Regimes of Happiness: Comparative and Historical Studies

“BE JOYFUL ALWAYS!”: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY EVANGELICAL CONCEPTIONS OF HAPPINESS AND TRUMPIST POLITICS

Joanna Tice Jen

Traditionally, Christianity views happiness as a state not guaranteed during earthly life, but promised to Christians in the afterlife. Myriad Old Testament stories make this traditional view clear, from the fall of Adam and Eve to the travails of Job. In the New Testament, the Beatitudes of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount emphasize the blessings to come in the next life and the suffering to be found on earth. Every tradition has a different interpretation of these and other biblical discussions of happiness, but earthly life as suffering tends to be a prominent theme in many Christian understandings. How do contemporary evangelicals—the largest religious group in the United States and a rapidly growing force globally—conceptualize happiness?

This question holds special significance for contemporary American politics because of the strong evangelical support for President Donald Trump. But what connection is there, if any, between evangelical views of happiness and the evangelical political orientation? Alongside a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi, four evangelical pastors presided over the Trump inauguration in January 2017: Pentecostal televangelist Paula White-Cain, evangelist and missionary Franklin Graham, pastor and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership council Samuel Rodriguez, Jr. and Pentecostal Bishop Wayne T. Jackson. If anything, the inaugural invocation and benediction prayers were a high-visibility display of the diversity of evangelical belief in general and views of happiness specifically. The views expressed in [the] inaugural prayers included: the prosperity gospel (White-Cain), the blessing of the poor and humble found in the Beatitudes (Rodriguez), the connection between earthly and divine authority (Graham) and unity among Americans through an allusion to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s recitation of the gospel song “we shall overcome” at his final sermon before he was assassinated (Jackson, 2017). While the prosperity gospel—which sees financial prosperity as a sign of God’s blessing (Balmer, 2002)—as well as the connection between divine authority and earthly authority might seem most in line with Trump’s political vision, the evangelical movement does not necessarily share the views expressed by the pastors who read at the inauguration.

In order to paint a picture of evangelical conceptions of happiness and to discuss the connections and disconnections between these conceptions and Trumpist politics, it’s necessary to first pick one view on which to focus attention. Since the American evangelical movement is large and diverse, without a central authority for deciding matters of biblical interpretation and public message, popular devotional texts are a good source for gauging which of the existing evangelical views expressed might best represent the most popular interpretation among contemporary evangelicals. Devotional texts allow scholars to identify the ideas that are most influential among today’s evangelical pastors and laypeople, and to do close readings of these texts with an eye toward the political orientations the texts may explicitly or implicitly promote.

This chapter surveys two popular evangelical devotional writers of the early twenty-first century: the work of megachurch pastor Rick Warren and missionary and Christian counselor Sarah Young. Warren’s Purpose Driven Life (2004), and Young’s Jesus Calling (2004) appear to be closest to the Beatitude-oriented view espoused by Rodriguez in the inaugural invocation, as I will discuss in greater detail later in the chapter. Warren and Young’s books are two of the most widely popular devotional texts published in recent years. Warren’s Purpose Driven Life has been translated into at least 11 languages and sold 32 million copies worldwide in its first 10 years in publication (King, 2009; Mair, 2005). In a report on their survey of American pastors, The Barna Group described Warren’s work as incredibly influential to evangelicalism, essentially without peer (2005). While Young herself is much less known by the general public, her devotional book, Jesus Calling, sold more than five million copies worldwide—ranking it first among Amazon sales of Christian devotionals, ninth on the Nielsen Top 20 list and first on the Nielson print list of all nonfiction titles in 2014, a full 10 years after its initial publication. Given their renown among the reading public, how do these leading figures of contemporary evangelicalism describe happiness and the means to achieve it? The bulk of this chapter explores this question, and in the conclusion, I discuss the connections and disconnections between this view and evangelical support for Trumpist politics.

The conceptions of happiness found in Warren and Young’s devotional texts primarily focus on discussion and interpretation of: the Beatitudes, the practice of meditation, other techniques for training the mind to connect to God, and the normative ranking of good and bad emotions. However, the route to achieving happiness or how it might be defined in evangelicalism is never precisely established. In one chapter of Purpose Driven Life, Warren makes an explicit distinction between happiness and joy—labeling happiness as emotional and earthly and joy as heavenly and spiritual. However, elsewhere Warren and Young’s writings demonstrate a clear slippage between terms like blessedness, peace, grace and happiness—never clearly defining the role of each one. Thus, as we topically explore Warren and Young’s texts, we will comb the material for implicit statements of evangelical happiness.

What Is Evangelicalism?

