Notice Their Smiles… Then Their Actions
“We often say that the perpetrator was living a double life. I often call it the ‘quadruple life,’ however. There is the public self we present to the world, the private self we share selectively with others, the blind self that is clear to others but remains hidden to us, and the undiscovered self which, like the shadow, contains unseen and unconscious aspects of ourselves.” Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes To Church
Much can be said about how churches often discredit their adherents in the face of some unmentionable wrong committed by those in positions of power and influence in the Body of Faith. We have libraries of data and articles, police reports, and televised interviews mixed in with Netflix documentaries documenting just how often bad individuals subvert the moral compass of neutral or good individuals within religious communities forcing them to turn a blind eye to the criminal things happening behind their closed doors.
We can cite the thuggish messiah complex of David Koresh and his Branch Davidian cult from Waco, Texas whose ideas led them to face off against the American federal government. After a lengthy siege and a suspicious fire, their compound went up in flames for the world to see. The autopsy reports of all who perished in the compound listed the cause of death for men, women, and children alike, under the classifications of suffocation as a result of smoke inhalation, blunt force trauma from the edifice falling on them after catching fire, and many, many of them, children, had gunshot wounds listed as their cause of death.
Jim Jones was a disgraced social revolutionary who integrated previously racially segregated religious spaces through animated preaching and teaching. His animus led many of his most ardent followers to give up all they owned to follow him to a developing country where they would, with time, meet their horrific ends at the mouth of a cup of cyanide-laced juice. Many of them, children included, had died from gunshot wounds.
Numerous cults exist as a result of cult leaders, the social and financial environment surrounding them, and the proclivities of the individuals who join them to belong and to be part of something that ascribes to them and their cause a greater meaning than life had previously relayed in their day-to-day vocations. Without adherents and followers, cults and their leaders simply disintegrate or rebrand. With each rebrand, you see a new gimmick applied to attract new followers or old ones who were discouraged by the belief system’s previous approach to life. When cults dissolve and disintegrate, their leaders are either arrested, killed, or commit suicide.
Cult leaders cannot survive without hosts. Like parasites, without something or someone to drain life out of, they simply cease to exist.
The problem I want to address today, isn’t necessarily the all-too-obvious and nefarious agency of cult leaders and cultic religious movements that we have become so accustomed to via the news, documentaries, and research. These movements are now well documented and yes, there are more resources available today than there were back then, in the mid-1960s through the 1990s when many of these movements operated with impunity; their adherents completely unaware of how their brains and emotions were being re-wired to think only as the cult leader thought. Critical thinking through the eyes of someone being victimized, love-bombed, isolated, or gaslit, was at times not even within the vocabulary of the people in these movements back in the day the way they have become standard vernacular for us now.
I want to address the duplicitous and often dangerous reality of toxic positivity and its relation and constant use, as a tactic and practice in the church today.
Tchiki Davis, Ph.D., writing for Psychology Today defines the term this way:
“Toxic positivity is defined as the act of rejecting or denying stress, negativity, or other negative experiences that exist (Sokal, Trudel, & Babb, 2020).”
Toxic positivity is a studied thought-terminating tactic, used by skilled leaders with wanton desires or by unassuming religious adherents who have been duped into believing that denialism is a form of faith maturation.
Thought-terminating tactics include but are not limited to:
“It is what it is.”
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
“No, because I said so.”
“Why? Because I’m your dad/mom/husband/wife.”
“Yolo.”
“God said so.”
“It’s written in the Bible.”
“I saw it in a dream.”
“God revealed it to me.”
“But don’t you do the same thing?” or “But haven’t you done worse?”
“What are your credentials?”
“Let’s drop it.”
“You’re too blessed to be stressed.”
Thought termination is a means to distort or dismiss reality, to prevent an inquirer from attaining the necessary information they need to make the best possible informed decision in their respective circumstance. This technique is so successful after some time that the individual prevents himself or herself from thinking critically about the world around them even when their cult leader, their overprotective parent, or authoritarian parent or structure is no longer around to weigh on them the psychological responsibilities of that movement.
When you question your very ability to question things, when you cannot even rise to the occasion to ask whether or not you should reconsider the potentially harmful decisions of your belief, your movement, or your leader, than you are a victim of cult think and thought-terminating cliches.
Herein is the issue with toxic positivity and its relationship with problematic religious circles. When you combine exploitative tactics from a secular view with the power dynamics found within religious circles you can create a near multi-century control tactic and environment that becomes, after some time, nearly impossible to recognize, name, and break away from.
Examples of this include but are not limited to: The Jehovah’s Witness WatchTower Society, a publication center devoted to the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witness sect that prevents its religious adherents from reading any sources of information, religious or otherwise, about them, outside of their avenues of information and control. Meaning that any attempt to investigate the Watch Tower Society by a “witness” is akin to blasphemy since the society is the spokesperson of Jehovah on earth. To question the society is to question God.
When news of mistreatment, or abuse, be it sexual, emotional, psychological, or spiritual occurs within the movement the society will convince its adherents that these accusations are satanic and that all is well in God’s kingdom. They must in turn trust their leaders, listen to their local ministers, and without fail, rely on the intellectual superiority of their leaders at the Water Tower Society over their ability to critically analyze information.
