I ended my last post with a story about a men’s retreat. I didn’t share any commentary about that event, allowing people to make their own interpretations. I suspect that the takeaway for most readers was that the problem for these men, including myself, was our shameful behaviors that we felt compelled to keep to ourselves; that my criticism was of these shameful things within the “secret lives of Christians.” Nope. Not really.

I was not disappointed in the thirteen men who fled the retreat without saying goodbye. I was disappointed in the Christian culture that is so rigid and shaming that those men didn’t feel safe speaking about their internal world. I felt disappointed in myself, too, for not understanding our culture well enough to have known better, or for not showing enough grace to make these men feel safe around me. Some may ask the rightful question, “Why were these men’s private lives any of my business?”

As I mentioned in the previous post, Dickens was right that we all have a secret book that our closest friends, family, and even the person in bed next to us don’t know about. For most of us, this hidden life is not too remarkable, where we put our boogers, bathroom habits, or little crushes on movie stars. But often, more perilous things dwell in our secret lives.

You hear about these perilous things when they metastasize into a major scandal. I could make a list dozens of pages long of “good church men and women” caught up in adultery, embezzlement, alcoholism, and drug abuse. The worst, and there have been many of those lately, of “pro-family,” Christian leaders (political or religious) who were arrested for meeting children (teenagers) for sex. If you want more evidence, click here for “profamily politician arrested,” or here for “pastor arrested.”

I am often misunderstood in what I write here. Maybe I’m not a good writer. But a big reason is the overbearing Christian subculture. Right now, I suspect many believe I am writing to condemn these people with the more shameful secrets because that is the Christian norm. No, that’s not my point. My point is, the Christian culture creates a world in which people must build these secret worlds. It is the secret worlds that are the problem. That dark space is the perfect environment for mischief to sprout and grow. It is only human to have the desire for mischief, but it can become inhumane to act on it.

My motivation for the personal sharing time at the men’s retreat, though misguided, was well-intentioned. If we can open our secret world to gracious, loving  people, it will thwart these warped thoughts or behaviors from becoming full-fledged evil.

I’ve shared before about a friend, a Presbyterian elder nonetheless, who told me that he had molested his daughter twenty years ago. He is one of the few people I had to de-friend when he told me he felt no guilt about it because God had personally told him it was okay. But imagine, when he was first having such repulsive thoughts, and he had shared them around a fireplace, late one cold night in Tom’s Lake cabin, that a group of men, without any condemnation, supported him, got him mental help if necessary. This woman wouldn’t be carrying around a profound pain, and this man would not have become so delusional that, twenty years later, he felt like God condoned it… thus likely to repeat such behaviors.

Next, I want to look at the nature of the Christian culture, both conservative and progressive, that creates the conditions for the secret lives that turn into the great hypocrisies that drive away so many people from the church. For example, the evangelical father who lectures his daughter on purity gives her a purity ring, and he is later arrested as a “John” visiting prostitutes.

Respectfully, Mike