Clipped wings, cages and the zoo of Christendom

E.B. White's Trumpet of the Swan tells the story from the perspective of a mute swan, Louis, who is given and learns to play a trumpet as a replacement for his voice. His goal is to play a beautiful song for his chosen soul-mate, Serena, and woo her. In a freak occurrence, Serena is caught in a storm and lands in the zoo where Louis conducts public concerts. The director of the zoo sends the zookeepers out to clip Serena's wings and Louis realizes if Serena's wings are clipped then his dreams are foiled. After a long discussion about the purpose of zoos and the fact that they can't just allow a swan to land at a zoo without taking advantage of the situation, Louis proposes to buy her freedom.

I think the conversation between Louis and the zoo director is fascinating. Zoos have this dual purpose of preserving animals in a way that is humane, yet, they support themselves by putting these animals on display for humans to observe, which means keeping them in cages, or other means, such as clipping their wings, so they cannot escape. There is a benefit to wildlife to have zoos, as zoos encourage amazement and wonder and that can inspire people towards conservation efforts so that their native habitat is preserved.

But these are wild animals, not humans. I think churches have taken the "zoo" approach to their members. Instead of being a safe haven for humans in the wild to receive healing and encouragement, churches cage or clip the wings of Evangelicals everywhere for the purpose of maintaining a zoo-like display to the world.

The pastor as zoo director, leaders as zookeepers

Instead of each Christian being encouraged to find their own Spirit-led path and expression, churches limit their members based on what the pastor and church leaders impose. If the pastor wants to run a soup kitchen, then members wanting to serve will be caged into soup kitchen ministry. If someone wants to minister in a way that the church isn't interested in, then the pastor and the elders will seek to clip the wings of the members to maintain the zoo as intended. For example, I was in a church that had a bad experience with small groups being led astray. The leaders decided that they could not maintain control of the teaching in small groups unless they were personally teaching the small groups, and since they didn't feel they had the bandwidth to teach, they issued an edict that there could be no teaching in small groups. Wings were clipped successfully and then, not surprisingly, they struggled to get congregational members interested in attending small groups. So, then there were occasional sermons on the importance of filling seats in the small groups.

Our pediatrician loved to see cuts and scrapes on our kids. That meant that they were active and exploring the world. Imagine a world where parents protect their kids by closing them more and more off to the world. The kid touches a hot burner, so we cage off the kitchen. The kid climbs out of his playpen and hurts himself, so we put him in a cage we can lock. The kid chokes on a peanut, so we grind all of the food into paste. Are we equipping children to interact with the world or are we creating bubble children that get blinded by the sun when we open their dungeon door?

The church disbelieves the work of the Holy Spirit and only believes in their ability to cage and clip their children's wings to keep them in the fold. If we don't teach our children about sex, then they will be safe from all sexual sin! If we don't teach our children about science, they will never doubt our assertions about how the world works! We teach them a warped version of Total Depravity so that they don't ask why they're in cages while the zookeepers roam free and tell everyone what to do. If we don't keep any non-Reformed, non-Christian sources of information away from our kids, they will grow up with a Reformed perspective! Of course, when these bubble children enter the world and inevitably stray from the faith, it's not because the bubble is a sham, but because the parents had some hole in their bubble somewhere... maybe the kids went to public school, or public university, or they joined the Boy Scouts or a secular sports team. We never look at the spiritual system and its assumptions for why people run away when they are no longer ecclesiastically chained to their beds.

The church as zoo

In one aspect of the zoo, the cages are there to protect the animals and provide a habitat for them to live and grow. If the goal is to release animals back into the wild, they are treated much differently - maybe not even put in cages in the first place, and their wings would certainly not be clipped. So, perhaps what drives the cages and clipping we see in churches can be compared with a different aspect of the zoo, and perhaps for the same reasons - public display and excitement.