Before exploring Warren and Young’s texts specifically, we need to define the evangelicalism that their work speaks to and represents. Warren and Young, as well as most other high-profile evangelicals, abide by or engage with four tenets of evangelicalism. The generally accepted scholarly definition of these tenets is provided by David Noll and David Bebbington, who define evangelicalism as belief in and practice of:

Conversionism (an emphasis on the “new birth” as a life-changing experience of God), biblicalism (a reliance on the Bible as the ultimate religious authority), activism (a concern for sharing the faith), and crucicentrism (a focus on Christ’s redeeming work on the cross, usually pictured as the only way to salvation). (Bebbington in Noll, 2001, 13)¹

These beliefs and practices encompass a wide array of spiritual, social and cultural positions that include: charismatics and Pentecostals;² non-mainline Protestant congregations; as well as believers across the socioeconomic and political spectrums. These Protestant congregations include: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, German and Dutch Reformed, and Restorationist Church congregations—making evangelicalism a transdenominational tradition.³ The movement might otherwise be described as a “loose alliance of Protestants,” united by a spiritual “emphasi[s on] both clarity and intimacy: a perfect Bible and a personal Jesus” (Sanneh, 2012).

The Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study identifies 25.4 percent of Americans as evangelical Christian—according to denominational affiliations—while reporting that 35 percent of Americans self-identify as evangelical. By either measure, evangelicalism is the largest religious group in the United States, including the unaffiliated (22.8%).⁴ The movement is evenly spread across all fifty US states, with a slightly higher concentration in the South. Evangelicals are diverse in both class and education level (Luhrmann, 2012, 7), and while they are slightly whiter than the US population as a whole, a significant and growing share of their numbers come from other ethnic groups—Latino, 11 percent; Black, 6 percent; Asian, 2 percent—a diversity that does more than any other measure to affect evangelical political leanings, as nonwhite evangelicals tend to sit further to the left on the political spectrum (Wong, 2015).

Furthermore, the last 50 years has seen a rapid rise in transnational evangelicalism, which is another factor that influences evangelical politics as the movement becomes more globally connected. While the United States still boasts the largest concentration of evangelicals, American evangelicals now make up less than a quarter of the global total (Pew, 2011). The regional centers of global evangelicalism include Southeast Asia (especially Korea), Latin America (especially Brazil), the Indian subcontinent and a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa—where rapid growth of the movement is projected (Pew, 2011).

The Beatitudes

The Beatitudes are the eight blessings listed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5, followed by a commentary. An abbreviated version—of four of the blessings accompanied by four woes—is listed in the Sermon on the Plain, found in Luke 6. The Beatitudes teach that the downtrodden are, and will be, exalted. In other words, those who suffer on earth will be happy in heaven. Part of that teaching reads:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. (Matthew 5: 3–4, 11, KJV)

To contemporary evangelicals, the Beatitudes teach that God’s favor and blessings fall on those who are unhappy and on those who are socially inferior and treated less justly—“the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn” and those who are “reviled and persecuted.” This Beatitudinal identity allows evangelicals to embrace their status as victims, giving this interpretation of the Beatitudes an interesting political and judicial connotation. But in terms of happiness, the teaching is often interpreted by contemporary evangelicals to mean that those who are unhappy now—on this earth—will be blessed in the future—in heaven. For example, in one of Warren’s reflections on the lessons of the Beatitudes, he writes,

Every time you forget that character is one of God’s purposes for your life, you will become frustrated by your circumstances. You’ll wonder, “Why is this happening to me? Why am I having such a difficult time?” One answer is that life is supposed to be difficult! It’s what enables us to grow. Remember, earth is not heaven! (Original emphasis, 112)

In this passage, Warren emphasizes that frustration and difficulty should be an expected part of human existence that enables the believer to grow.

This ideology of earthly suffering in exchange for future comfort in heaven also runs through evangelical narratives of disease and disability. Those who are disabled or constrained by a chronic disease are often celebrated in evangelical texts as poised for the highest level of godliness. In these discussions of disease and disability, there is, on the one hand, the words of comfort we might expect from devotional texts, but on the other hand there is also the more extreme claim that devotees should thank God for an illness that requires them to sit and wait—resonating once more with the interpretation of the Beatitudes above. Young writes,

Do not spoil these quiet hours by wishing them away, waiting impatiently to be active again. Some of the greatest works in [God’s] kingdom have been done from sick beds and prison cells. Instead of resenting the limitations of a weakened body, search for [God’s] way in the midst of these very circumstances. Limitations can be liberating when your strongest desire is living close to [God]. (2004, 74)

For Young, illness is an opportunity for contemplation, prayer and meditation. However, evangelical devotional writers do not always embrace physical limitations as an excuse for failing to evangelize or participate in other church activism. For example, Warren emphasizes there is no physical excuse that should prevent an evangelical from proselytizing around the globe. Warren welcomes those who see themselves as defective, victimized, weak or outcast and rallies them to action, initially for themselves and later for the church. Perhaps his strongest call to his army of “outcasts” is when he lists the defects of a long line of biblical protagonists:

If you’re not involved in any service or ministry, what excuse have you been using? Abraham was old, Jacob was insecure, Leah was unattractive, Joseph was abused, Moses stuttered, Gideon was poor, Samson was codependent, Rahab was immoral, David had an affair and all kinds of family problems, Elijah was suicidal, Jeremiah was depressed, Jonah was reluctant, Naomi was a widow, John the Baptist was eccentric to say the least, Peter was impulsive and hot-tempered, Martha worried a lot, the Samaritan woman had several failed marriages, Zacchaeus was unpopular, Thomas had doubts, Paul had poor health, and Timothy was timid. That is quite a variety of misfits, but God used each of them in his service. He will use you, too, if you stop making excuses. (Warren, 2002, 150)

The list includes at least three conditions that fall under the contemporary conception of disease and disability—“Moses stuttered […] Jeremiah was depressed […] Paul had poor health” (ibid.)—while the other conditions and character traits connect easily with the Beatitudes’ celebration of the downfallen.

