The Problem with Toxic
Positivity in the Church

I told a church leader once that I was struggling. That something was deeply wrong, and I didn't know how to fix it. That some days getting out of bed felt like climbing a cliff.

He looked at me with practiced warmth and said: "Brother, God's got this. Just keep praising — the joy of the Lord is your strength."

I left that conversation more alone than when I arrived.

Toxic positivity in the church is not a fringe phenomenon. It is embedded in the culture of many congregations — particularly in Pentecostal, charismatic, and prosperity-influenced traditions. It is the reflexive deployment of encouragement in place of presence. The pasting of a spiritual answer over a human wound before anyone has sat long enough to understand the wound's shape.

And it is doing real damage.

"Performing hope is not the same as holding hope.
One is for the performer.
One is for the person in pain."

What Toxic Positivity in the Church Actually Looks Like

Toxic positivity in the church has a vocabulary that most believers will recognize immediately:

"God won't give you more than you can handle." (He will. That's often the point — to bring us to the end of ourselves.)

"Just trust God. He has a plan." (True — and sometimes a plan looks like a very long wilderness, and telling someone to just trust Him skips all the grief required to survive it.)

"At least it could be worse." (This is comparative suffering — a denial of someone's reality by measuring it against a worse imagined reality.)

"Your breakthrough is coming — don't stop believing." (Possibly. But what someone in crisis needs is not a prophecy. They need a person who will stay in the room.)

None of these phrases are inherently false.

What makes them toxic is the timing and the function.

When a phrase serves the speaker more than the listener — when it ends the conversation faster than it opens it — when it tells the suffering person to feel something different rather than feeling what they feel — it has crossed from encouragement into dismissal.

The Scriptural Counterargument Is Overwhelming

If toxic positivity in the church were actually biblical, you would expect to find the biblical figures modelling it. You do not.

Job's friends begin well — they sit with him in silence for seven days (Job 2:13). They are doing exactly the right thing. It is only when they open their mouths with theological certainty about his suffering that they become the problem God later rebukes them for. The lesson of Job is not "have more faith." It is: sometimes presence is the only right response, and premature explanations are a form of violence.

Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus does not say "I've got this, cheer up." He weeps. He is "deeply moved in spirit and troubled" (John 11:33). The word in the Greek — embrimaomai — suggests more than tears. It suggests groaning. Indignation. The visceral collision with death that should not exist in a world God made.

The Son of God does not perform positivity at a graveside.

He weeps.

The Psalms — as I explored in lament as worship — spend more time in honest cry than in resolution. Psalm 88 ends with "darkness is my closest friend" — no resolution, no breakthrough, no prophetic word. Just darkness, honestly named. And God keeps it in the canon.

Spiritual Bypassing: When Faith Becomes Avoidance

The psychologist John Welwood coined the term "spiritual bypassing" in 1984 to describe the use of spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid dealing with unresolved psychological issues. The basic dynamic is: using transcendent language to leapfrog the painful territory of the inner life.

Spiritual bypassing says: "I've given it to God" as a way to not feel it. It reaches for supernatural resolution to avoid natural grief. It confuses faith with the suppression of difficult emotion.

This is not the biblical model of faith. The biblical model holds lament and hope together — not as opposites, but as the two rails of the same track. "We are pressed on every side, but not crushed" (2 Corinthians 4:8) — Paul does not say "we are not pressed." He says pressed, but not crushed. The difficulty is real. The deliverance is real. Bypassing the difficulty does not lead to the deliverance. It leads to numbness.

As I explored in why smart Christians struggle to feel their feelings, the theological training many of us received specifically taught us to bypass emotion — to treat it as weakness, as lack of faith, as something to be managed rather than processed. The cost of that teaching is a generation of believers who cannot access their own interior lives, and who reach for positivity clichés because they have no other language for pain.

What the Alternative Looks Like

Genuine hope is not the absence of honest reckoning with difficulty. It is hope that has survived honest reckoning. That is qualitatively different from optimism that has never been tested.

The alternative to toxic positivity in the church is not despair. It is not the absence of encouragement. It is presence that precedes prescription. It is staying in the room long enough to actually hear what is happening before offering a response.

It sounds like: "I hear you. That sounds incredibly hard. Can you tell me more?"

It looks like Job's friends in days one through seven. It looks like Mary of Bethany sitting at Jesus' feet rather than rushing to task. It looks like David in the Psalms, who does not spiritually bypass the descent before the ascent — who lets the descant be fully heard before the chorus lifts.

In practice, this means the church needs people who can tolerate the discomfort of not fixing — who can sit with someone's un-fixed pain without needing it to resolve so that they feel better. Because so often, the rush to positivity is about the speaker's discomfort with suffering, not the listener's need to be encouraged.

"You cannot rush someone through their grief
without leaving them more alone than they were before you arrived."