Ecclesiology & Complaint

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I have been listening to the podcast “The Happiness Lab”, which is hosted by Prof. Laurie Santos of the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Her podcast covers various aspects of the psychology surrounding the theme of happiness and is a joy (no pun intended) to listen to.

In one intriguing episode, Santos looked at the psychology of complaint. This episode pricked my ears, not only because of the psychological insights it afforded. What also intrigued me was the way some of these psychological insights had a carryover into the type of de facto ecclesiology that is manifested in online Church culture, and the way it also highlights the faultlines with the ecclesiology of the Church as laid out by the likes of Joseph Ratzinger (I explored this in greater detail in the chapter “Communio After Social Media” in the book Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium).

In that episode, Santos asked the question about why, if complaining is a record of negative experiences, people nonetheless gravitate to it like flies to honey. I would have said that “the results would shock” you, but seeing that you are already reading the text, I would not inflict that clickbait on you.

Be that as it may, the studies indicated a couple of things that are of great interest.

The first thing is that complaint can form the foundation for community building. What complaint does in the first instance is identify an object against which the complaint is directed. Complaint, therefore, makes concrete what could have been an abstract feeling of angst. Furthermore, in framing the angst into such concrete terms, the next thing is also does is provide an opportunity to share the experience of angst in common with others. In giving the complaint concrete form, and in realising that someone else shares that same concrete form of angst, a person would realise that they are not alone. The complaint creates a bond between otherwise isolated individuals locked in their interior suffering. In a way, complaint is an implicit admission of vulnerability, which is championed by the psychologist Brene Brown. Vulnerability, Brown argued, opens a door into a person’s life through which the bonds of communion can be woven through. Complaint opens this door in a similar way, but with one key difference, and this leads us to the second point.

Where complaint differs from vulnerability is in the kind of community that is created. If we follow Santos, a community founded on the basis of complaint will veer in the direction of homogenisation. Whilst complaint might initiate community, Santos went on to say that there is an insistence that the experience of the complaint mirror exactly the experience of the one doing the complaining. In other words, the slightest difference or disagreement becomes the grounds for shunning that person by the community.

Seen in this light, the behaviours of online communities founded on a gripe - and this includes those online Christian communities founded on a gripe about something going on in the Church - make more sense. The initial sense of community will eventually give way to what the sociologist of virtual communities Felicia Wu Song called a “lifestyle enclave”, from which emerge over time the pressures to conform to the mental picture painted by that community’s complainant-in-chief. In other words, there is at work here a de facto ecclesiology of conformity, which in turn finds its way into the de facto ecclesiology of the territorial Church.

In contrast to this, an ecclesiology of communion, grounded in the biblical image of the Body of Christ and manifested in the territorial Church, recognises that a body is made of many parts. It recognises that, beyond a common headship in Jesus Christ, there is also a great diversity that, because of that common headship, paradoxically strengthens the unity of the community. Again by contrast, this unity in diversity is manifested in the practice of thanksgiving, where Christians give thanks to God as the same common source for every good thing. Giving thanks provides the freedom for individual experience, while also reinforcing in the one listening to that experience a sense of a common kinship as recipients of a multitude of gifts.

Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.