Always Look On the Bright Side: American Christianity’s Toxic Positivity Problem

In which an entire culture struggles with what to do when things go really, really bad.

I had an interesting conversation just before staff meeting a couple of weeks ago with one of my co-workers. We were talking about the way the pandemic has cycled, and I made a comment about how maybe we could open up “in a few months, when things have calmed down.” Then I mentioned that it felt like we’d been saying things would calm down “in a few months” for two years, only to find ourselves, a few months later, in the middle of a new spike. After a moment she said, “Isn’t is important, though, that we have things like that to give us hope? We have to have hope that it will end if we just hold on another few months.”

I thought about it for a long time after the conversation had passed. I thought about it because I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve increasingly thought about the pandemic through a somewhat pessimistic lens after stumbling upon an interview with Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher. Summed up neatly, he argues that pessimism can actually be a quite happy way to move through the world. When we are too optimistic, we can be constantly disappointed, as we expect good things but do not get them. Pessimists, on the other hand…