Over the past several years I have been learning to follow my heart. Doing so doesn’t come easy.
You see, for most of my life I was socialized to believe that following your heart meant making bad decisions on a whim. Your heart was the place where fleeting feelings would lead to frivolity and irresponsibility. It meant impulsively acting upon your emotions, and emotions were irrational because they were feminine. People thought that our emotions have the dangerous power to lure and betray us, like chasing a balloon in the wind then falling off a cliff. Thus, we had to learn to control our emotions, which meant pretending they didn’t exist. We had to lie to ourselves.
But more than our fear of emotions, following our hearts meant inevitable destruction. We believed our “flesh was sin,” and the heart is part of that flesh, of course. So, we presumed that your heart would only lead you astray, tempting you into a life of bad decisions. You needed the Holy Spirit, God, Jesus, or any male entity outside of yourself to tell you what to do because you couldn’t trust yourself. After all, men were “reasonable” and “logical,” you know. They could “control” their emotions. Lol.
We were afraid of our hearts. Following the heart would surely mean becoming angry and lashing out, we thought. It meant overspending and overeating. It meant moving from job to job out of boredom. It meant getting divorced because of the heart’s lack of resiliency when life got hard. It meant laziness or pride. It meant giving in to sexual immorality, maybe even murder, who knows. It meant using alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, or cuss words. It meant all the bad things, which were considered to be equally bad because “the wages of [any and all] sin is death.” Basically, if you followed your heart, you would yield to a life of sin and die, we thought.
Somehow the logic didn’t include the fact that we all die anyway. Nor did we seem to remember that we invited Jesus into our heart, so it’s curious that we were instructed not to follow it. Apparently our binaries of human and divine were so stark that not even Jesus could be imagined to reside in our flesh.
When I was making one of the most important decisions of my life, I was told not to follow my heart. But I followed it, and I am forever glad that I did. I’m glad that I, a grown woman, listened to myself and not to the cacophony of men trying to tell me what to do. And now I will live my life in no other way than by following the sacred proclivities inside my heart.
***
I didn’t take much interest in the Joshua and Shannon Harris love story when they became poster children for the evangelical purity culture of the 90s. I had heard of them, of course. In I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris, a young twenty-something, outlined a Christian approach to romantic relationships: Just don’t. “Purposeful singleness” is what led to a life of love and purity he argued.
His book was published the year I graduated from high school, and for the next couple of years, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talking about it in everyday conversation. As a freshman at a Christian college, I intently listened to some sophomores and juniors talk on the steps of Stoll Hall. One of the sophomores smiled, “I kissed dating goodbye. And then I kissed Brad,” and we all laughed.
Just a year after he published his book about not dating, Joshua Harris got married. He must have been eager, like a lot of Christians are. He apparently wrote about his righteous purity in a follow-up book, Boy Meets Girl, in which he detailed his courtship with the woman who would become his wife, Shannon. By the time that book came around, I lost interest in the Harris’ story.
Until now.
Through various social media channels, I’ve learned that Shannon recently divorced Joshua, left Christianity, and wrote a memoir about it. Her book is titled, The woman they wanted: Shattering the illusion of the good Christian wife. I might read it someday, but for now, I’m content to follow the online chatter and support Shannon from afar.
In an interview for Slate about her book, Shannon explains:
There was this real Barbie moment—you know, the movie? The moment where the Barbies are waking up, and they snap out of it? I remember having that moment. That was the moment where I realized, wait a minute, this biblical submission thing—this wasn’t good for me. This wasn’t for me. This was for them. This was for their benefit. They are asking me to live in this little tiny box and be happy there. And it’s for their convenience and has nothing to do with being for my well-being. When I snapped out of it, the first question I had was, Why was I there for so long, and not able to see that this was not for my good?
