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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Challenges in Creating a Culture of Gratitude

Most Christians are not thankful. We’re excellent at thanking God for the weather (which happens to both the wicked and the just), and for food (while we’re sitting down before a meal), but we are abso-freaking-lutely terrible at thanking each other.

In fact, there are at least two sources of outright hostility toward the action of thanking people for their ministry, for the good deeds they do, or for just being who they are.

The first source pretends to be concerned about people. “We don’t want to publicly thank people for what they do,” goes the reasoning, “because we might leave someone out, and they would get mad.” There’s a pet phrase these people like to use. “It’s like giving a gift to one person, but giving everyone else a dead fish.”*

This statement assumes that the average congregation member has the emotional maturity of a two year-old. Sure, there are a small minority of emotionally immature people in the congregation. Imagine emotional maturity as a bell curve, and expect that the bottom 5% will get their shorts in a twist about anything. But, as with other issues in the church, are we really going to refrain from thanking people because someone might feel left out? This is just plain sick. It’s projecting - and replicating - the most dysfunctional family dynamic in the congregation: We must tiptoe around emotionally immature people so that they don’t blow up and cause conflict.

The other problem with this way of thinking is that it goes against everything we know about behavior change. If you want to shape the behavior of a group, you use positive reinforcement. My Dad points out that this is one of the best ways for teachers to manage a classroom. Rather than yelling at the class to be quiet or settle down, the teacher finds one person who is behaving appropriately and praises that person. The people surrounding that person will then imitate the behavior to earn the teacher’s praise. People who are skilled in this kind of strategy can manage a class without threatening, yelling, or scolding. Attention changes the behavior of a group. Thanking people for their service shapes the behavior of a community.

The other source of resistance to thanking people is philosophical. It suggest that we shouldn’t thank people for doing what they should do anyway. Like good soldiers, Christians should just naturally want to serve meals at shelters, give their money away, and do other acts of service. Some people carry this to the level of scorn. “You only go on a short-term mission trips to feel good about yourself,” goes the rhetoric, “and then you come back and do nothing.”**

Again, this goes against everything we know about behavior change. We learn best through positive reinforcement, not through stern lectures about what we ought to do, or through being guilt-tripped into action.

Failure to thank people kills communities. In John Gottman’s research on marriage and relationships, he found that couples who did not thank each other for doing chores, taking care of the kids, or basic loving actions did not stay married. It’s not that they thanked each other because cooking dinner or changing the oil in the car were somehow extra or unexpected. They thanked each other for doing their duty because they were grateful. They knew how to appreciate the simple things in life. They cultivated their own culture of gratitude.

And are do-gooders supposed to refrain from feeling good about the work they do? Are they supposed to remind themselves constantly not to be proud of the house they built, the money they raised, the people they comforted? Are those good feelings dangerous, and should we quash them lest we become prideful and think we are God-like in our beneficence? Posh. Posh, I say! Sure, Jesus admonishes his followers to beware practicing their piety in front of others in order to be admired by them (Matt 6:1), but he specifically refers to giving, praying, and fasting - “religious” behaviors to show others how good we are. Altruistic behaviors, in contrast to “religious” ones, release chemicals in our brain that make us feel good. God wants us to feel good about doing good. Actively working to suppress good feelings in ourselves or others is not just counterproductive in changing behavior. It’s sick.

Which brings me to the theological problem with thanklessness in churches. I’m going to be uncharacteristically supernaturalist here: I think the real source of both these attitudes is the devil. Satan. Ol’ Scratch. See, the devil is really good at disguising snarky, self-aggrandizing and selfish attitudes with philosophical and benevolent language: “We’re going to be thankless so we don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. We’re going to be thankless because thanking people is morally questionable.” The evil powers of this world do not want people to change their behavior, and so they have infiltrated the church and infected all our efforts at service and good deeds with theological suspicion, poisoning the pleasure of making human contact and doing human ministry, de-carnating our acts of pleasurable service into Platonic, abstract shoulds and oughts. This is the same attitude of ascetic Christians in times past toward sex: “just close your eyes and think of England.” So now, instead of just overcoming middle-class classism, racism, and fear to go downtown and work in a homeless shelter, you have to do so without feeling good about yourself. Yeah, good luck with that.

So thank people all the time because it changes their behavior. Thank them all the time because they are gifts from God, put here to do Kingdom work. Thank them and thank God for them.

“Y’all are the light of the world… let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5:14, 16)

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*Dead fish? Where the heck did a dead fish come from? I’ve heard this particular expression countless times, but I don’t even know where the metaphor began. Has it come detached from a story somewhere?

