People of the Truth

Learning to align ourselves with authenticity and openness

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

(An eleven-minute read.)

A number of years ago I remember alluding to loneliness on Twitter, and I had someone reach out to me privately, asking if I was OK. I assured the person, who was a very well-known leader in my faith community, that I was personally fine, but I was thinking of a friend who was really struggling.

I then went on to explain that this friend identifies as gay—and that though he is a Christian and has committed to a life of celibacy, he hasn’t felt at liberty to share this information with his closest friends and loved ones, and certainly not anyone from his church. He just didn’t feel he could tell people without being rejected.

The leader’s response after I explained this to him?

Why would anyone ever want to admit this to other people? He should just keep his mouth shut and live in silence. There are just some things we have to keep secret.

I was rather taken aback by such a response, and took a while to craft my own response.

But, among other things, I focused particularly on the question, “Why would anyone want to admit such a thing to other people?”

My very simple answer: because we’re people of truth.

A parable

As I have to explain many times, this particular piece is not about sexuality. It’s not about gender identity or culture wars. So please try not to get distracted by such illustrations.

Instead, this piece is about truth-telling.

It’s about wrestling with what it means to be people who place a premium on “truth,” as my faith community does (and as many faith communities do that give significant emphasis to theological orthodoxy).

This topic has surfaced in my mind again as my denomination once again publicly debates, to some extent, the topic of sexuality. A pastor in Germany recently “came out” in a sermon, sharing he was bisexual, and it created a big stir, with a remarkably-swift response from our worldwide governing body.

Again, this piece is not about sexuality, per se, and it’s not about that particular pastor or how he does or doesn’t live out his sexuality.

This is about a common response I heard from people who commentated on his admission, just as the leader commented on my gay friend’s admission: people should just stay quiet and keep those things to themselves. They shouldn’t openly admit their struggles—especially pastors and religious leaders.

The thing is, living that way is not a truth-telling way of living. It’s encouraging deception and deceit, asking people—perhaps even demanding that people—embrace an incongruence between what’s going on inside and what’s going on outside.

It’s encouraging them to live a life that Jesus rebuked the religious leaders of his day for living—of giving the appearance of beauty on the outside, but on the inside they were “full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27). (I am not here making the claim that people who identity as gay or bisexual, or openly share their inner dispositions, are “full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.” My point is simple: we are acting like those religious leaders when we expect and demand people to keep quiet about what’s going on inside of them.)

We actually see this from the very beginning of human existence, as Genesis explains it. In Genesis 2, Adam and Eve were “naked” and “not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). There was no contradiction or inconsistency between what they had going on inside, and what they presented on the outside. And they had no shame.

After they ate the forbidden fruit, however, suddenly everything changed. Ashamed of their nakedness, they tried to cover it up, which led to dissonance between who they really were and who they tried to present as. They transitioned from being people of the truth to being people of the lie (I have deliberately chosen this phrasing because of psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s book, People of the Lie, which touches upon similar themes).

But trying to hide our nakedness, trying to hide our struggles and weaknesses and mistakes, is no way to live. It’s also a life of dishonesty—and truth-denial. And it can, by the way, lead to serious repressions on our physical and mental health (with suicide being the most extreme outcome).

And, in a bit of tragic irony, it cuts off the very condition necessary for growth and victorious living.

And yet it’s so often what religious communities ask and require of their members (and especially their leaders), preferring the appearance of perfection to the messiness of authentic living.

I think, however, of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that German pastor and theologian who lost his life for standing up to Hitler, wrote in his classic book, Life Together (which is an absolute must-read):

He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.

The first time I read those lines, probably six or seven years ago, I was blown away.

So long as we create religious environments that do not actively promote and encourage openness and vulnerability, we’re encouraging lie-telling and hypocrisy. We’re not people of the truth.

Of course, I understand the attraction to secrecy and silence. I understand why many people, especially among the older generations, are incredibly uncomfortable with openness and vulnerability. It so often resulted in judgment, rejection, and shame, especially during past eras, during economic depressions and World Wars, when people were just trying to survive. It’s thus not “safe” to be open about one’s struggles and weaknesses, because people were shamed for doing so.

But times have changed. We live in an age, especially when it comes to Millennials and Gen Zers, that values authenticity and openness. They—we, as a Millennial—are done with the pretenses. We’re done with the soul-crushing and health-ruining denial of what’s going on inside of us for the sake of outward appearances.

We are, in short, done with religions that are not truly truth-telling communities.

And thus, many Millennials and Gen Zers are rejecting expressions of religion that opt for appearances over authenticity. They’re done with the hypocrisy and done with truth-denying expressions of faith.

A truth-telling family

I thought about this a few weeks ago with my own family. We were going to be hosting a group at our house one night and, as happens from time to time, we were all getting a bit stressed as the gathering approached. This led to tension between everyone and things expressed that we all probably regret.

But as soon as everyone arrived, what happened?

