The Call to Cognitive Dissonance

Several years ago, during a period of clinical depression in my life, I discovered the concept of cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance is the psychological term for what happens in your mind when it is presented with two conflicting ideas or constructs.  As an example, if I am convinced that people on welfare are only on welfare because they are too lazy to get a job, when I meet someone on welfare who is not lazy but who cannot find a job, I will experience cognitive dissonance.  The dissonance only resolves when the tension between the conflicting ideals/constructs is resolved - I must either adjust my assumption about people on welfare or somehow convince myself that the person in question really is too lazy to get a job.

While I was talking with my therapist about some of the depression issues I had, the concept of cognitive dissonance came up.  He suggested that many of my symptoms were a result of unresolved cognitive dissonance in my life - dissonance between what I had always believed to be true about the world and about God and what I was beginning to discover as I entered young adulthood.  Since I had not been able to resolve the dissonance, it was growing stronger and causing problems.

The solution, then, was to systematically rid myself of the cognitive dissonance.  So that is what I began to attempt to do - ruthlessly rooting out cognitive dissonance in order to make myself "healthy"...because cognitive dissonance is evil.  Or so I thought.

What I have come to realize since is that the problem was not the existence of cognitive dissonance or even that cognitive dissonance itself was evil.  Rather, the problem was that I was unprepared to deal with cognitive dissonance when it presented itself.  The systems in which I grew up - at home, at school and at church - all tended to ignore cognitive dissonance by offering unsatisfying or simplistic answers to tough questions or by going to extreme lengths to mitigate or eliminate tension between ideas/constructs. So when I reached my twenties and was faced with real cognitive dissonance, I was caught off guard.  My depression was not a direct result of the cognitive dissonance, but an indirect result - caused by my inability to accept the reality of cognitive dissonance and even befriend that dissonance.

So why is all of this important?

First, cognitive dissonance itself is not evil.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that cognitive dissonance is the root of transformation and, therefore, the root of Christian faith.  If it were not for the tension between what I say I believe and the reality of my actions, where would I find the impetus for change?  If there is no dissonance between sin and grace, where do we find and how do we proclaim the gospel?

Second, we cannot hope to eliminate cognitive dissonance.  This is quickly becoming a core truth for me - cognitive dissonance simply is.  There is no avoiding it - unless we choose to live in a world completely detached from reality (which, unfortunately, many of us do).  Cognitive dissonance, as I have already said, is the source of transformation.

Moreover, cognitive dissonance is found in the very core tenets of Christian faith.  What is the cross but an exercise in cognitive dissonance?  Love meets hate.  Death meets life.  Grace for life comes through the horror of the crucifixion.  The resurrection is also a source of cognitive dissonance - we "know" that people do not come back from the dead...yet we are convinced and believe that Jesus did exactly that.  This leads to my third, and most important, realization.  The very idea of God creates cognitive dissonance - the God who is simultaneously distant from us and close to us.

Third, because cognitive dissonance is always around us and forms the source of transformation, the task of the church and of the Christian community is not to eliminate cognitive dissonance in faith by offering simplistic answers to resolve the tension(s) presented by life.  Rather, our task is to model and teach what it looks like to live a life that is, if not comfortable with, at least accepting of cognitive dissonance.  As Peter Rollins puts it, in a sentence that is simply profound:

That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

I spent way too much time following those therapy sessions trying to eliminate cognitive dissonance from my life only to discover that every time I get rid of one form of it, another pops up in its place.  I am gradually coming to the place where I understand that, while I do not always like the cognitive dissonance in my life, it serves a purpose.

Ultimately, I believe that the call of Christ in the gospel is for people to embrace the call to cognitive dissonance.