Young’s assertion that “limitations can be liberating” (2004, 74) and Warren’s claim that no personal limitation provides an excuse for an individual to serve God both evidence an evangelical prioritization of the disembodied spirit of the reader over her embodied reality. The celebration of evangelicals with major disabilities, such as Nick Vujicic—who ministers on the topic “Life without Limbs” in his book Stand Strong (2015)—provides another example of the way this narrative of disease and disability functions in the evangelical movement. As I show elsewhere, any identity that is penalized by structural inequalities can be placated and depoliticized by the central argument of the Beatitudes (Tice Jen, 2016, 159–81).

In contemporary devotional texts, justice is often achieved, by God’s intending, in the disembodied afterlife. This decentering and depoliticizing of individual justice on earth places the Beatitude-inspired discussion of happiness at odds with the conceptions of the good life discussed in the Declaration of Independence and other constitutional documents of both the United States and other liberal democracies. This claim—that the pursuit of happiness on earth is not a God-given right—could easily be argued to be the most politically conservative message devotional writers deliver. These teachings—emphasizing divine care of and favor for those who have been treated unjustly by society—are regularly used to attend to the political issues of identity. But more importantly for this essay, happiness in this life is not only subordinate to happiness in the next, but suffering is expected and even praised by contemporary evangelicals.

However, the evangelical acceptance of earthly suffering is not permission to behave as a suffering person might behave. Grief, anger and resentment are not to be expressed. Instead, evangelical acceptance of suffering is accompanied by techniques of accessing comfort that will allow the believer to be—or at least act—joyful in the face of that suffering. Meditation is a central strategy for contemporary evangelicals to access that comfort, strengthen their relationship with God and thereby strengthen their ability to find joy in the face of suffering.

Meditation

Twenty-first-century evangelicalism places special importance on the believer’s personal, intimate connection with God—an experience that a believer must be prepared to receive. There are a number of accepted ways of accessing God, but the most common practice advised by contemporary devotionals is not prayer, church attendance or worship music, but a practice referred to as “meditation.” For Warren and Young, the practice of “continual” meditation is an essential devotional tool, used specifically for bringing the devotee closer to God (Young, 2004, 92). Young writes that “this practice of listening to God [elsewhere referred to as ‘meditation’] has increased [her] intimacy with [God] more than any other spiritual discipline” (ibid., 24). Meanwhile, Warren writes that the reward for meditating on God’s Word is friendship with God and access to “God’s secrets and promises” (2002, 101).

In their discussion of meditation, both Warren and Young are careful to distinguish it from prayer. In their conception, prayer is asking God for something, while meditation is listening to God and being receptive to his messages. The details of how one “listens” to God are slightly different in Warren and Young’s accounts, but their meditative models share important features. Warren introduces [his account of meditation] in a chapter titled “Becoming Best Friends With God”:

Meditation is often misunderstood as some difficult, mysterious ritual practiced by isolated monks and mystics. But meditation is simply focused thinking—a skill anyone can learn and use anywhere. When you think about a problem over and over in your mind, that’s called worry. When you think about God’s Word over and over in your mind, that’s meditation. If you know how to worry, you already know how to meditate! You just need to switch your attention from your problems to Bible verses. The more you meditate on God’s Word, the less you will have to worry about. Prayer lets you speak to God; meditation lets God speak to you. Both are essential to becoming a friend of God. (Warren, 2002, 100–101)

This passage tells us several basic things about meditation as Warren envisions it. First, meditation is not an emptying of the mind—as it is in the popular Western conception of Buddhist, yogic, mindfulness, and therapeutic practices of meditation.⁵ Warren’s meditation practice is Bible-based, meaning that he encourages his reader to focus on a particular Bible verse while meditating. The reader is instructed to use memorized verses as a way to “let God speak to [her]” (Warren, 2002, 100–101). Second, by referencing the misunderstanding of meditation as a “difficult, mysterious ritual practiced by isolated monks and mystics” (ibid.), Warren is attempting to mainstream the practice of meditation within his Christian readership. This is striking, given that meditation, as a Christian practice, dates back to the medieval era.⁶ But given evangelical anti-intellectualism (Noll, 1994), old practices can be introduced as new, which in turn becomes yet another technique for reinforcing the success of evangelical revival. Third, the mode of this meditation is cognitive—focusing thought on a biblical passage—but the goal of the practice is emotional and spiritual. Fourth, for Warren, meditation can be done in conjunction with other activities, as a sort of multitasking devotional, “throughout the day” (2002, 100). Fifth, it is clear that whatever else meditation is, it is a form of communication with God, who is depicted as a friend and confidant. Thus, we see that there is some slippage between the elements of Warren’s description of meditation. On the one hand, meditation is framed as communication with God, while on the other hand, meditation refers to “mulling over” a biblical verse of your own choosing (Warren, 2002, 59).

