My friend KM commented on Facebook today that she was still trying to get over the revelation that a young man she knows thought “relationship abuse didn’t happen to people in his church”. A shocking attitude, perhaps. But sadly one that I don’t think is particularly uncommon in religious groups or maybe even ethnic groups.
I have noticed the same sort of attitude to lots of things – domestic abuse, mental health problems, issues with money management, addictions, drug use, use of prostitutes and pornography….I could go on. There can be a tendency within a church environment to lean towards a ‘them and us’ attitude, where people within the church are apparently magically unaffected by the problems the rest of the world experience. There is still a large taboo around mental health issues such as depression, which some narrow-minded ‘religious’ people can see rather than an illness or condition, as simply a failure of your spiritual life. You clearly don’t have enough faith if you are depressed. Or perhaps you are not counting your blessing enough? Such reactions are especially unhelpful for a person suffering from depression, but to be honest are pretty much unhelpful full stop.
What KM noted was that “sometimes being sheltered is a set up for not knowing how to deal with serious problems.” I couldn’t agree more. I think my own denomination here in the UK was shaken a few years ago when a long-serving minister committed suicide after a long battle of depression. If it could happen to a minister, to such an extreme extent, then maybe we had better take notice? It’s sad that it often takes a tragic event for people to realise that a problem ‘other people have’ really does affect people in your own circle. In recent years the church has also become more openly outspoken against domestic violence and taking action to protect people in such situations.
I have thought for a long time that our young people in church (and in general, really) should be allowed to have open discussions about topics like these, with adults who can give them frank advice and guidance, without a judgemental, narrow-minded attitude. A much greater level of honesty and transparency is needed if we are going to prevent problems from rooting, so that they lead to tragedies later in life. It might have been fine to be hush-hush about sexual issues back in the early days of the church, when these issues were taboo in society generally. But now that information is so widely available, now that children are being exposed to adult issues early on and are becoming sexualised at younger ages, can we really still pretend that just telling them “don’t have sex before marriage” or “respect your partner” is education enough?
My experience with my own parents has been good and bad. I suppose the main negative point for me was that I always sensed they were embarrassed to talk about certain things and that embarrassment rubbed off onto me, so I never felt that comfortable raising questions about certain issues or telling them things I was worrying or unclear about. I think I was lucky that I enjoyed reading, because I think I got most of my sex education from books my parents either made available to me, or I just sought out myself. I have thought about how I would feel answering such questions if I had my own children. But I think it would be important to make the conscious decision to deal with these subjects and swallow any embarrassment or awkwardness I might experience for the sake of teaching my children about the more difficult aspects of life and how to deal with them, as well as giving them the security of knowing that they could ask me with any questions without feeling scared of reproach or embarrassment themselves.
I feel sad knowing that there are people I know personally who have experienced domestic abuse, mental health problems, issues with sexuality and so on, who feel they can’t always be completely open about these difficulties with the people within their church because of a lack of understanding, of education and often of basic human compassion. It’s sad but it’s true. So, now the hard bit: what to do about it?
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