What I realized is that I froze. So, I was dealing with a lot of trauma [resulting from those early years in the church]. When you can’t integrate a traumatic experience, you fight, or you flee, or you freeze. I froze. I couldn’t make sense of it. And then I basically got married as a frozen person. And some of these events I couldn’t make sense of keep happening. And now I’ve just gotten used to not making sense of anything. And I’m basically living in a frozen state, I don’t know what to say, what to do. I don’t respond, because none of it actually makes sense. And that’s how I ended up getting stuck for 20 years.
Shannon is describing what I, too, have had to unlearn in therapy, all the ways I freeze and numb to keep myself from the painful truth. As women socialized in similar spaces, we were quite literally taught that doing something for our own good was selfish, so we froze, deferred to others, and pretended everything was fine. We learned to lie to ourselves.
Trauma responses are often talked about as individual behaviors, but they are also directly taught to the masses: Just freeze and yield to authority, and there won’t be any trouble. Comply. Obey. Stay quiet. Do what you’re told. Don’t feel. Numb yourself. Serve others. Please them. Fawn. Teaching people to freeze by suppressing their own truth out of fear of authority is a highly effective way to maintain a sense of control. So is teaching women to fawn by pleasing others. Within this paradigm everyone begins to valorize submission and service within power imbalances, calling obedience and self-sacrifice acts of love. It’s not just a few individuals who experience controlling dynamics. Entire collectives do.
Exploitation, then, becomes endemic because masses of people regularly justify, excuse, deny, or condone the harm that results from normalized hierarchies. Within a paradigm of hierarchy and authority, people normalize the practice of numbing, freezing, and fawning, whether they do it or others do. People normalize the practice of lying to keep the peace.
As could be expected, some White evangelical Christians are not so enthused about Shannon Harris’ memoir. On September 28 in Christianity Today, Rachel Welcher authored a compassionately condescending piece about Shannon’s decision to leave Christianity. It had a lot of familiar mixed messages: flowery language on the surface that hints at nice things like grace and understanding, but beneath the surface lurk words that contain daggers of shame and bellows of arrogance. Essentially, it reads: Christians should listen to Shannon’s story and take responsibility for mistreating women, but at the end of the day, people who leave Christianity will end up doing bad things.
Let me explain. Rachel writes:
Harris concludes that, to heal from this theology, we must strive to connect “to our own wisdom, to nature and our bodies, to our own fulfillment in work and pleasure, and to our own ways of being and doing.” And I imagine many readers have underlined that particular sentence in their copies of her book, finding it refreshing to think so positively about themselves and their bodies after years of sermons on our “foolish hearts” and “sinful flesh.”
But what does this really look like in practice?
Sometimes, it might look like bringing your neighbor freshly made bread, just to cheer them up. But other times, it might look like following your own wisdom and seeking your own pleasure, like binging on a sleeve of Oreos while watching porn. Or trolling someone you don’t like online instead of spending time with your kids.
I chuckled at that last line because just before I read the article, I told my kids about “that one time I trolled a guy online who joked about being bored while his wife was in labor.” While trolling that day, I was not, in fact, watching my son play on the playground. I was nearby, but according to Rachel, I was doing something bad, all because my heart really needed to stick it to that guy. What’s worse, I potentially hurt his ego by suggesting that his so-called joke masked his deep fear of women’s power. How dare I. “That sounds like something you’d do,” my 7th grader said. He knows me.
In her appeal against the heart, Rachel appears to presume that unhealthy choices inevitably result from seeking one’s own wisdom and pleasure. She suggests: If you listen to yourself, you’ll end up doing bad things because you need authority to tell you what to do. You simply can’t know what’s good for you without asking the external God. You can’t trust yourself. You need to be controlled. Knowing what to do without being told disrupts the whole order of things. Trusting your own wisdom can only go wrong because you are rebelling against the paradigm of control.
