Sincere Intentions vs. Real Harm
Why well-meaning people don't get let off for simply having good intentions.
((Hello everyone! On Monday’s I post old material that I think is either relevant or that relates to what I’m writing about that week. This was originally posted in November 2023)
I still remember the one “True Love Waits” event I ever went to. It was a “lock in” at a local YMCA. As it wasn’t summer the prospect of the pool and obvious advertisement to many youth groups brought in a couple hundred teenagers (the promise of “free pizza” probably helped too). I remember sitting on the gym floor and becoming more and more incredulous as obvious half-truths were being repeated by people with microphones and a weird amount of energy talking about abstinence, condoms, etc. What finally pushed it too far for me was their depiction of a “hole” in a condom (hula-hoop) that a sperm (basketball) or HIV (ping-pong ball) could escape through. Even at the time I thought, “You just told a couple hundred teenagers that you are going to lock into a building overnight that condoms don’t work.”
Looking back many have noted the damage the “Purity Movement” has done in which “True Love Waits” played a major part. The founder of “True Love Waits” however, does not, ““I do not feel guilty, nor do I second-guess the rightness of the original message.” Richard Ross stated, “Inviting teenagers into a lifetime of sexual holiness and purity…is a beautiful thing,” This sentiment echoes something I’ve seen consistently in my time in American Evangelicalism, that the sincere desire to do good ameliorates whatever harm may have occurred.
You see this tendency when someone defends a leader, ministry, or institution based not off what they did, but the intention of what those were trying to do. “Just trying to educate” becomes more important than following the law (especially when it comes to reporting sexual abuse); “having a heart for” matters more than whether those with that “heart” did anything productive. Probably the biggest excuse is, “They did their best”. The implication being one cannot critique something at all because of the earnestness of the parents, leaders, organizations, etc. What’s more, this pronunciation comes with a “How dare you” kind of presumption that assumes any criticism is either unwarranted (“judge not”) or an “attack” from the “world”.
Caveat Intentio
Intentions matter, what someone intends has real weight regardless of the outcome of their actions. There is a difference between someone who is trying to discipline the best way they know how and someone who demands their child’s unquestioning devotion selfishly. There is a difference between someone exhorting another to something they honestly believe is best for them and someone who is merely controlling. That said however, we have to see sincere intentions along two spectrums: methods and motives.
When it comes to methods there is a spectrum when it comes to knowledge and implementation. It in many ways is like whether someone has the right tools for the job. If you were to look at a rough table that looks to be made poorly and ask the person who made it why it looks like that, if they respond they only had a few tools that weren’t made for woodworking that explains the outcome. At this point there are other questions that need to be asked, why did they only have those tools? Who taught them woodworking? Did they know there were better options? Etc. This isn’t saying someone did a “bad job” per se, but it’s asking why they didn’t do a better one. In some cases it will be a matter of exoneration, they only were able to use the tools given. In other instances there were other tools readily available and the question is why did they not use them? In any case there is both an acknowledgement, “this didn’t turn out well” and a gauging of how culpable someone is in why that outcome has occurred.
Similarly, but more subtle the issue of motive comes into view. This is where the “tools” used are far less important than why they were used. What is even more intriguing is the correlation between what tools are used and what they were intended to do. For example the “True Love Waits” campaign often used misinformation, guilt, fear and shame to convince generations towards abstinence. One has to wonder if the tools used end up as a means of control if control is not the end goal? One reason why “sincerity” is difficult looking back is it is difficult to exonerate those who use bad methods when those methods achieve the short-term ends of those employing them. When shaming and controlling methods so happen to prevent persons from having sex before marriage that seems like a win even if those same methods have traumatic side effects. This is especially the case when side effects are dismissed as “not that big of a deal” or “you didn’t die”.
This last spectrum of tools and meaning when it comes to usage really comes into question when one considers corporal punishment. It would be great to assume that parents for several generations simply didn’t have other knowledge, that the popular Christian parenting advice reinforced these issues over and over again. But the question comes if what was offered was exactly what parents wanted. If “well behaved” children were a sign of success and status in the church, and if getting to an ease of “instant cheerful obedience” didn’t simply make parenting less difficult. Similarly, with much of the Christian cultural movement of the past 40 years (homeschooling, the purity movement, nouthetic counseling) the question comes quickly whether various ways parents and pastors sought to “obey God” were in fact ways to control persons, or to force people into an “ideal” that completely ignored the way God fashions each person uniquely. It brings into real question as to why we’ve been told as a Christian culture to conform to an idealized image.
