What if it’s actually hope that is holding you back from achieving wholeness?

Hear me out.

There’s this fantastic scene in The Hunger Games between President Snow (evil) and Seneca Crane (also evil) where Snow talks about why the hunger games have a victor. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie (or if it’s been a while), here’s the clip:

And here’s a transcript if you’d rather just read:

Think about that… a little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous.

Why is a little hope effective?

It’s effective because it disincentivizes action. It keeps people on the string, hooked, thinking, “If I just hold out, if I just keep my head down, if I just follow the rules… things will get better.” You don’t speak up, you don’t protest, because the cost is too high if you still think there’s a chance things will improve on their own.

It’s a type of hope that’s incomplete because it’s based on lies. This type of hope doesn’t actually believe life can be substantially different—just that it’s survivable.

The type of hope that tells people in terrible marriages that if they just pray harder, God will convict their spouses and make them change. The kind of hope that tells people that if they just put up with those awful husbands and keep having sex on demand even though they’re being horribly mistreated, God will reward them someday. But it’s also the kind of hope that doesn’t tell them, “Things should be different,” because that would be too much hope.

See, if people lose hope entirely there’s no longer any impetus to follow the rules. And we see this often in Christianity—when peoples’ marriages fall apart they often completely deconstruct and leave the church entirely, because the hope of what they wanted is gone. That spark of hope built on a lie was snuffed out, and now they had nothing more to lose. So they stop obeying. They stop being passive. They stop submitting to unearned authority.

It’s why it’s so unsettling to see how much carefully manicured and contained hope is present in so much of our teaching and evangelical culture. So much discussion about how suffering will bring you closer to God, and very little on how to stand up against people who are causing undue hardship. “A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous.” Emphasize the need for authority and leadership as a God-ordained role with the promise that they will do what is best for you as God wills. “A spark is fine, so long as it is contained.” So much emphasis on justice in heaven, but hardly any on justice here on earth. “Contain it.”

The result is a whole population who has been successfully convinced that resistance is futile, while clinging to a spark of hope that there’s still a chance that things will improve despite there being an obscene amount of evidence to the contrary.

But what if you could have more than a spark of hope?

What if you’ve been lied to about the cost of stepping up, speaking up, and changing your life?

What if you’ve been tricked into believing that the best you can hope for is survival, and that aiming for a life that is thriving is a fool’s errand?

What if the people in charge don’t actually care about you at all, but are more focused on keeping you placated than they are actually doing their job?

I think that’s what’s been so infuriating for me personally in dealing with the Evangelical Marriage Complex™ for the last nine years now. I’ve realized along with the rest of our team that, frankly, these people who have made millions off the backs of people trying desperately to save their marriages do not give two shakes of a rat’s tail about the people to whom they purport to minister.

Instead, we see authors publishing the same book over, and over, and over again saying the same thing, hammering down on the, “Pray and submit” message. Keeping that spark of hope alive, but contained. Not allowing anyone to dream for bigger, dream for more, dream for—one could say—the marriage they wanted.

(See what I did there?)

When you find yourself in a position where you’re drowning….

When you’re scared, you’re living in survival mode and people in charge are acting like there’s nothing you can do to change things… resist.

Ask yourself, “who wins if I have a spark of hope right now? Who would lose if that hope was snuffed out and I actually started fighting back? Who would lose if my hope grew, and dwarfed my fear?”

It’s a myth that you can’t make a change.

It’s a lie that you need to put up with mistreatment or negligence.

It’s hogwash that people asking for progress and change are “asking for too much.” That’s just them trying to contain the spark—don’t let them.

Stop allowing people to keep you muffled at just a spark of hope.

Let it burn. Let it grow. Let it fill you until you can’t help but do something to make a change.

All we here at Bare Marriage want to see is people’s hope become uncontainable. We want people to change not because the spark was snuffed out, but because it was fanned into something bigger.

We want you to feel empowered, equipped, and emboldened to speak up, stand up, and start working towards goodness and wholeness and truth.

And you know what? It’s not nearly as much work as people want you to think it is. You don’t need to buy twenty different Focus on the Family marriage books or go to a huge marriage conference every time one comes to town. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars a year on date nights and babysitters to “prioritize your marriage.”

You just need to start doing the stuff that actually works.

(And if you want to know what stuff really works, it’s very well laid out in The Marriage You Want, which is officially launching TOMORROW! Right now it’s on sale at a bunch of different retailers, so make sure you get it fast while it’s still cheap!)