Control Dressed Up as Religion

Like you, I have been horrified by the report of the Turpin family in California.

Religious Hell House

David and Louise Turpin held their 13 kids captive for many years in both Texas and California.

They were isolationists who seldom if ever spoke with neighbors, and rarely if ever left their home.

The children were forced to march in circles at all hours of the day, and spoke robotically and in unison whenever they did venture out in public.

The couple were said to be “highly religious” and had formed their private school made up only of their own children.

The police raided the house after a 17 year old escaped to a neighbor, and found children shackled in beds, malnourished, and surrounded by human excrement.

You can read about it here and here.

Family Cults

Some cults are formed out of charismatic leaders holding sway over unthinking followers who long to be controlled, to be told what to think and do, to find security in being dominated, etc.

Others, however, are formed around a family.

Here we have parents who need perfect control, to make subordinated children parrot and do their will, and who often use religion to reinforce and build a family system to express their absolute dominance.

And when their kids act like kids, or deviate in any way, these parents use greater and greater extremes of control to achieve their dominance until torture, confinement, starvation, beatings, and even death happens.

With nobody on the outside to see what is going on, the cycle of failure to be perfect and of greater extremes to achieve absolute control runs unchecked until the home becomes a house of horrors.

Then the break happens, someone escapes and the house is raided and their tightly-controlled, highly imaged public facade is exposed for the private horror it actually is.

The same cycle of required but never-achieved perfection, and greater and greater extremes of abuse, go on in spousal-battering marriages and in toxic employer situations.

Warning Signs of a Control Based System

It is well worth educating ourselves about control-based systems, and moving out of naivity and ignorance.

There are definite markers and warning signs:

• a belief system based on perfectionism and performance
• a need for dominance and absolute control
• asserted control over every aspect of life of the subordinants,
• a perfect and guarded public image,
• a need to be seen as super-good, super-religious, always right, etc.,
• social isolation and denial of all access to anyone outside the system
• cycles of pampering and punishing, of increasing physical, spiritual, emotional, social, and verbal abuse
• no guards, checks and balances, or restraints against increasingly extreme measures of control
• discovery and “outing” in the final, most extreme phase months and sometimes years later

From the perspective of genuine, biblical Christianity that reflects the character of God, I want to point out that none of the above has anything to do with God.

In fact, these parents are themselves trying to be gods of their family who demand god-like control, and actually worship absolute control instead of the actual Person of God.

They dress up their system as religion, even as biblical faith, and use “god” as a tool to obtain their goal, which is perfect control.

They commit actions and perpetrate evils that are in total opposition to the lovely character that God is seeking to produce by grace through love in totally imperfect, totally needy people (Gal. 5:22-24)

Rather, their actions express the worst of our fallen human nature (Gal. 5:19-21).

Diagnostic Questions:

Is this family, group, or church seeking to be honest? Or seeking to be always right?

Is there a spirit of grace, of growing together, of admitted need and receiving mercy and care, in this group, family, or church?

When making mistakes, blowing it, and exposed as sinning, do they hide it and up their efforts to look good and become hyper-dutiful in response?

Or do they admit sin and failure openly, seek help, and, out of being helped, give mercy to the failing and the fallen as well as structure and help so the evils are remedied?

Is there bonding and boundaries, love and healthy limits, care and correction in balance?

Or is it all boundaries, limits, and disproportionately punitive responses to even the smallest failings?  (i.e. perfectionism)

Is there a robotic quality in their voices?  A tightly controlled “emotionally damaged” countenance on their faces?  A lifelessness and crushed and dull quality about their spirit?

Reactivity Times Two

I didn’t know the word “reactivity” until I studied addiction and family systems as part of my doctoral studies.

The Sum of All Fears

When a large amount of fear is injected into a system, people react and their reactions carry them into places they normally wouldn’t go.

Expressions like, “He just lost his head” and “I don’t know what came over her” are fair descriptions for the effect.

Sadly, it’s possible for reactions to become a person’s entire way of life and for reactivity to dominate how a family operates.

All of us, at some point or another and on one issue or another, react and over-react.

Most of us have had traumas of one kind or another, and thus have hot buttons that others push and chains others can pull.

These are our triggers.

And the amount of unresolved fear, unhealed soul pain, and unfixable tension we carry within us is our reactivity potential.

One Big Reactive, Alcoholic Family

I’ve observed before that America is like one big alcoholic family, torn between enablers and co-dependent cause-aholics on one side, and narcissistic punitive types on the other side.

We have the “over-nice” pamperers, and the “over-enforcing” punishers.

Both these groups rage against each other and each other’s preferred policies.

Both these groups idealize their heroes, and demonize the other side’s heroes.

Both these groups over-dramatize and are hyper-vigilant–calling out the slightest things and seeing conspiracies behind everything the other side says, does, and thinks.

Both these sides build identities upon being totally against anything and everything the other side believes, wishes to accomplish, and sees as good.

They don’t merely want to win, they want to destroy each others hopes, dreams, and beliefs.

They are absolutists and politics is their secular religion, their chosen vehicle to establish their side permanently in power and to cast out the other side from power forever.

Fueled By Reactivity

In other words, our society and especially our politics is filled with and fueled by reactivity–a reactivity where everyone’s lost their heads and few if any are remaining calm.

