The premise to Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood may seem a bit unrealistic to us today. Its protagonist, Hazel Motes, attempts to start his own religion, the Church of Christ without Christ, by preaching on top of the hood of his rundown car to groups leaving the movie house. Really, he’s dealing with the trauma of his Christian upbringing by a fire and brimstone grandfather preacher by exerting control over his life. Growing up, he avoided sin at all costs because he felt Jesus hunting him from the trees; now he seeks a life free from the burdens faith and belief placed on him — a church without Christ.

He is as good of an example as you’ll find as one who is addicted to control, trying his damndest to break the chains that bind him telling others to do the same:

Our addiction to control comes out in various ways. It’s not the same for everyone; I certainly don’t see many people starting anti-religions left and right (though maybe that’s what Seculosity is really about). But everyone is addicted one way or another.

It is the planner who schedules their vacation down to the minute in the hopes of squeezing out every ounce of “rest” one can find. It’s the “free-spirit” who cannot be bound to anyone else’s agenda breaking the ties that bind in hopes of finding that elusive “freedom.” It’s the parent capitulating to every demand of their child, afraid that unless they do the frayed at-best relationship they have with their parents will be recapitulated a generation later. It’s the tired student who stays up late at night for “me time” as a protest against their ever-increasing stress, even though they know sleep is probably best.

We long to be free from the constraints of our past — to exert at least a measure of control on our circumstances. Indeed, what else is the American dream other than to be in complete and total control of one’s life, not dependent on anyone or anything else for “flourishing?”

We want to be in charge of our lives. We want to be the ones making decisions, to preemptively ward off misfortunes through willpower, skill, or foresight. Help from others can humiliate more than empower; why else would people go to food banks in disguises, wary that someone might recognize them? We prefer to give than to receive.

It seems we equate a loss of control with powerlessness. If you aren’t in a place to take care of yourself, if you can’t bull-rush your way through life, if you don’t have the capacity to go at it alone, then you are deemed lower on the totem pole of life than everyone else. You are looked down upon like it’s your fault this happened, whatever “this” is — addiction, hunger, job loss, illness.

This used to be true of mental health too with things like depression and anxiety seen as character flaws to be solved by trying to look at the “bright side of life. Maybe the tide has turned on this front. “It’s okay to not be okay” is the chant I hear most these days, and I nod along in agreement. But even then, it becomes another avenue with which to exert control, to tip the scales of power and powerlessness in our favor. If we were to experience a mental break, the onus would still be up to us to go and take care of it. Go to therapy. Take a vacation. Cut out those unhealthy people. Find a life-giving hobby. Start exercising. We would still be expected to be the ones in control of our recovery.

The problem is we cannot control our way out of the forces of this world (save ourselves by the Law) because we are caught among them: Sin, Death, and the Devil. We are more like the Gerasene demoniac (Mk 5:1-20) than we’d like to admit — out of control, a detriment to ourselves, beset by a force bent on our destruction, needing someone to rescue us from our predicament.

A Church of Christ without Christ proclaims the gospel of self-salvation. But try as he might, Hazel Motes couldn’t outrun his past, caught up in forces he couldn’t pay mind to at the beginning of the story but forced him to confront them in the end. 

And that’s why the gospel is so scandalous. It speaks a truth we’d rather not hear — we aren’t in control and we need to be rescued. For those of us addicted to control (all of us) the Cross is bad news at first because it says we cannot save ourselves but need someone else to do it for us.

But for those who’ve already realized they aren’t in control, who have had their eyes opened to the reality of this world, who have been brought to rock bottom, Christ’s death on our behalf is good news. It is a balm of unmerited grace, given to us because of Jesus’ righteousness. And just like Jesus did for the demoniac, he gives it to us even though we’ve done nothing to deserve it.

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