August 06, 2024

224. Why Does ‘Church Back Home Syndrome’ Distort Christian Imagination?

1 hour 19 minutes

You are being haunted.[1. Photo by grayom on Unsplash.] Specters from your past, or someone else’s past, lurk in your world. They twist meaning and distort symbols. They make you jump in the night, recoil from stories others find wonderful, and make the upright seem downright wicked. There is a cure that helps us imagine better, but first we must recognize the problem. What on earth is Church Back Home Syndrome? And why does this matter for Christian fantastical fans?

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Quotes and notes

French culture and artists have been prone to clear anti-religious bias over the years. It’s a country whose faith has been waning despite the beauty and faithful tradition of the past. Do you want to do something about it?

Makoto Fujimura, Aug. 1, 2024 Twitter post

This defense—“you failed to interpret my art properly”—doesn’t absolve an artist. That kind of response is lazy and pretentious. It comes from an ego that assumes the artist’s perspective is the only proper reading of what has been communicated.

By blaming the viewer’s faulty interpretation, the artist asserts that their intent supersedes what their work has communicated. It denies the objective reality of how their art sits in time and space, its context in history and culture.

Jared Boggess, “The Lessons of the Paris Olympics Tableau,” Aug. 1, 2024 at ChristianityToday.com

The organizers claimed they wanted to promote a French culture that welcomed all people to the table and celebrated feasting and peace over war and conflict. They claimed it was centered around Dionysus, the Olympian God of wine and festivity. They have since said it wasn’t meant to depict the Last Supper at all but rather The Feast of the Gods; however, many performers continue to claim it was a reference to The Last supper. Either way, the table stretched over the Seine Friday night was not designed to offend Christians; it was designed to offend the exclusivity of the Christian god. It was designed to honor the new god of the self.

Chase Replogle, “The Last King Strangled with the Entrails of the Last Priest,” undated post, 2024

I was in France watching the opening ceremony live on TV with family and friends. The everyday French people I talked with (none of them believers) are by and large flabbergasted at the bad taste of it all. I also pray, therefore, that this might be a wake up call. We know what God does with what it meant for evil (Gen 50:20).

Stephanie Rousselle, July 30, 2024 Facebook post

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Concession stand

If we tried to cover all these, we’d likely never get to the topic.

But in short: church trauma is real, it’s harmful, and it’s caused by sin.

We address this at length, along with the painful and slow healing from this, in our roundtable episode 152: How Can Christian Fantasy Fans Heal from Church Trauma? | with Marian Jacobs and L. G. McCary

You may prefer that episode. This one is for folks who feel in a better place.

CBHS stands for “Church Back Home Syndrome.” Stephen made this up.

In that spirit, we may refer to CBHS “victims,” even if they use their real victim experience to become villains, effectively real and tragic villains.

“Church” is shorthand. Could be a family, school, group, or employer.

CBHS is challenging to explore, so let’s start by carefully defining this.

1. What exactly is ‘Church Back Home Syndrome’?

Once you know the common symptoms, it’s a little hard to unsee.

But the symptoms will also vary between people who suffer this.

Imagine, if you will, how would Stephen’s own Syndrome manifest?

He may have grown up hearing, “Don’t read the Wally McDoogle series!”

If he was a big fan, this would have already been very hard to hear.

But if the bad judgment was accompanied by abuse, so much the worse.

Now, make the problem even worse: hearing this from different places.

Imagine, no matter where you go, at a formative age, being told this lie.

But that’s not a syndrome. It’s just a terrible tale of bad religious folks.

As we discuss, recovery from this nastiness, even trauma, takes time.

Imagine a false “healing”: the Syndrome metastasized

Now imagine, if you will, that Stephen grows up and escapes this evil.

He wasn’t able to find intelligent rebuttals from loving, caring people.

Instead, he found this support from a religious or even secular cult.

They got there first. Now, he associates the “cure” with another illness.

Now, he’s inducted into a movement to avenge the wrongs done to him.

That begins the origin story. He’s not just a victim. He’s another villain.

And in response, he begins a quest to rid the world of this special sin.

In his new world, there are no other sins. Only bad rules against fiction.

In his new reality, everything is about “church bad, anything else better.”

The Church Back Home Syndrome has metastasized. His case is chronic.

In reality, people suffer this because of very complicated backstories.

They had a bad church, family, youth group, school, or organization.

One way or another, that experience leads them to very narrowed focus.

2. How does CBHS begin to distort our reality?

Let’s move beyond imagination. CBHS victims may think irrationally.

Often when they’re talking “politics,” it’s not really about the politics.

For instance, dare we mention it, consider the image of a “border wall.”

That’s a hot issue, but many people aren’t really thinking about issues.

They think about themselves. How do I relate to the “wall” as symbol?

Do I feel like I’m stranded outside “the wall,” or secure inside “the wall”?

Similarly, CBHS victims will choose to “punch church and coddle culture.”

They hear bad stories about Christians and assume they’re all true.

Or they hear bad stories from Christians and assume they’re suspect.

After all, the Christian is just a rabble-rousing culture-war mercenary.

And after all, Christians only seek power for himself and his friends.

Of course, some Christians behave this way. But so do many others.

There is more than one villain in the world. CBHS victims refuse to see it.

And if you resemble that foe in any way, the victim will do a face-swap.

Instead of seeing you as a person, the victim sees threats to be defeated.

Imagine a limited view of church: “ministry myopia”

Or, just last week after we planned this show, new debates broke out.

At their heart is disagreement over what “the church is always doing.”

People say, “The church does too much about X, not enough about Y.”

Stephen is allergic (maybe legalistic) about church over-generalizations.

That blaming phrase is usually a tell about the complainer’s own church.

Or it may be a tell about the propaganda the complainer has heard.

You can “catch” secondhand CBHS from victims you empathize with.

These may be real victims. Or they think they are victims, based on lies.

For instance, they may wrongly think Hell is an evil, “abusive” concept.

In this case, the problem is not real church trauma, but toxic empathy.

3. Where can CBHS distort excellent fantasy fiction?

Having defined CBHS and showed how it distorts reality, we come to it.

In short, CBHS distorts fiction by making everything about its message.

For the author, reality is defined by “church bad, anything else better.”

That impulse soon leads to simple heroes/victims and cartoon villains.

As an example, we at Lorehaven have received books with this posture.

We’ve forgotten the titles and wouldn’t (rudely) name names anyway.

But in short, these stories clearly had an axe to grind against Christians.

This made the stories not just anti-Christian or anti-Church but just bad.

Evil church leaders of the past supposedly lied to you about Jesus Christ.

And evil church leaders of the present/future just want to hurt people.

The result? Victim heroes without agency. Cheap villains without nuance.

CBHS will not only corrupt your fandoms, but your heart

Worse than bad stories, CBHS slowly poisons everything we have loved.

The quest for vengeance makes us dig two graves: for reality and fiction.

Even now, it’s difficult to find CBHS victims who genuinely love things.

Increasingly they see everything as tools to serve the vengeance quest.

They effectively reject true heroes, good stories, and beautiful worlds.

They resemble the villains of stories who become similarly pragmatic.

And, ultimately, they (as Lewis said) want “to see black a little blacker.”

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