She outlines Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life. I'll share those rules here and apply them to the Christian context. You can also think about these rules and how they apply to your own Christian context.

1. The first rule involves the bitter pill of accepting that some people literally have no conscience. These people do not often look like Charles Manson or a Ferengi bartender. They look like us.

- This is especially true in the church, which is a community of sinners bound together by the grace and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It is important to remember that the church is a community of saved sinners, not a community of the conscienceless or a community of Evil.

2. In a contest between your instincts and what is implied by the role a person has taken on- educator, doctor, leader, animal lover, humanist, parent- go with your instincts.

- It is stunning the extent to which Christians forgo what they know to be true, pure, and right when they get to sit across the table from a powerful and charming bishop, pastor, or seminary professor. Studies show that otherwise normal and healthy personalities will do some of the most atrocious things in their blind allegience to an official with a title.

3. When considering a new relationship of any kind, practice the Rule of Threes regarding the claims and promises a person makes, and the responsibilities he or she has. Make the Rule of Threes your personal policy. Three lies, three broken promises or three instances of neglected responsibility are pretty indicative that you are dealing with a sociopath. Do not give your money, your work, your secrets, or your affection to a three-timer. Your valuable gifts will be wasted.

- I often wonder why Christians continue to engage leaders who consistently bamboozle them. In the Mainline leadership, it has become common practice to lie- well not always technically lie- but obfuscate the truth with artful use of words. It has also become common practice to use "bait and switch" and do things like "thread the needle." This is when leaders come to an agreement with a group or a person, and then use some obscurity in the conversation to achieve their agenda anyways through a "loophole" of some kind. It is also when church leaders say, for example, that they are upholding the rules of the church while they actually have no intention to and are on the other hand working feverishly to overturn the rules of the church say in respect to clergy standards. This kind of dishonest manipulation is pure sociopathy.

4. Question authority.

- Just because your Bishop says it, doesn't make it so. You should always question a leader's authority when you have the feeling that they are abusing power, people, or the authority of their office. Do not go along with authority when you know full well they are wrong, and do not get tangled up following the rules they set down- especially if the rules they set hold the door open for evil and moral vacuity.

5. Suspect flattery.

- I have seen quite a few pastors and lay leaders buy lock, stock, and barrel into a sociopath's agenda because they have been flattered with an appointment to an office, or with the opportunity to sit in the sociopath's "inner circle." In fact, there could be nothing more insulting than a sociopathic bishop wanting you on his team.

6. If necessary, redefine your concept of respect. Too often, we mistake fear for respect, and the more fearful we are of someone, the more we view him or her as deserving of our respect. To mistake fear for respect is to ensure your own victimization. Let us use our big human brains to overpower our animal tendency to bow to predators, so we can disentangle the reflexive confusion of ansiety and awe. In a perfect world, human respect would be an automatic reaction only to those who are strong, kind, and morally courageous. The person who profits from frightening you is not likely to be any of these.

- How many churches bow to the demands of a denominational leader or bishop they know is doing wrong because they are afraid he or she will not send them their next pastor? How many bishops have threatened to remove a pastor, or take control of a congregation's property, or have refused to provide qualified pastoral candidates to fill a vacant pulpit unless a congregation stops its protest against their radically sociopathic agendas? How many Churches have caved to these sociopathic bullies, allowing their evil to have free run in the world?

7. Do not join the game. Intrigue is a sociopath's tool. Resist the temptation to compete with a seductive sociopath, to outsmart him, to psychoanalyze, or even banter with him. In addition to reducing yourself to his level, you would be distracting yourself from what is really important, which is to protect yourself.

- In the American church reform movements, good Christians constantly engage sociopathic denominational leaders with the hope of convincing them to do what's right, or in their attempts to save the denomination itself from becoming wholly sociopathic. Conversely, sociopaths know that decent people will not be able to overcome them because we generally do not use the same tactics as they do. The best thing you can do is to refuse to be a piece in the sociopathic chess game. Instead, work to become the board upon which the sociopaths are constrained within boundaries and lines. You can't beat a sociopath at their own game, but you can reshape the field upon which they have influence and access to limit their ability to hurt you and others.

8. The best way to protect yourself from a sociopath is to avoid him, to refuse any kind of contact or communication. The only truly effective method for dealing with a sociopath you have identified is to disallow him or her from you life altogether. Sociopaths live completely outside of the social contract, and therefore to include them in relationships or other social arrangements is perilous. ... You may never be able to make your family and friends understand why you are avoiding a particular individual. Sociopathy is surprisingly difficult to see, and even harder to explain. Avoid him anyway. if total avoidance is impossible, make plans to come as close as you can tto the goal of total avoidance.

9. Question your tendency to pity too easily. Pity is another socially valuable response, and it should be reserved for innocent people who are in genu9ine pain or who have fallen on misfortune. if, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.

10. Do not try to redeem the unredeemable.

- This is the hardest pill to swallow for many protestant faiths, particularly Lutherans who have gotten their theology confused and fail to properly distinguish law from Gospel. Evil is not redeemable. Satan is not redeemable. God has made the choice not to redeem Satan, but to destroy him. Christ redeems sinners, but destroys evil. Christians have to be careful in fellowshipping and engaging church leaders that have demonstrated an insidious evil that we call sociopathy. All evil is sin, but not all sin is evil- which is to say that all Evil people are sinners, but not all sinners are evil people. Do not let evil people have a space or place in your church or denomination. You will never change them and your responsibility to yourself and your church is to keep them from hurting you- which will only be accompolish through expulsion or excommunication, or simply totally ignoring them and limiting their influence in every way possible.

11. Never agree, out of pity or for any other reason, to help a sociopath conceal his or her true character.

- Think about how many children were molested because a Bishop felt sorry for a subordinate clergy person and hid their true proclivities, even to the extent of moving them to another place to conceal their behavior.

12. Defend your psyche. Do not allow someone without a conscience, or even a string of such people, to convince you that humanity is a failure. Most human beings do possess conscience. most human beings are able to love.

13. Living well is the best revenge.

Article printed from Jesus and the Culture Wars: http://www.revcjconner.com

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