Binaries of good and bad make things simple. It’s easy to hide within them. According to Rachel, cheering up your neighbor with fresh bread is good. Binge-eating Oreos, porn, trolls, and child neglect are all bad. But putting behaviors within stark categories of good and bad makes it easy to neglect the truth of what’s really going on. I mean, could there be an ulterior motive to cheer up your neighbor? What did you do? What do you want? When Christians say that following your heart leads to unhealthy behaviors, they’re also communicating an unwillingness to examine that which lies underneath the actions.
For people who are afraid that they will slip-slide into destruction because they followed their hearts, I’d like to propose an alternative way of thinking about this: Our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are messengers. They can tell us truths about ourselves.
If you’re afraid you’ll engage in compulsory cookie eating because you decided to follow your heart, perhaps your pleasure-seeking behavior is trying to tell you something. Simply ask yourself some questions: Why do I have this sugar craving? Am I stressed? Tired? Do I need to luxuriate every now and then with zero self-judgment? Is this becoming a harmful pattern? Do I have a chemical imbalance? Do I need medication? Do I need more self-soothing these days for some reason? Are these numbing behaviors? Am I having trouble facing the pain of some reality? Is my job bumming me out? Am I giving away all of my energy to my family? Is junk food the best way I can feel energized? Did someone shame me for feeling pleasure? Did someone named Rachel shame me for eating junk food by equating it with sin, and now I eat Oreos to have some sense of control of my body?
If any of this is the case, then let’s say that. Let’s not say that people who leave Christianity will start being unhealthy because they are learning to follow their hearts. Instead, let’s say, “I’m afraid of what I would do if I listened to myself.” Say, “I’m afraid I won’t know what to do without being told. I’m afraid of having some control. I’m afraid of being wrong if I follow my heart. I’m afraid of taking responsibility for my decisions.”
If certain behaviors are ways to numb your emotions, then say, “These are numbing behaviors to keep me unaware of my true feelings.” Say, “I’m having trouble facing a painful truth. I’m afraid that my compulsion for pleasure might indicate a repressed trauma that I don’t want to deal with. Say, “I might need to do something scary with the truth, like leave my job or my marriage. Or go to therapy. I’m afraid of being rejected, shamed, or abandoned by the people I love if I start following my heart.”
Or maybe say, “If I follow my heart, I’m afraid I just might experience pleasure and nothing bad will happen as a result like I currently believe.” Say, “I’ve experienced stress for so long that I’m afraid I won’t know what to do with pleasure, calm, stability, joy, or peace.”
Don’t say that people leaving Christianity will turn into bad people. Instead, listen to Shannon when she says that evangelical Christian doctrines teach people not to trust themselves. Listen to her when she says that evangelical theology relies on people’s sense of inadequacy so that they will become accustomed to needing something outside of themselves for a sense of security. Face the fact that this belief system leads to control, exploitation, and abuse, which is the reason Shannon left. It’s not because of a few corrupt leaders or individuals who weren’t quite “acting like Jesus.” The entire set of doctrine promotes power imbalances. The beliefs create destruction, not our hearts.
***
The way Rachel interprets the idea of freedom in Christ from Galations gives us clues about why she believes Shannon, not Christian theology, is the problem. She goes on to write:
Paul, anticipating our human tendency to abuse Christian freedom as a license to indulge our own flesh, warned the Galatian church that our desires and the Holy Spirit are often in “conflict with each other” (5:17). This means that we cannot always “follow our hearts” and expect that we will naturally choose Christlikeness. We need help. We need the Holy Spirit, the “Helper” whom Jesus left for us when he returned to heaven. To deny this is to reject the very words of Jesus.
Rachel claims that Christians can’t always follow their hearts because indulging our own flesh would mean abusing Christian freedom, or being bad. She thinks people won’t “naturally choose Christlikeness,” or being good, because our natural human state is one that needs external guidance, the Helper. She quotes Paul in this paragraph, not “the very words of Jesus.” So let’s take a look at what Jesus says about the Helper. In John 15, Jesus says:
26 “I will send you the Helper[a] from the Father. The Helper is the Spirit of truth[b] who comes from the Father. When he comes, he will tell about me. 27 And you will tell people about me too, because you have been with me from the beginning.
