Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2024-05-12 10:35 pm
silveradept) wrote2024-05-12 10:35 pm
My Happiness Is Not Your Church's To Command.
One of the several churches I go by on the way to work had an interesting message on their advertising sign: "It's time for you to be happy again."
I found it interesting mostly because this is, I'm guessing, a Protestant-aligned Christian church showing this message. (A cursory glance at their website says they're Christian, yes, and their values and beliefs strike me as people who would happily call themselves evangelicals.) They bill themselves as the "happiest church in the [area code]," so this emphasis on happiness is put into their design as well as their marketing. And…I'm kind of interested to know where they got this idea from that it's time to be happy again, because I thought Christianity was not generally a belief system that promoted happiness as a core tenet or a thing to achieve in life. Quite a bit of the parts that are the Christian part of the Christian Foundational Writings are concerned with the eternal happiness and reward of heaven after life, and the happiness that comes from living a life according to the tenets laid out for you, and what is supposed to be happiness that comes from suffering for your beliefs or the persecution that comes from them. The parts collected from Judaism are a little bit better about temporal happiness and happiness without additional conditions attached to it, but there's definitely a desire in some strains of Christian thought to make differences between temporary temporal happiness from external sources and the more internal and lasting happiness or joy that comes from that security of your faith or from enduring trials in life. The former is something that's a blessing, but not an end in of itself, the latter is what Christians are exhorted to strive for. So, as usual, there's the need to ask exactly what's meant about "happy" in "It's time for you to be happy again."
I suspect, however, that there are much more obvious things here that we are supposed to be leaving behind in the exhortation to be happy again, and I am significantly less pleased if that is part of their messaging. It's true that the official words and proclamations coming out from our authorities is that we have managed to defeat the scariest parts of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and we can resume our normal lives and interactions with each other, safe in the understanding that our vaccines, if we received them, will hopefully keep us from dying from an infection. The reality of the situation is significantly less glib, and there are still all the people who have not survived to this point. And there is yet again destruction and death by a government against an oppressed people elsewhere in the world, and there are agents of the state in the United States committing violence against those who protest their resources being used to fund that destruction, and the participation of their government, their universities, their industries and companies, in funding and supplying that destruction. There is a major party candidate who seems intent on getting elected so that he no longer has to deal with free, fair, and contested elections nor has to respect the principle that all persons in the country are subjected to its laws. And he seems to have enough sycophants in the judiciary willing to let him ignore that principle. (You can substitute your own conservative politicians trying to hurt people here, even if it doesn't seem to be quite as terrible as the potential end to democratic rule.) Things seem pretty dire, and there's not much for happiness or joy to be found in the state of the world, as described by many of our media outlets. If the exhortation to be happy is about ignoring the suffering of other people or ignoring what dangers are around you, then that seems very much against at last some of the tenets of Christianity. (That story about a Samaritan who found a man who had been beset by robbers, took him to an inn, and made sure his needs were cared for, as opposed to the priests and holy men who had passed him by, too busy in their own business to attend to the human needs of others, for example.)
On the other paw, compassion fatigue and compassion burnout are definitely real things. It's always possible to find someone else who is suffering and to deny your own happiness and joy because someone else is suffering, and to feel guilt or shame at not having the resources to assist every person who needs it. (Unless you are someone who has those kinds of resources at your disposal, and then perhaps you should feel shame that you have been given all those talents and are not investing them wisely in ways that will benefit yourself and the people around you that, as a Christian, you are exhorted to assist, rather than exploit.) If someone denies their own happiness long enough, or does not experience happiness in their lives for long enough, then they start looking for ways to stop the suffering, and sometimes that progresses to looking for ways to stop the suffering permanently. I think I can say with confidence that most Christians do not want their religious beliefs to be the catalyst to someone choosing death over life. So there must be times of happiness, even possibly of seeking happiness, so that someone can refresh themselves, possibly set down their burdens for some time, and then continue on the journey of life feeling better than when they stopped to rest. Rather than what happens in the "Footprints" thing that is probably still popular in various places, where instead of being abandoned in the worst times, we are supposed to believe that Jesus chose to carry us through the most difficult parts because we couldn't go on by ourselves and needed divine help.
