New Book Review: Blessed Disruption

Title: Blessed Disruption

Author: Suzie Hall

Date: 2025

ISBN: 979-8-9986493-1-8

Quote: "I noticed similarities in the descriptors that people used to describe me. Strong. Competitive. Intimidating. Beautiful. Independent. Intelligent. Complicated. Self-centered. Religious. Sweet. Sexy. Strong-willed. Impatient. Spirited. Why did I pay so much attention to these labels and emotionally agonize over them, which subsequently caused me to judge myself and play small in life? It’s because I didn’t truly know how disconnected I was from who I was created to be."

Preach it, Sister. Yes, this is another book about how someone grew up Christian and felt traumatized by the church. They're becoming a genre. I read this type of books because one day I may write one, though I'm also concerned about whether the popularity of these books is discouraging Christians who feel called to stay in their churches. What Suzie Hall brought out of her church, however, sounds an awful lot like what I shook off my feet when I left.

It's gone from an obscure theory, when Hall and I were growing up, to settled medical science: People not only have the ability to choose what look like introvert or extrovert behavior, but are literally, physically born introverts or extroverts. There has been a lot of misunderstanding about this. Wanting to be with others sometimes does not mean that a person is an extrovert; it means that the person has friends. Feeling shy, or tired, or alienated from others in a certain social setting does not make a person an introvert. We're born with one kind of brain or the other, though some people who were born introverts "become extroverts" after a long high fever. 

Introverts have more complete brains. The development of individual neurological "wiring" varies, but there are a few recognizable patterns that link introverts of "artistic temperament," introverts with talents for math, introverts who think things through with their long brain stems, and others, as having one crucial thing in common: We're born with a moral sense--a sense of right and wrong, honor and shame. 

Extroverts are defined by their failure to develop complete enough brains to have this sense. Some extroverts' academic intelligence is comparable with introverts', but in a very important way, the extrovert brain is handicapped. Disabled, even.

I think evangelical Christianity has been particularly vulnerable to a sort of minor heresy that casts Jesus as "the greatest salesman in the world." Say what? Read the Gospels. He was not a salesman. He was a religious teacher who intentionally restricted his audience and turned away followers. Great salesmen aren't hanged! The idea of Christians applying lessons from the Bible to their business seems good, but in some churches it has created a cult of people who think they are saved by some combination of Christ plus extroversion. 

A real religious life is an introvert thing. Extroverts can enjoy the feeling of being in a crowd, singing and clapping and even praying, but they're not built for serious spiritual discipline. We're told enough about St. Peter's life to indicate that he was, although an extrovert and a bit of a burden to Jesus and the other disciples, loved and saved...but as work, because he was a burden, because his whole brain had to be rewired in order for him to represent Christ to anybody. Which is why the rest of the Christian world will probably always have very mixed feelings about the evangelicals.

Extroverts are also prone to make hasty, superficial judgments, which can lead to bigotry, so in some evangelical churches--not the ones I attended--there is a well documented history of embracing bigotry, both against women and against various demographic minority types of men, perhaps also against the young, certainly against those with less money and those with physical disabilities. (Except for extroversion.) Evidently Suzie Hall's family's evangelical church was one of those. She felt traumatized by her church's attitudes toward women, which were harsh enough that as a teenager Hall reports letting herself be raped outright without even calling for help from family members sleeping only a few yards away.

Seriously. It wasn't even a "date rape" where the girl wants to touch but wants to stop at a certain point. It was an outright rape in which a larger, older boy barged into a hotel room and shoved little Suzie down on one of the beds. Her brother (!!!) was in the other bed, their parents in an adjacent room, and they apparently slept like logs through the whole episode. Years after my mother told me, tersely, how to make a boy stop groping and whining for "more," and my father didn't even go there but just ordered me to carry a pistol--loaded with gas pellets rather than lead, so no whining!--there were still teenaged girls who hadn't even been taught to yell for help. Who might, after years of "depression" and therapy, finally tell their parents what had happened, and, when their fathers blurted out "I thought we were family," think their fathers were blaming them rather than the boys the fathers had been teaching or coaching. (Suzie Hall's father was college football coach Skip Hall.)

God in Heaven, turn Your face from our intolerable race...

Right. This goes out to all Christian young ladies of the world: Boys mature slowly. Sometimes they still act like toddlers when they are fifty or sixty years old. Sometimes they are so confused they even try to deny how pitifully sensitive some parts of their bodies are. They may even try to pretend their sensitive parts are weapons. With one good gouge of one fingernail it is possible to clear up their understanding, even at some risk to their lives. Most of the other effects your dainty little hands can have on a 300-pound footballer's sensitive parts are more fun, and put you in the position of "sympathetic friend" rather than "plaintiff," but if you ever meet the type who would attempt outright rape, you should be the last girl he ever thinks about in that way. Don't leave him capable of thinking those thoughts about your younger sister. Possibly the reason why this was omitted from Suzie Hall's education was something to do with her not having a younger sister.

