The worst legacy Baptist Christianity left in my life was misanthropy.
The Bible is not a bad book. It has some good things in it, but there is also a lot in there that holds a really troubling view of humanity. Here’s a few examples.
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
My youth group leader back in the day quoted this verse at us a lot. It was usually in the context of him saying that the popular advice to follow our hearts was not good, because our hearts were inherently untrustworthy. I spent a lot of time (still do, sometimes) agonizing over the true intentions of my heart. I felt like I was okay as a person, but I knew I must be lying to myself because the Bible said the heart is deceitful above all things!
Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. - Luke 18:192
The context of this verse isn’t too black, I suppose. Jesus has a point here contextually. Getting too wrapped up in your own perception of what goodness is can make you think that you’re some sort of holier-than-thou saint. At that point, your good acts become more about how you are perceived than what you’re actually doing. But in my experience, this verse is usually taken to reinforce that no one is “good enough” on their own. Especially in my experience with neo Calvinists, it’s used to tell people that if they don’t feel good enough, that’s accurate and should be an impetus for them to go to church and rely on God, whatever the fuck that means.
The Lord looks down from heaven
on all mankind
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.
All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.
Another day, another verse that is commonly used in attempts by Baptists to get people to realize that akshually, they aren’t as good as they think they think they are. This is usually coupled with some cherry-picked statistics about horrible crimes in the world and how if we were so good, inherently, why do people do horrible things to each other? You starting to see a theme here? First, you convince your churchgoers that they themselves are inherently evil, and so is everyone else around them. Everyone’s first instinct is always to do the wrong thing. Couldn’t possibly be a line of thinking that thins and frays social interdependence, no siree.
This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that the same event happens to all. Also, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. -Ecclesiastes 9:3 4
And on and on it goes. The version of Christianity that I grew up with and eventually left is predicated on the idea that humanity was created good (because God made us in his image), but the first humans chose to be evil (the whole Eve-ate-the-apple business). That sank us all and now we’re all born with inherent evil in us.
This is such a shitty central ideology to have. It’s obviously true that there are many people in the world who decide do to fucking horrible things. I’ve actually experienced one particular depth that humans can sink to first hand (short version: felony elder abuse). Seeing that happen, and seeing the perpetrator completely get away with that crime has deeply challenged the otherwise optimistic view I try to hold of other people.
But like, long term, what are the consequences of believing that people are inherently bad, or that people are inherently evil until saved by god or just proven otherwise? What are the consequences of even believing that people are inherently selfish or untrustworthy until proven otherwise? What are the consequences of a guilt-first mindset?
For me, as a teenager and twentysomething, it made trusting new people incredibly difficult. I had grown up with the ideology of inherent human evil reinforced over and over again, and I believed it. The pastors had Bible verses to back up what they were saying. They pointed to the murderers and rapists and child traffickers of the world. They said you don’t have to teach kids how to be bad, they just know how to do that, you have to teach them how to be good. It’s all very convincing, especially when it’s delivered from a pulpit with that lilting cadence preachers have that builds to an emotional, single-male-tear crescendo.
A couple of decades of that kind of instruction was massively damaging to my social skills in high school and in college. If that’s what you believe about people, you aren’t going to socialize much outside of your church friends. Why would you? All humans are inherently bad to some degree, so you should really only socialize with the ones who are aware of that fact and are fighting it by being saved by God and trying to be good Christians.
If you do socialize outside your church friends, you do so in a highly guarded manner, and will very rarely form deep connections with non-church people. That’s because you know all people are inherently bad to some degree, and you’ve heard your pastor say over and over again that you are who you spend your time with. You want to spend it around good influences, but you don’t know where they are because you have internalized this lie of inherent human bad-ness.
It definitely doesn’t occur to you that this insular ideology might be on purpose. It does not occur to you that this ideology might be forcing you to stay within your small bubble of fellow Baptists and to seek out even more Baptist spaces when you move away from home so that you stay “in the fold”.
No, that doesn’t really occur to you. So instead, forming new friendships in college becomes a Herculean task of guardedness and unnecessary loneliness while you feel your way around your new peers. It also becomes an incredibly confusing exercise in cognitive dissonance when you end up becoming friends with people who don’t share your religious beliefs at all—and yet they are good people.
You might get lucky like I did and still find a group of friends in college despite the sheer effort it takes to get over those feelings of fear and falling to bad influences. You might even be blindingly lucky like I am, and still be friends with those people after a decade. That might happen to you, and you might wonder why you wasted so much time having your guard up around people who weren’t also Baptist and navigating the social world as if it was full of people who were inherently bad in some way and trying to rub off on you.
It might just be the love of your college friends that convinces you to give up on this misanthropic bullshit worldview altogether. Believing that everyone is inherently some degree of bad until proven otherwise is an isolating philosophy. Even if it comes with the belief that you are also some degree of bad—it’s still shit. It fucks with your ability to trust others, isolates you from what might otherwise be really good relationships, and makes you too independent and not interdependent enough.
I know that trusting people opens you up to getting hurt. I’ve experienced that a number of times. But the alternative is loneliness and no one to lean on, and that’s worse.
When you’re able to set aside your misanthropy, you’ll find that most people are actually amazing.
You might find that a person who you previously felt guarded around because they like to “party” more than you (whatever the fuck that means) actually has an incredibly expansive music taste. Letting go of your preconceived notions about what might make this person “bad” will make room for you to appreciate the adventurousness that makes them like every genre of music known to man. It might rub off on you a bit, too, and you might have an endless source of joy that is discovering abundant human creativity through music.
You might find that someone you judged prematurely because she did things you thought you shouldn’t do before marriage is a brilliant scientist. Letting go about your preconceived notions about what might make her “bad” will make room for you to appreciate the gift of human intelligence, and to learn from it. You might find she has a lot to teach you about thinking empirically.
You might find that your friend you felt the need to put walls up around because she smokes cigarettes and doesn’t give two shits about her lung cancer risk has the most boundless love in her heart for the human race and is a natural community builder. Letting go of your preconceived notions about what makes her “bad” will make room for you to learn from her heart and how she manages to stuff so much love for people in there. That love may rub off on you, if you let it.
Maybe, just maybe, the real sin was not all of these lifestyle choices that you once thought predicted whether someone was good or bad. Maybe the real sin was being so fucking judgmental about people’s life choices to begin with, and the consequence was missing out on depth of relationship. Maybe, letting go of misanthropic judgmental-ness was your ticket to falling in love with friendship and human connection.
Misanthropy is making you lonely and judgmental. Don’t miss out on human connection because of it, it’s all we have.
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See you after Coalesce, most likely.
This is contextually in a passage where God is telling Jeremiah that people should trust Him over one another.
This is contextually in a passage where Jesus is describing the standard of good works that someone must have to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, where the point is that no one is good enough to go to Heaven on their good works alone, so they may enter Heaven through the sacrifice of Jesus.
This is contextually from old-testament times which are chock-full of periods where everyone is doing bad things all the time and there’s a few desperate prophets trying to get people to turn to God. idk how that’s not all the time but whatever
Ecclesiastes is sort of a grim book overall where the writer is constantly going “MEANINGLESS! MEANINGLESS! LIFE IS ALL MEANINGLESS!” only to conclude later on that it is worship of God and dedication to God that imbues life with meaning
I love how you broke it down to psychological reasons. I always had an inner feeling myself that most people do good and are nice and never quite understood people that said the opposite. It now makes so much sense. Society is a huge factor in how we think.