Good Friday Squares Off with Joel Osteen

Raised in American evangelicalism, I was no stranger to Easter or to Christmas or even to Advent. But, Lent, not so much. No Ash Wednesday. And, really, not much of a Good Friday. A hallmark of American religion is skipping anything that smacks of death or sorrow and jumping to Easter and hope. We can’t bear to “be negative.” Which means that the first time I watched the stripping of the altar, sat a vigil, or walked the stations of the cross was incredibly powerful for me.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, argues that Americans have been lured into “positive thinking” by pop psychology, encouraged to always look on the bright side and taught that positive thinking brings success (all while having the highest consumption of anti-depressants in the world). This, of course translates into our religious life, where we have adopted a Santa in the skies view of God, a God who showers wealth and blessing on those who believe and are positive enough. For those of us who are millennials, especially, this message rings hollow.

It rings hollow in an uncertain or sometimes non-existent job market, rings hollow as we watch our grandparents struggle to get health care, rings hollow as we find it nearly impossible to make ends meet no matter how hard we try.

The deadly danger of our bright theology is that it teaches that job loss, economic crisis, and inability to find stable employment are a result of not being positive enough, not trying hard enough. And we internalize that shame. Ehrenreich writes that, during the economic downturn, Joel Osteen (among many others) told Americans to avoid seeing themselves “as victims” and to stay positive. A convenient philosophy for those in power, but a damning one for young people driven to the streets, to drugs, or to suicide by their “failure” to succeed.

Good Friday squares off with this great lie. Good Friday is not simply a symbol of death and sorrow, not only a memorial of a God made flesh who went so far as to die to enter into solidarity with us. Good Friday is the day God made flesh died at the hands of the power and greed of empire.

This is why Good Friday is so important in a world like our own. We need a place to name what we experience for what it is. In Aberdeen, we need a place to hold our terror and pain in the midst of an economic crisis, closed mills, and tattered tenements. We need a place that names our reality, a reality that is no fault of our own. We need a place that does not tell us to be optimistic, to stay positive, or to believe that positivity leads to success. We need a place that allows us to mourn, yes, and more importantly allows us to name that this crisis is manufactured by those in power; that the system we live in has betrayed us; that allows us to confront the injustice of it all.

Because the young men and women I meet who camp out along the rivers or sleep in unheated apartments do not doubt that their suffering is unjust. They simply have no place to name it as such in a world drunk with fuzzy good feelings and therapeutic diagnoses that hand out pills instead of justice. Good Friday is a place to name the injustice of it all.

Sarah