While the details of the subjective experience of meditation are vague, the importance of the practice to contemporary evangelicalism is clear. Warren writes that the “reward” for meditation is friendship with God, a relationship in which God will “share his secrets with you,” which will help you understand the “‘secrets’ of this life that most people miss,” and “the secrets of his promises” (2002, 60). Warren’s choice of words—concerning the rewards for meditation—explicitly communicate how essential meditation is in the evangelical universe and how this friendship and open communication with God fosters well-being and happiness through the comfort of that relationship and learning the “secrets of life.”

Young certainly shares this high regard for the practice [of meditation], as she bases her entire book—both method and message—on the communications she receives from God when spending hours meditating “in His Presence.” She describes taking up the practice of listening for God’s direct messages after reading the 1978 devotional book God Calling, written by two evangelical women who Young identifies as “two anonymous listeners” (Russell and Sand, 2012). Young describes the meditative, communing practice used by the authors of God Calling as “waiting quietly in God’s Presence, pencils and paper in hand, recording the messages they received from him. The messages are written in the first person, with the ‘I’ designating God” (Young, 2004, 23). Reading this devotional led Young to take up the practice herself by starting a journal in which she recorded “God’s messages,” which she eventually developed into the manuscript of Jesus Calling (2004):

I began to wonder if I, too, could receive messages during my times of communing with God. I had been writing in prayer journals for years, but that was one-way communication: I did all the talking. I knew that God communicated with me through the Bible, but I yearned for more. Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a given day. I decided to listen to God with pen in hand, writing down whatever I believed he was saying. I felt awkward the first time I tried this, but I received a message. It was short, biblical, and appropriate. It addressed topics that were current in my life: trust, fear, and closeness to God. I responded by writing in my prayer journal. My journaling had changed from monologue to dialogue. Soon, messages began to flow more freely. I knew these writings were not inspired as scripture is, but they were helping me grow closer to God. I have continued to receive personal messages from God as I meditate on Him. The more difficult my life circumstances, the more I need these encouraging directives from my Creator. Sitting quietly in God’s Presence is just as important as the writings I glean from these meditative times. In fact, some days I simply sit with Him for a while and write nothing. During these times of focusing on God, I may experience “fullness of joy” in His Presence [Psalm 16:11 NKJV], or I may simply enjoy His gentle company and receive his Peace. (Young, 2004, 23–24)

Similar to Warren’s primer on meditation, Young’s account includes a number of differing descriptions of meditation. Even in this one passage, she refers to the practice alternatively as “listening,” “communing,” “communicating,” and “dialogue[ing]”—a practice in which she receives both “directives” and “personal messages” (ibid.). Some of these words indicate a passive practice of meditation, while others indicate activity, and still others describe God as giving directions or even orders.

The happy results of meditation, whether Young’s “‘fullness of joy’” or Warren’s claim that the practice leaves you with “less to worry about,” provide a major overlap between Young and Warren’s description of meditation, even as there are some significant departures. While Young acknowledges divine communication through the Bible, her practice begins where Warren’s ends by relying more on openness to whatever Bible verse or message God wants to transmit to the meditator, rather than restricting it to those verses the meditator chooses to focus on. In this sense, Warren represents a more mainstream or traditional evangelical method of contacting God—sticking to what God tells the believer by way of the Bible.

However, Young’s departure from that tradition has proven wildly popular and reflects the charismatic and Pentecostal turn within evangelicalism. When she writes, “I knew that God communicated with me through the Bible” (2004, 23), she is tactfully acknowledging the standard way that evangelicals—as well as Christians of all stripes—expect to communicate with God, while also providing a tantalizing invitation to quench the contemporary evangelical desire for a dialogue with God that is less intellectual—as the study of the Bible has been traditionally is—and more experiential—a dialogue that changes the way the believer feels.

Young’s careful wording in her introduction serves the double function of planting the seed of the desire—introducing the concept of an intimate, experiential connection with God—while also providing the means to fulfill it. She writes of her own experience with that desire: “but I yearned for more [than biblical communication]. Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a given day” (ibid.). Her desire is easily justified by the contemporary evangelical mandate to develop a relationship with God, in which her radical method is justified by the claim that the meditative writings “were helping [her] grow closer to God” (ibid.). In that one phrase, Young congeals the purpose of many contemporary evangelicals’ lives. As long as a believer feels a growing connection to God, even unorthodox methods are justified and accepted—suffering is expected, but emotional comfort is as well.

In explaining how her radical method can be deemed acceptable to the evangelical mainstream, Young clarifies that she is not comparing herself with biblical writers: “I knew [my] writings were not inspired as scripture is” (ibid.). By claiming that she receives messages directly from God, Young is not only playing with the boundary of mainstream evangelical epistemology—which claims that the Bible is the only divinely inspired text—but goes even further, stating that, sometimes, the most important part of communing with God is the emotional release. In this way, her methodology departs from historical and mainstream conceptions of Christian worship, which see God’s glory as the primary purpose of worship, rather than the comfort of the worshipper. Extrapolating from her own practice, she advises her readers that the quiet time with God found in meditation is often as significant as any communication achieved in that time (ibid.). Compared with Warren’s careful instructions that his reader should stick to biblical verses, filling the mind with memorized passages, Young’s method is more free form and open-ended. But if the means are questionable—according to evangelical tradition—the purported result is just as clear as Warren’s outcome. Young’s meditation provides emotional comfort, an experiential connection to the divine that provides succor and “joy” (ibid.).

