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March 8 - March 28, 2020
we also want to surround ourselves with people who will confirm our ideology, thus affirming our own identity and making us feel good about ourselves.
John Stott intuitively stated that, “The people we immediately, instinctively like, and find it easy to get on with are the people who give us the respect we consider we deserve. . . . In other words, personal vanity is a key factor in all our relationships.”
By simply associating with a high-status person or group, people felt better about themselves, even when the reason for the association was quite trivial.
We tend to gravitate toward churches that “look good”—from presentation to population to property—because to be associated with an organization that is successful and attractive makes us look like we are successful and attractive.
Another social identity theorist named C. R. Snyder observed that in addition to increasing self-esteem by BIRGing, people also reliably boost and maintain self-esteem by distancing themselves from losers.
It also showed that often our self-esteem takes priority over group memberships. We tend to remain in the group as long as it’s good for our self-esteem. But if the going gets tough and our self-esteem starts to suffer, we’re likely to change group membership in order to preserve our self-esteem.
It’s more important for us to feel good ourselves than to embrace other members of the body of Christ.
In the end, we may technically share group membership and the label of “followers of Christ,” but we are no longer a team. We are driven by our own needs, not the needs of the entire group. We are teammates in name but not in heart. Our ability to unite with the entire body of Christ is seriously impeded when our primary concern is to preserve our self-esteem.
Unfortunately, for the most part, our divided body of Christ is not living up to this ideal. Our identities tend not to overlap across cultural lines, and our commitment to Christ is not holding us together. Instead, our need to feel good about ourselves often comes at the expense of commitment to each other.
The body of Christ is like a bad marriage.
One day, after receiving yet another indifferent response from a potential employer, Pimentel expressed his frustration to one of his differently abled friends, wondering aloud how he could change the way the American public perceived differently abled people. His friend’s response was incredibly insightful. He said, “You don’t need to change how they see [differently abled] people. You need to change how they see themselves.”
This approach will work for the body of Christ too. We need to adopt the belief that to be a follower of Christ means to care deeply about and pursue other followers of Christ, including the ones that we don’t instinctively value or like.
To the extent that culturally different members of the body of Christ are included in our identity and ingroup, we’ll resist the urge to ditch them when the going gets tough or in order to save our self-esteem. This idea gives me hope that members of the body of Christ can experience significant and much-needed identity shifts that will bring us closer toward unity.
Not only do we use our group to create affirming spaces for our beleaguered identities, but we also shore up self-esteem by perceiving situations in biased ways. We want to believe that we, and by extension our groups, are good and valuable, so we go to great and even irrational lengths to maintain positive perceptions of ourselves.
Regardless of the situation, in our eyes, our particular group is superior. By thinking highly of ourselves, we naturally think less of others. There might be social problems in the world, but our group is not responsible for them. That other group is the cause of all of the ills.
I know that this is a tad bit dark, but if someone approached me, confessing an uncomfortable bout of low self-esteem and asking for a quick and dirty boost to their self-esteem, I would advise that person to put someone else down. The unfortunate truth is that the easiest and most effective way to boost your own image is to lower someone else’s. Most of us learn this the moment we step foot on an elementary school playground. By the time we reach high school, we are quite skilled at both blatant and subtle putdowns.
This is the sort of subtle belittling that runs rampant on elementary school playgrounds, in high school hallways and within the body of Christ. We don’t often picket each other’s churches or boycott each other’s events, but we do often make snarky comments that threaten our unity in subtle but potent ways. Rather than reaching out to contribute to what God is doing in other church groups, we’d prefer to sit back and talk about how they’re missing the point or going about it all wrong.
Group memberships based on ethnicity, political affiliation and so forth are not bad per se. In fact, they can be quite useful. The problem is that, if we place too much value in them, they can prevent us from finding our identity in grander, far more important groups. In this case, the grander, far more important group that often gets overlooked is the body of Christ.
However, my lack of desire for friendships with stay-at-home moms was spurred on by my own identity and self-esteem issues—namely, my difficulties in carving a path for myself in the Christian world. I often observed that the Christian world validated more traditional female roles, and my identity was threatened by what I perceived to be a lack of support for my nontraditional path.
We must find our true source of self-esteem, restore our true identity and relativize all others if we’re going to have a fighting chance at unity. I believe that the metaphor of the body of Christ, which preaches mutual crosscultural interdependence, was designed to rescue us from homogeneity and remind us of our truest identity—as diverse people united in Christ.
Well, research on self-affirmation theory has found that derogating other groups isn’t the only effective way to regain self-esteem. Another powerful way to regain self-esteem is to simply affirm the self, even if you affirm a part of the self that is unrelated to the part that has been threatened.
For many historically oppressed people in the church (e.g., women, people of color, etc.), crosscultural journeys with the goal of connecting to the other parts of the body come at great cost and great risk.
In my work with churches, I find that most Christians agree that we should unite across ethnic, linguistic and socioeconomic lines but only if we share beliefs and practices with the other.
Sherif had a hunch that group competition for scarce resources was a significant cause of group hostility and prejudice. He believed that this was most likely to occur when groups competed for an important goal that can only be attained by one group at the expense of the other group.
Researchers have found that between 1880 and 1930, the lynching of African Americans increased when cotton prices decreased in the South.
More recently, research has demonstrated that discrimination toward immigrant groups increases when unemployment levels are high. When everyone is vying for a small number of jobs, people are less tolerant of immigrants.
