What’s your relationship with cynicism?

Ten years ago, I graduated from the University of Chicago. My PhD program was in religious and political ethics. For me, ethics is the study of good and evil—what’s worthy of love, worthy of resistance, and how to tell the difference.

This rigorous training in ethics gave me precious tools for understanding our human condition and the (im)moral cultures we create. But observing religion and politics for the last ten years has tempted me toward cynicism again and again.

For me at least, cynicism says, “Everything is fake. Nothing changes. It’s all about power, money, status—ego. Stop caring. Become hard. Live for yourself.”

This morning, I woke up feeling a fresh tug of cynicism in my chest—that dull pull to indifference. The night before, I had watched Shiny Happy People, yet another compelling documentary about how “God,” “Jesus,” “the Bible,” “authority,” “order,” “blessing” have been used to control and abuse people, especially young women.

The documentary made me sick. But what was especially sickening to me was that this culture, the names behind it, and the stories it produced were so saddeningly familiar. This was my childhood and youth in so many ways (though certainly not all of it).

And there again was the voice of cynicism: “Everything is fake. Nothing changes. It’s all about power, money, status—ego. Stop caring. Become hard. Live for yourself.”

So today, ten years after completing my formal training in religious and political ethics, I’m checking in with myself and continuing my everyday training. Why say no to cynicism? Or really, why keep saying yes to something better?

Here are some impromptu, unscripted reflections from my heart today. Perhaps they’ll resonate with yours.

First, cynicism, like anger, is a secondary emotion.

The heart of cynicism is grief. It’s intimate sorrow in the face of a deep disappointment. That sadness is the primary emotion.

Cynicism then is a form of self-protective numbing that sits on top of grief: “Don’t feel this pain. Don’t let your heart get broken (again!). Stop caring. Harden.”

Compared to cynicism, grief is more disorienting. It’s a loss of control, like swimming in deep waters—waters that are sometimes madly swirling and sometimes madly still, boiling hot or ice cold. Grief happens *to* you and can seemingly overtake you.

This sounds cliche, but it is true: grief is love. Grief is sorrow in the face of losing something truly precious or seeing something you cherish be cheapened. Grief is the ache of caring. And so grief is painful, confusing, upending, life-changing.

But I want to continue choosing grief over cynicism. The vision of a good Creator making our world out of love—that is beautiful and worth grieving when it is trivialized or weaponized. The vision of each person being created with precious worth—that is beautiful and worth grieving when it is trivialized or weaponized. The invitation to receive that Creator’s love embodied in the disreputable Jesus and witness that love with others—that is beautiful and worth grieving when it is trivialized or weaponized.

The cynicism in me wants to shrug and say, “Fake. Bullshit. Melodramatic manipulation. Stop caring.”

But that’s really the echo of my grief: “This is precious to me. This matters to me. I’m deeply saddened when I see this cheapened. I’m heartbroken that we humans can turn something so beautiful into something so ugly. I’m disappointed we twist an awe-inspiring mystery into such a predictable system of abusive control. Why do we keep doing this to one another? Why do we keep falling for it?”

I don’t like grief. But I want to choose grief over—or really under—cynicism. For me, it’s a choice to live in the truth, both the truth of what’s really happening in my emotional life (sadness) and, by faith, what’s happening in reality (goodness).

Second, cynicism is conformity.

What I mean is that cynicism often mirrors what it reacts against. Cynicism sees legitimately cheap behavior and says, “It’s all cheap, so who cares?” Like violence, cynicism easily conforms itself to the thing it claims to despise. Retributive violence (“justice”) says, “You killed them, so we’re going to kill you back to make killing better.” It’s more of the same. Cynicism says, “Aha! You don’t *really* care (you wanted power, money, status, ego); so *I* won’t care either (and I’ll live for myself).”

In a sense, cynicism is a cyclical defeat. Cynicism allows the hypocritical, the manipulative, the abusive to win by defining our attitude and (dis)engagement. We check out rather than seeking a wider truth, a deeper integrity, and thus an expanded vulnerability because we’re all fallible and fragile.

Third, cynicism isn’t what I really want, even if it feels safer.

When I allow myself to sink to the deeper layer of my grief, my desire is to resist cynicism, not to succumb to it. I don’t want to check out of caring; I want a more authentic integrity in pursuing love with others. I want to live in the truth, and honor the lives of others and our planet. I want to contribute to relationships and a world where our words, the things we claim to value, and the fragile trust between us is truly sacred. I want to do the harder work of confessing when I’m tired, weak, fragile, discouraged, tempted, failing, and so to live with real intimacy rather than putting on a performance of perfection or indifference. I want the real thing and to ache when it’s just not fully present—not to say that it doesn’t exist.

I believe this is why Jesus blessed the poor in spirit, the grieving, and the nonviolent in that specific order: when (1) we see how broken we are and (2) let that pain break our heart, (3) that grief enables us to become a nonviolent presence rather than numbing or aggressing. I unpack this in my book Blessed Are the Others.

I want God; I don’t want to surrender God to the narcissists and egomaniacs.

I want love; I don’t want to surrender love to the manipulators and abusers.

I want truth; I don’t want to surrender truth to the authoritarians and control addicts.

I want Jesus; I don’t want to surrender Jesus to the fundamentalists, politicians, and TV personalities.

Looking back on my graduation in religious and political ethics, I confess: I’m tempted by cynicism. As a follower of Jesus, I’ve thought more times than I can count, “God, I studied the wrong discipline. I thought my Christian community cared deeply about ethics—about loving goodness, resisting evil, and imperfectly discerning the difference. But we don’t. We say we do. But what we really mean by ‘ethics’ is claiming power for ourselves and control over others. How silly of me to think otherwise.”

But after ten years, as Bonhoeffer said in a different context, I’m choosing grief over cynicism. I’m choosing nonconformity over cynicism. I’m choosing love over cynicism. My religion, what binds me, what holds my heart, what keeps me breathing, is ethics, this divine invitation to orient our lives around what is worthy of love, worthy of resistance, and the grief-stricken task of discerning the difference.

Cynicism does feel safer to me. I feel the tugging ache, the sadness inside myself. Keeping the heart soft and open makes it vulnerable to being wounded (again). But a soft, open heart is the only way to love, and love is the heart of life.