According to Warren and Young’s texts—as well as recent ethnographic work on American evangelicals by T. M. Luhrmann (2012)—meditation is a key element of the exercise of evangelicalism today—a practice that involves both intellectual study and physiological responses to socialize readers to the evangelical ways of understanding, feeling and ultimately believing. Regardless of whose method is used, the practice of treating God as a friend with whom the believer converses daily is the cornerstone of the contemporary evangelical regime of happiness. This practice puts emotional experience at the center of the evangelical belief system, both as a means to transcendence and the product of that transcendence. In other words, emotional exchange is a key part of the proposed method of contacting God, and the outcome of that exchange is a positive emotional response in the believer, despite the earthly suffering that many evangelicals seem to expect in their interpretation of the Beatitudes. The source of the believer’s happiness in the face of sorrows is not a chemical shift in the body or a cognitive response to outside stimuli, but rather a “gift” or a “message” from the creator—a reassurance that he is with her, comforting her amidst her suffering.

Receptivity to God through Emotional Discipline

Given the burgeoning industry of devotional literature outlining meditation and other related techniques, this contact with God is presumed to take some practice, to require some skill or knowledge. The desire to contact God via meditation is not enough. In Luhrmann’s account, the proper receptivity must be taught (2012). This receptivity is a discipline whose guise is care of the self. If this technology of the self is adequately developed, and the proper emotional attitudes are employed, the believer will “hear” God and the promised emotions will be produced. In their discussions of emotion, Young and Warren each describe how bad emotions need to be corrected for and how good emotions—which come from God—need to be encouraged. While the terms “good” and “bad” aren’t actually used, the devotional writers’ classification of emotions into these binary normative categories is clear.

There are several particularly dangerous emotions and emotional states that the devotional writers warn against. The logic of Warren’s injunctions against “worry”—which recommends replacing anxious thought patterns with biblical mental recitation and contemplation (2004, 100–101)—also appears regularly in Young’s text, where her solution to anxiety is to fill the mind with communications from God:

The temptation to be anxious is constantly with you, trying to work its way into your mind. The best defense is continual communication with [God], richly seasoned with thanksgiving. Awareness of [God’s] Presence fills your mind with Light and Peace, leaving no room for fear. This awareness lifts you up above your circumstances, enabling you to see problems from [God’s] perspective. (Original emphasis, 2004, 92)

Young’s advice for coping with anxiety is to tune out this negative emotional state by training to eliminate fear and cultivate gratitude. Young’s discussion provides a road map for evangelicals to cope with anxiety—or transcend anxiety, as it is understood from the evangelical perspective. Young elaborates on what meditation does for her reader when she writes that communication with God is an “awareness of [God’s] Presence” that gives the reader a divine perspective on her earthly problems (ibid). For Young, meditation allows the practitioner to enter an altered state of awareness that changes her perspective on life—a gratitude and openness to God’s plan. This alternative viewpoint and “awareness” produces the emotional effect of “Light and Peace” (ibid.), in contrast to the emotional weight and distress of anxiety, anger and possible political engagement. Instead of reducing suffering—as is the goal of many Progressive political movements—this evangelical method changes the way the believer feels about suffering.

However, it is unlikely that these meditative and prayerful practices are able to produce consistent emotional effects on the reader. Instead, they only encourage a performance of practiced and studied emotional states. In other words, telling someone not to be anxious but to be grateful produces an outward show of gratitude that may be hiding an inner terror. Certainly, cracks in the façade of a socialized individual are not unique to evangelicalism, but the way this particular façade operates is an important observation in a country where approximately one third of the population is evangelical.

This phenomenon of emotional self-regulation is seen in many Bible verses favored by contemporary evangelicals, verses where there is no promise of happiness flowing from the practices of Christianity, but rather a call for the individual to self-produce a certain emotional state and sustain it—regardless of exterior circumstances or true inner feelings. Young’s choice of scriptural passages demonstrates this in several places where a disciplinary approach is taken to emotional states, normatively coding and valuing these states, and providing diverse justifications and incentives for doing so.

She draws on 1 Thessalonians (5: 16–18 in Young, 2004, 92) to this end: “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” This verse provides clear support for her regime of performed joy and gratitude. Similarly, she quotes Proverbs, in a verse that promises good health to those who follow the mandate of high spirits: “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones” (Proverbs 17: 22, in Young, 2004, 104). While it is unclear whether cheerfulness and joy meant the same thing to Solomon and Paul—the likely writers of these verses⁷—it is clear that Young is employing them to advocate for a particular emotional state. Solomon incentivizes “cheerfulness” with the promise of good health, while Paul merely asserts that “being joyful” is God’s will—this evangelical joy is an emotion that is commanded, a cheerfulness that is prescribed.

