Self-Esteem or Holiness
Published: July 28, 2008
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I have a distinct memory from my junior year of college, when a member (I’ll call her “Cindy”) of the Christian fellowship I was helping to lead asked to get together for coffee. I hadn’t seen her in a while, so I happily agreed. To my surprise, after the prerequisite small talk (How are classes? How is your church? Great!), she blindsided me with an accusation:
“I know that you have been really against my relationship with Daniel.”
“Okay,” I nodded to acknowledge that her statement was constructed in a language I knew, although I was honestly struggling to figure out what the heck she was talking about.
“Anyway, I just really wish that, if you were so against us being together that you had come to us directly, instead of saying so many things about us,” she said with a solemn expression. I sipped my coffee and stared back, wondering what I should say.
“Umm, I’m really sorry, but I’m going to need you to clarify what you’re talking about,” I finally said. There was simply no way I could answer this poor girl’s concerns without more information. I had a vague notion in the back of my head that she and a casual acquaintance of mine named Daniel were dating. I could not recall issuing a fatwa against their relationship.
“Well, I know you’ve been against us being together from the beginning,” she said. Not helping. I still couldn’t figure out if she thought I was morally opposed to the relationship, or if I was secretly pining for Daniel myself.
“Who told you that?” I finally asked, trying not to sound so direct. As it turned out, she couldn’t really remember exactly what I had supposedly said, and she couldn’t or wouldn’t say who told her. But she was sure I was against her and Daniel going out, as they had been that semester, and she was sure that I should have come to them directly, for which I apologized profusely.
That incident taught me something very important: otherwise sane and intelligent people can become completely immersed in their own paranoid self-obsession. So much so that they will blame you for radiating disapproval rays, even when you are honestly minding your own business, trying to pass your mid-terms. And while paranoid self-obsession is undoubtedly a universal human tendency on some level, it can be brought to the surface disproportionately in communities that seek to establish some kind of moral standard for conduct (this used to be known as “civilization”).
To be fair to Cindy, our particular fellowship tended to frown more on dating than our “anything-you-do-above-the-neck-is-okay” counterparts on campus. However, none of us “leaders” had any real authority over anyone else, unless you count the right to set up chairs for a meeting and pay for refreshments out of our own pockets. So basically, there was a mild peer pressure at work to carefully consider romantic attachments, which some might consider a “positive” thing. As for Cindy and Daniel, they had honestly not been on my radar, since I was entangled in my own personal mission to organize a major conference trip while simultaneously not failing Japanese.
I have learned since graduating that these emotional hallucinations don’t necessarily cease when people pass out of their early twenties. My husband is one of the nicest and most diplomatic people to walk the earth, and he has watched more than one person storm out on a message he was preaching, convinced he was talking about them. The slight arrogance of assuming that a preacher has constructed an entire message to personally indict them doesn’t seem to register. It’s also much easier to get mad a messenger with whom you can find fault than at your own conscience!
I don’t know whether to blame Nathaniel Hawthorn’s brilliant novel, but there seems to be far more concern today about branding people with figurative Scarlet Letters than with actually discouraging self-destructive behavior. Even in the Church, we tend to embrace the secularist view of guilt and shame as a negative emotions rather than symptoms of sin. The fact is that loving and accepting people, warts and all, in the face of a biblical standard of conduct, can be a lot of work. Many times, it’s much easier in the short term to jettison standards and just try to “make people feel good about themselves.”
Yet excessive concern with self-esteem over holiness has led to the assumption among many that any negative emotion they experience is someone else’s fault. If the job of the Church is to make people feel good about themselves, then the Church can be blamed when people feel bad. That’s when people can storm out of church service or confront you with their delusions and feel completely justified.
We can never forget that genuine “positive self-esteem” and “self-acceptance” comes from a clean conscience before God, obtained by the accepting Jesus’ work on the cross. Any cheap substitute that involves some variat
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