Eleven Healthy Ways to Navigate the Inherent Tensions in Religious Communities
Posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms is not one of those ways.
How are our Louisiana friends doing?
As a reminder, last week, Governor Jeff Landry signed legislation that required all public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. This caps a week in which their agenda to develop eliminate grooming measures for children became strengthened by legislation that requires fellow students, teachers, and administration to refer to trans students by pronouns associated with their sex on their birth certificate (not gender—remember, newborns cannot have a gender, since gender is a set of expectations ascribed to them by societal norms), and another law that allows public schools to employ chaplains as staff members.
To learn more about the tailspin that is the Louisiana legislative system, keep your eyes on the Substack
.A quick note. Julia and I might, fairly, be accused of being anti-religion, given the nature of our podcast, Sexvangelicals, and our primary audience, folks who have left Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal spaces because of their rigid understandings of theology, gender, and relationships.
Religion has a lot of value. It provides community and ready-made relationships for folks. It teaches pro-social, pro-civic values; I wouldn’t hold the values of compassion and hospitality that I do without the influence from my religious communities of origin, and Julia and I plan on passing those values to our children, regardless of whether or not we participate in religious spaces in the future. It often develops structures and practices to honor and celebrate major life transitions, such as marriages, deaths, and newborns.
However, Julia and I speak out when groups of people begin to politically organize through religious language to create policies that repress, suppress, and discriminate against other people, as we’re seeing in the United States with the merging of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities with the Republican Party, showcased through the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. (To learn more about Project 2025, check out our friend
Substack.)While we’re less familiar with the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Likud Party, the 969 Movement (the Buddhist nationalist movement in Myanmar), Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India, and myriad Christian and Muslim nationalist regimes in Africa, each of these scenarios involve a political party organizing around a religious ideology to discriminate against some combination of women, other religions, immigrants, and queer people.
One of our favorite comedians, Mohanad El-Shieky, a Libyan-born New Yorker, tells a story where he and some friends were stopped and held up by Muslim nationals. One man got into Mohanad’s face and shouted, “WHO ARE YOU FOR? US OR THEM?” Mohanad hilariously describes his internal thought process, including the ridiculousness of the question posed to him.
He eventually answers, “I’m for….God.” The Muslim nationals reflect on the answer, and then celebrate, patting Mohanad on the back, and letting he and his friends continue their journey.
Religion becomes dangerous when it establishes false binaries that tear at the fabric of relationships with our fellow humans. Us versus them. Saved versus unsaved. Republican versus Democrat. Believers versus nonbelievers.
Religion becomes dangerous when the moral certainty marketed and propagandized by local clergy gets used to develop laws that favor those with specific religious beliefs or community identification, reinforcing gender, class, and ethnic inequities along the way.
Religion becomes dangerous when those with power simultaneously enact morally-based principles against other people, but behave in ways that are opposite from the values of their religion. In the US, we see this through the myriad of Evangelical church leaders who preach values of Purity Culture but engage in sexually abusive, exploitative behaviors.
writes a lot about this on her Substack.David Dollahite, Loren Marks, professors at BYU, and Hilary Dalton Pippert, former student at BYU and current research associate at Auburn, suggest that religions become dangerous, both in family systems and larger national settings, when they lose the capacity to hold on to natural dualities. They write:
“Religion involves a number of core ideas and practices that, when lived in families, result in inherent inconsistencies, tensions, and paradoxes.” (p. 220).
These dualities exist in two different contexts: the religion itself, and with each individual family unit, given the experiences, personal ideologies, and relational factors (i.e. practice of gender roles, flexibility and cohesion within the family, and the satisfaction of relationships). Dollahite, Marks, and Dalton Pippert suggest that religions, and religious families, have to figure out strategies to effectively hold the tension between the following eight dualities:
Transcendent and mundane spiritual experiences. Religious groups that celebrate both the unexplainable engagements with the supernatural and everyday spiritual encounters, without favoring one over the other.