Few survivors of physical violation want to spend the next year or so of their life telling everyone they meet all about their experience of shame and pain. Many, like the teenaged Suzie Hall, try to put it behind them and behave so well, achieve so much, that nobody would ever guess what happened that night. Suzie played sports well, did well in school, did well on jobs, went to all her father's students' games and cheered, married a man her parents liked shortly after graduation, and had two perfectly beautiful children. And then for no obvious reason she flopped into bed with another man. Well, she admitted when her husband guessed what she was doing, she didn't like his assumption that he was in charge of the family's money. But she couldn't consciously say, even to herself, that the easiest way to walk out on her husband without suffering financial loss was to catch another man who could afford to pay her to be a "full-time homemaker." And she didn't want to be a "full-time homemaker" anyway.

Yes, when Christian young people stay single, this is the kind of thing older Christians should give thanks that they are avoiding. It's far better that people in their twenties spend enough years alone to know that they don't need to be coupled, to wonder if they'll ever even really want to be coupled, until they prove someone to be a good enough friend that they know for sure.

So why didn't Suzie Hall forge on into the world and do the job she wanted? Her book doesn't show a single reason why she chose to be a full-time wife when she wanted to be a TV news reader. Those of us who remember the 1980s can remember that there would have been more even than the two reasons she lists--a Christian youth group preaching that girls should try to be full-time wives (in the name of "submission" to their husbands, following a "tradition" concocted by the French Socialists and contrary to what the Bible actually says a good wife does), and her own post-traumatic stress disorder warning her that "being seen" might lead to being attacked again. There was also the well publicized bigotry against women in an industry where Christine Craft was so famously fired for being "too old, too ugly, and not deferential enough to men." There was also the fundamental moral ickiness of the industry, which went beyond the analyses of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Hall probably wouldn't have liked being a news reader. What is certain is that she resented being told to be a full-time wife, instead. We may read between the lines that this resentment leaked out in a passive-aggressive way that ended two marriages and cut off half a dozen "relationships" after her second divorce.

And so, after lots and lots of the kind of "therapy" extroverts love, with lots of ego inflation and a suggestion that financial benefits are tied to perfecting their personalities (I won't say it it's too easy), Hall took the very very courageous step of identifying herself as a "believer" rather than a Christian. That she'd been sent an actual letter from a church she had attended, warning her to repent and advising the rest of the congregation to guide her toward repentance, she's still denying as a factor in this. That some people, or spirits, or cosmic principles, just love it when people's righteous indignation with other people separates them even in name from the love of Christ...

People recovering from emotional abuse by fellow Christians do seem to find some strange words gushing out of our mouths. No Seventh-Day Adventist church I attended literally had a Cradle Row for believers' babies, but all of them had "Cradle Roll Classes" at their "Sabbath Schools." They had songs, which the infants couldn't sing (except for my natural sister the musical prodigy), for the benefit of brainfogged mothers. One of those songs went "I'll share my goodies'cos I love you, and that's what Jesus wants me to do." I knew a rather awful woman who used to chant "And that's what Jesus wants me to do" when she was bullying some younger person into doing what "Mrs. Awful" wanted person to do. In my early twenties I told her I had felt led to adopt the belief that, when she was doing that, I was meant to "take 'what Jesus wants me to do'," I chanted, then changing the tune, "'and throw it out the window'!" Jesus, I'm sure, understood. It was not necessary to reject what Jesus taught, either by His reported words or by His example, in order to reject Mrs. Awful's insinuation that what Jesus wanted me to do was what she wanted me to do...

It's true that Christians who accept the idea that they have something to repent of, that other people in the church are meant to guide them to repentance, are often making the kind of submissive display that invites emotional abuse. There is no simple, objective behavioral rule about what they did that was so bad or when the blaming and shaming has to stop. It cam become an ongoing unwritten contract that if X wants to belong to the group, X needs to enjoy having everyone else find fault with everything person does, because anything X does might be said to show that that spirit of whatever-X-did is still present.

That tended to happen to introverts. The mere fact that many of us liked the traditional rules of modesty and frugality probably started it. I remember that at one church about a dozen people had asked me whether I was a Seventh-Day Adventist. I thought it was a simple question of fact, no more tiresome than "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?", so at some point I asked someone else that question. Poor Baby was so hurt she couldn't even say anything like "I feel hurt by that question," but could only cry on the shoulders of about a dozen other people until they agreed to tell me what a horrible person I was--asking someone the same question that many other people had asked me.

At a certain stage in the spiritual formation of a serious introvert Christian, many of us will continue to talk to people who play that sort of game. Some part of us must notice that we're behaving like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football, but we want to be humble and teachable. Correcting this harmful social pattern usually involves cutting off communication with the person who needs encouragement to leave cravings for dominance in the bedroom.

Hall has heard, of course, about the damage it supposedly does to lesbian couples that some churches don't invite them to become members. I am afraid there is a biblical basis for this. I am afraid, also, that churches have a right to require members to give up other things that the Bible doesn't even describe as "unseemly" for Christians. People who believe in Christ but don't believe in the rules of these churches have a right to join churches that have more liberal rules. Nobody is really harmed. I don't have a lot of sympathy for homosexual lobbyists who come to churches where they know they don't belong, just to try to make people feel bad about taking the Bible's rules about homosexual behavior seriously. 