I think the thing that bothers me the most about this hillside message is the imperativeness of it, or the ease in which it can be read as an imperative. It could be intended as an invitation for someone to experience what they have, on the idea that someone has suffered sufficiently in the eyes of everyone else that they can begin to let happiness back into their lives. But it very much feels like this is a demand, a statement that someone has been unhappy for too long, has been focusing on the wrong things, and that now it's time to leave that thought process behind and come back to a state of happiness, even if that happiness comes with steep costs, like deliberate ignorance or indifference to others, or in being brought into the fold, consensually or no, of those believers that espouse the prosperity gospel and turn their efforts toward gathering material rewards as proof and keeping score of how favored they are by God. Even if the idea is that it is time to come into the fullness of understanding of the great gifts and grace of Christianity and assume the happiness that comes from having accepted the possibility of eternal salvation and being one of those who Jesus will count as one of his own at the moment of judgment, the potential imperative along with it carries the threat of coercion, or that a person has to first profess allegiance and speak the correct shibboleths of being part of the in-group and then they will receive the happiness that has been set aside for them, whether that's temporal happiness or eternal happiness. Compulsory Christianity is certainly in the goals of many of those who wish to seize the levers of temporal power and use them to create a "Christian nation" and to, as they claim, "take back America for God." The happiness that comes from that is much more the happiness of the Simpsons world where Ned Flanders became the unquestioned ruler of the planet. "Just relax and let the hooks do the work." Or the constant smiles needed for a Paranoia game.
To say "It's time for you to be happy again" is, in its most charitable, a reminder that despite the terribleness of the world around us, there are reasons not to give into despair and to make time for us to refresh ourselves and do things that make us happy. At its least charitable, it is a demand that we ignore the things around us or consider them to be mere artifacts of the past and focus on making sure that we are happy because we are secure in the reward that we will receive and nothing else matters. I think, perhaps, this message needed a few more thoughts before being deployed to the hillside.
I found it interesting mostly because this is, I'm guessing, a Protestant-aligned Christian church showing this message. (A cursory glance at their website says they're Christian, yes, and their values and beliefs strike me as people who would happily call themselves evangelicals.) They bill themselves as the "happiest church in the [area code]," so this emphasis on happiness is put into their design as well as their marketing. And…I'm kind of interested to know where they got this idea from that it's time to be happy again, because I thought Christianity was not generally a belief system that promoted happiness as a core tenet or a thing to achieve in life. Quite a bit of the parts that are the Christian part of the Christian Foundational Writings are concerned with the eternal happiness and reward of heaven after life, and the happiness that comes from living a life according to the tenets laid out for you, and what is supposed to be happiness that comes from suffering for your beliefs or the persecution that comes from them. The parts collected from Judaism are a little bit better about temporal happiness and happiness without additional conditions attached to it, but there's definitely a desire in some strains of Christian thought to make differences between temporary temporal happiness from external sources and the more internal and lasting happiness or joy that comes from that security of your faith or from enduring trials in life. The former is something that's a blessing, but not an end in of itself, the latter is what Christians are exhorted to strive for. So, as usual, there's the need to ask exactly what's meant about "happy" in "It's time for you to be happy again."
I suspect, however, that there are much more obvious things here that we are supposed to be leaving behind in the exhortation to be happy again, and I am significantly less pleased if that is part of their messaging. It's true that the official words and proclamations coming out from our authorities is that we have managed to defeat the scariest parts of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and we can resume our normal lives and interactions with each other, safe in the understanding that our vaccines, if we received them, will hopefully keep us from dying from an infection. The reality of the situation is significantly less glib, and there are still all the people who have not survived to this point. And there is yet again destruction and death by a government against an oppressed people elsewhere in the world, and there are agents of the state in the United States committing violence against those who protest their resources being used to fund that destruction, and the participation of their government, their universities, their industries and companies, in funding and supplying that destruction. There is a major party candidate who seems intent on getting elected so that he no longer has to deal with free, fair, and contested elections nor has to respect the principle that all persons in the country are subjected to its laws. And he seems to have enough sycophants in the judiciary willing to let him ignore that principle. (You can substitute your own conservative politicians trying to hurt people here, even if it doesn't seem to be quite as terrible as the potential end to democratic rule.) Things seem pretty dire, and there's not much for happiness or joy to be found in the state of the world, as described by many of our media outlets. If the exhortation to be happy is about ignoring the suffering of other people or ignoring what dangers are around you, then that seems very much against at last some of the tenets of Christianity. (That story about a Samaritan who found a man who had been beset by robbers, took him to an inn, and made sure his needs were cared for, as opposed to the priests and holy men who had passed him by, too busy in their own business to attend to the human needs of others, for example.)