These words say that the Helper is the “Spirit of truth.” When that Spirit of truth comes, he will tell about Jesus, and you will too. I interpret this to mean that the Spirit of truth, like a still small voice, will come to you to tell you about truth that can be made manifest, a truth that can be born into the world, like Jesus was. In essence, whatever is true can be made known. The Helper can help with that.
In my more recent experiences, the Spirit of Truth, the Helper, will tell you things like, “You’re sleeping so much because you need rest, not because you’re lazy. Rest. The other things can wait.” Or it will say, “You’re intellectualizing everything because you’re avoiding your emotions. You need to allow the pain to move through you.” Or it will say, “You feel that pinch in your side, your flesh, when you think about that decision. Listen to your body. Don’t go that direction.” Or the Spirit of Truth tells you that something is true without any apparent evidence that it is. It might tell you that a loved one is sick or that a baby has just been born. Sometimes the Helper says, “This thing brings you joy and fulfillment. And you’re good at it. Seek it out. You’ll experience expansion.” In other words, the Spirit of Truth will tell you the truth.
So what could following your heart also mean in practice? Seeking the truth.
From this rendering of Scripture, finding the truth of you means following Jesus. So, every time I try to unearth what’s really going on underneath my emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, I invoke Jesus because I invoke the truth.
As for Rachel’s interpretation of Galations, she presumes a human-God binary in the ideas of flesh and Spirit. And of course, it maps to a bad-good binary: Humans are bad. God is good. Even though elsewhere in the article Rachel critiques worm theology, which is the idea that humans are depraved and in need of the external divine good, she does so without naming that she is, in fact, using worm theology. She critiques others for what she herself does. This is called projection, which is an indication of an unintegrated truth.
Let’s check the board for just a bit more context about what Rachel is quoting regarding the Spirit and flesh in Galatians 5. Paul says:
16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever[c] you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
Might it be that Paul is talking about degrees of awareness that are in conflict with each other? Might it be that the Spirit refers to the truth, as mentioned by the author of John? I mean, Jesus says he is the truth, after all. Might it be that the flesh in this context refers to the desire to keep the truth hidden? The tendency to use numbing behaviors?
The problem is that some people think that believing the truth means believing in dogma. It’s as if “the truth” is something external, something that someone else says is true like a creed, statement, or someone else’s interpretation of The Story. It’s as if espousals are enough.
I think believing the truth means believing the truth. It means seeing something for what it is. It means facing and integrating the reality right in front of your face, inside of you, or around you. For example, it means believing that our bodies’ matter holds energy inside our atoms, the body creating an illusion of what lies within. It means believing in “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), or in other words, believing that our body’s death is not our energy’s death. You understand death as an illusion when you believe this. You understand truths to exist within you, beyond the illusions on the surface.
For the sake of illustration, let’s say for a second that I developed a compulsory habit of frequently eating a sleeve of Oreos while watching porn, and I wanted to stop. As Rachel fears, let’s say my health is drastically deteriorating, and the compulsion keeps me from various responsibilities. Let’s also say that I am simultaneously being abused at work, but I can’t recognize it as abuse because I don’t want to. If I saw it as abuse, I’d have to ask myself why I am staying in the job. I’d have to consider reporting it. I’d have to consider leaving. All of that is incredibly daunting. It would be very painful and stressful to do. So instead of facing reality, I numb with pleasure-seeking behaviors.
Honey, if this frequent compulsion ever were the case, I wouldn’t need to stop following my heart. I’d need to listen to it. I’d need to hear the The Helper say, “Wake up, you’re being abused. You can no longer tolerate it. Do something.”
