Jacob Z. Hess

This is the first of a seven-part series, “Recruiting Alma the Younger“

There continues to be lots of discussion about disaffiliation and disaffection from faith communities these days – most often, involving a language of unexpected “faith crisis” hitting, which can subsequently trigger what many experience as an inevitable, irrevocable “transition process” away from religious practice.

While the language of “crisis” may be a useful framework at times, it also has its limitations.^[1] So, I’d like to propose today another way to make sense of some of the moments that seem often to act as early catalysts to a process of disaffection.   

For the last decade, marriage and family therapists have been learning to better help couples navigate intense moments that can prompt an unraveling of otherwise secure, loving relationships – moments where marital attachment has essentially become “injured.”  Formally, “attachment injury” has been defined by Dr. Sue Johnson and colleagues as occurring “when one partner violates the expectation that the other will offer comfort and caring in times of danger or distress” and is “characterized by an abandonment or by a betrayal of trust during a critical moment of need.”

This “injurious incident” subsequently “defines the relationship as insecure and maintains relationship distress because it is continually used as a standard for the dependability of the offending partner.” Whatever happened in the past thus “becomes a clinically recurring theme and creates an impasse that blocks relationship repair in couples therapy” (italics my own).

While acknowledging some limitations of this other proposed metaphor, I’d like to suggest the concept of “attachment injury” as having some unique applicability and relevance to the variety of incidents that often precipitate what is most often characterized as a “crisis of faith.”  My proposal below applies across faith communities generally, since clearly disaffiliation is a broad phenomenon.  But I take as my primary focus examples from my own faith community: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In particular, I raise this as another way to help make sense of times or specific moments when our understandably high expectations of life in our respective faith communities are not only not met, but in different ways (and for different reasons) painfully disappointed.

My new post on Come Follow Me

https://joelsmonastery.blogspot.com/2019/07/come-follow-me-acts-1-5.html

https://joelsmonastery.blogspot.com/2019/06/come-follow-me-resurrection-matthew-28.html

Our nation was founded upon the principles of “natural rights,” based upon the concept that our Creator gave us all basic freedoms. This is established in the Declaration of Independence, establishing the three most important natural rights, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
These natural rights are sometimes called, “negative rights,” because they do not take anything away from anyone else. Free speech, religion, 2nd amendment, etc, all were put into the Bill of Rights to establish some of those natural rights, which the government could not take away from us.
It is this concept of each person being his/her own free agent that has allowed people in many nations to arise out of poverty and terror, and into a truly meaningful life, which they can pursue for themselves.
The Constitution was established to ensure our natural rights, founded in the Declaration of Independence, would be protected by government. Our president, Congress, judges, military and others swear an oath to defend and protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. This ensures the citizens are free, as long as government remembers its key role is to protect our natural rights.
Some people, however, including many in Congress, want to add to these natural rights a group of claimed rights called “positive rights.” They aren’t called positive because they are good, but because they require limiting someone else’s personal sovereignty, freedoms, and natural rights, in order to give something to someone else. Medicare for All is an example of a positive right, taking money away from some to benefit others.
The problem with positive rights is it trashes the key concept of the Declaration of Independence. Instead of us being free citizens with natural rights from the Creator, rights suddenly are given by the government. No longer free, but subject to the whims of a changing government, we become slaves.
A government that gives us rights, can also take away our rights. We then are no longer citizens, but serfs. We can hope for benefits from the government, and fear its punishing wrath, when it becomes no longer the protector of natural rights, but the one who bequeaths rights.
This is exactly what our Founding Fathers sought to avoid. European kings and lords were the ones who provided benefits and rights to the people, mostly serfs. Serfs could only hope to dwell under a kind lord, who would not overwork them, overtax them, or imprison them for the smallest things. Remember Prince John of Robin Hood fame? He was notorious for taxing the people to enrich himself, but also to pay for King Richard’s expensive Crusades (and a ransom, when Richard was kidnapped). When starving, the poor could only hope for a bit of bread from the Lord’s largess.
Once freedom became a part of the reality, people fled to freedom. Pilgrims and many others chose the dangers of the American wilderness over the captivity of England’s rulers. They risked starvation and death, but freedom raises all boats, and citizens became well off.
As other nations began accepting even a little freedom for its people, extreme poverty shrank from 90% of the world to under 10% in the last 150 years. China’s acceptance of free markets has created a middle class of 600 million people over the past 30 years. Meanwhile, Venezuela languishes in militant violence and poverty, because of government taking away rights from the people of what once was a free, healthy and wealthy nation.
For those government people who think they do us a favor by regulating our lives and offering us new “rights,” please don’t. You are going against your oath of office. Protect our natural rights. Protect our freedoms.

Taxation is Theft (mandatory Libertarian stock phrase).