Beware of Cruel Optimism and Hopium

People are often bifurcated as being either optimists or pessimists, but I have long tried to be neither. Rather I have tried to be a realist. Recently, though, in an article by Chris Smith, I came across a new term (to me), “cruel optimism,” and that strengthened my stance against optimism.**  

“The Rise of Cruel Optimism” is the title of the eighth chapter of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, a British journalist. Hari (b. 1979) in turn introduces Lauren Berlant’s book, Cruel Optimism, published in 2011 by Duke University Press.

Berlant (1957~2021) was an American scholar who was a professor of English at the University of Chicago from 1984 until the year of her death. In a July 2021 essay in The Nation magazine, she was deemed “one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States.”

Cruel Optimism was Berlant’s most influential book, and Hari states that in it she explains that cruel optimism “is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture like obesity or depression or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic solution.

“It sounds optimistic,” he continues, “because you were telling them the problem can be solved and soon—but it is in fact cruel because the solution you’re offering is so limited and so blind to the deeper causes that for most people it will fail” (p. 150).

Consider a couple of examples of cruel optimism. Hari’s first example is stress. Self-help books often suggest that meditation and mindfulness are helpful ways to reduce stress. While it is true that they may help reduce the symptoms of stress, they do nothing to eliminate the stressors.

Hari goes on to say that it is cruel optimism to think that meditation and/or mindfulness can “cure” stress, for the stressors “are often socioeconomic in nature: low wages, poor working conditions, poor or nonexistent health insurance” and the like.

Chris Smith gives another good example: greenwashing. As I explained in a blog post in February 2024, greenwashing is “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is.”

Smith asserts, “Greenwashing aims to make the consumer feel good about themselves, while doing little or nothing to address the present climate change.” It is cruel optimism because it leads people to buy what they don’t need by mistakenly thinking they are helping the environment even though they aren’t.

Cruel optimism is an example of “hopium.” This latter term means holding on to false hopes that prevents us from accepting reality. Hopium differs from hope in that the optimism it fuels is unwarranted or irrational. Like opium, it may make one feel better temporarily but causes harm later on.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, wrote (here), “...there’s a kind of ‘hope’ that is meant to numb us, to distract us from thinking about what could be a bleak future.”

Moore goes on to say that there is a deficient type of hope similar to the deficient type of grace that Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Thus, “Cheap hope” is “actually not hope. It’s a hopioid.”

In his book God Can’t, Thomas Jay Oord writes about the danger of religious people praying with great hope for their sickness to be cured. In reality, though, Oord avers, “Instead of bringing hope, prayers for healing lead some to despair.”** Their hope becomes a type of hopium and cruel optimism.

In closing, I share a comment local Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs posted in response to my April 30 blog article. Anton, who admits to being pessimistic often, wrote, “…my main hope is that my sense of hopelessness is mistaken.”

I thought that was a helpful stance that is neither cruel optimism nor an example of hopium.

So, yes, let’s beware of the negative attitudes of cruel optimism and hopium. But for those of you who at times (or often) tend to be a victim of pessimism, I hope that you can embrace the hope that your sense of hopelessness is mistaken.

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** Chris Smith, the founding editor of Englewood Review of Books (ERB) introduced the term “cruel optimism” (which he said was new to him as it was to me) in an April 3 email sent to subscribers to the ERB online book review website, which he launched in 2008.

** The full title of Oord’s book is God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (2019). I introduced Oord and his book in January (see here).

Doubt is Better than Certainty

Last Sunday, the 97^th Academy Awards presentations were made at Dolby Theater in Hollywood. I didn’t watch the award ceremony, but early Monday morning, I read the results with interest. I was especially eager to know the results for Conclave, the only one of the Best Picture nominees I had seen. 

Conclave did not win the Best Picture Oscar, and Ralph Fiennes (pictured above) was not awarded the Best Actor Oscar for which he was nominated.*¹ Still, please think with me about the striking words of Cardinal Lawrence, who was in charge of the conclave to elect a new pope.

Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals so admirably played by Fiennes, speaks these striking words near the beginning of the film:

… over the course of many years, in the service of our mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.