Sincerity as a Cultural Blindspot
One of my mutuals on X (formerly Twitter) Heather Griffin talks about the “culture of sincerity” in this way,
“This is classic evangelical Sincerity Culture. If we have right beliefs & believe them with sincerity & then act on those beliefs with good intentions, we will only have good impacts on the world. If someone claims harmful impact from our well-intentioned actions which are reasonable because we have good doctrine & sincerity, they must not have good beliefs. Perhaps they "misunderstood"- something common with less reasonable people like women who are So Emotional… If someone is claiming harm from well-intentioned actions by Sincere & Biblical believers, perhaps it is not only that they have misunderstood. Perhaps they themselves are not sincere & that is why the sincerity of the well-intentioned leader isn't being received.”
Where the culture of sincerity meets up with “good intentions” and “best motivations” you have a recipe for toxic abuse. It isn’t what was believed, why it was believed, what aim or goal that may have been good or not, or any other number of things; only the sincerity of the participants (leader and follower) can be “judged”. What’s worse is this presumption simply assumes the governance, doctrine, or system is healthy or “Biblical”. There really is never any assessment of fruit or recognition of harm. As H says it’s always an individual problem and never weighs whether what has been taught or assumed even fulfills the promises made.
This is where many are sounding the alarm over many of the movements that have dominated American cultural Christianity give their voice. “Purity movements” that ended in dysmorphia, difficulties with intimacy and difficult if not failed marriages. Prescriptions about marriage that did not produce faithful, loving, long-lasting unions. Parenting techniques and schooling methods that did not end in believing loving adult children. These don’t even consider church ministry focuses that did not “lead the next generation to Christ”, or teachings about authority and submission that created havens for sexual abuse.
As painful as it might be I believe we need to acknowledge that intention and sincerity does not mitigate harm. All of the best intentions and the most sincere desires to do good does not mean that hurt did not occur. This is where, as I’ve stated before, our concern that injury took place matters more than a perceived “rightness” in intentions. What this requires is humility. Humility that what we’ve been taught isn’t necessarily “correct”. Humility that what was done, even with the best of intentions, was possibly done with an underlying poor motive. Humility that the tools used did not produce the outcomes expected and at some point we should ask why we are using them. Humility to look at the fruit revealed in story after story that all have similar elements and ask why that is. Humility to look at the character and actions of those who hold to beliefs that aren’t too dissimilar than our and ask if they are the outcome not the outlier. In many cases it’s just the humility to listen, without defense or response, as people are attempting to be honest.
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This is very helpful. The insight that the obsession with defending intentions ultimately is a barrier towards the humility towards recognizing competing, less noble, intentions in our hearts is so helpful.
Reflecting on this paragraph here: "Our concern that injury took place matters more than a perceived “rightness” in intentions. What this requires is humility. Humility that what we’ve been taught isn’t necessarily “correct”. Humility that what was done, even with the best of intentions, was possibly done with an underlying poor motive." This is why the defense of "best intentions" quite often is an illusion. I also think, as you mentioned, that intentions sometimes do matter in how we assess character - that the presence of good intentions and lack of better information for some people can be a mitigating factor in whether or not we choose to stay in relationship with someone. But we cannot simply take for granted what people state their intentions are. And when it comes to abusers, we can often assume the opposite of what their stated intentions are.
If we explore more the example of corporal punishment - beating children because you've been taught it's the only way to address "sin." A parent who reluctantly, rarely, spanks their kids because they've been taught to - and who regrets it when they're presented with better information and realize the harm - is very different from someone who is quite comfortable hurting their kids over and over again, always using religious justification (sin, God's wrath at their little ones' normal developmental behavior). The reluctant user's misguided intentions don't excuse the harm, but if their core intentions were never to hurt a child and if they were reluctant to spank even when taught to, that can help a lot with forgiveness. But the latter, the parent who revels in their power to hurt a child and who sees no distinction between their desire to hurt a kid to control them and God's will, is a child abuser. When they are confronted with the harm they've caused, people in that latter category are typically as entirely dismissive of the harm they caused as they were when they were parents abusing the child. That is because their core intention - to revel in the Godlike power given to parents in authoritarian circles even at the cost of harming and dismissing the pain of a small child - has never changed a bit. They didn't care about the pain of their small children then, and they don't care now. So their core intentions actually stayed in the same, no matter no much they hide behind supposed godly intentions of disciplining away sin. A parent who truly wanted to do what was best for their child, when confronted with the endless resources about how such methods actually cause harm, would be horrified and repentant.
The purity movement example can be analyzed similarly - pulling away that veil of "intentions" and facing other intentions like ego and power and the rush of controlling other people "for their own good." Someone involved in that movement who says they feel "no guilt" because their motives were supposedly so pure reveals that their motives weren't actually ever pure if they feel no guilt about unethical misleading methods and harmful impact.
Marissa Burt and Kelsey McGinnis explored these concepts in depth in their book “The Myth of Good Christian Parenting”.
As a deconstructing Christian mom who has religious and attachment trauma from going up with a deeply religious mother and a mentally ill, abusive father