"Just give me the simple truth."

It's the sort of proud and stubborn thing church people say all the time. Pastors especially. Anything complicated is viewed with suspicion. Feared even. And so an ethos comes into formation: a subculture of people who think the answer to everything is found in their Bibles, which they insist on reading literally... even as they refuse to read them literately.

"...Just give me the simple truth."

It's enticing. It can make you feel confident in your lack of depth, and it can shield you from feeling the need to evolve or adapt in your thinking. It can make you wear grossly binary ideas as a badge of honor.

"...Just give me the simple truth."

The great irony of statements like this is that those who make them tend to also end up making a mess of everything, complicating relational dynamics and poisoning their own response to pain and suffering. In our insistence on oversimplification, we do not preserve an honest view of the core of things. In fact, we fail to recognize essential depth. Fail to appreciate nuance and diversity. Fail to comfort with any real traction. This avoidance of anything that isn't "simple" creates distance. We become two dimensional beings in a multi-dimensional world, offering false hope that does not ultimately satisfy. Trivial explanations and empty engagements fall flat. Our lives carry the pretense of having the answers for everyone, even as we remain in the shallows. And as clichés fail to provide any real comfort, many people have been sacrificed on the altar of our need for “simple” – their identities abused and their hearts left adrift, offered up to a hollow god.

Within this way of thinking, there is no space kept for the complexities of who we are, nor the realities of the things we face.