Unity is one of those slippery words which sound splendid until you begin analysing them.  On the positive side, unity implies an end to conflict, cooperation and everyone in harmony with everyone else.  It can suggest the victory of love over division and hostility.  But there is also a very real negative side to this innocuous word.  Unity is a word that can indicate the way an individual has become locked into a group-think situation.  Instead of having an independent functioning brain, the individual is forced into thinking in and through another person, perhaps a religious leader.

As I read accounts of Christians who grow up part of fundamentalist groups, one thing constantly amazes me.  A huge swathe of Christians takes on the assumption that their faith, their group and their understanding of the Bible is the only one that will enable them to go to heaven.  If they stray outside the faith of their group, even to another church down the road, they may be endangering their soul, entering a place that potentially leads to hell.  Not every conservative Christian thinks like this, but there are enough of them who do to make this extraordinary corruption of thinking exist right across the world today.  Even those who are part of denominational alliances of churches are encouraged to think that their congregation, their minister, has some special unique handle on the will of God.  Their membership of this congregation puts them in a place of safety, well protected from the heresies and false beliefs of those who belong to other groups.

Why am I so adamant that this way of thinking is wrong?  Common sense suggests that no human being can ever claim infallibility for the words he/she uses or the group to which allegiance is claimed.  Truth is far too elusive to be contained completely in human words and human speech.  My saying this will no doubt be responded to by the cry: ‘we have the Word of God in the Bible’.  The Bible, whatever claims are made for it, still consists of words.  Words need to be defined, interpreted and understood.  To suggest that there is ever a fixed meaning for a particular word which somehow transcends culture is absurd.  Words shift in meaning according to who utters them.  The task of translation and interpretation is always messy, imprecise and approximate.  Whatever rhetoric may be spouted from the pulpit, the declamation ‘the Bible clearly says’ is seldom, if ever, true.  If the Bible is so clear, why, one has to ask, is there so much disagreement among preachers.? When Pastor A takes a particular line on a bible passage which is different from Pastor B, what are we to say?  Do we conclude that one pastor has been given the Holy Spirit denied to his colleague, making him the true interpreter of God’s will?  Or do we take the common-sense point of view which says that the passage is open to more than one interpretation and that both are to a degree correct?  A ‘true’ church has to be for now a myth that will only be revealed to us the other side of the Second Coming.

A failure to explore the provisionality involved in bible interpretation is to betray a congregation.  To allow a group to believe that there is an infallibility in the preacher’s words is on the way to creating infantile dependence.  When a child is very small, it is expedient for him/her to believe that the words of the parent are completely reliable and true.  As the child grows older it is helpful for the child to be introduced to certain aspects of adult life.  For example, the child can be made aware that money does not grow on trees or that there is not an endless supply of food to be gathered from the shop whenever one feels hungry.  Things like choice or having one’s desires frustrated in some way are part of life.  In the same way the congregational member might be expected to learn that quick answers that will give a certain place in heaven are not on offer.  The Christian pilgrimage is about negotiating a way through this life.  It is about struggling to find God and to make sense of many things in the light of the teaching and example of Christ.  The answers are simply not handed to us on a plate.  Easy answers are a bit like ‘get-rich schemes’ where plausible rogues promise to take over all our decisions about money, giving us quick easy answers to investment decisions.  A lot of Christians seem to be sucked into ‘get-rich’ equivalents of faith.  These appeal, because, as I said before, they draw us back into the dependency that we enjoyed as infants.  Someone else is taking care of us and we do not have to do anything for ourselves except consume what is offered.  A relationship like this with a Christian leader is an immature one, both spiritually and emotionally.

Apart from Christians being drawn into immature dependency on a Christian leader, they are also seduced into an unthinking ‘oneness’ with other Christians.  This again feels attractive.  It is likened in their minds to memories of being in a family.  While families bicker and argue, they are still a place of safety which demands loyalty on the part of the members.  The ‘family’ Church has an appeal by evoking the safety of childhood, the comfort of numbers to face the threatening and the unknown.  Looking again at this situation from the outside, we can see once again that it needs to be challenged.  There is nothing wrong in seeking such comfort and safety for the purpose of negotiating particular crises in life.  It is when it becomes a permanent resting place that it become problematic.  The contention of this blog is that many of the stances adopted by conservative Christianity seem to be drawing people back into a place of immaturity.  Growth, whether as Christians or as human beings requires one to pass through thresholds or stages and these frequently involve challenges or pain.  To suggest that there is a ready-made path for the Christian life to follow that allows other people to do the hard tasks of thinking and making decisions, is unrealistic.  It is also harmful since much of the richness of life which we receive from making choices for ourselves has been taken away from us.  We have become husks, complete on the outside but empty on the inside.

Next month I am taking part at the International Cultic Studies Association in Manchester.  I normally report from this conference on the blog.  At this conference I meet a fascinating array of people, many of whom have given a year, even a decade to a destructive religious or political group.  While most of the participants are well on the way to full recovery, there is still a sense of loss for the time and the emotional expenditure that was handed over to the group.  In one way or another life was put on hold for them, maturity was delayed and they were made victims through the narcissistic behaviour of cult or church leader.  Their inner lives were hollowed out because, in the interest of the smooth running of the cult, only one opinion or way of thinking and feeling was tolerated.  That experience of unity was very costly to them personally.  Too many churches behave like cults and that is one of the topics that is debated at the bars and over meals in the conference. 

The sense of unity peddled by cults or abusive religious groups is seductive.  It reconnects people with times in their life when they felt safe and nurtured.  Whether this regression is good place for them to return to, is an open question.  Perhaps the first way of answering this dilemma is to take a complete look at what is going on for the individual.  Is the group they belong to helping truly to negotiate the challenges of maturity, the learning, the questioning and experience of pain?  Or rather is the group regressing the victim for its own possibly nefarious purposes?  Even asking that question may help to bring clarity into the situation, the clarity that can rescue a person from futility and emptiness.