Sean Feucht, the Reality of Suffering and You

Let’s start, just for fun, by imaging a painful scene. Picture an injured man. Maybe he’s fallen down a flight of stairs; maybe he’s tumbled off a ladder.  Either way, he lies sprawled on the ground. He’s suffering. His leg is broken, twisted at an unnatural angle. Maybe he’s wincing, crying out. Tears trickle across his face.  He shouts for help. 

Now imagine another man appears on the scene. He has good news. He leans over the broken-legged man to tell him his real problem is that he needs to stop elevating his pain above the power of the cross and to stop making his pain a part of his identity.

Seems absurd, yes?  More than absurd. It seems cruel, abusive even. 

And yet, something like this happens often in Christian circles. 

Just recently, prominent Christian leader and musician Sean Feucht published this tweet:

Got that?

Not only are the suffering of the world exaggerating, they are cheapening the sacrifice of Jesus by “elevating” their suffering, whatever that means. 

We can see how saying this in response to the suffering of the man with the broken leg betrays, at best, a total lack of connection to reality and, at worst, a heart hardened by ideology. 

Why then do many conservative Christians then agree with Feucht when it comes to emotional pain?

Well, because of the largely unconscious beliefs they carry. 

The objection they might raise to analogizing emotional and psychological trauma to a broken leg reveals one of those beliefs.  The pain of a broken leg they think, is somehow more real, than emotional pain.  Pain in the body, they assume, is more real because it can be traced to a physical cause that cannot be healed by a change of attitude. 

The correlating assumption is that pain that comes from emotional wounds is somehow less real, and that it stems not from the emotional blows we’ve suffered, but from our stubborn refusal to decide to stop feeling so bad.

They believe, as Feucht puts it, that the pain of emotional wounds won’t go away because sufferers elevate their “trauma, pain & victim-hood over the power of the cross.”  The difference between the pain of a broken leg and the pain of, say, a broken family or having suffered sexual abuse is, in their minds, that the pain of a broken leg comes upon the sufferer unbidden and thus he is innocent of causing any of it.

Those living with emotional pain, however, contribute to their suffering by “elevating” their pain above the power of the cross, a phrase while so amorphous as to be undefinable surely means something to Feucht. I doubt Feucht would say victims of abuse and trauma bring those experiences upon themselves, but the implication is that they do bring upon themselves unnecessary suffering by refusing to cease cheapening the sacrifice of Jesus.

The view that emotional and psychological pain is mostly exaggerated is not uncommon in many right-leaning circles. One sees it often on X-that-used-to-be-Twitter. The idea that the cure for emotional pain is for people to just be tougher is common there. If people would get themselves together and stop being such pansies, the thinking goes, we wouldn’t have a society full of whiny victims. The real problem, according to this view, is not that people have been victimized, but that they won’t shut up about it. 

Feucht takes such destructive thinking to a new level by turning an unwillingness to deny suffering into sacrilege. Not only are people suffering merely because they are weak, he says, they are insulting Jesus by talking about it. 

One hears such language in evangelical circles: a combination of vague accusation and unwarranted triumphalism.  The point of Feucht’s tweet is that by elevating their trauma over the power of the cross, suffering people are choosing not to be completely free. The accusation is meaningless, of course, people suffering emotionally aren’t “elevating trauma, pain and victim-hood” any more than the man with the broken leg is. 

The man with the broken leg is preoccupied with his pain, not because he is selfish or weak but because pain demands attention, and severe pain demands all of one’s attention. Expecting victims of trauma and abuse to choose not to focus on their unhealed psychic wounds is as unrealistic as expecting the man with the broken leg to choose to hop up and walk home. 

The further implication of Feucht’s tweet is that the kind of total and miraculous healing that would enable suffering people to be whole is available if only these stubborn losers would stop rejecting it.  Of course, that isn’t true. Healing for our psychic wounds is not instant. We cannot be completely free. Life is tragic and some wounds, even when they heal, will ache all life long. 

Feucht’s comment is more careless than cruel. He probably lives in a bubble where such platitudes are routinely uttered and rarely pondered. When we stop to ponder them we see a deeper problem yet. 

The worst thing about this Christian tweet is that it fails to capture Christ. When we consider those whose healings are recounted in the Gospels, we see Jesus take their sufferings with the greatest seriousness. Throughout Scripture, we see God concerned with the injustices people perpetrate against each other. The damaging consequences of such mistreatment are taken to be real, not simply a matter of poor attitudes that could be changed if only the sufferer would mortify his stubborn will.

Feucht assumes that what heals our pain is an action we take for ourselves. We change our attitudes, cease to “elevate” our trauma, and our suffering disappears. This message, of course, runs counter to the claims of Scripture that make clear that our pain is not self-inflicted, and our healing is not self-generated.

Life, as portrayed in Scripture, is more complicated and vastly more tragic than that. There, in the Bible, we learn what we already knew in our hearts, that our wounds are real and gruesome and the healing we need requires no mere shift in attitude from us, but the touch of a great and compassionate physician.