He goes on to say,

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts.

These were perplexing words to most of the Cardinals gathered for the conclave—and they are likely perplexing to many of you also, especially those of you who have grown up as (and still are) “traditional” Christians.

“The Appeal of Certainty” is a short subsection in my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020). In the first paragraph, I write that “the claim to certainty is one of fundamentalism’s primary attractions.” That same claim is true for many, if not most, conservative evangelicals today.

Nearly 100 years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent neo-orthodox theologian, declared, “Frantic orthodoxy [=fundamentalism] is a method for obscuring doubt.” The foundation of that method was an emphasis upon belief in the Bible, believed to be God’s infallible or inerrant Word.

In 1969, W.A. Criswell, the prominent pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, stressed that the Bible is the literal, infallible Word of God, and then averred, ”If the Bible is the Word of God we have an absolutely trustworthy guide for all the answers our souls desire to know.”

That position is appealing to so many who desire the comforting presence of certainty.

God After Deconstruction by Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller is a new (2024) book, and one that I highly recommend. The second of the twelve chapters is titled “Certainty Crumbles.” At the end of a sub-section called “The Benefit of Doubt,” the authors write,

Rather than being an enemy of belief, we think doubt is essential. Believers aren’t ‘certainers,’ to coin a word. To believe means to be uncertain. The wise ones among us learn to resist the impulse to seek certain foundations of knowledge (31).*²

Then, in “Bible Conundrums,” their fifth chapter, Oord and Fuller deal directly with how many people leave Christianity when they realize that there are many problems related to belief in an infallible Bible as a sure foundation. They give much good advice on how to take the Bible seriously but not literally.

Throughout their insightful book, the authors insist that doubt is more conducive to a life of faith than certainty.

This is similar to what Anne Lamott (whom I plan to highlight in a blog article next month) wrote in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005). One of her religious mentors is a Jesuit priest, whom she refers to as Father Tom. Near the end of her book, she writes,

I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. (p. 256).

Retired pastor Martin Thielen recently wrote about the benefit of doubt. He said, “Religious doubt can lead to a more authentic and mature faith, including the embrace of divine mystery ….”*³

Yes, when carefully considered, doubt is better than certainty.

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*¹ This was in contrast to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts presentation ceremony held on February 16. Conclave and Fiennes both won the BAFTA awards. 

*² While they didn’t cite him, perhaps the authors had read the eminent agnostic Bertrand Russell, who in 1935 wrote, “The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

*³ In April 2014, I posted a blog article (see here) in which I introduced Thielen, who at that time was a Methodist pastor in Tennessee. After making that post, I found out that he had graduated with an M.Div. degree from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1982 but left the Southern Baptists Convention in 1994. He now publishes articles regularly on his website that he calls “Doubter’s Parish.” The words cited above are from his March 1 post, “Faith, Doubt, and ‘Conclave’,” which I encourage you to read (here).

 

Remembering John Cobb and His Transdisciplinary Theology

 Several months ago, I intended to post a blog article today titled “Happy 100^th Birthday, Dr. Cobb!” He was alive and well at that time, but sadly, he passed away about six weeks ago. Still, I am remembering him today/tomorrow and I hope you will enjoy learning a little more about him and his theological thinking. 

John Boswell Cobb Jr. was born on February 9, 1925, and passed away on the day after Christmas. He was a “missionary kid” (MK), born in Kobe, Japan, to parents who were Methodist missionaries.

Until age 15, John lived primarily in Kobe and received most of his early education in the multi-ethnic Canadian Academy in that central Japan city. (Several of the Baptist MKs I knew in Japan, including the two children of Dickson Yagi [introduced below] went to high school at Canadian Academy.)

Dr. Cobb taught theology at the Claremont School of Theology (in California) from 1958 until his retirement in 1990. In 2014 he became the first theologian elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his interdisciplinary work in ecology, economics, and biology.

At least 25 years ago, Dr. Cobb moved to Pilgrim Place, a retirement home in Claremont. Thinking Friend Dickson Yagi was a faculty colleague of mine at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan. Not long after Dickson returned to the U.S., Dr. Cobb invited him to retire at Pilgrim Place, which he did in 2002.

