The Importance of Being Unpopular

Did you know that the literal meaning of the word “blessed” as it is used in scripture is, “happy and healthy”? This is an amazing thing to me, because many people tend to think of God’s commandments as a calling to sacrifice personal happiness in return for some kind of reward in the next life. And there may be times when that is the case, but as a general function, the directions of scripture have been repeatedly shown to produce the deepest and most reliable happiness of any lifestyle that we know.

That’s remarkable in itself, but it becomes especially incredible if you apply this backwards to, for example, some of the beatitudes. “Happy and healthy are those who mourn! Happy and healthy are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake! Happy and healthy are you when others persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely!” Personally, if I know someone who’s going through , say, the loss of a child, or a false accusation of some terrible crime, it would take quite a bit of guts for me to tell them that they should feel happy and healthy about it!

These are among the most challenging aspects of faith, because even holding a real conversation about them is hard. In the last post, I touched briefly on a prevalent modern conception of love as something that is fundamentally comforting, and which must therefore exclude anything that might give offense. Obviously, this is incompatible with the life of Jesus. But the ubiquity of this idea, even when it is perhaps felt without being verbalized, is such that speaking openly on these sensitive topics becomes taboo.

This is a problem, because it effectively produces dogma, neuters honesty, and produces a people that punish disagreement with anger and exclusion. And yet… “Happy and healthy are you when you are persecuted for your faith.”

Happy and Healthy

So how can we make sense of this? Because spaces that fit this description are emerging all over the place, in secular spaces and religious ones. You have to consider these truths as something designed to build you up and facilitate growth, which never happens without pain. But to be healthy is to be strong, and an inability to speak your mind is a fairly serious form of weakness. So this ancient wisdom is calling us to strength, and describing what it means to be healthy as much as it is promising us health. But it goes deeper as well, because one of the most profound sources of strength in our lives are the friends and family with whom we share our lives.

There’s a modern piece of wisdom which says that you become like the five people with whom you spend the most time. I don’t know the significance of that precise number, but the principle is beyond doubt. We owe much of ourselves to the people closest to us. So what do you think the effect on your personality will be if you do not feel safe to express yourself around those people? What effect do you think it will have on your beliefs, and on your ability to distinguish the things you believe and the things you don’t, if your circle of friends doesn’t allow you to voice them? Eventually, you may lose that individual sense of yourself entirely, but at the very least it must inhibit you from growing stronger in your beliefs.

Growth requires sacrifice, yes. But first, and most often, it requires the willingness to sacrifice, whether the act becomes necessary or not. The resolution to do a painful thing is itself painful, and sometimes this is enough to make the difference. Perhaps even most of the time.

This is the sort of sacrifice I mean when I talk about the importance of unpopularity. It is not that there is some virtue in being disliked, it is that valuing popularity limits honesty and growth, to the extent that it is a matter of conformity to what is popular. In order for discussion to be healthy and conducive to growth, integrity and openness must occupy a higher priority than being liked.

Putting it into Practice

So how does this make you happy and healthy? Let’s say that you do all of this, and you start speaking your mind and openly disagreeing with the popular opinion around you—and some of your loved ones will probably get angry with you. You may even lose friends. But let me ask you this: what are the characteristics of the best, most meaningful relationships in life?

Isn’t open communication and the ability to speak your mind without fear one of the most important markers? Certainly it’s needed in a healthy marriage, and there is an extent to which healthy marriages are a blueprint for any close relationship. Not physically, of course, nor in the sense of time commitment and proximity, but in the way that we relate to and value one another. When you commit yourself to a person come hell or high water—and then hell and high water actually comes, which it always does, and you have to figure out how to deal with that—it is a way of laying bare the deepest mechanisms of functional, fulfilling relationships.

This is why the promise is a vital part of the marriage ceremony, because it is through the times in the relationship that we would never have chosen for ourselves that the relationship is empowered to become more than we could have previously imagined. The promise is simply a way of compelling ourselves to go through them. For believers, the instruction to love your neighbor as yourself must be seen as equally convicting. We cannot control our neighbor’s behavior, but we also cannot claim to love them as ourselves without attempting painful honesty and a willingness, insofar as it may be beneficial, to go through hell and high water. In doing this, though you may lose the acceptance of the masses, you will find that those willing to return your honesty and effort—meaning those most able to engage in deep, fulfilling relationships—will self-select themselves in response, and the end result will be far stronger and more strengthening friendships than you could hope to achieve any other way.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd