Victim Mentality or Silencing Convention?
“Offense is just pride. I want to live unoffended,” she said.
She spoke with such conviction and authority that I immediately believed what my friend was telling me and resolved to keep any future stories of hurt feelings to myself.
It’s a theme I’ve encountered often in the charismatic church where a well-intended commitment to living peaceably and cultivating honor seems to be the norm. “Don’t be easily offended. Forgive easily. Love covers over a multitude of sins. Just let the little stuff go.”
There’s some wisdom in this type of thinking, to be sure. We all know people who live on the opposite side of the spectrum—the perpetually offended, the ones who relish each and every opportunity to center themselves as the victims of some terrible thought crime, parasitically latching onto peoples’ sympathy as some sort of surrogate life force in lieu of contributing anything meaningful of their own to the world around them.
“I can’t get a job because everyone discriminates against me,” says the blue-haired gamer who showed up to the job interview 15 minutes late wearing sweat pants. Or “I can’t pay my rent because I have an undisclosed emotional problem that led to my decision to blow all my money on concerts and entertainment, and if you hold my feet to the fire, I will accuse you of ableism. I’m just so oppressed. How can I possibly be expected to function under these conditions?”
Like I said, you know the type, and no one with an ounce of self-awareness or shame wants to be that person.
Intersectionality and the Oppression Olympics haven’t helped. Everything starts to feel like one giant contest for highest victim status, like your voice isn’t relevant or welcome on any given issue unless and until you can prove that you’re entitled to the microphone by virtue of the volume of injustice you’ve suffered. And I get it—when everything is labeled oppressive, people grow weary of walking on eggshells, and they start to tune everything out.
I laughed the day I saw my friend Miriam’s name on the SPLC hate watch website, where she was labeled as a dangerous bigot, a threat to the LGBTQ community. Miriam herself is a Jewish lesbian radical feminist who made history as the first person to be reinstated to the military after being fired under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. By all accounts up until this point, she was considered a lesbian legend—a trailblazer for other members of the gay community. But because she refused to call a man a woman, she was suddenly deemed a threat, a bigot, a danger to her own tribe. It’s just so obscenely absurd. And it’s one of the reasons so many people tune out when conversations about injustice arise; they’ve learned to become skeptical of most claims of oppression.
But while the left may be guilty of seeing oppression under every rock, I'm increasingly realizing that the right is guilty of pretending it's not under any rocks at all. And the problem is compounded by church culture that inadvertently trains people to regard their legitimate wounds as symptoms of pride to be ignored and dismissed for the greater good, which really is just a pretty spiritual sounding way of peddling conflict avoidance.
I’ve known so many people who spiritualize their relational problems, and, rather than confronting them head-on, allow them to fester, saying, “It’s God’s business. He will have to fix it.”
This is especially true when the offending party holds a position of leadership, often at the pastoral level. Honor culture says, “Just tend to the greater good, and overlook flaws to protect the ministry.”
I mean, by all means, pray before acting. That’s always wise counsel. But we need to take a lot of people by the shoulders and give them permission to address problems rather than ignoring them under a facade of forbearance. Offense is not always pride. Sometimes it’s just gold old garden-variety offense because someone behaved badly and caused injury. And the wounds need cleaning. Ignoring them only assures that they will happen again, perhaps on a greater scale.
I’ll give you a hypothetical example. Let’s say you’ve got an uber extroverted pastor with enough charisma to charm a king cobra. Like many dynamic people, it’s unclear where anointing intersects with charisma. One often gets confused for the other. All people know is that the man can command a stage, and he’s bold in his desire to take ground for Jesus, and that’s contagious. He runs his operations by impulse, frequently irritated by any invitation to plan ahead or be intentional about anything at all. He’s got a team of people working overtime behind the scenes to make up for his slack, and he frequently runs roughshod over their expressed needs. When they tell him they need more time to plan the worship sets, he tells them not to be so uptight, to just go with the flow. When they ask if he can make time to meet with them one on one, he will pencil them into his calendar—six months down the road. They feel perpetually unheard and underappreciated. But honor culture. They all quietly resign themselves to deal with their frustrations privately, none of them at all aware of the frustration and burnout all the others are experiencing.
Is this a model for a healthy church? Can a church truly flourish when 90% of the team tasked with keeping it afloat are feeling chronically exhausted? Is it really godliness to pretend like there isn’t a problem? Of course not. It’s aggressively unhealthy, but everyone’s afraid to say so. Don’t be offended. Don’t play the victim. Remember?
The term “victim mentality” is something of a double-edged sword; on one hand, it accurately describes a prevalent cultural scourge. On the other hand, it’s a convenient silencing convention, designed to shut down uncomfortable conversations that could lead to life and health if allowed to be engaged.
Two of the pervasive wounds that need the most healing, especially in the church, are racism and sexism. Unfortunately, any time you try to start a meaningful discussion about either of those things, there’s a pretty high probability you’re going to be accused of fostering a victim mentality. How can we have meaningful discussions about racism and sexism on the right without being accused of indulging identity politics?
"All lives matter" is often a dismissive, unintelligent response to complaints of a racism that remains all too real in this country. There are thousands of people alive today who know what's it like to be forced to sit in the colored section of the bleachers. Why is it so very hard to understand that their experience might be uniquely difficult? Why do we refuse to acknowledge that racism still hurts some people a whole lot more than it hurts others?
Similarly, when women speak up about epidemics of harm their sisters have experienced at the hands of men, why do we insist on accusing them of "man bashing" or indulging a "victim mentality?" It is objectively true that thousands, even millions, of women in America alone have been sexually traumatized and forced to remain silent.
Why are we so quick to post memes about how men are under attack but so slow to require godly repentance in leaders who enable decades of sexual trauma to go unchecked on their watch?
I’m a Christian. This means I think true solutions to the problems that plague the world are ultimately found in Jesus, not government programs. Identity politics have created unspeakable amounts of harm and division rather than the healing they promised, and I emphatically reject the vast majority of “solutions” proposed by intersectionality enthusiasts, who often seek revenge rather than justice.
But there's real cost in denying people the right to specifically name patterns of harm suffered and inflicted. It looks a lot like whitewashing and denial, and it only makes the problem worse and the backlash more vicious.
We cannot fix what we refuse to name.