Last August, I wrote to Dickson regarding Dr. Cobb. Dickson responded, “John Cobb’s brain is as sharp as ever. ... He lives in the partial nursing quarters now, so I don’t see him very often. But he still speaks in public .... He is a very courteous and pleasant, intelligent man.”*¹

John Cobb has been influential in a wide range of disciplines, including biology, ecology, economics, social ethics, and theology. I find his thought and writing quite valuable because of how he sees these disciplines as being interrelated and overlapping.

As Wikipedia correctly states, “Although Cobb is most often described as a theologian, the overarching tendency of his thought has been toward the integration of many different areas of knowledge.” Indeed, this sort of integration is what theology ought to be but so often hasn’t been.

Ecological themes have been pervasive in Cobb's work since 1969 (!), when he turned his attention to the ecological crisis. He became convinced that environmental issues constituted humanity’s most pressing problem. His book Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology was published in 1971.

In 1973, Cobb and his colleague David Ray Griffin (1939~2022) co-founded the Center for Process Studies (CPS) at Claremont.*² Three years later, they published Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, a book of singular importance.

In the Foreword, the authors reject much of the traditional theistic understanding of God, according to which “God seems to be the archetype of the dominant, inflexible, emotional, completely independent (read “strong”) male. Process theology denies the existence of this God” (p. 10).*³

Cobb published Becoming a Thinking Christian in 1993. The first paragraph of the Preface states that the book is for people who are lay Christians “in one of the oldline Protestant churches.”

Cobb perceived that many intelligent people in the churches “are still operating out of a simplistic view of faith. Too many have been led to assume that faith is incompatible with intellectual challenge and integrity. … that is the problem to which this book is addressed.”

I fully agree with Cobb’s expressed purpose for that book. In fact, it was just the following year that I started writing a somewhat similar book provisionally titled “Christian Faith and Intellectual Honesty.”

Because of soon being elected to heavy administration responsibilities at the educational institution where I had taught university and seminary classes since 1968, I was, sadly, unable to make much progress on that writing project.

My strong desire, as well as Cobb’s, is for all Christians to be thinking Christians—as well as for all those who are no longer, or never were, Christians to be thinking people. Most of my blog readers are, thankfully, such people, and many of them are on my Thinking Friends mailing list.

I hope some of you will now go to a library or to Amazon.com (or elsewhere) and obtain a copy of Cobb’s book. (There are several “very good” used copies available at Amazon for less than $7.00, including postage.)

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*¹ I heard Dr. Cobb speak in Japan (in 1995) as well as in the U.S., and I visited with him personally on both occasions. In the 1980s when I taught at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Cobb attended an academic meeting there.  At the close of the meeting, I had the privilege of driving him to the Kansas City International Airport and much enjoyed the conversation we had on that occasion. I fully agree with Dickson’s closing words about him.

*² In 1974, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (b. 1933) received her Ph.D. degree at Claremont Graduate School. A few years later, she authored God Christ Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (1982, 1989). After teaching in various universities, she was a faculty member at Claremont School of Divinity from 1990 until her retirement in 2002. During that time, she was also a co-director of CPS. At an academic meeting in 2006, I had the opportunity to hear her speak and to have a private conversation with her.

*³ The paragraph on the previous page where they reject the idea of God as a “controlling power” is very similar to the fundamental idea of Thomas Jay Oord, whom I introduced in my January 10 blog post.

Note: Dr. Cobb’s last book was published in 2023, shortly after his 98^th birthday, and much of that book was written in 2022. It is titled simply Confessions and is a very personal—and timely—book. I bought the $10 Kindle version last year and carefully read the 200+ pages. I highly recommend it. 

Are There Things God Can’t Do?

Thanks to my good friend Fred Herren, last year I became acquainted with theologian Thomas Jay Oord. God Can’t (2019) is the only one of his many books that I have read in its entirety, and initially I was “put off” by the book’s title. After reading it, though, I mainly agreed with Oord’s main points. 

