Can You Trust Your Thoughts and Feelings?

Some evangelical leaders don't want you to

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

“One of the most destructive practices of your generation is that you value your own thoughts way too much,” said former megachurch pastor Francis Chan. “You want to look inside and tell everyone what you’ve been thinking, what you’ve been feeling, rather than opening up the word of God and saying, ‘these truths are way beyond mine.’”

Chan’s voice boomed throughout State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where 65,000 young adults gathered for the “name and renown of Jesus” at the 2022 Passion Conference. He pleaded so hard with his audience he seemed on the verge of tears. Or popping a blood vessel. 

The sermon went viral on Instagram, where it amassed over 1 million views. Tens of thousands of young people travel to Atlanta every summer to worship and listen to evangelical icons preach, some of whom earned their qualifications through seminary and others through reality television. 

“I don’t care about my thoughts,” Chan continued. “What’s the point of thinking about my thoughts when [God’s] thoughts are infinitely superior to mine? I wake up every morning and empty myself of my thoughts.”

But Chan doesn’t empty his mind to meditate. The goal is for the head emptiness to last all day. An ideal day for Chan consists of having none of his own thoughts. 

“You want to tell everyone what you’ve been thinking and what you’ve been feeling instead of opening up the word of God.”

At a 2014 discipleship conference, Chan held up an open bible to an audience of biblical teachers, pleading them to surrender their thoughts to God. 

“A lot of discipleship is people getting together and sharing their feelings and thoughts,” Chan said. “And so as leaders, we need to be able to teach others your thoughts really don’t matter that much. … When I disagree with [the Bible], I have to assume that He is right and I am wrong.” 

What Happens When We Deny Ourselves of Feelings?

Chan isn’t the only evangelical leader warning believers to be wary of their thoughts and feelings. 

The influencers who run the non-profit Girl Defined regularly patronize the emotions of their young female audience, suggesting they “take [their] thoughts captive” to let God control their  “crazy-girl emotions.” A popular blog for Christian women says that anger doesn’t matter because Ephesians says to “get rid of all bitterness.” 

Ex-evangelical Joshua Harris instilled a fear of emotion in an entire generation when he published I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a Christian guide to sexuality and dating. It wasn’t enough to save your body for marriage, but your mind and emotions must also remain pure, according to Harris. He encouraged Christians to stop dating and adopt a model of courtship to guard their hearts from forming deep emotional bonds. While dating couples might spend a night alone together over a nice dinner, courting couples prioritize group hang outs with friends and family. 

I Kissed Dating Goodbye opened with a story about Anna, a young woman engaged to be married. But her wedding day didn’t go quite as planned.  

As the minister began to lead Anna and David through their vows, the unthinkable happened. A girl stood up in the middle of the congregation, walked quietly to the altar, and took David’s hand. Another girl approached and stood next to the first, followed by another. Soon, a chain of six girls stood by him as he repeated his vows to Anna.

“Who are these girls, David? What is going on?” she gasped.

“They’re girls from my past,” he answered sadly. “Anna, they don’t mean anything to me now… but I’ve given part of my heart to each of them.” 

“I thought your heart was mine,” she said.

“It is, it is,” he pleaded. “Everything that’s left is yours.” 

A tear rolled down Anna’s cheek. Then she woke up.

Anna disclosed this dream to Harris in a letter in which she expressed anxiety about “how many men could line up next to [her] on [her] wedding day.” 

“How many times have I given my heart away in short-term relationships? Will I have anything left to give my husband?”

Whether or not Anna was a real woman or a fabrication is beside the point. The message was clear, and it goes something like this:

Your thoughts and feelings are potential dangers because feelings can provoke action to engage in the satisfaction of desires that “cannot be righteously fulfilled.” Having deep romantic feelings for someone you don’t end up marrying robs your future spouse of the greatest gift you have to offer - your mental and physical chastity.

Harris was a 21-year old virgin when the book was published in the 90s, but he was already the mouthpiece for the American purity movement. In 1998, Harris married Shannon Bonne. They divorced in 2019. He has since pulled printing rights for I Kissed Dating Goodbye, apologized for writing it, and left the Christian faith altogether. But the damage was already done.

Purity culture both predated and outlasted Harris’s time in evangelicalism, but his book is the most common point of reference for those harmed by the movement. Local pastors nationwide continue to send the same messages, even amidst a cacophony of (predominantly female) voices warning church leaders that shame-based sex education ruins lives.

Many evangelical women find that, once married, they can’t enjoy sex. Having repressed their sexuality for years, they find it impossible to enjoy it without shame, even within the confines of marriage. 

Some women claim that I Kissed Dating Goodbye gave them vaginismus, a psychosomatic condition in which the vaginal muscles contract so severely that penetration becomes virtually impossible. Sexual assault survivors are the most likely to experience vaginismus, but it’s recently become a phenomenon among evangelical women.

Some online communities are dedicated to helping victims of purity culture deal with the aftermath of emotional denial. 

Thinking and Feeling is How We Make Sense of the World

One of the theological arguments against the primacy of emotions is that God’s Word transcends human feelings. Part of what it means to live in alignment with the Christian faith is submitting your emotions to the Bible. 

