Lonely? Here's One Way To Find Healthy Community
Long before the pandemic, the WHO had already identified a Loneliness Epidemic. Social media isn't fixing it, churches are clearly not fixing it, but here's something that might.
Churches have been notoriously abusive for centuries, yet they are still alive and thriving. Why?
Because they offer something that, thus far, only they have offered. Everything they offer, however, also comes at a cost. They offer a sense of community but the cost is generally total conformity. You can be accepted and welcomed into the community as long as you behave in ways that conform to community standards and at least pay lip service to agreeing with the community’s beliefs. What is “acceptable” has changed throughout history, but one thing that has never changed is that there has always been an “in group” and an “out group”, or an us/them.
At one time, churches found divorce to be unacceptable, so many married couples stayed unhappily married rather than risk alienation from their churches. Churches have also traditionally thought addiction to be a sin, giving rise to millions of closet addicts. As divorce rates rose, however, and people started finding support outside of churches for addiction, churches had to change their stances if they wanted to keep their doors open. Instead, they found a new target: “homosexuals.” As the number of people identifying as queer are rising, however, churches are again having to realign their values. Today, rather than having one universal enemy, churches are instead forming around individual enemies.
Today, you can find entire churches full of addicts but you might have a hard time fitting in if you aren’t one of them. There are thousands of LGBTQIA+ affirming churches, but if you’re not quite so affirming you probably won’t be welcome. Just flipping the script on who is and isn’t welcome isn’t actually solving the underlying problem. Churches are still not accepting of anyone that isn’t like them, so now there’s simply a different church for every different type of person.
The problem is, no one fits perfectly into any church or group and the larger the group, the more aspects of your individual personality you have to diminish or hide to be a part of the group. Community is critically important for our central nervous system because it provides a sense of safety. If you don’t have a community you feel safe in, it can cause deep anxiety. The key word there, however, is safe. Just being a part of a group can bring at least some sense of safety, but the more you feel you have to hide about yourself to continue to be accepted in the group, the less safety you actually feel.
The problem is that humans bond around a shared threat and those particular bonds become very strong. There’s even a name for it: hate bonding. When you join a group that is formed by a hate bond, your continued acceptance in the group depends on you continuing to hate the same people or things the group does. Any empathy you begin to feel towards that person or group of people will threaten your own standing in the community. This is particularly problematic if you know you share traits with the “hated” group.
Being a part of a community that you believe would not accept you if they knew certain things about you can create that same sense of anxiety as not having a community at all. If your acceptance into a certain community is dependent on maintaining a certain image, you will spend most of your time living in fear of being ejected from the community if they discover the truth. Which means you will spend most of your time living in fear.
Churches are too often groups of people that agree to agree that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
The power of churches is so strong, that even Atheists have gotten in on the action and formed their own churches. But while churches offer something we “like” or feel the need for, the very fact of their existence can be toxic. Any church that perpetuates the notion that the people gathering inside of its walls are in any way better than those outside of it is creating a toxic environment. But since hate bonding creates such powerful ties, that is exactly the myth that most churches perpetuate.
Recovery groups, on the other hand, have had wild success helping people overcome almost all manner of addictions. They do this without trained and licensed counselors or even a budget. The way they do it is to get people into rooms that are a safe space for them to share their deepest secrets and darkest thoughts. While hate may create strong bonds, those bonds are nothing in comparison to the bonds created by vulnerability. When people bond over their shared failures rather than their shared successes, they not only create strong bonds but they also do away with the fear of what would happen if their “tribe” found out who they really are.
The reason recovery groups succeed where churches fail is because they don’t bond on the basis of being better than others.
Too often, when people have a negative experience in a church, they think that the problem was simply that one church. Scandal after scandal after scandal, however, has to eventually wake us up to the fact that the very nature of churches is toxic. The Evangelical “megachurch” model has now permeated almost every corner of Christendom, which focuses on numerical growth over spiritual growth. Nothing draws people faster and creates stronger bonds than an us/them mentality. But nothing is more destructive to real relationship than the fear that you will no longer be accepted if your group discovers who you really are. Any group that demands conformity to a certain norm is inherently toxic, particularly when that “norm” is an impossible standard of perfection.
Simply living life requires us to keep a great deal on lockdown. We have to keep certain things to ourselves or keep certain parts of ourselves hidden in most situations. While it might be perfectly appropriate to dress in drag to go to a bar, it is generally not considered appropriate for the office. This is simply reality. While we all may want to be 100% ourselves 100% of the time, that just isn’t realistic. What we need instead is a group or community where we can be fully and completely ourselves and know that we will be fully accepted just as we are.
Sadly, that probably isn’t going to happen in a church. While you can certainly still be a part of a church, it is important to understand that church is probably never going to fill your deepest need for connection. Even Evangelical “celebrity” Jen Hatmaker recently took a trip to Mexico with her tribe. A tribe they formed around getting healthy and developing healthy eating habits, rather than around someone or something they hated. One great way to develop a healthy tribe is to figure out something you want to do or accomplish, then go find a few friends to do it with you. Setting and achieving a goal can be just one more way to create healthy community and having healthy community can even help you better achieve your goals.