So, if the pastor and leaders cage and clip just right, they can put their churches on public display and hopefully generate excitement for their vision of Christianity. They certainly don't want any public scandals and if they build the cages just right, maybe, just maybe, their church will look perfect from the outside. If something really bad happens within the church, the fear that the church will somehow be exposed to public disdain can overwhelm any desire to seek justice. So, maybe a few animals have to be put down to cover up the truth. Maybe the leadership decides to ignore the sins of a leader because it would look bad that their policies and procedures were woefully inadequate. Maybe a member must be shamed into silence because the truth would jeopardize the future of the zoo.

But, as surveys and studies show, people understand that people do bad things in churches. They want to see justice and not a fake, shiny veneer over a cesspool of shame and silencing. Why does church after church think that Jesus is somehow more glorified in coverup and ignorance than in shedding the light on internal sin and pursuing justice. Or maybe it's not really about Jesus in the first place, but about the celebrity pastor and churches that think, like the bubble parents, that shielding their members within their narrow worldview somehow generates perfect righteousness and are ashamed when the formula doesn't work.

Lay members as animals

That brings us to the experience of lay members. If we were born into captivity in this sense, perhaps we never realized what it meant to spread our spiritual wings. They were clipped with teaching about our depraved state and the need for spiritually-gifted leaders to discern truth on our behalf and show us the right cages we were expected to fit into. For those who were injured in the wild and found the church. Maybe it was a safe place at first. The zookeepers worked to mend to bones and heal the bleeding, but then something happened. Instead of being encouraged to return to life with spiritual healing, we were locked in the cage of legalistic rules and teachings.

I think we can get comfortable in our cages with the food the zookeepers provide and the fellowship we experience with the other caged animals, but for many of us, something will happen that breaks our sense of safety and comfort in the cage.

Ideally, we sense the urging of the Holy Spirit to free ourselves of our legalistic cages, our insular community and our spiritual scraps and realize that there's a whole world outside that we should be free to explore, but there are other ways of being lulled out of our sense of comfort.

Maybe one of the other animals in our cage attacks us. Because it doesn't look good for the zoo to have bloody animals walking around, we get quietly ushered to an even smaller cage and hidden from public view. It doesn't feel safe and it doesn't feel comfortable, and maybe the zookeepers think that caging us with the animal that attacked us will force us into a positive relationship (although it generally ends up with us getting eaten).

Maybe one of the zookeepers decides to use us for their own advantage or pleasure. Since they're the zookeepers, we assume they know best, but eventually something doesn't feel right when we are whipped or beaten or worse. Again, we get put in the small cage. It wouldn't look good for the zoo if anyone found out one of the carefully screened zookeepers was abusing the animals.

So, we make our escape. At that point all of the zoo's resources are refocused on getting the wayward animal back in the cage. If that proves unfruitful, then the zoo's reputation must be preserved at all costs. The cages get another few bars, but nothing else really changes.

Churches as recovery centers, not zoos

I think we need to recover the idea that a church is there to be a place of safety and healing, not cages and public display. If one animal is dangerous towards another, the aggressor needs to be dealt with and the victim needs to be strengthened and healed. A rescuer who abuses animals shouldn't be rescuing animals, and shouldn't just move to the next recovery center to abuse the animals there. But, the central point is cages are temporary and for the safety of the animals, not a new habitat. We need to be strengthened to thrive in the spiritual wilds, not hidden in a protective bubble.

Recovering from the caged life

Just like animals raised in captivity can rarely be released into the wild, I think recovering from legalistic and abusive spiritual systems is uniquely difficult. Instead of being fed the views of the leaders, we need to be trained to discern truth from scripture and seek the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. We need to learn how to find spiritual friends within and outside the church to help us have a good perspective. Because the zoos are so pretty and appealing, we need to find the animal recovery centers when we need safety and healing. It is so hard to discern the difference between veterinarian and zookeeper, but it is crucial in finding healing vs just getting stuck in a cage of a different zookeeper's imaginations. I can definitely understand when someone doesn't want anything to do with a person wearing a white lab coat. I'm thankful that I (think) found a recovery center and not a zoo. Maybe I'm not going to ever put on the lab coat, but I can maybe be a warm and encouraging presence to those around me as I seek to find my way back into the wild.