On the other paw, compassion fatigue and compassion burnout are definitely real things. It's always possible to find someone else who is suffering and to deny your own happiness and joy because someone else is suffering, and to feel guilt or shame at not having the resources to assist every person who needs it. (Unless you are someone who has those kinds of resources at your disposal, and then perhaps you should feel shame that you have been given all those talents and are not investing them wisely in ways that will benefit yourself and the people around you that, as a Christian, you are exhorted to assist, rather than exploit.) If someone denies their own happiness long enough, or does not experience happiness in their lives for long enough, then they start looking for ways to stop the suffering, and sometimes that progresses to looking for ways to stop the suffering permanently. I think I can say with confidence that most Christians do not want their religious beliefs to be the catalyst to someone choosing death over life. So there must be times of happiness, even possibly of seeking happiness, so that someone can refresh themselves, possibly set down their burdens for some time, and then continue on the journey of life feeling better than when they stopped to rest. Rather than what happens in the "Footprints" thing that is probably still popular in various places, where instead of being abandoned in the worst times, we are supposed to believe that Jesus chose to carry us through the most difficult parts because we couldn't go on by ourselves and needed divine help.
I think the thing that bothers me the most about this hillside message is the imperativeness of it, or the ease in which it can be read as an imperative. It could be intended as an invitation for someone to experience what they have, on the idea that someone has suffered sufficiently in the eyes of everyone else that they can begin to let happiness back into their lives. But it very much feels like this is a demand, a statement that someone has been unhappy for too long, has been focusing on the wrong things, and that now it's time to leave that thought process behind and come back to a state of happiness, even if that happiness comes with steep costs, like deliberate ignorance or indifference to others, or in being brought into the fold, consensually or no, of those believers that espouse the prosperity gospel and turn their efforts toward gathering material rewards as proof and keeping score of how favored they are by God. Even if the idea is that it is time to come into the fullness of understanding of the great gifts and grace of Christianity and assume the happiness that comes from having accepted the possibility of eternal salvation and being one of those who Jesus will count as one of his own at the moment of judgment, the potential imperative along with it carries the threat of coercion, or that a person has to first profess allegiance and speak the correct shibboleths of being part of the in-group and then they will receive the happiness that has been set aside for them, whether that's temporal happiness or eternal happiness. Compulsory Christianity is certainly in the goals of many of those who wish to seize the levers of temporal power and use them to create a "Christian nation" and to, as they claim, "take back America for God." The happiness that comes from that is much more the happiness of the Simpsons world where Ned Flanders became the unquestioned ruler of the planet. "Just relax and let the hooks do the work." Or the constant smiles needed for a Paranoia game.
To say "It's time for you to be happy again" is, in its most charitable, a reminder that despite the terribleness of the world around us, there are reasons not to give into despair and to make time for us to refresh ourselves and do things that make us happy. At its least charitable, it is a demand that we ignore the things around us or consider them to be mere artifacts of the past and focus on making sure that we are happy because we are secure in the reward that we will receive and nothing else matters. I think, perhaps, this message needed a few more thoughts before being deployed to the hillside.
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I noticed the difference between what Jesus taught and what Paul taught immediately upon reading the new testament as an adult, and I strongly believe that the real life Jesus would have denounced Paul as a deceiver. Turning the message "care for others because God loves them too" into "do these things so that you have a nice afterlife" was pretty bad IMHO. Ever since then I have been suspicious of anything branded Christian, regardless of sect/denomination.
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n.b. I say this as someone who is only culturally Christian, in the sense that my parents were actively repulsed by religion, but we still celebrated the secular aspects of Christmas and Easter. Most of what I know about the practice of it comes from the occasional "thank fuck I left my church, here's why, and here's how you can too" post on Tumblr.
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When someone asks me 'How's it going?', my hoped-for response is 'Not too bad.' Things are pretty good, sometimes things aren't the greatest, but all in all on the positive side. And that's good enough. I /expect/ the occasional downer: slow traffic, unexpected bill, something breaks, someone dies, etc. It's called life. And sometimes I get good news, something funny happens, a friend calls me out of the blue, etc. Yin and yang.
I don't want happiness all the time. I'll settle for good enough.
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