Behind the Calmness Curtain

I learned early into my career as an amateur keyboard warrior that there’s a really effective trick to maintaining the upper hand in Facebook flame wars: Whoever stays calmest wins.

That’s it. That’s the secret. It’s actually pretty effective.

A transactivist tells you to die in a fire? Say, “Bless your heart” and wish him a good day. A misogynist calls you a feminist Jezebel who’s too ugly to be desirable? Thank him for his opinion and wish him peace, safety, and freedom from his porn addiction. But again, stay calm. Never let them see you waver. They get off on the power of affecting your emotions. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Be bulletproof.

I remember staring down my ex’s rage and calmly stating, “Go ahead and hit me if you need to.” (Disclaimer: I would NOT recommend this course of action to other women stuck in abuse. It’s pretty friggin dangerous, so please, do whatever you need to do to maintain physical safety.) But the point is this: I was basically saying to him, “You can break my face if you need to, but there is no way in hell that I am going to give you the satisfaction of breaking my spirit. You can’t touch me there. That’s mine, and you can’t have it.”

Calmness, as it turns out, is a form of control. It can be wielded for good or ill, and it’s often a veneer or a facade. Behind the curtain of my calm in these moments, I was anything but serene. I was wildly flailing. I was traumatized. I was furious. I was storming. My face was not telling the truth. It was a temporary solution that would ultimately require years of therapy to navigate.

All of this came rising to the surface of my thought life this week after a series of encounters with tweets defending a video that’s been making the social media rounds. The video spotlights Nancy Wilson (wife of Moscow, ID cult leader Doug Wilson) as she shares her parenting expertise, specifically through a story about disciplining her then 3-year-old daughter Rachel. Rachel was enjoying a play date at a friend’s house when Nancy came to pick her up. Disappointed by the fact that her fun was about to end, Rachel audibly sighed, “Awwww” as her shoulders sank.

Nancy’s response to this was to take Rachel home, spank her, and train her henceforth to always to respond to her mother’s arrival with enthusiasm and fake joy. It’s bad parenting for obvious reasons, and it’s a little vexing that this type of example is being held up as the gold standard for other Christian parents.

For one thing, the kid was three, and she wasn’t sinning by expressing an honest emotion. She didn’t throw a tantrum. She didn’t stomp and pout. She just acknowledged that she was disappointed.

Nancy trained her that it was unsafe to confide her feelings in her mother. She trained her to lie to protect adults’ image and feelings. If you know anything about the Wilsonites, this is significant because it’s the same thing they do to survivors of abuse within their ranks. It’s a more sophisticated version of the Gothard “shiny happy people” mentality, where what matters most are how people look, not really how they are in their hearts. This kind of parenting creates untold volumes of damage in the developing psyches of the children who learn to perform their lives instead of fostering honest, connected relationships with the people they should be allowed to trust most in this world.

In any case, Christian Twitter is currently ablaze with commentary on this situation, and I keep encountering passionate defenses of the video that appeal very specifically to the claim that this parenting behavior can’t possibly be abusive because it’s “calm and measured.” There seems to be a pervasive belief in some Christian circles that corporal punishment can only be abusive if it’s accompanied by demonstrations of rage or hysteria. It’s the man who’s screaming at his kids while he spanks them that’s the true abuser. And yeah, of course, that kind of scenario is unacceptable.

But I maintain this is a very shortsighted, superficial analysis of what actually happened here. My issue in this particular context is not even so much with the spanking as it is with the abuse of power and control.

These people routinely weaponize calmness and wage devastating wars against emotions. This is actually a pretty big problem in much of Reformed Christianity, which seems to have a chronically dissociative relationship with emotion in general. This might be one of those things that you have to experience firsthand to fully understand, but I promise you there are thousands of people across the globe who are taught, from a young age that feelings are basically the enemy, a perpetual threat to holiness. Rather than working to balance emotion with reason, it seems to be easier to kill emotional altogether, especially if it’s anything other than joy.

Like little Rachel, they’re taught to fake it. You can show up in one of their churches on a Sunday morning with a gaping wound no one will ever be curious enough to notice through the smile you’ve learned to plaster on your face to disguise it. There can be no healing for injuries you’re not even allowed to acknowledge.

In these circles, there’s an intense disdain for all displays of passion. They view the charismatic church as an embarrassment that must be overcome. Dancing in church? Forbid the thought! Even belief in miracles is viewed with contempt because miracles rely on faith, not reason, and this gets in the way of their airtight theology and forces them to deviate from the paint-by-numbers script that governs their lives. At the end of the day, they want their God in a neat little box that they can predict and ultimately control. Emotions get in the way of that.

It’s a mistake to think, though, that because calmness is present, sin is absent. Heck, calmness is one of the most easily identifiable hallmarks of psychopaths. It’s what enabled Jeffrey Dahmer to convince police to let him off the hook despite the copious amounts of physical evidence that should have clearly alerted them to the reality that he was literally in the middle of committing murder.

Calmness is not a substitute for true peace. It’s a tool that should be used to reclaim power from those who abuse it. But there’s a marked difference between Jesus’ calmness and the Wilson variety. When Jesus calmed the storm, He demonstrated the Father’s authority, which provided true peace for others. When the Wilson’s weaponize calmness, they demonstrate their own authority at the expense of others’ peace.

We must learn to identify the difference.