Righteous Savior Syndrome

What is this foundational, insatiable drive to be right and righteous?

What is this foundational, insatiable drive to be a savior and to save others?

Who are the so called "whole" condescending and called to help the "broken," "the least of these?"

When I first started working with at-risk youth and youth with disabilities, I did so with a sort of savior complex; albeit unknowingly. My religious training infused in me the need to convert the lost. But since I was working in the public sector, I was not allowed to use my words to convert anyone to Christianity, of course. So in my mind I prided myself that I could BE the image of God to the lost through my actions, role modeling. My thinking was that working with these kids, there is no way they could understand a message like, God is your Father. Their understanding of father is a person that abandons them, beats them, and is never happy with them. Or God is Love, conjuring images of abuse, domination, and/or sexual atrocities, often to children. So my sense of saviorhood is that I would be that representative image of God that would demonstrate unconditional love by my own consistency, calmness, and caring everyday. I could be like my parents were to me, examples of love. This is all well and good, but the reality is that I am nothing more than a human being. no better than anyone else. I am not god to them. There is no "them." I have no right to label them the "least of these" or label myself like Jesus, a friend of sinners. It is nothing more than us. We are all in this together, equally. And yet, deep down, this was my foundational motivation so deeply implanted and embedded that it was invisible to me. Of course, looking back, I know am begging to see that this is way that our conditioning sustains itself, by being invisible, silent, or even subconscious.

For more of my credentialing as a righteous savior, check this out:  https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-image-of-god.html  

We, as humans, have this need to be more than we are, to be little gods in our little worlds, our self-defining bubbles, so that no one would be lost. If I'm on a mission from God, or doing the work of God, then my life becomes something more than what I am, simply human. I can be God's messenger or missionary. I can be a part of a greater scheme that is eternal and includes eternal consequences. My work was to prepare these broken kids to be able to eventually receive the saving words of God. Now I am beginning to see that preparing a person for "saving" including myself means that humans are all broken, despised worms that need saving. More and more I see that under this world and life view and conditioning, after being "saved" I was still the same person with a good heart trying to do my best to make a difference in this world. Calling myself a "child of a god" that reveals himself through invisibility and silence doesn't seem to be what I signed up for.


Also see, Why do We Make Gods?

I was always taught that the ultimate achievement as a Christian was to “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel” in order to save their souls from hell. I had ulterior motives beyond purely unconditional love. I had my own agenda to change them to think, believe, and act like me, since I am the righteous savior, a friend of sinners. During one spring break at Grand Rapids Baptist College, as a good evangelical that I was, I joined an evangelistic trip to New York city to work with evangelist Tom Mahairas of the Manhattan Bible Church as they preached the gospel on the streets of New York. Secretly, I hoped that I would finally capture my first soul for Christ and appease my guilt about being the best Christian possible, and yet not to save one soul. What was wrong with me? My words are not good enough from this stranger on a mission from Michigan to save their soul? The next spring break, I joined a trip to Jesus People USA, a Christian community in Chicago, ministering to the poor with the ulterior motive of saving their souls from hell.


This conditioning took root in middle school, after I walked the aisle to get saved at age 9 and was baptised the next year. Now I am ready to save the world as I have been told I am saved, so during an evangelistic campaign at my church, I got all fired up and, because I was afraid to preach the gospel to strangers, would reconvert my peers because I felt the need for myself to be reconverted during those evangelistic services. I wanted for them the euphemistic high that I felt before it wore off, not being told of course that it would wear off like any emotional high. My feeling of being born again inevitably faded and I began to feel lost, so charging those born again batteries by being born again and again and again appeased my guilt and so I logically felt that I needed to do that with others that I know, like my siblings and the neighbor kids. Going to Christian Bible Summer Camp also had that same result of recharging my batteries so I could charge on being the righteous one. 

Looking back, I’m astonished by how deeply ingrained that conditioning was. I also remember how often I felt a need to make my opinions the truth. So even regarding cultural things like where I lived, what cars I drove, what clothes I wore, along with many other values and beliefs, I would take a fundamentalist stance that “I’m right, making you wrong.” As I have been awakening I feel guilt for this kind of thinking and how demeaning and alienating this was to others. Why did I feel such a drive to “know”, to be right, and to “convince”??? As I mature in my unbelief, I'm beginning to see how often I have carried over the militaristic, fundamentalistic rightness when talking about living without religion. Conditioning can be so insidious.

So now, as I reduce my cognitive dissonance by letting go of "all" dogma, I find myself without anything to stand on. I still have strong values about equality, peace, nonviolence, and how people are treated, but I’m learning that I cannot hang on to anything in a absolute sense. I need to stay open to learning and open to following the truth, as it reveals itself through life, and be willing to go anywhere it leads me. My angst of groundlessness is growing because I know that the first step in learning something new, in learning anything, is to say and believe that "I do not know." And now I'm learning to question the very concept of truth and reality. There truly is nothing that I know.

In this process, more gods have emerged, sort of like “whack a mole.”

Gods #1-3: My insatiable drive for comfort, security, and certainty 

God #4: My insatiable drive to be right and righteous.

God #5: My insatiable drive to be a savior and to save others.

I have a hunch that I'll spend the rest of my life uncovering subconscious gods made in my image for me to cling to and create stories in my head about.

Is my goal in life to change others to be like me? If so, what a nightmare I’ve conjured up. What an unhealthy illusion of nothing good. What insidious pride.

And yet, this constituted my identity, my purpose. It was who I was for 50 years. Too bad deconversion isn't as quick and easy as conversion, like a quick (un)born again prayer. Religious and cultural conditioning is so deep seated by its very nature that it stays submerged just under the surface of our consciousness. It sustains itself by its own invisibility and refusal to reveal itself. Therefore, apart from the severe mercy of life's devastating events, we remain stuck, asleep under the influences of the principalities and powers that rule this world and our lives. I suspect it will take the rest of my life to unlearn my knee-jerk responses that are so deeply conditioned.

The Enlightened One
Recently, a couple of days after I wrote this post, I came across a facebook post (memory) that struck me deeply, illustrating everything that I wrote about. I reposted it, 5 years later (now) with these observations.

Here it is:

When I posted this, it seemed so true. But now, 5 years later, I'm taken back with the sense of pride that I had thinking that I could look at others and know that they are unthinking automatons. How can I presume that about those that I do not know, or even those that I do know? Isn't this simply another way of showing that I too am an automaton living out what I have been taught, what I have downloaded from culture?

For me this gives me a sense of progress in my own growth. I've been conditioned to think that I am the enlightened one. I'm right, you're wrong. I think, you're unthinking. I'm conscious, you're unconscious. I'm woke, you're not.

It has been only in the past couple years that I have been able to let go of my own pride and ego, my own righteousness and dogmatism; that I have begun to see my own sense of "righteousness." I am no savior. I am no teacher.

I am simply a country boy trying to make it in the big city!

Now, I am grateful to be able to write this from a perspective of being outside looking in to White Western Christianity .

But as an awakening Christian for the past 15 years or so, here is an interesting emerging perspective I was beginning to see regarding some of these same ideas, and yet falling so far short because I was still trying to see it from within White Western Christian bubble:

"Though I was never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls, the engine driving me was the white savior complex. I thought the dark bodies living in the developing world needed us white, Western, Christians. The other Westerners I worked with believed we had it all pretty much figured out. We had the right theology. We had the right answers. We had the expertise. We were the so called 'whole' condescending to help the 'broken.'”
https://sojo.net/articles/6-harmful-consequences-white-savior-complex

For more, check these out:

What is this Drive to Convince? … to Be Right?

Being Human Together

From Dissonance to Wholeness

Grounded in Groundlessness

See resource pages at the top on White Fragility and on Racism (White Saviorism)

... and many other posts in this blog.