The following article is adapted from a chapter of the book Eucontamination, which wrestles with themes of disgust psychology and Christian witness pertinent to faith communities in Cascadia.
My (Paul) personal journey out of mainstream evangelical Christianity began in college. I attended Grace College and majored in communications (after a not uncommon roundabout road through a few other majors). I was looking for a place to answer my questions about God. I came to school believing that my faith was true and that there were good answers to my questions. Unlike Billie, I was not so determined and studious as to keep pushing for answers, instead I was easily lulled into apathetic comfort with chicken wings, Dr. Pepper, and my new found freedom of adulthood. But the gnawing splinter for me was nationalism. I couldn’t believe how many churches displayed American flags outside and inside their buildings. This was during the second Gulf War and news of the torture perpetrated by American soldiers was all over the news, along with the other atrocities of that conflict, but very little discussion was to be found on campus. I expected to see Christians, of all people in my mind, being horrified by the news coming out of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but I heard nothing.¹ Having been raised in Turkiye—a land that still remembers the horrors of the Crusades—with a heavy dose of Five Iron Frenzy pumped into my head throughout highschool, I was ashamed to see the cross of Christ side by side with the flag of the most powerful military in the world—Jesus used as the symbol of empire. Questioning this connection by seeking the God of Love and the crucified Christ has continued to pull me after Jesus but out of and away from many churches.
So it was that my experience of running into a contradiction—how can a church that purports to follow a God who is Love so readily choose to embrace all the trappings of empire?—took me to a place of questioning and uncertainty. Those questions led to me asking more questions and continued to unravel so much of what I had taken for granted. I couldn’t ignore or avoid the contradiction once I’d found it. Like Weezer’s sweater, I had to keep pulling while I walked away. Can I still be a follower of the way of Jesus and consider myself a Christian? The uncertainty gnawed directly into my sense of identity. My carefully constructed categories crumbled. I was deconstructing my faith in the face of my doubts. Importantly, though, this was not a reactive desertion of everything I once believed. This was a dogged pursuit of what had first wooed me into the church: Jesus. I was reading more, wrestling more, praying more, all while I doubted more. Love led me to deconstruct who I thought I was and what I thought the Gospel was. Love pointed me towards Truth.
Truth or Bullshit
Truth is not an abstract set of propositions we can depend on; Truth is more (though not less) than that. Truth is a person: God. And to have faith is to trust in the One who is Truth; as Jesus tells his followers in John 6:29 “This is the labor of God, that you have faith in him whom that one sent.” When our bullshit* lives are confronted with the Truth, we face the choice between acceding to our disgust reaction or trusting the One who is Truth to let that Truth eucontaminate our bullshit realities.² And this is terrifying; it requires that we exchange certainty for doubt. Paradoxically, clinging to certainty is the rejection of truth: allowing ourselves to be governed by our spiritual gag reflexes. That is what Jesus describes to Nicodemus as “God’s judgment.” To be left to our little bullshit worlds desperately producing and smearing more bullshit over any cracks with the temerity to let in a little light.
*We use this more vulgar term here to build off the concept from an earlier chapter that utilized the work of Harry Frankfurt and his book On Bullshit. In this way we argue that bullshit is an important concept in conversation with honesty and deception. To bullshit is to focus on creating an impression over representing truth. It is thus a greater threat to truth than outright deception because it has no concern for truth. The bullshitter may say something true or not. They are only concerned with their impact regardless of fact. In the previous chapter we use this frame to argue that the ego is a “bullshit self” and that humans are drawn towards preserving our bullshit images over facing a shared reality.
And we know that to be eucontaminated by Truth is not easy. We admire those who demonstrate fidelity to the Truth. We hold fidelity to the Truth to be a high virtue. But our language and our stories, our whole world, is also heavy with the recognition that the Truth can be severe. Too often we talk about “hard truths” when we are really selling our own bullshit. What passes as hard truth for someone else or their community never seems to be hard for me or my community. It’s always hard for them—never in the first person, only in the second or third. The one who takes a posture of being eucontaminated by Truth is not a person who is willing to be scorned by others for telling them what’s up. It is a person willing to be impacted by others, open to Truth wherever she may be hiding, pursuing a God who insists from the margins and haunts our comforts. Truth rarely erupts out of us and onto others, showering down with power and destruction, but irrupts into our own world, destabilizing and disturbing.
