The Commentariat Speaks (39)

Mental Health America says 80% of Americans experience emotional abuse and that 84% of women and 75% of men report having a “toxic friend” at some point. Toxic people, they tell us, are manipulative, self-centered, relentlessly negative, judgmental and passive aggressive. Worst of all, toxic people make us feel bad about ourselves.

Their solution? Eliminate the toxic influence. Cut them off, say sayonara, so long, adios.

Looking for Advice

I’m encountering this approach to relationship failures everywhere these days, both online and in the real world. I’m even running into it among believers. Rob is a Christian father writing to a columnist for advice and reassurance about two family members he has cut off. I guess in his mind they qualify as toxic. Here’s how he describes his situation:

“My sister is not a believer. She [is] an advocate of homosexuality and same-sex mirage as well as abortion, and hates our country. She was baptized years ago (which was really an attempt to appease my father who she lived with while she was recovering from drug addiction) and therefore my father (who professes Christ) holds that she is a believer. Her recent social media posts have her claiming she is an atheist.

My relationship with my father has been strained because I don’t want her anywhere near my family and directly oppose the idea that she is a believer. I have even told him that he should repent of enabling her and falsely categorizing her as a believer. As a result my father and I no longer speak, haven’t for years. I cut off relations with him and my kids because of his views. Am I biblically aligned by withholding them from him? I feel I am. Am I in the clear to decide to withhold him from them as long as he continues to have a deranged view of what a believer is? His focus has been on wanting to have a relationship with them only and not me. I have explained that I am the head of my family and all paths lead through me.”

I tend to take people at their word. If my sister’s social media posts declared her to be an atheist, I would feel obliged to accept that reality. Rob does, and it seems reasonable to start from that premise. Rob’s sister is a self-declared enemy of the truth and enthusiastic promoter of evil stuff. She’s a flaming lefty. Conceded.

Self-Declared Enemies

Still, as a father myself, I understand Rob’s dad’s earnest desire to believe his daughter is not destined for the fires of hell. Such self-delusion is especially poignant when Christians engage in it about family members who have just died, clinging to memories of a childhood profession of faith that the relative has gainsayed for an entire lifetime. I think it’s naïve. I don’t think it’s particularly useful to the sinner or to the Christian who enables him or her, but I absolutely sympathize with the poor enabler in his weakness and desire for his world to be a different place.

As far as Sis is concerned, Rob declares her an unbeliever in his very first sentence and concludes, “I don’t want her anywhere near my family.” If I were counseling him, I’d have to refer him to 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul plainly tells us that though there IS a biblical reason for cutting off toxic influences, the sphere of those to be eliminated is limited to people who claim to know Christ. Rob’s sister doesn’t make that claim for herself. She flatly denies it. That’s what the word “atheist” means. You can hardly put people out who, by their own confession, are not in. 1 Corinthians 5 does not apply to her. There, the apostle finishes with these words: “What have I to do with judging outsiders? God judges those outside.” If Paul didn’t cut off contact with unsaved sinners, I can’t see why Rob should.

Managing Negative Influences

Now, I would be very cautious about exposing my family to too much of Lefty Sis, but I would never cut her off myself, and I think any potential negative influence on the family could be managed with prayer, discernment and setting the occasional necessary boundary for impressionable youngsters. I wouldn’t be moving Sis into my basement anytime soon. But if the Church has no help at all for people like Lefty Sis, then who does? Where is that woman ever going to see the love of Christ in this world if her own brother won’t show it to her? If we are unwilling to get our hands dirty by dealing with our own lost family members, who will? Moreover, what are we even here for if we are so busy protecting ourselves from the world that we can’t even bring ourselves to engage with it? Who’s to say the Lord can’t reach a drug addicted socialist with a little genuine compassion and love? I’ve seen him save worse.

The saddest thing about this is Rob cutting off his Christian father for clinging to false hope for his daughter. He writes that he and his father have not spoken for years, and that he keeps dad from seeing his kids. The only possible scriptural basis I can possibly see for Rob’s position would have to come from our Lord’s instructions about how to deal with the brother who sins against you in Matthew 18; nothing in 1 Corinthians 5 would justify Rob cutting off his father. Matthew 18 is a very Jewish set of instructions that ends with “if he refuses to listen even to the [assembly], let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector”. But even applying that passage to Rob’s family situation seems highly dubious. How is Rob’s father sinning against Rob by deluding himself about Sinful Sister? Even if we argue that Dad has indeed sinned against Rob, where are Rob’s efforts to establish his case by the evidence of two or three witnesses? Where is his attempt to apply the words “tell it to the assembly” to his situation? All in all, I’m not seeing this being handled in a biblical way, and I’m definitely not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel given Rob’s attitude to his family.

A Qualification

There is one aspect I should probably qualify. Rob writes that his father wants to have a relationship with his grandchildren only and not with Rob. He says, “I have explained that I am the head of my family and all paths lead through me.” I believe Rob is probably correct in taking that position. Apart from an ex-spouse, family members who refuse to have a relationship with the father (or mother) have no automatic moral right to enjoy access to minor children.

Still, given how Rob has treated his dad, calling his thinking deranged, telling him to repent, and cutting him off from personal contact, I understand his father’s reserve. The grandfather’s too-gracious opinion about Rob’s sister is certainly a case of bad judgment, but scripture also instructs children to treat their parents respectfully. Younger men are not to rebuke their elders harshly, but to encourage them. From the tone of Rob’s letter, I get the feeling he has not approached the disagreement with his father sensibly or sensitively, and his father’s reluctance to deal with Rob may well have a solid basis. If Rob were to ask his father’s forgiveness for his own harsh words and bad judgment, it’s not inconceivable that might clear the way for the occasional lightly supervised visit with the grandkids. Sadly, I don’t see that happening.

Loving Toxic People

I don’t like the term much, but toxic people are a fact of life. At the same time, loving toxic people is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith. Cutting people off invariably presents followers of Christ with conflicts of conscience foreign to the unsaved. Perhaps that’s why Rob wrote: he wants somebody to confirm him in his course of action and ease his mind about it.

Not happening here. The biggest problem with cutting people off is that Jesus didn’t do it, though he had greater cause for it than just about anyone in history. His own family didn’t believe him, didn’t support him and tried to have him committed. Religious leaders maligned him mercilessly. One of the people he called friends and family schemed, stole from him and betrayed him to death, another denied knowing him repeatedly, and all deserted him in his darkest hour. He blacklisted not a one.

Our Lord told his followers to do good to people who hate us and to give people who hurt us multiple chances to do it again, then he modeled that teaching for us impeccably. He said we are to greet our enemies when others wouldn’t bother, then he called Judas “friend” and let a thief handle the moneybag. Paul wrote that when our enemies are hungry, we are to feed them and when they thirst, we are to offer them a drink. To prove he meant it, the apostle took the bread of life and living water to his worst enemies in every synagogue in every town he visited, and he did it before anything else. It’s not the obsolete Law of Moses that commands us to love toxic people, but the teaching and practice of the Lord Jesus and his apostles.

It seems to me it’s awfully hard to show Christ’s love to people when you have entirely ceased to interact with them. Anyone who can pull that trick off is a logistical genius. Perhaps Rob will be the first.