Unlike some secular conceptions of emotion as a reaction to external circumstances and/or internal chemistry, Young and Warren mark positive emotion—as Aristotle did—as a state achieved through study and practice. In his statement differentiating between happiness and joy, Warren himself highlights this difference between evangelical and secular notions of emotion: “God teaches us real joy in the midst of sorrow, when we turn to him. Happiness depends on external circumstances, but joy is based on your relationship to God” (Warren, 2002, 131). As Warren makes clear—“God teaches us joy” (ibid.)—the emotional/spiritual state of joy is learned, coached and internalized. Warren does not promise emotional happiness as the upshot of his devotional techniques, but rather a spiritual joy that is immune to “sorrow” (ibid.). Despite the fact that the English words “joy” and “happiness” share an etymology that refers to a feeling of pleasure, Warren marks happiness as worldly—dependent on “external circumstances” (ibid.)—while he characterizes joy as the appropriate emotional or spiritual state to be desired, generated and upheld by his reader.⁸ When Warren draws out the distinction between joy—encouraging his readers to nurture it under God’s tutelage—and the conventional notion of happiness, he doesn’t focus on correcting that conception, nor on describing an evangelical way to “do” happiness. Instead, he marks happiness as worldly—dependent on “external circumstances”—while marking joy as the appropriate emotional or spiritual state to be desired, generated and upheld—despite the fact that both terms etymologically refer to the same thing and are often used interchangeably elsewhere in the Bible.

Coupled with these instructions to maintain a cheerful state is the evangelical injunction against negative emotions and the causes of them. In one passage, Young seeks to regulate her reader’s self-criticism:

Stop judging and evaluating your self, for this is not your role. Above all, stop comparing yourself with other people. This produces feelings of pride and inferiority. I lead each of My children along a path that is uniquely tailor-made for him or her. Comparing is not only wrong; it is also meaningless. (2004, 86)

In this passage, Young’s generally soothing tone takes on a stern edge as she not only discourages her reader’s self-judgment, evaluation and comparison, but also discredits the ability to do these practices of self-assessment at all. On the one hand, she is concerned with the emotional effects of such practices—the feelings of pride and inferiority that she marks as negative. On the other hand, she asserts that humans are not suited for the role of self-assessment and that any attempt to do so is insubordinate, wrong and meaningless.

This is quite a radical position. She is asking her readers to avoid an activity—self-assessment—that is a constant component of human life. Yet, the extreme popularity of Young’s writing may signal a desire for such deactivation in the lives of her readers.

In this way, biblical narratives about submission can easily become a cultural norm of complacency that leaves evangelicals less guarded against dominant cultural demands, such as neoliberalism’s emphasis on productivity, efficiency and market rationality. While evangelicalism may sometimes operate as a countercultural force—defending and insulating believers from societal demands on them—it also has the potential to deploy forms of discipline that mute critical discourse that would allow the individual to escape these demands through other routes, such as political activism, legislation, voting or adjudication.

Normative Ranking of “Good” and “Bad” Emotions

One of the key features of evangelical devotional practices—as they relate to the control of emotions, thoughts and behaviors—is the belief that positive emotions (and thoughts and behaviors) come from God. While feeling good, thinking good thoughts and producing “right” behaviors are all supplied by God, we’ve seen that they still require willpower, discipline and practice to be achieved. In order to accomplish this, believers pivot their mind away from negative thoughts and feelings to a focus on God—a pivot often accomplished through meditation. Massive benefits accompany this shift. As Warren writes, “Your focus will determine your feelings” (2002, 128). Once again, we see that outside circumstances or internal chemistry are discounted in the face of God and an individual’s focus on him. Young suggests that the best way to secure this cognitive attachment to thoughts of the divine is to focus on gratitude to God.

Thank [God] for the glorious gift of my spirit. This is like priming the pump of a well. As you bring [God] the sacrifice of thanksgiving, regardless of your feelings, [his] Spirit is able to work more freely within you. This produces more thankfulness and more freedom, until you are overflowing with gratitude. [He] shower[s]‌ blessings on you daily, but sometimes you don’t perceive them. When your mind is stuck on a negative focus, you see neither [God] nor [his] gifts. In faith, thank [God] for whatever is preoccupying your mind. This will clear the blockage so that you can find [God]. (Young, 2004, 108)

This explanation of emotional function from Young’s perspective is rich with the tensions and slippages generally found at the center of evangelical accounts of emotion. First of all, she is clear that an individual’s focus should be on gratitude for “the gift of God’s spirit” (ibid.)—which in Protestant doctrine may refer to creation, to Jesus’s death on the cross as saving humanity or simply to the signs, signals, gifts and presence of God in daily life. That gratitude, as Young states, should be expressed “regardless of [the reader’s] feelings” (2004, 108). Gratitude is tautological in this evangelical formulation. Gratitude is both the cause and consequence of good evangelical practice, which could work to produce a fatalistic complacency or apathetic contentedness. Similarly so with Warren’s distinction between happiness and joy, Young’s demand for gratitude demonstrates that she recognizes emotions outside of God, but disciplines her readers against expressing them. Repressing non-godly emotions is the sacrifice she speaks of. Being thankful, even when you don’t feel genuine gratitude, is the psychological sacrifice evangelicalism requires of its adherents.

