Our Despair Might Say More About Us Than it Does About Reality

As I’ve mentioned before, over the last six years or so, I have devoted my sermons between Epiphany and Lent to questions of faith asked by members of our congregation. These can range from questions about specific biblical texts, to theological issues, to how faith intersects with this or that social issue. Sometimes I get only a few questions, sometimes I get so many that I have to extend the series. It’s a series that I find both enjoyable and challenging. The preacher always tends to approach the task with his or her own questions buzzing in the background. It’s always fascinating to take what’s on other people’s minds as my starting point.

Among the more interesting questions I’ve received over the years was this one: “Is despair a sin? How do we account for its prevalence these days?” Quite a question, that one. I was reminded of it as I made my way through David Brooks’ recent article in The Atlantic called “The Zeitgeist of Doom.” According to Brooks, despair is prevalent because we have collectively curated a culture that rewards, even manufactures it. This is true on both the progressive left and the conservative right. Both have a vested interest in believing things are terrible. And, of course our digital media environment has a massive interest in everyone believing everything is always awful and it’s the other side’s fault because this keeps the clicks (and the revenue) coming.

I want to highlight a few passages from the article that I think are worth pondering. Each of these could be its own blog post, but I’ll resist the temptation to offer too much commentary. In each of the following passages, Brooks is speaking about broad cultural trends, but I see these trends reproduced in church contexts as well:

In this culture, people feel bonded not because they are cooperating with one another but because they are indignant about the same things. Consider the word woke, which has been so politicized, and has been used in so many sloppy ways, that it has outlived its usefulness. But when it entered the  mainstream—sometime between 2008 and 2013—it suggested that you could enter the circle of the enlightened, the inner ring of social belonging, simply by adopting a mode of awareness. To be woke was to perceive the world in a certain way, to understand how terrible everything is. You established solidarity by demonstrating that you were enlightened enough to see the pervasive rottenness of things.

In this way, pessimism becomes a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you’re naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.

And, again, whether it’s a progressive or conservative flavour of despair, the psychological dynamic is identical.

Brooks refers to what Reinhold Niebuhr called “apoplectic rigidity”:

This mode of escalating indignation led to what Niebuhr called “apoplectic rigidity,” an inability to see the world as it is, but rather only those nightmarish elements that justify the hatred and rage that are the source of your self-worth.

That last sentence is worth pausing on. How easily we attach our self-worth to the righteous indignation we can summon for our enemies, for all those who can’t clearly see how dire things are and how complicit we are in this wretched state of affairs.

Brooks argues that this mindset “damages the ability to perceive reality accurately.” Which seems fairly obviously true to me. If also feeds the human need to feel superior to someone:

Being negative also helps you appear smart. In a classic 1983 study by the psychologist Teresa Amabile, authors of scathingly negative book reviews were perceived as more intelligent than the authors of positive reviews. Intellectually insecure people tend to be negative because they think it displays their brainpower.

Ouch. As someone prone to negativity, this one stung. But the shoe fits. I see it all around me (and within me). To assess reality positively (or even realistically, in many cases) would be naïve, credulous, weak-minded. And who wants to be associated with any of those words?

Further to the human needs that “despair as virtue” feeds:

Conspiracy theories put you in the role of the truth-telling hero. Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.

Quite a sentence, that last one.

This whole package has broader societal effects:

Moreover, negativity is extremely contagious. When people around us are pessimistic, indignant, and rageful, we’re soon likely to become that way too. This is how today’s culture has produced mass neuroticism.

We have produced a culture that celebrates catastrophizing. This does not lend itself to effective strategies for achieving social change.

Brooks’ whole article is worth reading in its entirety. I think he diagnoses our cultural moment with devastating clarity. It certainly addresses the second part of the question that I began with: “How do we account for despair’s prevalence in our time” But what about that first part of the question: “Is despair a sin?” How to approach that one?

Pastorally, my instinct was to instantly go into comfort and reassurance mode. I wanted to say, “No, of course it’s not a sin to despair! I understand how hard this world is, it’s ok to struggle, God understands, God is near to the broken-hearted, God is present with all of those who struggle with the darkness of this world.”

But I resisted that urge. Instead, I said that I think that it actually is a sin to despair.

I didn’t mean that I think it is a sin to feel sad. There are things in this world that can and should call forth our sadness. I didn’t mean that I think it is a sin to have seasons of life where things feel bleak, even hopeless. I think that we all go through these. I didn’t mean that it is a sin to have doubts. Doubt is part of the life of faith. Unexamined and untested faith is often very thin and fragile and easy to lose. I didn’t mean that depression and mental illness aren’t important or that they don’t deserve our best and most multifaceted care and attention.

So, what did I mean when I say that I think that despair is a sin. Sin, fundamentally, is missing the mark. This is what the Greek word hamartia means. There is a mark that a human life was created for. That mark is faith, hope, and love. Yes, the world is fallen and broken in countless ways. Yes, we are part of this brokenness. No, we will never fully or finally hit the mark this side of eternity. But the mark still exists. There is still a good and true and beautiful way to be human in this world. And the good, the true, and the beautiful really do rely for their existence upon a transcendent order beyond our preferences.

And in light of all this, I think that true despair is a kind of sinful mistrust in God. It is to absolve oneself of responsibility. It can be a way of taking refuge in easy cynicism and victimhood and refusing to engage the world that God has called us to live in, to contribute to its flourishing.

As it happens, this year I didn’t get any submissions for my Faith Questions series. I guess I’ve answered everyone’s questions. Um, well, no, probably not. At any rate, I decided instead to do a short three-part “Why Christianity?” series anchored on those three categories above, the “good, the true, and the beautiful” (what philosophers call the “transcendentals”). It was not a comprehensive series by any stretch, but I tried to show how despite all its sins which might call forth despair (legitimate or performative) Christianity has borne these three things into the world and changed it for the better.

Above all, what I wanted to do in this series was to give people permission to be proud to be a Christian. To not apologize for our existence as some kind of misguided attempt to show how smart or sensitive or morally serious we are. To resist the cheap cynicism and virtue signalling that so often accompanies negativity. We must always tell the truth about the church’s sins, yes. But we also have permission to be joyful. Maybe even overly optimistic. Jesus Christ and his church was, has overwhelmingly been, and remains good news for a broken and hurting world.