Rosaria Butterfield and the Sin of Empathy

Image source: https://x.com/nakedpastor/status/1883862633704571106

I was trying to decide between two topics to write on and this one won. Rosaria Butterfield has written the foreward to The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits a book by Joe Rigney. It's published by Canon Press, Doug Wilson's publishing house.

I haven't really wanted to spend a lot of time researching the arguments, but I found some interesting articles and summaries that have started showing me a systemic issue. I do love to weigh in on those systemic issues!

If I understand the argument correctly, empathy is differentiated from sympathy by where the emotions are anchored. Sympathy is anchored in our own experiences while empathy is us trying to understand someone's emotions from their own perspective. Rigney's original flashpoint article is here: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empathy, and I really valued this article in trying to understand some of the nuance: https://www.lambsreign.com/blog/the-dangerous-fad-of-calling-empathy-a-sin

Rigney claims that empathy is sinful because it somehow detaches us from truth and our own lived experience. This is similar to the "can I attend the wedding of my gay friend" argument. That is attendance at a wedding is tacit approval. Since we cannot approve of a gay wedding, we cannot attend such a wedding. In the same way, if we, say, empathize with a drug dealer, we are somehow detaching our emotions from the truth that dealing drugs is wrong and re-attaching them to the false worldview of the drug dealer. Rigney then uses this premise to rail against empathy for any LGTBQ+ person because, in his thought process, one cannot empathize with that person without somehow attaching to their sinful worldview. This is most likely why Rosaria Butterfield was asked to write the foreward.

I think Rosaria is in a uniquely hard position and, while I disagree strongly with her stance, I can see things that led her in that direction. Ken and Floy were truly wonderful people, but I think that the RPCNA she joined because of them 'gloried in her flesh' by parading her around and, certainly Kent's heavy patriarchal and authoritarian beliefs have not helped. When she came to speak at my church, she did not want any public advertisement because she drew crowds of protesters and threats of violence. I can't really imagine the effect living with hate mail, death threats and protests would have on me, but I doubt I would have handled it with the grace she did for as long as she did. However, it seems that all of this has taken its toll on her, as https://reformationproject.org/rosaria-butterfield-shift/ has described, she's become increasingly vindictive in her rhetoric against that community.

The idea that empathy is a sin reminds me of the RPCNA response to transgender issues. Essentially it starts with a scientific and empathetic view of transgender people and the struggles they have, even showing evidence for intersex people in the Bible. Then some sort of snap happens and the discussion seems to re-anchor in a black and white absolutism of scripture with the idea that God made "male and female" and thus, we must overcome our empathy to make sure people are forced into their proper bucket and gender roles.

My initial thought was that Jesus's interaction with Mary and Martha was totally empathy and not sympathy. Jesus weeps. It doesn't appear that Jesus being overcome with emotion is anchored in his own experience and truth. He already knew and he already told Martha that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but when (I think) he saw the situation from their perspective, he was overcome by the sadness and hopelessness of it and he wept.

The lambsreign article also also had a helpful example. Christians can be involved in prison ministry, and we can empathize with people in prison without abandoning our desire for justice. We can be sad with them that they are locked up even if they are locked up because they killed someone. Someone told me about a book that said, two things can be true at the same time. This person can be a criminal and this person can be justifiably sad about their current state. I could counsel a prisoner as a human without having to keep their "criminal" label front and center.

I appreciated that advice. What was demonstrated to me in parenting was that it was somehow wrong to comfort someone who caused their own grief. So, if my kid burns himself on the hot stove after I told him not to touch it... well, I can treat the medical issue, of course, but the idea of entering into the shock and pain and sadness was somehow justifying the disobedience. Two things can be true - my child burned himself, and my child is sad and in pain and needs comfort.

Apparently there was a Facebook discussion based on a similar article by Joe Rigney. I suppose that if empathy is a sin, then abuse and vitriol must be righteous.