Thomas Jay Oord was long a pastor and theologian in the Church of the Nazarene. Born and raised in Washington state, Oord (b. 1965) graduated from Northwest Nazarene College (now University, NNU) in Idaho in 1988.

After serving as a pastor of a Nazarene church for several years in Washington state, he enrolled in Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, graduating with a Master of Divinity. While in seminary, he was a pastor in nearby Lenexa, Kansas.

After earning his Ph.D. degree at Claremont Graduate University in California, he taught theology at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts and then for sixteen years taught at his alma mater (NNU). Since 2020, Oord has been directing doctoral programs of the online Northwind Theological Seminary.*¹

God Can’t, Oord’s thought-provoking book, is about theodicy, the attempt to resolve the problem of evil that arises when all power and all goodness are simultaneously ascribed to God. If God can prevent all evil, why doesn’t a loving God do that? That is a basic problem for traditional theology.

Oord explains his reason for writing God Can’t: “I wrote this book for victims of evil, survivors, and those who endure senseless suffering. I wrote it for the wounded and broken who have trouble believing in God, are confused, or have given up faith altogether” (3).

His book, though, is also of considerable help for all of us who know people who have trouble believing in God's existence because of the suffering in their own lives or that which they see starkly in the world around them.

Oord insists that “God loves us all, all the time.” He goes on to assert, “Every idea I advocate in this book assumes God is loving” (11-12). This leads him to reject belief in God’s omnipotence and to emphasize what he terms God’s amipotence.*²

According to Oord, “God’s nature is uncontrolling love.” Thus, “God’s love is inherently uncontrolling” (26). That is why God “can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. God’s love governs what God can do” (27). So, here is Oord’s “Belief #1”: “God Can’t Prevent Evil Singlehandedly” (44).*³

How could God be considered all-loving if God could unilaterally prevent evil but didn’t do so? By substituting amipotence for omnipotence, though, Oord concludes, “I can whole-heartedly adore my uncontrolling Creator, knowing God neither causes nor allows the evil I’ve experienced or know” (183).

And then he leaves these final words: “The Lover of the Universe empowers and inspires us to live lives of love. Let’s cooperate with this uncontrolling God of love!” (186).

Much more needs to be said about Oord’s challenging book, but I will mention just one more important thing I realized afresh from reading it. Much of what Christians have said about prayer is based on an erroneous view of God. So often God is asked to do what an uncontrolling God cannot do.

Back in August 2016, I wrote about this in connection with reports that Jimmy Carter was “cancer free” after being diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2015. I encourage you to (re-)read that post (here).

I realize more fully now that it is simply “wrong” to pray for God to heal anyone or to perform other “miraculous” deeds. Yes, I believe in prayer, but not prayers that seek to change God or to “beg” God to do things that God could not do.

So, yes, given the loving, noncontrolling nature of God, there are some/many things God can’t do. But rather than that decreasing our devotion to God, such realization should cause our faith in God to deepen and to strengthen our determination to work with God for the betterment of the world around us.

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*¹ For more detailed information about Oord, see his website at https://ThomasJayOord.com. That site includes this recent news: “In 2024, Oord was taken to trial in the Church of the Nazarene for being queer affirming. The verdict was the removal of his ministerial license and membership in the denomination.” Last August, my friend Brian Kaylor interviewed Oord about his expulsion from the Church of the Nazarene. You can  hear that interview here.  

*² In April 2023, Oord published a new book under the title The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence. He coined the latter word, which means all-loving, to use in place of the former word, which means all-powerful. Christian theology has often talked about God as being omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Those are not biblical terms, however, and Oord firmly believes that the latter term should be replaced by his new term, amipotence.

*³ Oord’s other basic beliefs articulated in this book: #2, “God feels our pain”; #3, “God works to heal”; #4, “God squeezes good from bad”; and #5, “God needs our cooperation.”

Note: Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs reminded me that Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s bestselling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1991) presents ideas quite similar to Oord’s. I read Kushner’s book back in the 1990s but didn’t remember that similarity while reading Oord, who does not mention Kushner.