Bullying - a curse beyond the playground

 Bullying is insidious. It is an attack by a thousand cuts. It belittles and undermines, it gradually wears the targeted person away until they are the shadow of who they once were.  Yet at the same time each action is seen as so small that alone they would not be considered significant. But cutting again and again causes deeper longer lasting wounds.

I cannot remember a time in school before I was singled out as someone to be teased.  There we go - words that undermine the intense power of bullying, 'just teasing', 'kids will be kids', 'it's only a joke'.

What decides who will be the focus of a bully? Someone different from the rest, someone perceived as weak, someone maybe seen as a threat that a bully wants to stop, it can be so many things. Maybe it also depends on the context of the bullying, childhood or adult, by those who should be your peers, or those with power over you.

Back to school, primary and secondary, right up to leaving the upper 6th. By then my year group bullies had either left or grown out of the worst, but younger year group lads had taken up the slack.

I wasn't beaten up, no bruises to show, and yes I am grateful for that, yet it also made it hard for me to complain or prove what was happening. It even made me feel I had no right to complain or be bothered.

Yet it is the verbal bruises that don't heal, 'no one will ever like you', 'no one will be your friend'. When you are told something day in and day out for years it gradually becomes your inner voice too. Even stones are worn away by the continual drops and flow of water.

Once a bully has the power then even things that would sound like a neutral act come with sinister messages. I clearly remember the day in my mid teens when this dawned on me. I had been encouraged to 'tell' on examples, but when a bully says hello to you in a way that is threatening, a reminder that they are there, the look in the eye etc.   But what can I report, that 'he said hello'?

And that brings us to bullying in the workplace, governments, or churches. Sometimes it is a targeted attack on individuals, sometimes it is an overall culture that is more indiscriminate in the aggression shown.

As with the Priti Patel, Home Office, case it takes great courage to speak out about bullying. You know that they will twist each individual cut, 'just banter', 'need to toughen up in this workplace', 'you are just being oversensitive' and the current fashionable one 'don't be such a snowflake'.

Yet again, as in so many contexts including too often the church, even with evidence accepted as valid no one has to take responsibility. In many organisations it is a case of no one wanting to rock the boat. In church contexts, which I see though those I know and also through union work, there is a lack of courage to challenge bullying behaviour even when it may have driven away several ministers in a row.  Or where a senior minister affects others.  Bullying can come from any side, and those targeted can be of any type.

There is malice intended in some cases, a deliberate targeting of someone or a certain group. But yes it can be unrecognised by even the bully themselves, this does not excuse behaviour and attitudes to others that consistently and significantly damages them.  If someone is left emotionally crippled and suicidal by your actions then you have responsibility for those actions, and those words.

And among the greatest lies ever taught to us as children 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never harm me'. 

The truth is 'stick and stones may break my bones but names can break the soul'. 

There are many reasons I despair at our current government, but standing up for someone who has been found through independent review to have used bullying behaviours, shouting and swearing at workers in her team, is definitely one of them. But then I know all too well that we in the church structures have a plank in our own eyes too.  And that is cause to weep. 

Faith, and spiritual abuse

I am a church minister, I am part of the union for faithworkers and a rep, I have raised the issue of problems with the system to deal with discipline and complaints within the UK Methodist Church.  I have been part of a multifaith conference discussing spiritual abuse, where religious beliefs are a cover for un loving and even abusive attitudes.

Why? Because I have personal experience of bullying within my faith community, because I have known others to also suffer, because the systems to report this fall way, way too far short of facing up to those who bully in the name of faith.

I am a church minister, I have mental health struggles. I want to lobby for proper understanding of such issues. I have encountered those who gave me permission and acknowledged that mental heath wasn’t a failure. The student from another church in the circuit when I was at uni who spoke about being a Christian and depressed was the first step in that, and I cannot recall her name but spoke to me before I would ever have admitted to my own issues.

I have encountered a big barn church near here that sells a booklet written by its retired minister that says depression is self pity and that Christians should look to Jesus and reject psychology and psychiatry as of the devil (since Jung and Freud were not Christian).  Sorry but psychiatric care and medication are what enable my stability, and would they ever dare to say the same for physical conditions like cancer, even if those who discovered medications are not Christian? (And by the way psychology has developed way beyond Yung and Freudian ideas anyway).