In Christianity we speak of prophetic voices or, in Walter Brueggmann’s idiom, of prophetic imagination.³ Within the text of scripture we encounter both false and true prophets: voices whom we might characterize as those who reinforce our bullshit with bullshit confidence (false prophets) and voices who eucontaminate our world with Truth. False prophets may say things that we find uncomfortable. They may well demand that we give, serve, or obey more, they may strike us as severe or demanding but at the end of the day their words are not marked by the necessity for any profound transformation of our lives. In contrast to that, the prophetic voices in the Bible and prophetic speech today are marked by suffering. As Brueggemann explains, the prophetic imagination is informed by compassion for and empathy towards the unjust state of the marginalized.⁴ The suffering of the oppressed has irrupted successfully into the world of the Prophet and when she speaks, the greater Truth of her re-structured world insists upon our own bullshit existence. Beyond uncomfortable; prophetic utterance insists on the death of our reality in preparation for its re-structuring around what the Truth conveys. True prophetic language confronts us with the suffering of the other and insists that we break open our insulated reality and accept that suffering into ourselves, first as empathy and compassion, but then in the form of action and a fresh imagination of the world. True prophecy invites us into life through the death of our old comfortable social realities. In Brueggemann’s words:
The cross is the ultimate metaphor of prophetic criticism because it means the end of the old consciousness that brings death on everyone. The crucifixion articulates God’s odd freedom, his strange justice, and his peculiar power. It is this freedom (read religion of God’s freedom), justice (read economics of sharing), and power (read politics of justice) which break the power of the old age and bring it to death. Without the cross, prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and as destructive as that which it criticizes. The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.⁵
In John 8, (after the famous line about truth setting people free) Jesus brings some harsh language for those who reject his teaching. “Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.” (v. 43). This point is important as it raises the question of why they could not bear to hear Truth. The conversation in the chapter is all about identity. Those who can hear the Truth are those that have cultivated a relationship and love for Truth, over and above their imagined identities. These people are less concerned with impressions and images of themselves than they are with pursuing Truth. Jesus is calling us to fall in love with Truth rather than trying to control or master it through propositions and data. This means allegiance and trust in something more than our group, risking our own belonging for something far more valuable. Fidelity to Truth will inevitably lead to heresy in one’s own group.⁶ “Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country” (John 4:44).
On the other hand, those who cannot bear to hear Truth are those whose allegiance is first and foremost to their earthly identities—the categories sanctioned by the existing social authority. When we are most concerned with belonging to a group, we will buy any amount of bullshit to be counted in. Consider the ridiculous lengths college students go to join a fraternity. The desire to belong is so strong. Social psychologists have long shown how people will deny blatant reality if they are in a group where everyone else does.⁷ Personality factors do not play into this and it’s a finding that’s been replicated across the globe. People will modify reality to belong and you are no exception. Cults have long preyed on this desire for community, leading to all manner of controlling and horrific behavior. Importantly, one of the biggest risk factors for being lured into a cult is the belief that you are immune. We buy our own bullshit.
On Discourse
The psychoanalytic thinker we have been relying heavily on in this book, Jacques Lacan, had some fascinating thoughts on discourse and how it structures our world and communities for better or ill. According to Lacan, all social relationships are structured through a form of discourse. The very act of communicating is always already within the context of a discourse. While the content of that communication matters, the structure itself also plays a deeply significant role. As Marshal McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.”⁸ How you say something—the form of your communication—is as, if not more, important than the content. Think about how you choose whether to call, text, zoom, write a letter, or meet up with someone in person to tell them something. The context matters—it shapes the very message.