When Paul says that the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh, I think he is talking about how we sometimes suppress our awareness of reality. So in the example above, my numbing behaviors are contrary to the truth of the abuse I’m experiencing because the pleasure is keeping me from the pain of reality. But the pleasure itself isn’t the problem. The numbing is. It’s killing me. And the truth of the abuse is contrary to my numbing behaviors because I’m not doing anything to stop the abuse. My flesh (numbing to maintain illusions) and the Spirit (the truth of the abuse) are in conflict with each other.
I get it, it’s painful to acknowledge hard things. Most of the time we numb and freeze involuntarily, employing natural coping mechanisms. Our brains so badly want to protect us. Sometimes the numbing happens with Oreos and porn. Other times we numb with alcohol. Other times we numb by staying busy at work. Or by intellectualizing everything. Or by controlling people. And still other times we numb with denial and repression.
So it’s understandable and okay that people seek comfort. We need all kinds of ways to self-soothe and self-regulate as we integrate painful truths. Again, pleasure itself isn’t the problem. The problem is in the numbing, when we seek relief to evade reality. That’s when the Spirit and the flesh are in conflict with each other, and that’s when things go awry. But when you’re led by the Spirit (the truth of the matter), you are not under the law (a paradigm of bad and good, right and wrong). Jesus even said he didn’t come to judge. There’s no need for judgment of good and bad, right and wrong when integrating truth, only observation of what is. It is simply a matter of becoming aware of reality, of the truth, in order to have life and have it to the full. Consciousness.
***
The conclusion of Rachel’s article appears to call for Christians to take responsibility. But like a back-handed compliment, it twists reality and functions as a condemnation against Shannon and others who leave Christianity.
But I think it is also time to soberly consider the ways we might have personally contributed to pushing people out of the church—people like Shannon Harris. People like your friends, who you mock for deconstructing their faith. Maybe everything they have seen and experienced in the church has nothing to do with Jesus, and they’re walking away without ever having seen his face.
It’s quite the jab to say that Shannon never saw Jesus’ face. What an insult. And what a lie. Of course Shannon saw Jesus. And of course she saw the evangelical version of Jesus. She knew that version of Jesus really, really well. She was the poster wife for that Jesus. And knowing that version of Jesus is precisely what led to her abuse.
The evangelical Christian version of Jesus teaches people they can’t trust themselves. It teaches people that the truth is outside of them. It teaches people they need to submit to something external in order to be okay. It teaches binaries of good and bad. It tells people, “Just don’t.” It teaches relationship dynamics of savior and saved, controlling and controlled, needing and needed. It teaches people to base their lives on an externality, what he wants, what he says, what he needs, and what will make him comfortable and least likely to retaliate. It creates fear of punishment and enables hiding. It teaches hierarchies. It teaches power and control. It teaches people to live in codependent dysfunction, trauma, and abuse. It teaches people to focus on what others think and say. It teaches people to hide, so it teaches people to live in lies.
People who claim that those who leave Christianity are wrong and headed for danger seem to be evading the painful truth. Deflection is a numbing behavior. Like Rachel did, people might say they should listen to those leaving while simultaneously refusing to reckon with the fact that others’ pain comes directly from Christian beliefs. Perhaps Shannon’s wisdom about the harmful Christian practices makes Rachel feel uncomfortable, as if she’s perpetuating harm. Perhaps Rachel is trying to alleviate her own pain of that reality by claiming that those leaving are going to be bad now that they don’t have Jesus. Perhaps it makes her feel good about herself by insulting Shannon’s agency, condemning her choices, and correcting her beliefs. Perhaps Rachel is seeking pleasure to hide the truth of the pain.
Rachel, if you’re afraid that following your heart might reveal the real you, then what you fear is the truth. And I will affirm, reality can be terrifying. As scary as it is, truth brings us to safety from being lost. It saves us. And remember, perfect love casts out all fear. So, to bring truth into your awareness, you’ll need lots of love. Give yourself compassion as you integrate what’s really going on within and around you so that you can move forward with it toward wholeness. Listen to that still, small voice inside of you.
And when you follow your heart, I suspect you will find Jesus there.