We live in a permanent state of protest, of investigations and insinuations and slander.

And we live in a permanent state of denial about our own side–each side believes that “fake news” is totally and only the other side’s problem.

Each side’s political leaders profit handsomely from reactivity, from championing their side’s cause against the nightmare scenario of the other side.

Each side’s camp knows few if any people from the other side, and likes it that way because they prefer the bubble of continual validation to disagreement in actual relationships.

Each side wants to pretend it is big and powerful and great and above it all, when, in reality, it is small and vulnerable and weak and under the dominion of its own fears.

Both sides are stuck in cycle of thwarting the other, raging against the other, and viewing any connection with the other side, any cooperation, as treason.

Seeking to control the other, we have completely lost control of our selves!

And we give ourselves permission to say, think, feel, and do things that go against our own principles because fear tells us we are justified in doing so.

Our reactivity disguised as anger has ended up in utter hypocrisy on all sides and has discredited us all.

Escaping the Idol of Fear

Neither side really knows how to escape from its own reactivity, for reactivity has become a way of life and even an identity they’ve formed their entire person around.

To put it bluntly, once we begin to dance around the idol of fear, it enslaves us and holds us captive–blinding us to our fetters and bonds.

There is no human means to escape reactivity, to find deliverance from all our fears which are driving us nuts.

We need an intervention, an intervention we cannot arrange and an intervention initiated from the Outside.

There is a solution.

The Debate Behind the Assisted Suicide Debate

A friend of mine was taking her son to a barbershop when the Brittany Maynard story came on the television news.

Both barbers and all the waiting men were in hearty agreement with Brittany’s plan to end her life on her terms.

They turned to the gal and asked her what she thought.

She answered, “I think this all comes down to needing to control everything.  And I believe God is the one who ought to have control over life and death, not us.”

Everyone got silent and they changed the subject.

But I have thought about that exchange for several weeks.

First, I think my friend is right.

There is fundamental core value clash going on, and it does center around the question, “Who has the control?”

On one side are those who answer, “I have the control and I have every right to keep/maintain control over life, my body, my death, etc.”

This is what I call Personal Control Religion (PCR).

In Personal Control Religion, the Self is absolute ruler.

I am my own measuring stick.

I am above all beliefs and causes, picking and choosing among them to find what fits ME.

I deserve my highest loyalty, and I require all others to bow to my wishes.

My own interests are paramount.

My control is the center around which all of life swirls and which everyone else in the universe orbits.

Therefore, my choices are beyond challenge and I am free to do whatever I want, any way I want, anytime I want.

Hence, I have the right to decide how much suffering I will endure, how long I will live, and the means by which I will die.

Which is why I found all the nodding heads in that barbershop so telling.

PCR is so dominant, so pervasive in our culture, that it seems automatically right and valid.

We are a nation of control lovers and control worshipers.

Using older language, we’ve made an idol out of personal control and an unspoken religion out of personal control.

And, like many regions around the world, people might have a Christian veneer but still worship something deeper and dearer to them than Christ.

It’s called syncretism.

I therefore believe the vast majority of so-called Christians and non-Christians in the USA worship their personal control.

And it comes to the surface in debates like this.

People don’t even realize how married they are to control, how control is the bottom line in so many of their decisions, and what they are prepared to sacrifice to gain or maintain personal control.

Until it comes out in the open, and they reverentially nod their heads and give their deepest validating approval of it.

Interestingly, the master addiction behind all other addictions is the addiction to control.

The need to control and the duty to maintain control at all costs is what keeps people from admitting they are out of control and that their life has become unmanageable.

It is the fuel that sustains addiction and which forbids losing control.

It is also why, when addicts gain initial sobriety and start to do better, they re-assume control and relapse.

And it also explains why there is such a strange, intense antipathy against God in the hearts of so many addicts.

If God is God, then I am not.

If God is God, then He controls and not me.

If God is God, then He sets the limits and makes the rules, and I don’t.

So the real debate isn’t over whether or not people should have the “right” to die.

The real debate is over who has the final say-so, who decides how much and how long we suffer, who owns our bodies, who is on the Throne of the universe, and who therefore has the rightful authority over all life-and-death decisions.

The truth is we don’t really control anything.

The truth is we are small, weak, mortal, and vulnerable, and therefore incapable and incompetent managers of the universe.

The truth is we are sinners, are selfish to the core, and therefore are morally disqualified from occupying the Throne.

The truth is we don’t really have control but only the illusion of control.

And the truth is we don’t want to admit it.

So we cloak our utter lack of control around heroic stands, noble causes, and trying to be huge and all-significant.

Which is why a life-ending ritual sacrifice to the false god control is a sad and ultimately meaningless sham.

An older friend once told me, “People won’t hate you when you disagree with them, they’ll hate you when you topple their idol and call them to repentance.”

Simply stated, the bitch-goddess control doesn’t deserve our worship, our devotion, our lives, and, most especially, our deaths.

So if these words have touched a nerve and cause a loss of emotional control, it’s not evidence I am wrong but confirmation that this idol is easily threatened and doesn’t stand up to the light of day.

The humble response is therefore to see our worship of personal control as a failed idol, to repent of it, and to return to the true and only God who rightfully deserves all control.

There is a solution.