But I’ve never met an evangelical who practices this. Not because they’re hypocrites, but because it’s impossible for us not to center our own thoughts and feelings in our perception of reality. Even what an evangelical would consider a literal reading of the Bible is filtered through thoughts and feelings. This is just how humans perceive the world.

Take this verse in 1 Timothy as an example. 

“Likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire.” 1 Timothy 2:9

Hair braiding is discouraged again in 1 Peter. But even Christians who believe the Bible is without error say these verses are specific to a cultural context. The churches receiving Paul’s letters would know that women who braided their hair in that culture adorned their braids with costly jewels. The followers of a religious revolution started by a poor carpenter’s son were called to devote themselves to serving others and not their own appearance.

These verses are treated like the ones that prohibit women from speaking in church and require them to wear head coverings while praying. No mainline conservative church reads these verses literally. 

So what Chan and others do is filter the verse through their knowledge of Biblical culture and their thoughts about how Paul’s audience might have interpreted his letters. Such a reading involves a lot more than a literal reception. Biblical interpretation and application therefore requires deep thinking and feeling on the part of the believer, even the believer who considers their reading of scripture literal.

Morality Binds and Blinds

Our moral judgments are motivated more by personal feelings than a consistent moral or biblical logic. At least that’s what the research suggests.

Sociologist Jonathan Haidt says that morality “binds and blinds.” A shared moral framework can bind groups together in solidarity, but it can also blind them to their own flawed logic. In his 2009 book The Righteous Mind, Haidt suggested that humans are wired for tribalism. Our group affinities are driven by intuition, fear, and disgust - not reason. 

Haidt was not the first scholar to make this suggestion. A vein of moral philosophy dating back to 18th century thinker David Hume asserts that moral judgments are largely informed by sentiment. 

In their 2008 study, Haidt and his colleagues highlighted the role of disgust in moral convictions. Haidt made two groups answer questions on a survey that asked respondents to make judgments on a variety of topics including marriage, sex, driving, and film. 

One group was exposed to a can of fart spray in a nearby trash can while they completed the survey. The goal was to elicit disgust in these participants. The other group wasn’t exposed to external stimuli. 

Haidt et al. found that sensory disgust makes moral judgments more severe even on topics that did not produce disgust in the preliminary studies, like driving. The group exposed to fart spray was consistently and significantly more judgmental on their questionnaires than the other participants. 

Researchers replicated similar studies with the same results, affirming Haidt’s conclusion that respondents make judgements based on unrelated, preexisting, and perhaps even unconscious feelings - not reason. 

Instead of aligning our feelings with our reason, we tend to search for reasonable justifications for our pre-existing feelings. 

Francis Chan is a Christian Because of What He Thinks and Feels

I wonder what Francis Chan would say if you asked him why he is a Christian. 

While I can’t say for certain what his response would be, evangelicals of the same theological background often respond with something like this: 

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, I felt convicted of my sin, which separates me from God. I’m unable to make it right with God on my own, and need to rely on his grace through the sacrifice of Jesus’ redeeming work on the cross. Because I felt the love of God in my heart and the conviction of my own shortcomings, I have realized that the Bible makes spiritual, intellectual, and emotional sense to me. So I’ve decided to accept Jesus as my savior.

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Coming to faith requires a mixture of thinking about scripture combined with the feeling of a personal spiritual experience (i.e. the Holy Spirit) that guides the believer to Jesus. 

Here Are the Contradictions

Let me remind you that Chan has decided to believe scripture, even when it doesn’t make sense to him. 

“When I disagree with [the Bible], I have to assume that He is right and I am wrong.” 

But if he has decided to agree with the Bible even when he disagrees, that means he has made the decision to center a particular interpretation of scripture above his personal thoughts and feelings. Which is all fine, except that to make that decision in the first place required both thinking and feeling. Chan made a decision (based on his own subjective experience) that the Bible is a trustworthy source.

Some pastors criticize those who left the evangelical church for prioritizing their thoughts and feelings too much and God’s Word too little. But in order to prioritize the Bible in this way requires one to prioritize their thoughts and feelings about that interpretation - making those thoughts and feelings come into alignment with a specific worldview.

Chan made a fortune selling 1.6 million copies of his books, three of which are New York Times best sellers. This is a man who makes his living from conforming to and spreading a particular ideology. 

I don’t blame him. Christians who veer from groupthink face consequences. Preachers lose their jobs when they do things like participate in same-sex weddings or question the existence of hell. 

(I question the intellectual integrity of someone whose job security is threatened by a change of mind.)

I can imagine that the thought of changing his mind on a variety of theological topics produces in him a lot of feelings. One of those feelings might be a fear of not being able to provide for his family if he were ostracized by his church community. Francis Chan has a social and economic incentive to maintain his beliefs.

We all make decisions informed by our thoughts and feelings. And the spiritual leaders the church lauds as examples of emotional submission are also led by their thoughts and feelings.

This means we need to recognize how our subjective internal experiences enlighten every area of our lives - our spiritual lives included.

But what about the times when you can’t trust your feelings? Anyone with an anxiety disorder knows that feelings can be distorted and imperfect reflections of reality. Stay tuned for next time - I’ll share what I’ve learned about trusting myself over the past few years.