The bad combination of fear and perfection

These excerpts from Rosaria Butterfield and Francis Schaeffer are rather uncanny given the latest round of Christian scandals. I have no intention of discussing the scandals themselves. Neither do I intend to gloat over anyone's moral downfall. But I think it is worth taking a very hard look at the movements in the Christian subculture that all but guarantee the perfect Christian family. There are conferences and books galore which play off of fear, especially the fear that our kids will fall into sexual immorality. This is a legitimate concern for parents, which I do not want to make light of, but the solutions are often long on rules and short on gospel. Success is achieved and measured by external behavior, and shame is used to enforce the methodology. When a person falls, he/she needs to own that sin without shifting the blame. But I can't help but wonder if these systems set up their adherents for failure. Moralism never kept anyone from sinning.

From Rosaria Butterfield:

When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack onto it. I think that as parents we would be more effective in our parenting if we leveled with our children, if we told them that some of our dearly held rules are not morally grounded but are made for our convenience...

Adult children can appear obedient when they are tuning out instead of acting out. College life tends to bring out all the fears and doubts and perceptions of contradiction and hypocrisies. Between this hyper-sensitivity to authority and rules, and a growing sexual awareness, we met students who were struggling with real moral issues. Their unsuspecting parents had no idea how their over-protection had dangerously ill-prepared their beloved, overly protected children from all of this. Sin - especially sexual sin - has a sneaky way of triumphing in an environment of secrecy and shame.¹

From Francis Schaeffer:

If I demand perfection from myself, then I will destroy myself. Many Christians vacillate between being permissive in regard to sin toward themselves, on the one hand, and demanding perfection from themselves, on the other. They end up battered and crushed because they do not live up to their own image of perfection.

The worst part is that often this image does not have anything to do with biblical standards, with the true law and character of God. A person builds up an image of what a Christian is like as his group or he himself projects it, and then constantly turns inward for subjective analysis and finds he does not measure up to this image. Perhaps the cruelty of utopianism is most manifest at just this point, when an individual applies his own utopianism to himself, "A Christian is like this...," "A Christian is like that...," and then he proceeds to an inward destruction. A Christian must understand that sin is sin and yet know that he should not establish for himself a model of "perfection or nothing."

In other words, a Christian can defeat himself in two ways: One is to forget the holiness of God and the fact that sin is sin. The Bible calls us to an ever deeper commitment in giving ourselves to Christ for him to produce his fruit through us. The other is to allow himself to be worn out by Christians who turn Christianity into a romanticism. The realism of the Bible is that God does not excuse sin but neither is he finished with us when he finds sin in us. And for this we should be thankful.²

1. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Crown & Covenant Publications, 2015, pp. 115-116.
2. No Little People: The Weakness of God's Servants, Francis A. Schaeffer, Intervarsity Press, 1974, pp. 48-49.