Mom and Dad put on smiley faces, acting like everything was fine and we were the perfect family who had it all together. We opted for pretense over truth, lies over authenticity.

The amazing thing is we did this in a religious community—the one I serve—that places a premium on authenticity and vulnerability. And yet we still didn’t feel safe enough to be truth-tellers, afraid of the rejection that might ensue.

And here’s the take-home about this example: as I was processing it later, it suddenly occurred to me that the believability of Christianity for my children will be far more determined by the consistency of my life than by the “objective” truth claims of the Bible I proclaim to them. If there’s a difference between how I act toward them and how I act toward others outside my home, I cannot, in any intelligible way, claim to be a person of “truth.”

And I cannot expect that they’ll find the Christian message “believable,” so long as there’s an incongruence between the “truth” I supposedly proclaim, and the “truth” I actually live.

This is not to say, of course, that we must tell everything to everyone at all times. We must use discernment. There are appropriate times and places for everything.

But we must, at the very least, foster and promote an environment that truly values truth-telling, and provide spaces and circles where people can openly admit what’s going on inside of them without being condemned, shamed, or rejected for doing so.

This also doesn’t mean that such circles need to agree with or affirm everything someone admits about themselves. If someone tells me they feel like a cat, it’s not an act of truth-telling to affirm that they are, in fact, a cat.

But the point: we must provide spaces where people can at least admit they feel like a cat—to continue the example. To insist they keep quiet about their feelings is to doom them to a life of loneliness and despair—or, perhaps more likely, push them to communities that not only give them the space to admit those feelings, but who also encourage them to surrender to those feelings and embrace such a way of living.

Liz and the birthplace of redemption

A few years ago, I reconnected with an old friend after many years. Liz and I knew each other from childhood and were very good friends in high school. But that was over 20 years ago and we’d lost touch.

There was a good reason for that. Soon after high school, Liz spiraled out of control and got heavily involved with drugs. Over the next few decades she was in and out of recovery, trying to regain control of her life.

These addictions were largely propelled by the shame she felt from all forms of abuse she experienced in childhood—physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual; shame which she dare not name or share out of fear of rejection. That led to overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, leading her to use substances that she thought would help her escape those feelings.

At one point, in a moment of sobriety, she decided she needed to go to church, hoping to find comfort and support. But when she showed up, she became so overwhelmed with guilt, and was convinced she wouldn’t find an accepting community that valued honesty and authenticity, that she went into the bathroom and shot up heroin in a stall. Such feelings of shame were all the more compounded since her dad was the pastor of the church. Imagine the horror of discovering that the pastor’s daughter, of all people, was a drug addict!

Eventually, Liz settled into a place of recovery, and after a few months, reached out to reconnect with me. I was thrilled to hear from her, and I invited her onto my podcast, where she shared her story. It was my favorite episode I’ve ever recorded (you must listen to it).

In the episode, she talked about how important honesty is. Truly, we can’t experience recovery, we can’t grow, we can’t move beyond our addictions and weaknesses, if we can’t be honest. The recovery community understands this. That’s why when you go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting there are no pretenses. People don’t try to hide. They’re simply who they are, foibles and all.

It’s so refreshing.

In fact, wearing a mask, hiding, pretending to be someone we’re not, or pretending to have it more together than we really do, undermines recovery and growth (what Christians call “sanctification”). As they say: we’re only as sick as our secrets.

In other words, the degree to which we try to hide our true selves is the degree to which we remain enslaved to our weaknesses and addictions.

This is, incidentally, the very problem the Laodicean church has in the book of Revelation. Jesus said they were naked and impoverished and yet they didn’t acknowledge their nakedness and poverty. They were out of touch with reality—or, at the very least, they weren’t willing to admit their reality. And God couldn’t work with them so long as they denied that reality.

And God can’t work with any of us so long as we deny our reality, pretending to be someone we’re not. Such people, after all, have “need of nothing” (Revelation 3:17).

And thus, our religious communities will experience arrested spiritual development so long as we discourage an environment of openness, vulnerability, authenticity, and honesty. Indeed, so long as we denigrate truth-telling, we won’t ever truly be people of the truth.

We can proclaim “correct” doctrines all we want. We can highlight truth over error. But we will not be people of the truth to the fullest extent so long as we fail to create circles where people’s stories and secrets can be shared.

Tragically, my friend Liz passed away last July, just a few weeks before her 40^th birthday. She seemingly lost the fight to an environment where truth was not pursued to its fullest extent. While her family certainly gave her the support she desperately craved, she had been the product of years of truth-denial; the expectation of a religious community that values “perfection” over truth.

I have no doubt I’ll see her again someday—not because she was perfect, but because she was honest; because she was a person of the truth, desperately though imperfectly trying to live an open and honest life before God and man.

Of such, I can hear Jesus say, is the kingdom of heaven.

Indeed, my favorite line in the whole podcast I recorded with her speaks so powerfully to this very point.

“Honesty,” she explained, “is the birthplace of redemption.”

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.