Imagine it’s September 12, 2001. Yesterday, you watched on TV as the World Trade Center towers fell and the Pentagon was hit. You realize that nearly 3,000 people have died and a war may be just around the corner. Maybe you know someone with family in the city and communications are still down. The foundations of a world order that has governed your life are cracking, and you don’t yet know how far.
You watch the news obsessively, in an irrational hope that the next report will give some answers, some sense of stability, some understanding of the emerging new world. As you take it all in, you grasp at stories of heroism, but you are also driven to face the details of loss. If there is a vigil, you will drop everything and go.
You will buy flowers and throw them down at the nearest city center, because you feel you must make some offering. When you go out into these spaces, you meet the eyes of everyone else, because there, your private bewilderment is revealed as part of a public crisis. You know you are right to feel grief and uncertainty; when you bring your grief together with everyone else’s, it comforts you a little to see that you are part of a people, a community.
You know everyone will be in church on Sunday, hoping for a chance to be together in the disaster. If you’re a pastor, you know you need to speak to the collective trauma within the context of gospel hope.
But now imagine that, instead, on September 12, half the population resolves to go on as if it never happened. Half the news channels ignore it. Important people declare it didn’t happen. You know your friend is still frantically searching for her sister; you’ve seen abundant footage of the disaster from all angles and dozens of sources; flights are canceled; the Red Cross is hosting blood drives. It’s not just in your head.
But when you say something to a certain neighbor, he laughs it off. If you go downtown to join with strangers who share your grief, you realize many people see you as subversive. You know some church friends are also suffering from the shock and bewilderment, and you talk about it with them—but if someone else enters the church parlor, the conversation must fall silent. The preacher never says anything, because he doesn’t want to alienate anyone. The liturgy carries on as usual; the event calendar doesn’t register a blip.
Is this pastoring? Is this church?
Those of us who must say things in public—pastors, professors, and others—are faced with a situation now in which half the people are enduring a protracted crisis at least as unsettling as 9/11, in which the accountability structures of our country, and even the international community, are collapsing … while the other half either think things are just fine or openly celebrate the normalization of cruelty. As professionals, we are so accustomed to tolerating various points of view with as much courtesy as we can muster that when we default to our habits, we end up saying nothing in spaces with folks from both groups. We recognize that people are experiencing split realities, and so we say as little as possible. We don’t use public speech to minister to people as we would, in another circumstance, know we must.
This stifling effect is understandable, but it isn’t without cost, to speakers or hearers. On the epistemic front, those of us who are experiencing a crisis find our perception of reality always undermined, because we are not behaving together in public as if there is a problem. This collective behavior comes from deference to the unbothered, as well as from our normalcy bias. No one wants to be called hysterical, so—as on the Titanic—we avoid acting like it’s a crisis as long as possible.
On the emotional front, we lack opportunities to grasp our distress, leading to an overloaded nervous system along with the distractibility and poor sleep that accompany retained cortisol. Intellectually, we are likely to be pulled in different directions, since opportunities to speak truth are often the best opportunities to think truth. When our public speech must perform “business as usual,” we are obliged to doublethink.
Sometimes we fall silent (or submit things late to our editors) because it is hard to say anything both acceptable and true. Sometimes the best we can do is to make a covert allusion to what we see going on. We might say something about “conflict” in general and prescribe something benign like “listening better.” Or we might just avoid it all and focus on timeless lessons about personal spirituality.
But is this pastoring? Is this leadership?
This past fall, I didn’t realize how numb I was, or why going to church felt like going through the motions. I have been regularly attending both Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, whose members don’t all agree about the current administration, but who—along with the pastors—mind their manners and hold their tongues. Sermons say nothing about public events.
But then I took students to a historically Black Baptist church in my community as part of their introduction to a range of worship experiences. The pastor preached on Jeremiah 29, urging us, with conceptual clarity and expressive vigor, to think of ourselves as exiles but to “pray for the peace of the city.” He didn’t hesitate to acknowledge that his congregants may feel that their enemies are in power, or even in the White House. He urged us not to take on the attitude of “burning the house down,” but to recognize that we need the house for our flourishing. He urged constructive action. Then, in a litany of things we might oppose, he urged repeatedly, “If you don’t like what’s going on, pray!”
I wouldn’t have expected such a message to move me to tears, but it did. Later in the day, I was still thinking about it with a tender spot. It was clear I felt pastored by that sermon in a way I hadn’t experienced, oh, maybe for years. When the grief was finally named out loud in the body of Christ, I could all of a sudden see how exhausting it had been to hold it in for so long. Sure, I have enough biblical formation to tell myself those same messages, but I had been longing to be accompanied by the church in that kind of discernment.
If I am living through a morally critical moment in history, I want the church to be my interpretive community. But if shattering public events are going on, and nothing can be said in the church, then church loses touch with my soul reality. Showing up begins to feel like play-acting, going through the motions. It’s lonely. And though the silence probably comes about as a default response by those who hope to keep a community together, that’s not really what happens: any bond that depends on not naming the elephant in the room is a pretty weak bond. And it gets weaker as the elephant grows.
I’m not saying Christian leaders who speak publicly should always weigh in on controversy or try to arbitrate between versions of reality. Nor should we stay silent in the face of a regime upheld by lies—truth is morally relevant, after all. But we can’t arbitrate all the details; we don’t specialize in fact-checking.
I’m also not saying that pastors or other speakers who say nothing are malicious, foolish, or cowardly; sometimes selective silence is the wisest choice. But even when we determine that’s the case, don’t assume nothing is lost. Naming things in public is an important way to meet human needs—intellectual, emotional, epistemic, communal needs—and it is a way to disciple people into wise action.
Can we start by simply naming the events, perhaps without commentary? Can we name the experience of the community? Can we name the grief, the fear, the confusion, even the anger? When the community is divided, can even that be named? Then, in smaller rooms, the more specific questions can be addressed appropriately as people are experiencing events in their own ways. Saying something at least signals that we are occupying this world together, that thinking it through is allowed here, that reality matters more than seeming unruffled.
But if the events are never named in public at all, we may go silent—even in our private conversations, even in our prayers.
Abigail Woolley Cutter, Ph.D., is assistant professor of theology at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. She enjoys the music and many trails of Appalachia with her husband and two young children.
