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Antebi, Lara

University of British Columbia

Like many religions, Christianity holds a morally prohibitive stance toward suicide. At the same time, the Bible compels people to treat those who suffer with care and compassion. Evangelical Christianity shares certain core tenets that are characteristically stable across time and place. Yet, research suggests that there is greater variability than we might expect in how clergy stand on and address certain contested issues. This slippage raises an important question about the applications of theology into practice: how do leaders understand and respond to suicidality in their communities? Using data from 16 interviews with Canadian evangelical church leaders, I found that pastors draw from two distinct logics when making sense of suicide and their role in responding. First, a person-based logic centers the suffering that might lead people to suicidality, emphasizing pastors' role of compassion and presence. Second, an outcome-based logic views suicide as a failure of duty, and highlights pastors’ role of direction and biblical authority. Put into practice, however, these logics lend themselves to conflicting approaches. This was especially salient for those who held a strong commitment to both logics, who expressed a great deal of tension when facing situations that demanded some kind of response. My findings reveal that between these two cultural anchors, there are a range of positions in leaders’ beliefs and subsequent approaches to dealing with suicidality, either exacerbating stigma and shame, or leveraging the protective potential of faith and community. In turn, how leaders negotiate this tension not only affects the kind of support they can provide, but also addresses a core conflict around Christian identity, contributing to either the persistence or transformation of what suicide means in a faith context.

Text

2024-08-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88834

Sociology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/