For today’s segment of “How Do You Move Beyond Blue?” I have the HONOR, the PRIVILEDGE, to interview the author of a favorite essay of mine, one that I read regularly to reassure myself that I’m okay even if I’m not following the latest fad in spirituality.
Patton Dodd is the editor for Christian features on Beliefnet. He is also involved in Beliefnet’s Community site, or social networking component. You can get to his page on the Beliefnet Community by clicking here. Patton is the author of “My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion,” which received a starred review from “Publishers Weekly” (and those are hard to get; I know because I used to write them).
Here’s Patton!
Patton, I have to tell you that your article, “Optimism Is Depressing” has been the most helpful piece of literature I’ve yet read on how to interpret such philosophies as the Law of Attraction and the opinions compiled in “The Secret.” Many Beyond Blue readers know this about me, but I continually struggle with what to say to friends and family who subscribe to this way of thinking. And I’m frustrated beyond belief when people tell me such things as “if you just counted your blessings” or “if you just mastered your thoughts” or “if you were just more positive and optimistic” then you wouldn’t be in so much pain.
I’ve wanted God to give them a day in my brain so that they can really appreciate what they are saying to me and how it might feel if received on the other end.
Ahem. Sorry, back to you.
1) You talk about how you became a Christian, attended a Pentecostal university, and embraced what is known as “the prosperity gospel.” Let’s stop there. In “Optimism Is Depressing” you say this:

So, I carefully considered the counsel of a fellow student who told me that if I had faith, I’d never have another cold. I prayed alongside a fellow student who “claimed in faith” that God would provide him with a new Toyota 4×4. Passages like Mark 11:23-24, where Jesus says that anyone who has enough faith can cause a mountain to leap into the sea, began to haunt me as standard-bearers for whether I had faith at all.

I can see why the prosperity gospel attracted you. Who wouldn’t love a faith in which you never had to hug the toilet again in your life. Do you think this is the main appeal for people—that it provides a sense of control that we otherwise don’t have?? It guarantees us health and wealth if we have enough faith?
Yep, that’s the appeal. The prosperity gospel, The Secret, and similar messages promise that you can have absolute certainty in your own comfort and security. It’s hope that comes with a guarantee that the world can be precisely what you want it to be, and it can be that RIGHT NOW…if only you can summon up enough faith.
The problem is that that’s a bastardization of hope. It’s a consumeristic hope, as if the universe, or God, is some kind of economic system where you can “purchase” whatever you need by coming up with enough currency. It’s a lie. (And I’m not saying that people who teach this are necessarily liars—they may very well be just as duped as the people who believe them.)
2) Then you lose your faith. You write:

I’ll not blame prosperity teaching alone for my years of pained spiritual searching. But it was a lie that was hard to shake. To this day, when I have a bad day or a great need, somewhere in my mind is a voice accusing me of not having enough faith.

Man, I am so with you on that!! I worked a year at a very conservative Christian camp. They had to separate me and another counselor who bunked together because our faiths weren’t strong enough to convert the little campers. Anyway, I want to hear more about why you lost your faith. What triggered it, or what made you think, “I’m not quite sure I’m with these people?”

First, I’d offer that your “conservative” Christian camp wasn’t conservative enough! Sounds like it was too ultra-modern and too individualistic, and not in touch with the traditional, historical idea of faith as something that exists alongside questions, and that can be sustained even in the face of doubt. But I know exactly what you mean, and have experienced the same frustrating problems…
My faith struggled in the face of many obstacles. Some of them were problems with the particular Christian community I was in, Some were problems that had more personal roots—my own family, my own psychological and emotional constitution, etc. But one main issue that made me feel very solitary is just that I wasn’t as certain as everyone else about being a Christian. In my faith culture, there was no safe place to be a skeptic, no place that welcomed questions and saw doubt as normal or helpful. We had the idea that to doubt was to disbelieve, and that true faith could not survive serious doubt. The more I recognized that I was filled with uncertainty, the more I wanted a community that could help me find answers that I could live with, answers that were intellectually honest and sustainable, instead of just one huge leap of faith after another.
Most of my questions were very basic—Is the Bible true? How can I trust that Jesus is real? How can I trust the validity of my own religious experiences? Do I have to believe that all other religious views are false? And so on. Those questions are important and difficult, but are not necessarily scary if asked in the right context. I just had to find that right context so I could deal with them adequately.
3) Next you present a brilliant synopsis of the prosperity gospel and the law of attraction, and what they have in common:

The prosperity gospel goes by various names (Word-Faith, Word of Faith, and more) and many forms, from Joel Osteen’s squishy “Just smile and receive happiness” approach to Creflo Dollar’s direct name-it-and-claim-it approach to Bishop Bernard Jordan’s “laws of thinking” approach. No matter its guise—and some practitioners, like Osteen, don’t admit to being practitioners—Christian prosperity teaching emphasizes one or more of these doctrines:
– God wants to bless you with health and wealth;
– Health and wealth are a sign of God’s favor;
– Having the right thoughts and professing the right beliefs are the keys to receiving God’s blessings.
In other words, you gotta believe it to receive it. And in still other words, the opposite is true: if you confess the wrong beliefs or think the wrong thoughts, you can expect to get the wrong stuff. What you think and say is what you get.
As Kenneth Hagin, the father of the Word-Faith movement, put it: “Say it, do it, receive it, tell it.” As Rhonda Byrne, author of “The Secret,” puts it: “Ask. Believe. Receive.”
Rhonda Byrne is not a Christian prosperity preacher. But her message is a close cousin of the beliefs of millions of Christians who are influenced by prosperity teaching.

I don’t know how better to explain “The Secret” and the prosperity gospel, but I presume some have disagreed with your interpretation? If you’ve received any criticism on your case, what have they said?
I have to admit that at this late date—I mean, after 13 years of wrestling over these questions—I’ve pretty much given up listening to a lot of criticism about this one issue. I’ve done my time in the trenches of this particular battle, so when I’m confronted with someone who is completely won over by prosperity thinking, I don’t engage them too much.
4) Then you place “The Secret” and the prosperity gospel in the context of the Bible as a whole. And here are the places the Gospel of Optimism comes up short:

The idea that positive thinking always attracts good things to you runs smack up against the biblical witness, from (this could be a long list, but I’ll keep it brief) Job to David to Isaiah’s condemnation of a people who said “peace, peace, where there is no peace” to, most of all, the suffering of Jesus—which, I might note, he prayed to be spared of. (Did his prayer go unanswered because he was being too negative?)
The message of the Bible is not that there is power in positive thinking. The message of the Bible is that sometimes we have power, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have plenty, sometimes we have little. In both states, God is sovereign.
The Bible is not a guide to optimism. It is a guide to hope.

Dang, that’s brilliant. The Bible is a guide to optimism, a guide to hope. And it makes me still be able to be hopeful as I’m realistic.
But why is that so offensive to “The Secret” disciple? Because good thoughts ALWAYS have to produce good results.? What do they think when they think themselves to death and still no result? Moreover, is your concept—the more realistic, more biblical concept—harder to swallow because there are no easy, nice answers? What do you think?

I guess it is harder to swallow in the sense that it requires admitting a certain amount of pain. Pope Bendedict’s last encyclical, which is all about hope, speaks to this a lot—how having hope does not mean denying what’s wrong with the world. In fact, having hope rather than optimism requires admitting that the world is broken and can be nasty, and for some of us (myself included), it requires owning up to personal shortcomings.
But I think it’s only harder in the short term. In the long run, it’s NOT admitting pain and lack that will be difficult. I know people who have clung to to the gospel of positive thinking most of their lives, and they are MUCH more weary than the rest of us.
Look, true peace lies down the path of self-knowledge. Saying “I’m not sick” when you really are is going to exhaust you. Saying “I’m rich” when you’re poor is going to disappoint you. The better way is to admit your needs, however great they are, and ask for help. Think of the hemorrhaging woman in the gospel story who pressed through the crowd to touch Jesus. She wasn’t trying to get in touch with the great “Secret” of the universe. She was desperate, and willing to make a fool of herself and to offend those around her to get the help she needed. When we’re hurting, that’s the model we need to follow.
5) Okay, now we get into your distinction between optimism and hope. We’ve had this debate a lot here on Beyond Blue. Many, heated discussions have been prompted by the difference between optimism and hope. This is what you say:

What’s the difference? The philosopher Cornel West has marked it as well as anyone. West says that optimism is a belief that things will turn out as you want them to—we might say it is faith in the law of attraction. Optimism begins in the self—desire for what you want is the basis for belief and action. Hope is different—it’s a conviction that something must be, because it is right and it is just, and you are prepared to fight for it regardless of the circumstances. Hope makes claims on you and pushes you beyond yourself.
Hope is neither optimistic nor pessimistic: it is realistic. With hope, you can acknowledge your current circumstances—Jesus suffering in anguish in the garden—you can want for something better—Let this cup pass from me—and still know that your life has meaning and value beyond your pain—Not my will but yours be done.
Optimism doesn’t let you acknowledge what’s wrong with your life; it encourages you to lie to yourself, and over the course of the years, to live in willful blindness to your real problems. Optimism tells you to be positive no matter the circumstances—which, if you can’t keep it up, is a recipe for depression. Hope lets you be honest about the circumstances, and still urges you to look toward something better.

I get what you’re saying. But here’s the thing: I have a lot of hope in my life right now. I’m a very hopeful person. But I think some people think I’m too stuck in my disease – that if I imagined that I wasn’t bipolar, I wouldn’t be anymore. They see my reality check as pessimism.
I tried for a time to pretend I wasn’t mentally ill. I was in the process of weaning off my meds; I pumped up my vitamins, meditation, yoga, etc. I continued to cry and shake. One person said, at that time “you didn’t TRULY believe … because if you had, you’d be okay.”
I guess this is my question: how do you know what is a necessary way of reframing your thoughts—and not being stuck in your disease—and what is unrealistic expectations? Also, how can I respond to people who tell me that “I’m as okay as my thoughts” in a nonviolent way?

Second question first: You can either ignore those people, or if they are open to it, offer them a critique along the lines of what we’ve discussed here. Either way, you will be doing them a service in showing them that their position is untenable.
As for reframing thoughts, there’s no doubt that we all absolutely have to do the (sometimes very hard) work of maintaining a cheerful heart and a hopeful outlook. I just don’t think that means being happy every day. Rather, it means fundamentally deciding that your life is worth living, that people are worth loving, and that you are valuable. Most of all, it means being part of a community that is fulfilling and challenging—that helps you when you are in need, and makes claims on you when others are in need.
6) The final paragraph of your outstanding essay:

Hope is part of the longstanding tradition of the Christian faith because it allows you to admit the condition of your life, warts and all, and trust that God can recreate that condition. That’s the story that we’re invited to participate in: God is at work renewing all things. Some of his work is now, and some of it is eventual, but we’re called to have hope and join in that work. That—as I learned in those years of spiritual searching—is what it means to believe. Faith is found not in getting your best life now, but in having hope.

Now we’ve been having a debate here on Beyond Blue, as well, on the whole thorn in the side thing. Did God really intend for Paul to have that thorn? Did he create it so that Paul would be a better person and have more faith? Or was it an accident, about which God said, “Ask me for help, which is all you need, and get over it.” I mean, some people have said that Mother Teresa wouldn’t have done all her charitable work if she hadn’t been in such a state of pain. Do you agree?
This is a philosophical and theological question, and I think reasonable people can disagree about the answers here. I think trials can be authored by God—the Bible attests to that again and again. It also attests that some people bring trials on themselves, and still other trials are brought on by others. It’s fine and proper to ask “why” about suffering, but I don’t think it’s wise to get stuck there, because it’s an unanswerable question. I try to read Job, and Ecclesiastes, and realize that I’m not nearly the first person to not be able to figure out the great purpose behind my trials. Instead, I look for smaller purposes in suffering—What good can come of this, and how can I extend that good to others?
Obviously that’s just my ideal perspective—I’m not saying I live up to it. But I try to put one foot in front of the other in this way.