How Fear Traps People in Tribes

Today someone asked me about people stuck in tribes, and how they might break out of those tribes.

This is a very preliminary draft which I’m writing, simply because it’s far too long to share on a Twitter or Threads response. I’ll develop it into a full post soon.

They asked:

Thanks for those posts, which I have replied to individually. Both are illuminating and important. The piece I’m trying to articulate – mostly for my progressive leftist friends who don’t understand how people can be stuck in what they see as an obviously regressive mindset – is how these norms are socially enforced within the community. The congregation as a community is the key social circle in many places. Being excluded from that can have devastating impact on your daily life, yes?

In the most extreme cases, people may fear for their physical safety, including the possibility of violence from family members, if they set themselves outside the tribe. But aside from that, in so many communities, the church IS the safety net for people who live at the economic margins. Living paycheck to paycheck can you afford to alienate your source of support? The church circles provide child care, food when it’s needed, are often linked to employment and even housing, etc.

So that’s what I’d love your first person perspective on if you have one. A person might have doubt in their heart about the ethics of their church, may want to change their life, may in fact already have shifted their beliefs, but be trapped in place because they can’t afford to lose their community, or they feel they can’t. Does this seem right to you? And how do we help these people? Especially those who can’t easily change where they physically live.Thanks for the time and energy.

My answer:

You’re absolutely right about the safety net. If you listen to the podcasts “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” and the spinoff “Bodies Behind The Bus”, you’ll hear a lot of stories about abusive churches and the trail of destruction in their wake. To me, the thread along a lot of the stories – aside from the abuse – is that the one thing that keeps people trapped in those situations – or at least in their minds, they’re trapped – is that very factor of not wanting to lose their tribe.

And you correctly point out that it has several factors: child care, support system for social and family emergencies, a sense of belonging, a sense of being respected, and so forth. And it’s further compounded to an extreme extent – making it spiritual abuse – by the threat of hellfire if you find yourself disagreeing with the dogma in that particular community.

Beyond the religion, the “theology” of the evangelical political views plays a similar role in trapping people in their party. This is certainly just as true of left AND right wing politics, but is probably more pronounced on the right wing because it embeds religious reasoning directly into the political choices, effectively doubling the risk to someone who steps away. If you dare violate the political boundaries, you’re at instant risk of getting kicked out of the religious tribe also.

A lot of what I’ve had to wrestle with in the last four years has been the separation from family (especially) and friends (to a lesser extent, because I still have a good tribe of ex-pats from my same church). But God started talking to me in 2021 and into 2022 about from where I derived my identity and sense of self worth, and I realized that I was being called incrementally deeply to put my allegiance on Christ, not my parents (physical, then spiritual, then church leadership). I wrote about it here:
https://crucibleofthought.com/a-man-shall-leave-his-father-and-mother/

Also, I began to understand how the threat of hell was also trapping me. And I began to see how fear played into all of this. It’s important that “do not fear” and “perfect love casts out fear” were such critically important Bible teachings, because I have a sense that fear underlies nearly all of the problems that trap Christians in situations of abusive and toxic and incorrect teachings. That idea is scattered thru my writings, but not really concentrated adequately, or I’d point you to a single post, but for example, this blog post explores Revelation and the fear that it creates in people.
https://crucibleofthought.com/how-revelation-warped-my-theology/
But the same holds true of fear of being outcast or shunned.

So in my journey out of evangelical theology, and the subsequent journey out of the associated right-wing morass, I’ve had to escape the trauma response of those teachings, and become comfortable with discomfort and losing my tribe, and turn in to the utterly implacable love of God and God’s absolute determination not to lose me, and stop fearing being sent to hell for wondering about theology. I wrote about that, too.
https://crucibleofthought.com/repenting-from-hell/

Of course, that whole dynamic also compounds any ability to rethink abortion, and gun rights, and LGBTQ issues, and antiracism, and other political issues for which my former tribe would instantly expel anyone who dared step outside the acceptable orthodoxy. When I realized that fear was what kept me from actually deeply investigating those topics, it released me to actually think carefully and listen to fresh voices for the first time in my life. (You can read about those topics in some papers I’ve published, starting here: https://crucibleofthought.com/my-media-and-content/)

How do we help people?

Great question. In reading the book “Faith After Doubt” by Brian MacLaren, I discovered that people live in four different spiritual stages. The majority are in stage 1 or 2; stage 1 “simplicity” is the binary-only, black-and-white, true-and-false world of dualism; this is a toddler stage, and very full of fundamentalists (on many religious systems, just as much Islamic fundamentalists as Christian). Stage 2 “complexity” allows that there are some greys between the black and white, but it still focuses on “this is right, that’s wrong, but there may be some nuance.” Stage 3 is fairly rare, but some people eventually discover that some things just don’t have any single answer. For example, salvation has three biblically-supportable doctrines (eternal conscious torment or traditional hell views, annihilationism where the unbelieving soul is destroyed rather than living in torment forever, and universal reconciliation or universal salvation, where God eventually restores every single human to full loving eternal life). All three can be successfully defended; ultimately we choose one we prefer but an honest student will realize there may not be one single answer. Stage 4 is exceedingly rare – harmony – and somewhat complex to summarize, so I’ll let you read the book if you want more info.

But the point here is that people exist in different stages, and in each stage, they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been able to internalize from what they were taught. A relative of mine, for example, will likely never move beyond stage 1, because his ADHD/autistic spectrum brain absolutely needs simplicity and clear choices. Mystery would literally break him. And so I doubt God is unhappy with his worship. I on the other hand am well into stage 3 if not tickling stage 4, and God is just as approving of me as my relative. So I have to let people be who they are – while also simultaneously offering a different message for those who are uncomfortable in their stage, who are doubting and need to jump to the next stage – but NOT insisting that anyone take such a leap to consider them whole and wholly acceptable to God. It’s a mystery, right?

But I didn’t answer: So how do I help them?

Perhaps you’ve already seen my answer here: I hold out hope and a view of a very different, sometimes mysterious, but God-filled, Christ-like life, even if it messes with people’s understanding of Gospel or Bible or religion or politics. If they’re able to come along, they will. If not, I don’t judge or condemn them, because like my brother, they haven’t been able to see beyond their understanding. But at least I’ve sowed the seed of a bright Gospel and maybe I’ll be around to see the harvest, but likely that honor will be given to someone else long after me.

Part of this method of ministry involves breaking myself of the need for efficiency and scale. I can’t effectively disciple a million people, even if I have a million social media followers. At best, I can effectively deeply impact just a handful.
https://crucibleofthought.com/henry-ford-christians/

And suddenly that starts to look an awful lot like how Jesus did things. And look at the results He got.

Interestingly, I did some math, and found something shocking. If each of us were to TRULY disciple just four people, and it took five years – so a LOT less effective than Jesus with 12 in just 3 years – we could fully disciple the entire world of 8.5 BILLION humans in just one 90-year lifetime. Consider: we’ve been at this church thing for 2000 years, and obviously the current methodology just ain’t working. It doesn’t take megachurches full of ten thousand people; it just needs deeply faithful disciples who are true representations of Jesus, in turn discipling just a few lives at a time. The miracle of exponential growth takes over, instead of the economies of scale.
https://crucibleofthought.com/exponential-christianity/

So… that’s probably enough of a crazy-long lecture-length answer for now. More to follow.