According to Lacan, every act of communication is formed in a discourse and can be analyzed structurally as well for content. His analysis asks about the truth that motivates the speaking agent in the first place (something that is always unconscious to that agent) and what the product of the discourse is. Significantly, he highlights that those two, the truth that motivates and the result of communication, can never perfectly connect—all communication involves a failure. You can never say all that you mean but will always say far more and far less than you imagine. Words say too much and never enough. This is in part because the truth that motivates your speech is necessarily unconscious to you. You think you know why you are talking but there is always more to the story. Poetry and myth—wilder forms of communication more inclined to embrace both the limitations and preconscious meaning they convey—are sometimes able to communicate more fully or wholly than didactic prose. Have you ever found yourself wondering what you’re saying as you spoke or been surprised by what you just said? There’s always more going on. We aren’t going to get too far into the full theory of the discourses here (though it is well worth it if you have the time) but we do want to highlight one of the discourses that Lacan posited: the university discourse.⁹
The university discourse starts with knowledge that comes from some sacred text or revered master. This could be the writings of important theologians and thinkers to a denomination or group, or perhaps even a bit of how we have used Lacanian theory in this text. The university discourse shares more and more knowledge, data, and facts with a desiring other—someone who feels a lack and need for it like a student or parishioner. However, this discourse always keeps two things hidden: the fallibility of the master and the resulting split in the listener. This means that the more knowledge that is shared, the greater the feeling of discontent in the listener because the unacknowledged truth of this discourse is that the master is lacking. The wizard is just a doddering little man with the same lack as everyone else—it can’t guarantee its own value. Like drinking coke on a hot day, the student will feel a conscious desire to know more, but will never be satisfied by the information they receive. While your thirst may be slated for a moment, your body is still dehydrated and will prompt you to drink more. The product of this discourse is always a further split in the listener because the knowledge being consumed is unable to satisfy.
The university, or church, will continually produce more knowledge—books, sermons, podcasts, and lectures—that will feel essential, but is actually endless. You could know everything there is to know about something and will still feel incomplete and unprepared. I (Paul) see this in my students every year as they prepare for their counseling internship where they will finally start providing psychotherapy to real people instead of simply reading and learning about it. There is a sharp disconnection between any information I could give them about how to provide therapy better and their own feelings of preparedness. In fact, the more I try to prepare them and teach them, the more insecure they feel. Their imposter syndrome is about something much more human and real than clinical skills, theory, or technique—there’s a reason Freud referred to psychoanalysis as one of the impossible professions.
What this discourse helps highlight is that knowledge and certainty is a game. It is the product of obfuscation and insulation and is thus more bullshit than Truth. This is not to say that all knowledge is false—remember bullshit may or may not correspond with the given state of things—but that Truth is something more. Information and knowledge is more in service of fantasy and group cohesion than Truth. More often than not it works to insulate us from Truth rather than expose us to it. This, again, is why Truth is usually found with the heretics, the discarded, the outcasts, and the hated. One simple (and inevitably simplistic) heuristic for the difference between a true and false prophet is how well they are accepted by their people. A true prophet doesn’t help people feel better about themselves—she haunts more than soothes. Insofar as this book has aligned with your own worldview, be careful!
And so we can see the language games that are used to silence the messages and messengers that would threaten the official, institutional position. Instead of being recognized as prophets, they are called heretics or apostates because of the very circular reason that they are questioning the core tenets of the institutionalized church. This leaves the institution safe. The act of questioning itself “justifies” the accusation of contamination. Deconstruction became such a polarizing idea for this very reason, but many who deconstructed—ourselves included—would argue we have followed Jesus out of our churches. Pursuing Truth threatened the institution, but not our love for Christ. It was that love that refused to stay settled, silent, and quiet in the face of injustice, racism, and nationalism.
¹ This is not to say that no one was talking about this in Christian circles. See David P. Gushee, Still Christian; Greg Boyd, Myth of a Christian Nation; and Shane Claiborne, Irresistible Revolution, for examples of leading voices in this discussion, but they were not discussed at all on my campus.
² Eucontamination is the central thesis of the book and denotes a contamination for good wherein the typical function of contamination serves the purpose of healing instead of harming the host. For more see Hoard & Hoard, Eucontamination.
³ Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination.
⁴ Brueggemann, 85-88.
⁵ Brueggemann, 95.
⁶ See Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You.
⁷ See Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader, PLOS ONE.
⁸ See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media.
⁹ For more on the discourses see Paul Verhaeghe, From Impossibility to Inability; and Alexandre Leupin, Lacan Today.
Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com
Cover photo credit: Jr Korpa