Gratitude has long been called for by the Abrahamic religions, but this new pointed awareness of being grateful when gratitude is not felt highlights a certain dissonance between evangelical emotion and action, between feeling grateful and giving thanks. To support her statement, Young turns to Psalm 50:14: “Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High” (Young, 2004, 103). This call for gratitude is based on the double justification of authority and personal gain. On the one hand, Young encourages her readers’ thankfulness in order to respect and worship God—to fulfill a vow to him. On the other hand, she encourages this behavior with the promise that it will enable God’s spirit “to work more freely within [the reader]” (Young, 2004, 108). In this sense, this nongenuine, sacrificial gratitude can be described as submission. If the evangelical reader submits herself gratefully to God, no matter how she really feels about her circumstance, she is giving the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate submission, allowing the spirit to “move” within her. Young argues that maintaining gratitude sets the stage for God’s work in the reader, which in turn produces more thankfulness and more of the “freedom” that is the result of submission in Young’s narrative (ibid.). This is a sort of “fake it until you make it” approach wherein gratitude is both the tree and the fruit of evangelical devotion.

However, if we continue to follow Young through this passage, she seems to also be making a connection between gratitude and powers of perception, connecting the reader’s ability to see God’s daily blessings with a mind freed from negative thoughts. “When your mind is stuck on a negative focus, you see neither [God] nor [his] gifts. In faith, thank [God] for whatever is preoccupying your mind” (Young, 2004, 108). This practice of gratitude in Young’s account once again relates to the claim that evangelical belief is achieved through a process of “learning to believe” (Luhrmann, 2012, xvi). And yet, in Young’s explanation, emotional benefits do not merely arise from “priming the pump” (2004, 108)—from clearing the mind of negative thoughts and surrendering to God. Positive emotions actually come from God himself.

Do no[t]‌ hesitate to receive joy from [God], for [he] bestow it on you abundantly. It is through spending time with [him] that you realize how wide and long and high and deep is [his] Love for you. Sometimes the relationship [he] offer[s] you seems too good to be true. [He] pour[s] [his] very Life into you, and all you have to do is receive [him]. In a world characterized by working and taking, the admonition to rest and receive seems too easy. There is an intricate connection between receiving and believing: As you trust [him] more and more, you are able to receive [him] and [his] blessings abundantly. (Young, 2004, 102)

Young describes God as giving joy and blessings, whether the reader realizes it or not. Elsewhere she writes, “I shower blessings on you daily, but sometimes you don’t perceive them” (Young, 2004, 108), explaining that, “there is an intricate connection between receiving and believing: As you trust [God] more and more, you are able to receive [him] and [his] blessings abundantly” (ibid., 102). Part of the evangelical epistemology is the expectation of a gap between the “reality” of God’s “abundant blessings” and the reader’s experience of those blessings. In other words, God provides more than the reader acknowledges. The more a believer trains and matures spiritually, the more she is prepared to see and experience those blessings (although Young and Warren both emphasize the ways that mature disciples can also face steeper challenges to their faith—life struggles that leave the believer feeling as forsaken as Job).

The epistemological point here is that these evangelical devotional writers make a connection between belief and proper perception. The more you believe, the sharper your spiritual senses will be for signs and experiences of God. Warren expands on this point, relating it to how a reader knows that she is on God’s prepared path: “It feels good to do what God made you to do. When you minister in a manner consistent with the personality God gave you, you experience fulfillment, satisfaction, and fruitfulness” (2002, 158). Despite the many cautions elsewhere in Warren’s writing against being led by weak emotions into the wrong actions, in this passage Warren emphasizes that the reader can tell when she is doing God’s work because it “feels good” (ibid.). This system for interpreting emotions seems like a weak test of God’s plan that could easily lead to confusion between what God wants and what the reader wants.

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the evangelical interpretation of the Beatitudes as predicting an earthly life of suffering and the specific techniques suggested to deal with that suffering—namely meditation and emotional self-regulation. The matrix of thinkers and discourses that work to teach, normalize,‌ and socialize evangelical happiness plays in the space between emotions, histories, and rhetorical choices, to create norms that work to classify emotions. This socialization process identifies some emotions as acceptable—to be encouraged and nurtured—and other emotions as sinful or dangerous—to be discouraged and suppressed. In this way, emotions are controlled by, read and interpreted through the lens of the evangelical worldview.

The discourse for achieving the evangelical good life relies on the techniques outlined above, through which we can begin to sketch an ethics and politics of the evangelical subject we are exploring here, based on their views of happiness in this life and the next. After all, feelings aren’t the only thing evangelicals get from God in meditation. The reader’s knowledge of the true cosmos is understood to be divinely derived as well. Evangelical devotional writers explain repeatedly that meditating and spending time with God gives them knowledge—of the huge scope of his love, of his plan for them, and of the size and shape and reality of the world and eternity.⁹ In other words, both knowledge and emotion come from God via the same mechanism—meditation. All humans need to do in the human–divine relationship is receive, submit, be receptive and rest in God’s care. In this way, belief is linked to the receipt of “blessings,” whether that is joy (or other positive emotions) or knowledge. A believer who is cognitively reshaped by her religious practices can be assumed to approach her social, political and ethical engagements with the world around her differently too.

