American Christianity has a real problem with suffering. As in, we pretend it doesn’t exist, at least not for us who’ve been washed by the blood of lamb! Our churches often feel like the religious counterpart to the gospel of the bootstrapping meritocracy—if you are good, if you work hard, if you put God first, you will be richly rewarded. We practice a watered-down version of the Prosperity Gospel while simultaneously sneering at it. Like the Christ whose own suffering is whistled past on the way to Easter Sunday, we expect Christians to put on a happy face, to end our testimonies on an upswing, because we need to sell Jesus to the unchurched. As Rachel Held Evans wrote in Searching for Sunday:
“What [grieving people] find is when they bring their pain or their doubt or their uncomfortable truth to church, someone immediately grabs it out of their hands to try and fix it, to try and make it go away. Bible verses are quoted. Assurances are given. Plans with ten steps and measurable results are made. With good intentions tinged with fear, Christians scour their inventory for a cure.”
I learned early the things that couldn’t be discussed with our “church family”—premarital sex and dangerous drinking, mental illness, family dysfunction. When I think of types of suffering the church was comfortable with, it was things like surgery or cancer, things that could never be proven to be anybody’s fault.
It took therapy and a good (mostly non-Christian) support network for me to be able to face the traumas I’d been running from. But while a good therapist can prod and handhold, they can’t answer “why”—why this mental illness, why my family? Thankfully, #exvangelical word-of-mouth led me to Scott Samuelson’s Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, a book which has stuck with me long after I finished reading it.
It was this book that came to me when a friend and I were sitting in a sauna talking shop, I remembered his chapter on Hannah Arendt and her theories on how industrialization has robbed modern work of its meaning. And Samuelson’s explanation of Job, while initially pissing me off, feels more honest than the many sermons I’ve heard on the topic.
I was fortunate enough to sit down with Dr. Samuelson for a recent Zoom interview. We talked about the Book of Job and the recency of the Problem of Evil as a reason people no longer believed in God, along with some more general questions about the merits of philosophy.
Samuelson’s path to a PhD in philosophy started with a chance encounter at the Iowa City Public Library. Sixteen-year-old Samuelson was perusing the shelves when he stumbled across a collection of philosophy featuring Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs of God. He was struck less by the content of Aquinas’ argument and more by the fact that such a thing could be argued. Philosophy, it seemed to Samuelson, must be a powerful thing.
“It seems to me a real tragedy when religion tries to shut down philosophical thought, and it seems to me the result of a kind of fear,” Samuelson said. “You know, a fear of what of ‘what thinking might do?’ and, in one sense that fear is not altogether wrong! Because thinking does take you on an adventure, and it can take you away from things that connect you to other people. It can! It can be disorienting…and yet, to go courageously through that fear, you almost always end up in a better place in the end, sometimes after a bumpy road. If the beliefs that you start with are truly good, I think that they will withstand reflection and be deepened by reflection.”
Samuelson’s writing is more about guiding the reader through that journey of reflection rather than pitching a particular worldview.
While philosophy has, generally, earned its reputation for being impenetrable, Samuelson laces each chapter with real-world examples, many of which are drawn from his experience teaching men incarcerated at Oakdale Prison. This choice adds emotional heft to the book—prisoners, perhaps, are more intimately acquainted with suffering than most.
Through seven chapters Samuelson presents opposing viewpoints from the likes of Nietzsche (“we should embrace pointless suffering”) and John Stuart Mill (“we should eliminate pointless suffering”) among others. He even takes a stopover at the Book of Job, which surprised me, raised as I was on the notion that academia had no place for the Bible. But Samuelson thoughtfully examines Judeo-Christian viewpoints on suffering alongside Confucius and the Stoics, peppering his book with poetry, Jazz musicians, and James Baldwin. This collage of thinking illustrates not only the different ways humanity encounters suffering, but also what suffering can do for us. Suffering unites us, and it spurs the creation of our greatest art. The existence of suffering gives life meaning; it can even reveal the face of God.
One of the things I noticed in reading was that Samuelson’s three primary ways of dealing with suffering echo elements of the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief (with “forget it” corresponding to denial, “fix it” with anger/bargaining, and “face it” with depression and acceptance.) When I mentioned this to Samuelson, he told me about losing a friend to cancer:
“I was really amazed by how he [and his friends] dealt with it. I feel like he had lived his life more or less in the knowledge that he was gonna die at some point, and he had cultivated relationships deeply. He lived well. He was a jazz musician and composer. He was curious about everything. He emanated this really kind of powerful, positive lifeforce around him. And when he died it was just incredibly sad, obviously, for all of us to lose him, and yet there was a pretty minimal amount of anger and denial among us…What I'm getting at is that that sometimes, when we can live as well as we can, losing someone is hard, but I don't necessarily know that anger and denial have to be part of it.”
If Samuelson is an evangelist for anything, it is for living a good life, one full of meaning. For that reason, he has previously advocated against “bucket lists.” These are themes he returns to in his writing. In addition to Seven Ways, he has published The Deepest Human Life: an Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone, along with his latest work, Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour. The latter he describes as, “a kind of travel guide, but one that is asking some of the questions that most travel guides overlook.” The book uses sites like the Colosseum as a jumping off point to tackle the big questions of philosophy. It can also be read by people who aren’t planning a trip to Rome but are nonetheless interested in this historically significant crossroad of ideas.
My biggest takeaway from talking to Dr. Samuelson and reading his work is that humanity lives in tension with suffering. It would feel wrong to constantly ignore it, but occasionally holing up with Ben & Jerrys and a Ted Lasso marathon is a salve. Likewise, if we think we can escape all suffering and solve every problem, we’re in for a rude awakening. And if we spend all of our time accepting suffering but never extending a helping hand, we would become complicit in the world’s brokenness. I think one of the greatest gifts Seven Ways brings is not boiling down a single “correct” response to suffering, but reminding us that, when confronting suffering, we do have choices. It behooves us not to fall into a mindless habit but to challenge ourselves to form an intentional response.
Journal/Discussion Questions:
Do you have experience with the prosperity gospel? How about its secular counterparts like The Secret? What do you think of them?
Are any big life questions perplexing you? Where do you think you can find answers on these? (leave your questions in the comments & maybe they’ll be the topic of a future Substack)
What’s your favorite way to ignore a problem?
Such a big topic, the book sounds really interesting.There is something inherently attractive about prosperity! I mean who doesn't want life to go well for them? I attended and loved (I'll add) a Pentecostal church where some people were very influenced by the word of faith movement, your words having the power of life and death. It turned out to be a terrible place to suffer though. There was no unexplainable suffering, no such thing as chance or mystery or part of the human experience. Oftentimes it was deemed a test of faith, oppression by the devil, or some sort of lack on our part. I think life being unexplainable can be terrifying for people that they cling to people who sound certain. The tension you speak about is the key issue. Not ignoring, denying or giving up but this is hard. Some suffering is preventable some is not. Trying to stay engaged is a challenge but necessary for really living life
Loved the article. I've never read Scott Samuelson, but his books sound very intriguing. And Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering was only 3 bucks on Kindle (at least in the US), so I grabbed it and will read it soon. Thank you!