Interestingly, even though we all agree that it is important to possess accurate theology and lead authentic lives of faith, we don’t agree on what this looks like. Further, the stakes are pretty high. We tend to care. We tend to be invested. We tend to believe that we have dutifully done our homework. We tend to be convinced that we possess the most accurate view. We tend to believe that our view should be the only view. All of these tendencies inevitably set the stage for a realistic conflict.
Once we realize that the stakes are high and that only one viewpoint can prevail, we must justify our belief that our viewpoint is most deserving of victory.
Michael Zarate and colleagues studied how nationals are culturally threatened by immigrants. When people were asked to consider the possibility of sharing a community with immigrants who differed in language and interpersonal style, they felt threatened and responded with negative emotions. However, when they were asked to consider the possibility of sharing a community with immigrants who possessed the same language and interpersonal style, they were not at all threatened and did not respond negatively.
Why do cultural threats trigger such strong reactions from us? We’ll look at three causes in particular. First, cultural threats increase ambiguity, which is unfortunate because we hate ambiguity. Second, cultural threats can confuse us, especially when they are caused by people who are supposed to be members of our group. Third, cultural threats are threatening because we fear negative consequences more than we seek positive outcomes.
Because we’re uncomfortable with ambiguity, if we can find a concept to help us make sense of the world, we will cling to it—even if the concept is incomplete. We want to quickly close the door to ambiguity because it threatens who we are.
Scot McKnight uses the concept of atonement to illustrate how we are often divided by our different faith perspectives. In his book A Community Called Atonement, he presents various atonement metaphors—offering,
McKnight points out that it is quite ironic that the body of Christ is ardently divided over the definition of atonement—a concept that is relational and unifying by definition. Research on the need for cognitive closure helps to explain why our church group, when trying to make sense of a difficult and mysterious concept such as atonement, might cling to one metaphor of atonement and resist acceptance of other metaphors. To acknowledge that other useful metaphors might exist is to risk opening what we have already cognitively closed.
People with a strong need for cognitive closure aren’t stupid, they just have a higher need to predict and control the world around them. It makes the world seem more safe, predictable and understandable.
Cultural distinctions are so crucial to maintaining ingroup/outgroup boundaries that group members have a special hatred for other ingroup members who, for the most part, act like normal ingroup members but do not “toe the party line” on one or two important issues.
Examples of black sheep are a pro-choice Republican and a pro-death-penalty Democrat. For the most part, the individual buys into the majority ideology, but fails to toe the party line when it comes to one issue. Yeah, we hate those people.
Can replace Republican and Democrat in this paragraph with Christian.
Outgroup members are supposed to disagree with us. As such, we are not as threatened by their disagreement.
Within the context of the larger body of Christ, when we interact with fellow Christians who possess a different cultural viewpoint or tradition, we are often interacting with what we perceive to be black sheep. Due to the gold standard effect, we believe that our culturally influenced beliefs and practices are the best ones and that our cultural group should be the standard against which all other cultural groups are measured. As a result of this thinking, anyone who disagrees with us is perceived as someone who is failing to live up to the cultural group’s standards—a black sheep.
According to research on cognitive closure and the black sheep effect, when faced with a different cultural viewpoint, we’re inclined to cling to our existing beliefs and reject the perspectives and wisdom of the outgroup, even when it might make sense to open up and learn. In other words, we tend to separate ourselves from the rest of the body. Unfortunately, our insistence upon cognitive closure is inconsistent with the reality of knowing Christ (and all of his mysteries) and being part of a body that by definition possesses different viewpoints that don’t necessarily lead to a tidy answer.
E. Tory Higgins, a social psychologist who studies the self and motivation, makes a distinction between prevention and promotion orientation that can help to explain the culture of fear in the body of Christ. Basically, Higgins believes that people are motivated by promotion (achieving a lofty ideal or advancement) or by prevention (avoiding danger or negative consequences). The promotion-oriented student, for example, is motivated to study for an exam in order to obtain a good grade. Her motivation to study is driven by positivity and hope for achievement. On the contrary, the
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Higgins has found that promotion is related to eagerness (a sensitivity to and desire for positive outcomes), whereas prevention is related to vigilance (a sensitivity to and avoidance of negative outcomes).
Researchers have found evidence for a trait negativity bias: humans have a tendency to pay more attention to and place more value on negative information than positive information.
In addition, Tiffany Ito and others have found that “negative information weighs more heavily on the brain.”
From a survival perspective, it makes sense for people to stay alert to negative information; in order to stay safe, you need to be aware of the dangers. However, from a kingdom perspective, it is adaptive for members of the body of Christ to stay alert to positive information about others. In order to stay unified, we need to override our natural tendency to focus on what we perceive to be negative information about other groups and instead stay alert to the positive information that they bring to the table of faith.
The glaring problem here is that our definition of we is far too small—it includes those who are part of our homogenous group and excludes everyone else in the diverse body of Christ.
Indeed, when we adopt an inclusive identity, we are more likely to see how other groups can help us and are more willing to receive constructive criticism from them.
As we begin to change the way we see ourselves—through adopting more inclusive language, doing self-affirmation exercises that remind us of common membership in the body of Christ and overriding the effects of natural categorizing—we will begin to see that they are a part of us.
Sometimes what we perceive to be a realistic conflict is in fact a cultural threat. We believe that we are fighting the good fight for an immutable truth, when in fact we are simply waging war against a cultural threat, a different perspective that threatens ours.
These definitions suggest that religion and culture operate in extremely similar ways; both create symbols, meanings, languages and practices that unify and organize groups of people over an extended period of time.
Just like cultural beliefs affect how people respond to certain situations, religious beliefs can also affect how people respond to certain situations.
