I remember sitting in senior seminar for my English major as we discussed how authors evoked emotions from their readers. I said something about how I had noticed how churches would strategically plan their worship song set list in order to maximise emotional potential after a sermon—that many more hands always went up after preaching than before.
A few months later, my global literature class discussed our assigned text (Partitions by Amit Majmudar) in a flipped classroom. Professor Zwart spent her time silently manning the expanse of the whiteboard, haphazardly writing down the ideas and connections as the class discussion flew thick and furious. I brought up the idea of ethical story-telling as we grappled with the idea of an unreliable narrator and the murky moral morass (say that three times fast) about how readers evaluate a story. It’s an uneasy layer cake, the reader sandwiched between the author and the narrator, and something I tend to dislike on principle.
Fast forward four (now say that three times fast…) years later, and I found myself once again discussing the gray lines of emotional manipulation as Andrew and I drove home from a church that, as you might have guessed, also strategically arranges its set list to get the most number of hands up after the sermon. This time, though, the ideas of ethical story-telling and religious pathos have stuck around and continue to roll around my brain.
Between being a reformed Protestant and an overall brainy-analytical type of person, I have a natural aversion to excessive displays of emotion, especially of a religious nature. But! As I try to look past my own hang-ups, I still wonder about how one is supposed to combine both thought and emotion if one really believes in Yahweh. Especially these days (do I sound like a tired old woman yet?), both conservative and progressive Christians seem to rely an awful lot on whipping up emotions in their congregations, for good or bad, though they would never call it that. It’s too sordid to think about religious emotional manipulation that way, but maybe it’s also too sordid to think about religious emotional manipulation at all.
One of my theology classes at Calvin was titled “The Holy Spirit and the Church.” I think I left that class with a firmer belief in the Holy Spirit, though I’m not so sure if I was more confident in knowing anything about said entity. Anyway, I wonder how much of my judgment is justified, per se, versus how much is just my own personal prickliness. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to judge the Holy Spirit?
Or is the Holy Spirit even there? We humans are emotional creatures, and the ills caused by emotional manipulation are serious and tangible—so much so that they can lead to belief. Which appears to be the crux of the matter: if it exists, where is the line between human-made emotional manipulation in church services and Holy Spirit-made (or boosted) conviction? I mean, surely there is something to be said about the dangers of having a religion of only pathetic conviction without more holistic engagement, right?
We think Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” is kind of weird, but I’d argue religious ecstasy is still alive and well today. We’re just the readers sandwiched between a narrator and the author. Admittedly, there are many false beliefs of Christians today for all sorts of other reasons, but I wonder what Yahweh sees when he looks down at us and sees such pathos, even if it’s muddled alongside sincere beliefs.
