You won't believe how alienated this will make you feel

In her media column for the Century last month, Kathryn Reklis, a theology professor at Fordham University, wrote about the many times a day that social media asks her to watch a video and feel something. “You too will cry after watching this . . . 90 percent of people cry,” the Facebook post tells her. She argues that, while kitschy, these videos contain the power of shared feeling, and shared feeling is a step toward empathy and a further step toward compassion—and so, in essence, a social good. I am not sure I agree.

Kathryn’s post got me thinking about church. In the evangelical churches in which I grew up, shared emotion was our common currency. Sing this song: feel this emotion. Hear this sermon: respond with this program. When I discovered the relatively unemotional experience of liturgy, I wept. The freedom of not being told how to feel gave me the freedom, at last, to feel.

I did not find that what I now consider to be emotional manipulation did, in fact, lead me toward empathy and compassion. Instead, I found that, at first, these experiences stirred my emotions. I sought out this experience again and again, because I liked feeling that same stirring. But over time, being told how to feel cultivated distrust—especially distrust toward my own reactions—and numbness. If I was told to feel joy and instead I felt cynicism, while everyone else was feeling joy, I cultivated a double alienation: one toward myself and my own response and the other toward my fellow feelers, who seemed to have no trouble feeling as directed.