I don't know that most of these people understand the Bible's teachings about homosexual behavior correctly. I suspect that most of them are quietly thinking that, because they're not tempted by homosexuality, homosexuality must be worse than the sins that appeal to them; the Bible never says anything remotely like that. Any serious spiritual practice does involve subordinating the body's appetites to the spiritual discipline. "Gay" promiscuity is absolutely not acceptable for Christians. Homosexual attractions are just one more of the carnal appetites spiritual people can choose to overcome. Whether that means that a committed couple, of different sexes or the same sex, have been called to separate, to repudiate commitments they've made to each other, is more than I would presume to say. Vocations to break off relationships and reject people are individual matters. Sometimes the clear biblical teaching churches could benefit from rediscovering is the one about, before Christians judge someone else's behavior, reexamining their own behavior in case something they are doing is even worse.

But I think Hall and so many of the other ex-churchgoers need to be called out for blathering about the positions some churches take on homosexuality, and never recognizing that another whole set of churches positively persecute introverts. Homosexuality is not an hereditary, permanent, physical trait. It is a behavior. Introversion is an hereditary, permanent, physical trait--and a valuable one, at that. Hall seems never to have noticed how any "friendly" feelings nice, quiet, respectful people used to have can be systematically beaten out of us by social bullies for whom we never are or could be "friendly" enough. In fact, among introverts some social problems don't even develop. People whose instinctive tendency is not to sniff at other people's crotches, to respect other people's personal choices enough not to ask whether people we are not personally pursuing are in any kind of sexual relationship, aren't likely to bother our heads about whether other people are committed to relationships that are not the marriage-for-the-sake-of-children the Catholic Church so slowly and grudgingly accepted.

Would I go to hear Hall speak? I would not. I can tell by the way she writes that at any meeting where Hall would be likely to speak, the audience would be packed in like sardines, there'd probably be sing-along songs played back on somebody's computer with the lyrics flashed on a screen, requests for money would be made repeatedly before, during, and after the performance, nothing at all would speak to my soul at any point where it had been on any stage of my life's journey, and there would probably be a group hug. If I had been wanting a spiritual, or social, or emotional experience when I went in, I'd still be wanting it when I went out of such a meeting. And at some point, very often in the first meeting, any effort I made to share some kind of fellowship with the extroverts would be slapped back into my face--I didn't seem "friendly" enough to them, so what was wrong with me? That, if anything was wrong, it was wrong with their selfish and bigoted way of presenting Christianity, would not be something extroverts would let themselves consider...

I wish extrovert Christians whatever joy they are capable of feeling in their fellowship with each other, but until they are ready to accept that spiritual people have completely different kinds of worship, faith, and fellowship, and learn our ways, I'm afraid these extrovert Christians don't have fellowship with me. But that's my reaction to Hall and her current life and work. It may not be yours. It may not be God's.

More to the point is the question whether Hall ever really repented of her adultery...because my understanding of the Bible is that, if unable to reconcile with her original husband, she is now called to celibacy. Married couples can separate but if they marry other people it must be a civil union, not a Christian marriage. I know there are churches that bless second, third, and no doubt on up to thirtieth marriages, just as there are churches that bless same-sex marriages. I don't find that in the Bible. 

In the Bible I find an affirmation of celibacy that the modern church needs to recollect. Evangelical extroverts don't like the parts of the Bible that teach that people may have to work, travel, or even sleep alone. And it's all one to me if some church somewhere feels led to blSess somebody's civil union with his motorcycle, saying that he who forsaketh a gas-guzzler and espouseth a Harley findeth a good thing, but all Christian churches need to be encouraging celibacy more clearly than they currently seem to be doing. Jesus called a woman who had had five husbands to spread Christianity in the town of Sychar; perhaps modern evangelical churches' tolerance for multiple marriages has good qualities, but it does not leave evangelical churches in a very strong position to denounce other deviations from the ideals of either celibacy or strictly monogamous marriage. 

Hall's insights can help church members who want to avoid alienating the young, but only in a limited way. Do churches need to invite same-sex couples to become members? There may be specific individuals a church wants to have as members, but if people are worried that offering membership to anyone amounts to encouraging sin they should know that the Universalist Church already exists and the other denominations don't need to merge into it. Do they need to try, in an era when most jobs tend to call for intelligence more than upper body strength, to revive the morbid French Socialist idea of male laborers being uplifted by "angel in the home" full-time wives? Does anyone seriously think that idea has any chance to work? Do the churches need to offer more support to young people, probably difficult and prickly young people, who have been sexually abused? That might work. Hall might be called to show the church the way. 

But a church that wants to recruit seriously spiritual people needs to focus on affirming and encouraging introverts. With that Hall can't be much help. Because people who are likely to replace churchgoing with private prayer are more likely to be committed lifelong Christians than people who would replace churchgoing with "partying," churches may have to make mindful choices about how much effort they want to invest in evangelizing "partying" types and how much in encouraging the kind of Christians whom churches need more than those Christians need churches.