But this level of thought control and thought management isn’t only found and experienced within sectarian movements. You can find it in modern, open, and non-traditional church movements like that of modern prosperity or hedonistic entertainment preacher circles. Ministers who utilize thought-terminating cliches to prevent believers from questioning their watered-down sermons, teachings, and lessons.
Whenever you find yourself in a religious environment where everyone is optimistic, you feel motivated to progress in life and with time share the same level of optimism in your life with others. The danger, however, is when there is a foreboding sense of malversation in the air, an environment of misconduct, a legacy of moral failures, and legal misgivings afoot and no one is talking about it. In fact, everyone behaves as if the wrongs on the news, on social media, and in the mouths of your neighbors about your movement are all fabrications of the devil or distractions from what God wants to do for you through your local community and its deified leader.
Toxic positivity within Christian circles works to control your thoughts, the doctrines you adhere to, or the way you understand those doctrines. It serves to control the language used within the Church, so as not to use “spiritually defeated” language that discourages others from falling in line with the shared pensament on a particular topic. It serves to protect the sacredness of silence and civil inattention required of believers to not only promote the wrongs being done in the church but also protect the wrongdoers.
Toxic positivity is false optimism. And false or inauthentic anything within the body of Christ is the symptom of something more nefarious happening elsewhere in that person or group’s private lives.
The difference between toxic positivity and faith, as in, believing in God for forgiveness, salvation, and spiritual security in light of life’s many woes, is that faith survives calamity and disaster, whereas toxic positivity reproduces spiritual and social psychosis. A follower of Christ who rests his or her hope in Christ for life’s many challenges will adapt and change, will feel joy and sorrow, will jubilate or experience depression, as the waves of worry inundate life or as the rays of sunshine radiate hope upon them. Life cannot be lived through others therefore when trials and tribulations arrive at our doorstep we mustn’t live in the denial that those things are there. In fact, our character is molded better by pain than by pleasure. Our mind is made sharp by new and accurate information that needs revisiting, analyzing, and correction, whereas it is made weak and ineffective by dull and dated information that has long been debunked and denounced. Our lives must experience challenges and pain, unfortunately, as a side effect of our present predicament as humans living in a fallen world, for us to develop social and emotional skills to mature. Similar to our spiritual lives, we must progress from elementary doctrines to weightier ones that better fortify us in the person of Christ. Relying on gimmicks, tricks, and entertainment to foster in us a greater sense of love and adoration for Jesus is a recipe for disaster, at best, and apostasy at worst.
Toxic positivity will have you believing that you are not, in fact, depressed. Because believers cannot be depressed. It will force you to mimic the smile of a deranged person, all to save face and maintain your position within the social group you are part of. Because to propose otherwise will incite the wrath of that religious leader and social ostracism from that group.
Faith, on the other hand, serves to edify, despite the reality of wrongs, to hold accountable, in light of wrongs, to denounce, in the face of sin, and to praise God, in the throes of misery.
Toxic positivity will drain you of your humanity just so you can belong to a group; maintain your friendships within it, and prepare your mind to be further exploited by cultic environments and cultish relationships.
Love bombing, another cult technique, serves to break down your “walls” if you would, to make you more susceptible to the people or persons who have ulterior motives for you in mind. Thought-terminating cliches serve to prevent you from thinking about the very imminent danger you are in by remaining in that relationship and social sphere. Toxic positivity teaches you to smile while you suffer the psychological abuse of it all.
Avoid church environments (and secular ones) that promote and build upon superficial joy and false optimism because more often than not, they’re hiding some form of sinful nature and illegal behavior, tactic, or purpose behind the veneer of positivity.
Learn to tell the difference by asking believers to open up about their troubles and worries. See if they end their stories with rapid shifts of thought by stating, “But God will provide!” or “I still believe in miracles!” or “I declare it.” or “I call it into existence.”
These are not words of an empathetic, well-thinking, honest person. They are simply rehashing and regurgitating words and sentiments they were taught to repeat from childhood without thinking through them well.
Biblical faith, from the Psalmists to the Proverbs and well into Lamentations teaches us that life in the body of believers includes joy as well as sorrow, at times, in the absence of a reassuring word from God. For He does allow us to go through pain, more often than the joy we want to experience. And if we’re not careful, we may base our faith more on moralistic hedonism than on the person of Jesus Christ, who, in fact, calls us to deny and die to ourselves and live for Him.
Therefore, remember, if you walk into a church and you find a person here or there using the standard traits of toxic positivity, it does not, in fact, mean that the church in question is a cult. What you need to determine is if their doctrines, the purpose that drives them to church every Sunday or whichever day of the week, is the person of Christ or a shady, often felt, seldom discussed, difficult to verbalize sense of superficiality hidden behind a smile and a firm handshake.
You won’t be able to determine this by attending just once but you will tell when you see and witness and feel that certain questionable things are going on, ungodly, heretical, and criminal things happening behind the scenes that everyone refuses to discuss, whilst smiling through their denial. And if you’re not careful, you too, for the sake of want of belonging, will refuse to acknowledge these things and, with a sinister smile, will say, “To God be all the glory!”
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
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