Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety that will Wreck you Family, Destroy your Church, and Ruin the World. Joe Rigney, Canon Press (2024).
In the last four years I have been drawn to the works of mid-20th Century dissidents. That eclectic and incredible group of people who suffered under one any of the several forms of tyranny, socialism, Nazism, and Communism of Europe and Asia still have a lot to say. Their experiences produced incredible insight. They resisted when most others collapsed. Some of them are still familiar names, even if the details of their stories and ideas are less known.
I am fascinated by them. I want to know what they learned. I want to understand what made them resist tremendous pressure (sometimes even brutal imprisonment) and stand for what is good and true.
This seems important to me, because I see the need for the same kinds of people now. We lack actual leadership on every level of culture and our institutions are decaying from within. And far too much of that is the result of self-imposed, self-destructive falsehoods and hatreds. Our culture has traded leaders for activists and has decided to commit suicide under the guillotine built by ideological radicals.
I’d rather not. And I think a lot of other folks would rather not commit cultural suicide either. However, to avoid the powerful cultural pressure to commit Seppuku, we need to have our eyes open, our minds turned on, and wise guides along the way.
Joe Rigney sees a cultural “powder keg.” “We live in an age of anxiety, confusion, and turmoil. There’s something ‘in the air’ that feels highly combustible, a highly reactive atmosphere that pervades all institutions of society: from families to churches to businesses to governments” (pg. 1). Not only is there an air of constant anxiety, but that anxiety seeks to consume individuals and institutions. Where leaders give in to the demands of the most anxious among us, organizations reorganize themselves around the most displeased and most unpleasable people. They have succumbed to emotional sabotage.
The pressure to not be labeled with negative terms, or loaded neologisms is intense. “If only we give way on this one issue,” a board may think, “then we can move forward without the pressure.” But that is not how it works. This kind of pressure is never-ending, and its goal is nothing less than the complete restructuring of culture.
It can’t be negotiated with. It needs to be resisted.
Introducing us to antidotes to emotional sabotage, Rigney enlists Shakespear, Rabbi Edwin Friedman, and the Ten Commandments. Rigney uses that surprising combination to make the point that God has ordained a leadership hierarchy in nearly every relationship on earth, and the break down of that structure spells disaster. Leadership is designed by God to follow Him and do their best to implement God’s will for the good of the people. Activists, by definition, do not have either in mind. Leaders, as God has designed the role, should.
Then there needs to be courage. Rigney focuses on courage in the home, the church, and the world. Only with courage will faithful people be able to resist the manipulation of the downward spiral. Reflecting what Peter writes in one of his epistles, Rigney makes the point that the world will make up false things about Christians and use those falsehoods to pressure us. In addition, they will take the things that are true and good about us and turn them into slanderous tropes. (“Christian Nationalism,” anyone?) Peter said, “”But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled,…For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil” (1 Peter 3:14, 17).
This diagnosis helps us navigate a culture that has become increasingly complicated and cruel. It often feels harder to make sense of the drift of the world around us an make wise, God-honoring decisions. But it is exactly when the storm rages that we need stable and faithful leaders.
As he finishes his book, Rigney reminds us that our lives are not being written by the ideologies and activists in the world around us. Big Corporations and Big Government are not in control. We belong to the One who is. He says, “Our call is to be cool as a cucumber: to remain unshaken by our adversaries, ready to roll with it when our plans come unraveled, confident, humble, and secure in the midst of mayhem, because we knot that Christ is risen, reigning, and working for our good” (pg. 103).
May it be.
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