God as a close confidant and authority figure. In our opinion, this is actually one of the trickiest dualities to hold. The Yahweh of Christianity and Orthodox Judaism is a megalomaniacal asshole who punishes those that don’t follow him (believer and non-believer) and hold to his values with exile and death. Allah and Mohammad both have capitalistic, expansionistic hopes as well. Polytheistic traditions typically have one or two deities with these traits, but other gods provide checks and balances to the nihilistic tendencies of these gods. I suppose Jesus plays a similar role in Christianity, although American Evangelicals develop their image of warrior Jesus around John’s bizarre (and possible drug-induced) dream in the book of Revelation. There’s a growing number of Christian churches that center their theology around a loving, compassionate Jesus, but struggle to find explanations and answers for the violent depictions of Yahweh in the Old Testament.
Accepting and refusing actions. Religious groups identify behaviors, ideals, and communication patterns that are sacred and profane. We would argue that the phenomenon of Purity Culture, where girls who wear spaghetti straps are sexualized because boys have uncontrollable sexuality that girls are expected to regulate, is a bastardization (pun absolutely intended) of this duality.
Religious actions and relational blessings. In our opinion, this duality is the easiest to fuse, as we see through Pentecostal and Prosperity Gospel traditions, where sacrifices and rituals are expected to be rewarded with financial comfort, peace, relational satisfaction. If you don’t receive these blessings, you aren’t trying hard enough. Holding this duality involves eliminating the causal relationship between religious actions and relational blessings. I pray without an expectation that God will do anything. When I receive something positive, maybe God had something to do with it, or more likely, God had nothing to do with it.
The capacity to generate and address relational struggles. Devout religious practice creates the practice of relational abuse or the perception of relational offense, as the myriad of exvangelicals who receive differing levels of shaming commentary from family members who are still engaged in religious practices can attest to. Religious communities can also provide relational support and feedback that can be transformative, inside and outside of traditional religious practices.
Religion is relationally unifying and divisive. Anecdotally, failure to navigate this duality effectively is the most common reason that the exvangelical community exists. For instance, I got fired from a church for my (admittedly liberal) views on sexuality and sexual health, at the same time that my church was trying to figure out how to be an outwardly affirming church toward LGBTQ+ folks. Julia has described numerous examples on Sexvangelicals where she and other church members were shamed and shunned for relational decisions they made. Exvangelical social media is chock full of stories of churches and family members who have chosen divisiveness “in the name of Jesus” over harmony and compassion. It is possible to hold onto religious differences while still showing care and compassion toward others. I’m reminded of this every time I talk with my mom, who believes differently than I do, but is also curious about my beliefs (and vice versa) and roots me on as I build my life.
The interpretation of experiences as baffling and profound. Life has a variety of unexplainable, WTF moments, as well as experiences that have clear significance and align with or contribute to a greater sense of purpose. Objectivity and subjectivity both exist, without one philosophy overpowering the other (except when there’s immediate danger to a person or community member).
The balance between evolution and homeostasis. This tension is the core challenge in most family therapy, where a family has to be simultaneously stable in its larger values and flexible enough to tend to the growth and development of each individual member in the family.
So how can families and religions hold the tensions in these dualities effectively? We want to suggest three options that families have:
Hold a both/and approach. For instance, with the eighth dualities, the balance between evolution and homeostasis, talk with family members about characteristics, values, and activities that unify the larger family unit. Follow that up with conversations about the preferences, personality traits, and relationships that are meaningful to each individual. Recognize and normalize that each person’s desired proximity with the larger family unit will differ throughout the life span.
Separate church and state. Theocracies, be they actualized, such as the Taliban or the variety of Papal States throughout Europe’s history, or theorized, as the 21st-century Republican Party, have historically been especially war-driven, unequal societies. The merging of church and state makes the practice of differentiation—acknowledging the differences in our fellow humans while also staying in relationship with them without attempting to assuage them into uniformity with us—virtually impossible.
Zooming out works much better than zooming in. When there is tension created by one of the dualities, zooming in by focusing on the minute differences between two people will almost always accentuate tension. I wanted to include Mohanad’s story in this article because of his clever way of getting out of the binary that the Muslim nationalists placed him in. All of them celebrated (or claimed to, int he case of Mohanad) God. What are the larger, more common values that you might share with others, and how do you communicate those?
This summer, Julia and I are developing programming to share with religious institutions that promote healthier dialogue, communication, and sexuality within religious/formerly religious communities. Stay tuned to Relationship 101 for more details!
In the meantime, please subscribe to Relationship 101! And donate, so Julia and I can continue to write articles about the relational and sexual health the church didn’t want us to have.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia