a worm that devours the shade to help Jonah understand that none of us deserve mercy, but because of his love God goes to great lengths to save people, and we should too.
It is beautiful, and as with almost everything I take apart and examine about my upbringing in the Southern Baptist Church, a double-edged sword. That’s because the same Bible story that built into me the principle of not giving up on people—this thing I do because I internalized that story and others like it that point me to the love, mercy, and grace of God eventually made flesh in the person of Jesus—has also made me a person who has difficulty ever giving up on people. Even when they engage in behavior that is completely inappropriate, cruel, dangerous, abusive, and in some cases, criminal.
I believe this dark side of the sword cuts through the heart of Christianity. It is a chronic problem, particularly for evangelicals, a cancer that steals and destroys the not-insignificant amount of good that is there. Denominations with this disease make their members easy prey for powerful bad actors inside and outside the church. The Southern Baptist Convention is sorely afflicted.
An example of this, and one of the most troubling aspects to me of the unfolding Immanuel Baptist Church scandal, is the role of the enablers. And not those who know full well what they are doing, but the ones who know not what they do.
They may be intelligent, accomplished, critically thinking people in other areas of their lives, but are so indoctrinated by stories like that of Jonah that they think they are doing the right thing—the godly thing—by sheltering an abuser; by believing the best, not giving up on someone they believe is repentant, investing hope in that person’s redemption. Even, as we see at Immanuel, at the expense of innocent people.
If that sounds crazy, it’s because it is. But I am an intelligent, accomplished, otherwise critically thinking person, and I have lived it. Now that I am outside that bubble looking in, I feel naive and ashamed. But I wasn’t stupid, nor an intentional enabler of bad behavior. On the contrary, I had extremely high standards of virtue, and one of those virtues was not giving up on people, so I took that to an extreme.
There were huge blind spots in my spiritual edification, and thus my understanding. There was no anticipation or acknowledgment of possible dark implications in these virtues—no psychological education, no discussion of the limits of these ideals in human relations, no basic training in boundaries.
I had to find these elsewhere, mostly after painful experiences that could have been avoided—and should be—in a healthy Christian life. No child of God should ever believe 1 Corinthians 13 means love literally endures all things. Nor that the greatest lover lays down her life. Nor a plethora of other things I am still trying to purge from my head like rotten potatoes that lurk in the bag along with fresh ones and stink up the whole pantry.
In the case of the Jonah story, if all you hear is that God wants you never to give up on anyone, and you trust the place you get that message, and you earnestly long to do what God wants; then never giving up on anyone becomes your goal. Your calling. It becomes what you think is right, no matter what.
An amazing thing happened that day I went to church with my friend that brings tears to my eyes as I recall it. Because for the first time in my 52 years of hearing the story of Jonah a pastor said, “Before we talk about never giving up on people, I want to say that if you are in a situation that is not safe emotionally or physically, the first thing you need to do is give up and get out.
“And we will help you. Come talk to me or any one of our staff. Tolerating toxic behavior is not what this story is about.”
Such a simple thing, really. But it makes all the difference.