However, evangelical political viewpoints are as diverse as evangelical biblical interpretations, so we can’t actually say a great deal about evangelical voting habits just by knowing their faith. Secondly, the conservative politics that are most often associated with evangelicalism are decreasing, as the youngest generation of evangelicals becomes more interested in progressive politics and as their ranks become more ethnically diverse (Wong, 2015).

In terms of political party affiliation, Pew Research Center reports that from 2000 to 2008, young white evangelicals (aged 18–29) changed their party affiliation, with the numbers of evangelicals registered as Republican dropping from 55 percent to 40 percent; Independent rising from 26 percent to 32 percent; and Democrat rising from 16 percent to 19 percent (Cox). Furthermore, rising evangelical support for Democrats in the 2016 presidential primaries indicates a larger shift: 20 percent of Democrats voting on March 1, 2016, “Super Tuesday” were evangelicals (Lipka), up from just 3 percent evangelical Democrats and 9 percent evangelical moderates in the 2004 election (Lambert, 222). Despite this shift, data analysts caution that many young evangelicals still hold conservative views on issues such as national defense, abortion (Fingerhut) and capital punishment, and that while their party affiliation may have shifted, their description of their political views has not (44% describe themselves as conservative, 34% as moderate and 15% as liberal) (Cox). However, young white evangelicals were also 14 percent less conservative on this measure than white evangelicals aged 30 and older in 2008 (ibid.). Thus, while there is still plenty of conservative activism waged under the banner of the Christian right, the next generation of evangelicals is showing some left-leaning movement through their interest in environmentalism, global poverty, the AIDS epidemic and their more moderate approach to gay rights—while continuing a generally conservative tack on abortion, national defense and capital punishment (Wilcox and Robinson, 54).

There are a number of theories about why a large number of evangelicals support Trump. In some cases, commentators say that the evangelicals supporting Trump are not religious but cultural evangelicals, who don’t attend church (Layman). Others point out that Trump does not have more support among evangelicals than among Republicans generally, but that their support, even in small numbers, is just more surprising (Grant). Still others say that evangelicals are attracted to messianic figures who are decisive “liberators” or “defenders” (Mitchell), while still others see an alliance between Trump and those evangelicals enamored with the prosperity gospel (Posner). Just as the overall direction of evangelical politics has puzzled commentators for the last decade, so too does the phenomenon of the Trump-evangelical, especially in light of the leftward shifts of others in the movement. Thus, the most popular evangelical views of happiness provide a counterexample to the supposed compatibility of Trumpist politics and evangelical worldviews. In other words, the continuation of evangelical alliances with far-right politics is not the foregone conclusion it might seem. These readings of happiness thus reveal evangelical paths into the future that may turn left, right or center.

1Activism, in Noll’s definition, refers to evangelism or proselytizing—not to “political activism.”

2Pentecostals and charismatics emphasize experiential and bodily practices: spiritual healing, signs, miracles, prophesy and speaking in tongues are expected in daily life (Luhrmann, xx, 14).

3Some of these denominations also include mainline churches (Noll, 2001, 11).

4Evangelicalism is technically a transdenominational religious tradition. It overtook mainline Protestants in the 1970s as the largest religious group in the United States (Hout et al., 2001). They maintain that lead today, trailed by Catholics (20.8%) and mainline Protestants (14.7%) (Pew).

5“d. In Buddhism, Yoga, and other systems of religious or spiritual discipline: a practice of the mind (and body) aimed at achieving the eradication of rational or worldly mental activity.” (“Meditation,” n.d.)

6The first use of the term in an English text dates from the circa 1225 text Ancrene Riwle or Ancrene Wisse, an anonymously authored rulebook for women anchoresses who chose to seclude themselves from society to live an ascetic, consecrated life withdrawn from the world. These women usually lived in cells adjoined to medieval churches, and thus, unlike hermits, took a vow of stability of place (“Meditation,” n.d.).

7The book of Proverbs is generally attributed to Solomon and 1 Thessalonians to Paul.

8Furthermore, the terms appear to be synonymous with one another in many verses in the New International Translation of the Bible, which is among the versions Warren uses. For example, “For the Jews it was a time of happiness and joy, gladness and honor” (Esther 8:16). In another verse in the New International Translation, God is credited for giving happiness: “To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness” (Ecclesiastes 2:26).

9For example, in his Christian life book, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, Rob Bell writes, “I don’t follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me to into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is. When Jesus said, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me,’ he was saying that his way, his words, his life is our connection to how things truly are at the deepest level of existence. For Jesus then, the point of religion is to help us connect with ultimate reality, God […] These religious acts and rituals are shadows of the reality. ‘The reality […] is found in Christ.’ [Colossians 2:17 (NIV)]” (original emphasis Bell, 2004, 83).

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