Then I hear that decades ago, when alone in a distant place, someone close to me who was experiencing wobbles in their faith journey, and went to the person who was there to support and help was told that if don’t feel that fit the Christian mould then going to hell. Knowing that this person came home suicidal, that surviving attempts on their life they then lived decades feeling unworthy of God’s love….     All my understanding of spiritual abuse is clearly there; all the failures to understand not just mental health but the normal ebbs and flows, stresses and strains of life, all the failures I have experienced in the church, and through others’ journeys, are encapsulated in that one dismissal of a hurting person.   I wonder if that person who listened and replied in such a way went home feeling that they had testified to God’s Word and therefore had had a good day at work? Yet they left someone feeling that they could not be good enough for God and suicidal.

Matthew 18 v 6-7

⁶ “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. ⁷ Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!

 Sadly such millstone bearers are all too common in our churches and in our structures. And our structures are too scared to call people out – keeping the peace being held as more valuable than calling out injustice, bullying, causing others to stumble, and even to the point of collapse.

When we sit in our church buildings and wonder where the people are we need to ask ‘what sort of God have we revealed to them?’, ‘how have they been hurt by the church, by Christians?’ and ‘what in our life as church is strong enough for them to dare to trust us?’

I believe in God who has been part of my journey, through physical and mental health iussues. I give thanks for those who were there to say that I was not alone and without trying to fix me. I could not always sense God with me, but I was not judged in that uncertainty, others held me in their faith when I could not trust in my own faith, because I could not process my own chaos.   

Yet so many are not held as they are, but told they need to show their faith in a certain way. As with the person I referred to, this can leave wounds open for years, people spiritually abused by those that should be there to support them.  Sadly it is more common than we like to admit.  

 

What is truth?

 What is truth? So Governor Pilate asked Jesus when the crowd cried for his death with no evidence of wrongdoing.

It was also the text of my first ever sermon when I was a university student and training as a lay preacher within the UK Methodist Church. Normally you start by sharing parts of the service with your mentor but since I came to the planning meeting with 3 points I got given the sermon.

I can't recall what I had to say about it, though somewhere I may have a floppy disc with evidence.  However it is a powerful question that is very important today and in the light of the US election of Nov 2020 the issue of truth versus claims is critical.

By a coincidence of scheduling this past week as well as bringing the US election count brought the BBC programme about lies in history. How many of us 'know' that in the French Revolution Maria Antoinette said of the hungry masses 'Let them eat cake' - except apparently she didn't. And the storming of the Bastille was not a grand liberation of political prisoners but 7 random men, and that actually the revolutionaries worked with the monarchy and elites for a couple of years before killing them. 

So to the 2020 US election - despite the rampant claims of the Trump loyalists, that there has been fraud on a massive scale, no evidence has passed muster in any of their legal claims. Yet the reality seems meaningless to upto 20 % of the American population.  80% of Americans are reported to accept the result of a Biden win, which leaves 1 in 5 still in doubt despite the thousands of votes in favour in each crucial state. In past election reviews the number of votes changed/removed were in the tens or just about 100s whilst the vote in favour of Biden was in tens of thousands.  

But what is truth? Is it the people who shout the loudest? No smoke without fire and all that. If one person can cast doubt on the truth as recognised by every other channel, where is our sense of truth?  Is truth about evidence or who shouts the loudest? Is doubt overwhelming even when it is proven wrong? 

 What about those accused of wrongdoing? It is embedded in our understanding of justice that we are 'innocent until proven guilty', yet the culture of trial by social media is such that someone is guilty by any association with someone else who is vaguely linked to a crime. 

Surely truth has a value of its own - not about claims but about evidence, but then as history is written by the victors in their own image we now seem to have arrived at a point where 'current reality' is now written as 'those who shout loudest'.  Maybe it was ever so, but the wider range of the loudest voice through modern technology brings a louder voice, regardless of what is actually truth.