Full of Darkness
This is one of a series social media posts that I wrote in 2021 during the height of my Faith Transition. Because I was publicly deconstructing in front of an entirely faithful network of friends and followers, I received a lot reactions, questions, and backlash from people I loved regarding my journey. Many of them were dismissive or hostile towards me because they had been trained to me as a “defector.”
Since an overly long response in a comment or personal message would have been seen as aggressive, I took quotes from these reactions to write these public posts in response. I never attributed the person who asked the question since I didn’t want anyone to feel specifically blamed or called out for having the response. The questions are also not unique. They are part of the scripted response we were taught to have as members of the “in-group.” Still, each post begins with a quotation because it is a question I personally received during my Transition.
Q: “You are just full of darkness now.”
😔 Most Post-members have to field this kind of cutting comment at least once along their journey. It’s another one of those dismissive in-group lines that is used to alienate those who “fall into apostasy.”
🧠 From a psychological perspective, this serves an important purpose in the minds and attitudes of still-active/believing loved ones.
- It pushes the person in faith crisis into the position of “other,” which allows the believing member to stop taking them or their concerns seriously.
- It asserts superiority and retrenches the believer’s idea of themselves as being “full of light, joy, and truth” when compared to those “dark and bitter” apostates.
- It often provokes a reaction of frustration, exasperation, or anger from the loved one in crisis (who rightly feels discounted) and thus, confirms the suspicions of the still-active loved one that questioning the Church leads to “weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.”
✨This line and lines like it (“Oh, you’ve lost the light in your eyes,” “Your countenance is so dark, now” etc) are excellent for preserving the status quo for the believing-member’s worldview, but it wreaks havoc on the connection between people.
👽 For in-crisis members who are open about their concerns or their doubts, it can lead to feeling alienated or discounted by their fully-believing friends and family, even if they choose to continue participating actively with the Church.
👥For in-crisis members who are private about their journeys, apprehension around hearing a line like this can lead to hiding a faith crisis from close family and friends, sometimes for years, creating a split-reality in which they can no longer be fully authentic with those they care about most.
👀In actuality, a line like this reveals a lot more about the internal cognition of the speaker than it does about the subject.
It reveals that a person is
–skeptical of life experiences/logical processes that don’t match their own,
–hostile to challenging worldviews
–fragile in one’s own ego/sense of self.
(Note: it could be that these qualifiers are true of BOTH the struggling and believing parties. This is just pointing out that the accusation of “losing one’s light” is an easy-to-spot sign of one or all of these underlying conditions.)
I understand why members say things like this. Our biological programming necessitates it.
We all act defensively, when we feel our sense of reality threatened.
We all gravitate towards in-group, out-group binaries, when we are not consciously reaching out with empathy.
We all take cheap shots, sometimes, when someone is crossing a boundary on something we care about.
But, that doesn’t make this kind
Or appropriate
Or true.
It’s just self-preservation.
That said, there are certainly a lot of dark nights of the soul during a faith crisis, but then again–there are plenty of dark nights of the soul before a faith crises, too.
🌉The good news is, there are a lot of ways to bridge this problem.
For example,
🤝 What if we reframed this issue and stopped making it our job to discount or defend ourselves from someone else’s darkness, but rather embraced the dark nights on both sides of faith and crisis?
🤝 What if we saw the difficulties as opportunities to see our loved ones in their moments of greatest pain?
🤝What if we chose to see the other person’s courage or vulnerability or humility in facing something difficult?
🤝 What if we saw that “darkness,” as an opportunity to get curious, instead of judgmental?
🤝What if we assumed there were room for both the dark nights and the bright days to be important areas of growth?
Most people leaving the Church these days are embarked on the most lonely, most disorienting, most transformative adventure of their lives. Sometimes they have compounded wounds of manipulative leadership, non-sympathetic family, abuse, divorce, poverty, sickness, or assertive missionary-type friends.
🧎♀️Even though there are thousands of people going through this same thing, right now, it is intensely isolating.
🧮 Most of us wonder a lot about what the value of honesty or vulnerability is, if our loved ones don’t want to talk to us on the other side of that.
So, here’s a reminder for anyone still reaching for this line as a shield.
The Church doesn’t need more
❌ Soldiers
❌ Line-men
❌ Apologists
👍 It’s big enough and wealthy enough and insulated enough, already.
🛡 Your friends in faith crisis don’t need you to defend yourself.
They are wishing that someone would defend them.
🌱And, if they have shared part of their journey with you, they are gambling on the wild idea that you might be someone who values them more than your comfort zone.
🌿 That’s not an attack–it’s a gift.
P. S.
It’s also okay if you’re not ready to go there with your faith crisis friends. You get to have your journey on your terms, too. Just…say that.❣️
–Brené Brown
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