**I’m still looking for reliable empirical data on the effectiveness of missions projects or trips at changing behavior. Anecdotally, at least half of the people I travel with on mission trips or participate in projects with say things like, “I should have done this years ago. I should do this more often. I’m going to resolve to do this once a week.” They talk about the relationships they build and the humility that comes with being served by the poor. I cannot measure follow-through, but I do know that praise and giving thanks for those activities will increase the odds that the behavior will increase. That’s basic behavioral science.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Advice for Preachers

I can no longer remember who said this to me, but it went something like this: “Julia Childs said never apologize for the food you’ve prepared. In the same way, preachers should never apologize for the sermons they’ve prepared, nor for sharing their jokes or repeating their stories.”

Thursday, February 18, 2010

10 Reasons Ash Wednesday is Better than Christmas

10. No braving the malls looking for Lent gifts
9. No pressure to send “Merry Ash Wednesday” cards
8. No explaining why using chi-rho isn’t “X-ing Jesus out” of Lent
7. No dominionist fundagelicals trying to fight culture wars by putting “Jesus resisting temptation in the wilderness” displays on public property
6. No celebrity holiday albums
5. No Ash Wednesday sitcom specials
4. No saccharine email forwards about “the true meaning” of Ash Wednesday
3. No tacky Ash Wednesday sweaters
2. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” extremely difficult to use in consumer marketing strategies
1. Nobody ever says, “Ash Wednesday is really all about the children.”

Monday, February 15, 2010

Cartoon of NT Origins

Here is a cartoon I made for my Bible Stuff class on NT origins. There was a lecture that went along with it, but I think it pretty well speaks for itself. Click the thumbnail for the full size version.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Of Making Many Books There is No End

Leaving Church. Quitting Church. UnChristian. They Like Jesus But Not the Church. Jesus Wants to Save Christians.

All of these are titles of books that have been published in the last few years. And as much as I agree with the theological and political views of their authors, the incessant harping on the spiritual death of the institutional church bores me. I pick up a book and hold it in my hands. I read the front and back cover. I browse the table of contents, and scan for familiar scriptures.

There they are. All my old friends. Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats. Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount (which I can recite). The letter of James. The invective of Amos. It’s nice to hear so many voices agreeing with me as I flip the pages of one book after another.

Each one I put back on the shelf. I don’t want to read them. I could lip-sync to them.

What we need, these books will say, is to get off our butts and get out of the pews and into the world. I can hear Bishop Willimon responding, “as if worship were distracting us from the more important work of relief and social justice!”

What we need, they will say, is more Jesus. Not that old blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus, but the post-colonial Semitic, Jewish Jesus.

What we need, they will say, is more faith. More gumption. Less consumerism. More love. Less Apathy. More oomph and less ahh. More relationship and less regulation. Less talk and more action.

So I put each book back with a sense of disappointment. What am I looking for? Something I don’t already know. I already know there’s not a magic formula to bring renewal to the church. I already know there’s not a manual. I already know the church needs an infusion of the Holy Spirit, to die and be resurrected, to be the incarnate Body of Christ. I don’t need any more books to tell me that.

Monday, February 08, 2010

Dawkins, Literalists, and the 10 Scientific Commandments

Here is an excerpt of Salon’s interview with Richard Dawkins back in the fall:

You say in the beginning of the book that you would like to convince people that creationism is not a feasible or a viable belief system, but you also make it clear that you’re not a big fan of creationists.

That’s putting it mildly, yes.

Doesn’t that make it difficult for a creationist to read this book without feeling insulted? Won’t that hurt your goal?

No, I’m not really aiming it at creationists. I don’t think they read books anyway, except for one book. It’s aimed at the intelligent layperson who does read books and who vaguely knows a little bit about evolution and who vaguely knows that there are creationists and maybe even vaguely thinks that he’s a creationist himself, but who is curious and wants to know the evidence.

The part that rankled was “except for one book.” What Dawkins doesn’t understand is that most creationists don’t read the Bible. In fact, I’ve found that literalists of any stripe do not read the Bible much because they believe they already know what it says. What they tend to do is read the same collection of inspirational memory verses over and over again.

It used to bother me that so many people show such a stunning lack of curiosity about the Bible. But then I realized that curiosity takes work, and requires a scientific openness to seek answers. If either Biblical literalists or Dawkins took the time to actually read the creation accounts in Genesis:
1. They would notice that the creation orders are different.
2. Their curiosity might lead them to look for other differences (language, style, etc.)
3. They would seek out sources that might be able to explain the differences (pastors, commentaries, scholars)
4. They would look for dissenting opinions
5. They would formulate their own reason for the differences in light of the available evidence (e.g., these stories were written by two different authors for two different audiences).

As I said, curiosity takes work. Literalists dismiss their curiosity by simply saying, “it’s the Word of God, sometimes it’s hard to understand, but I’ll just accept it on faith.” They just don’t think about it.

Dawkins doesn’t have such an excuse. He is supposed to be a scientist, for crying out loud, but he just accepts the literalists’ interpretation of the Bible. He even thinks they read it! If there is anything like a list of scientific sins, I think one of them would be lack of curiosity.

1. Thou shalt not be incurious
2. Thou shalt make thy methods discernible to all
3. Thou shalt not falsify evidence or results
etc.