Moralizing our emotions
This article is part of an ongoing discussion series on Mental Health and the Church. While each article can stand alone, if you’d like to start at the beginning click here.
Feelings
Emotions or feelings – we all have them, they’re a normal part of being human. There are emotions common to all people and cultures, according to psychologists – happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction, love, and amusement. We all experience every one of these emotions at some point.
Our senses, emotions, and mind work together as a highly complex communication system wired into our make–up to help us process information we receive from the world around us. They are allies and communicators that deliver important messages to us. Emotions such as happiness give us a sense of pleasure and contentment, and ones like fear can warn us and help keep us safe in certain situations. Both are necessary to help us experience and interact with, life.
Emotions are powerful influencers that have the potential to rule our lives if we let them. They are our response to what is happening around us and can be given weight, and even made stronger or weaker, by how we react to, and process, them. That processing is done through a combination of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Our emotions stir up responses in us and can motivate and drive us, delight us, and scare us. It’s this that can cause us to judge and label them as good and bad, which is interesting, as the terms good and bad are moral judgments. We have moralized emotions in society and declared them good, bad or dangerous, both in our personal and societal life. When we moralize emotions, assigning value judgments and calling them good or bad, then we must also establish ways of responding, centred around promoting or repressing certain emotions.
The truth is, emotions are neither good nor bad, positive nor negative, they have no moral value in and of themselves. They are, however, definitely comfortable, and pleasant to feel, or uncomfortable, and unpleasant to feel.
We are often comfortable sharing our feelings of happiness, excitement, satisfaction, amusement, and even pride with others at times. Yet most of us dislike sharing our more uncomfortable feelings with others. We feel unsafe doing so, often because we fear being judged by them. We also don’t like feeling vulnerable; it’s not a comfortable feeling, so we shy away from sharing anything that will make us feel vulnerable. Yet we all have unhappy moments, sad times, go through grief, feel angry or despondent, etc. When did being sad, anxious, angry, disapproving, or dejected, become something we became ashamed of, and why do we feel that we need to hide those feelings? Could it be because we’ve moralized them in our minds – made them right or wrong, good or bad?
What does God think about our emotions?
God certainly doesn’t assign a moral value to emotions in Scripture. He does talk a lot about them though, and many verses say our greatest and deepest joy comes from knowing Him, experiencing His love and His works in our life, and knowing that our future is a great one in Him. He wants us to be happy, and true lasting joy is best found in relationship with Him.
God is not ashamed of our uncomfortable emotions; after all, He created us with the full range of emotions. So why should we be ashamed of them? He loves us and openly invites us to share our hearts with Him. In Psalms we see David pouring out his heart to God, sharing both his most uncomfortable unpleasant emotions, and in the end coming back around to a balanced state, knowing that God has met him there in his problems. When we share our heartfelt feelings with God He can be depended on to comfort us, give us His wisdom and His peace (Phil 4:6,7; Ja 1:5) Psalm 34:18 tells us that “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
It’s what you do – where your emotions and thoughts lead you, and the actions you take – that really counts. For example, it’s alright to be angry; anger is an incredibly powerful emotion. When anger is handled correctly it can be very energizing and motivating. It can provide the resolve you need to defend yourself when you’re wronged, or respond when injustices are done to others. It can provide you with a way of venting tensions and frustrations. God certainly isn’t against anger. He won’t look down on you for feeling it, and neither should we. God gives us permission in the Bible to feel anger when He says – ‘Be angry – but do not sin’ (Eph 4:26). Anger itself is not bad, it’s what you do with your anger that has the potential to be harmful to yourself or others.
Emotions and church culture
Are we as Christians, any better off in handling the range of emotions we have, than society in general is? Do we view them in a healthy way, or are we still stunted in our acceptance, acknowledgment, and expression of our emotions? You’d think we would be better at accepting and dealing with them with God to help us, but are we? And if we’re not, then why not?
The truth is, as Christians we are people whose future is full of hope. It undergirds us and gives us an overall positive outlook on life and eternity. After all, we have God present with us in our now, and our future is going to be full of joy unspeakable (1 Pet 1:8,9).
While that’s true, Christians shouldn’t be expected to always feel positive; it’s just not realistic. Sadly, sometimes our church cultures, especially ones with a strong emphasis on good and bad, positivity and negativity, can be places where we become reticent to express anything that could be construed as being negative. In cases like this an over-emphasis on positivity, and being a victorious Christian, can become harmful and unwittingly create a suppressive atmosphere or culture. When that happens an over-emphasis on positivity can become toxic and harmful.
Yes we need to look at our circumstances in the light of what God has said – what He’s promised us individually, and what Scripture reveals of His will for us. We know He will make all things work together for good in our lives (Rom 8:28). But before we get to the place where we’ve processed situations through with God, and understand His perspective and what His promise and provision is, we often have a period of time where we may feel blah, bewildered, angry, are grieving, or are working through our situations and our emotions. It’s in these times where we need to be able to be truthful about our emotions, to say we feel down, or fearful, etc without fear of being shut down or frowned upon because we aren’t seeing through the eyes of faith or being positive enough.
Here are some good questions to ask ourselves as individuals, and to discuss as congregations, in regard to emotions in general, and our ability to be able to openly admit to having unpleasant or discordant emotions.
Have we bought into the belief that there are good and bad emotions, and do we even realize that these are a value we have assigned to our emotions?
What happens when feelings are given a value of either ‘good’ and ‘positive’ or ‘bad’ or negative’? How does that make us view them, or feel about them?
Do we feel free personally to acknowledge the full range of our emotions and express them? How are we doing in our family lives in regard to allowing ourselves, and others, to feel and express their emotions?
What emotions do we express and what do we suppress?
Do we know how to express unpleasant emotions in a healthy way? How do we express emotion in a healthy way?
Have we bought into the belief that we should always be happy and that we should always present a happy face to society, or within our churches? Where did we get that idea from – our parents, society in general, peers, church?
Do we actually really trust God to help us process our emotions, and give us the wisdom to know what to do with them?
How are we doing in our churches in regard to allowing people to feel and express their emotions?
Have anger, lamentation, sadness, grief, and the other emotions that are unpleasant to feel, become things that we don’t feel safe to express, in our families, with our friends, in our churches?
Do we have a culture of unreasonable, or maybe even toxic, positivity in our churches?
Is there such a thing as too much positivity, or toxic positivity? If there is, then what makes positivity become toxic?
While we don’t want to get lost down a rabbit hole of introspection, we do need to ask ourselves some of these questions. We need to get to know ourselves more and communicate better. Because if we do, we’ll find that we live healthier lives, giving ourselves more grace, and understanding and loving ourselves more, and we will also be able to extend that same grace to others. The world is waiting for a safe place, a safe people who will not look down on them in their humanity, but who will love and embrace them in their mess and say, “Hey, I know someone who loves you just as you are and who can help you become free and whole. His name is Jesus.” But if we, the church, don’t know how God sees us and our emotions. and how He desires to help us process them and walk in freedom, then we can’t show that to them.
Coming up next
In the next article I’ll go deeper into how positivity can become toxic and what that can look like in our individual lives, and in our churches, and suggest some things that may help in creating a healthier individual and church culture in regard to emotions and the place of their expression.
For the next article in this series click here