‘Who gets a casserole?’

‘Who gets a casserole?’ October 8, 2015

When hardship comes good neighbors often reach out to help. And often that means bringing over a casserole. That’s a tangible and practical gesture — people have to eat, after all — but it’s usually also a signal, a somewhat clumsy way of saying and showing that we’re here for you, and we want to help even if we’re not entirely sure what we can do.

But who gets a casserole? That’s the brilliant question that church historian Heather H. Vacek says led to her book Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness. Vacek recently responded to John Fea’s terrific regular feature “The Author’s Corner,” describing what led her to write this book:

VacekI’m curious about how religious beliefs shape practice, and in particular, how Christians respond — or fail to respond — to suffering. Working as a student chaplain at a state mental hospital a number of years ago, I realized Christian reactions to mental illness seemed more complicated than, for example, reactions to minor surgery or cancer treatment.

Early in my research about the history of Protestants and mental illness, I began to frame this reality with the question, “Who gets a casserole?” Thinking about typical modern congregations, it appeared individuals and families navigating cancer diagnoses were much more likely to receive support in the form of casseroles than those navigating acute or chronic mental illness. If Protestants profess to care for the well-being of bodies, minds, and souls, why did those living with mental illnesses often receive minimal attention? I found myself curious to know if the different reactions to mental and physical illnesses had always been the case, and so I set out to uncover Protestant responses throughout American history.

Vacek’s book looks like a fascinating exploration of that subject. Her research seems to have supported the general sense she gained from her work as a chaplain — confirming that, usually, those suffering from physical ailments get a casserole, while those suffering from mental illness are not regarded as meriting such warm neighborly support.

Her question — “who gets a casserole?” — also offers an insightful approach to a host of other topics beyond the important subject of mental illness. It can help us to better understand the unspoken limits of our neighborly impulses.

Americans — as a whole, and not just the Protestant subset Vacek focuses on — are generally willing to help when confronted with neighbors in new and urgent need. That’s good! But, unfortunately, there are limits on who it is we’re willing to help. Not everybody is perceived as casserole-worthy.

In discussing the stigma associated with mental illness, Vacek suggests two factors that tend to make us perceive others as undeserving of our casserole:

Both rising confidence in humankind’s ability to solve problems and the persistence of theological notions that connected mental maladies to sin deepened stigma and linked mental maladies with weakness and deviance, making Protestants reticent to respond.

Those we regard as sinners reaping the consequences of their sins are not seen as deserving help. But neither are those whose problems threaten our confidence in our ability to solve problems. In other words, we’re likeliest to want to help victims we perceive as unambiguously blameless and whose problems are unambiguously fixable.

The latter point is particularly interesting. That family who lost their home to fire, flood or tornado faces a hardship that we can clearly understand and that we know how to fix. They lost their home, so we can build them a new one. And once we do that, their problem will be fixed and we won’t have to worry about it anymore. But people whose problems are more chronic or enduring, whose problems don’t have such an obvious and final fix, are less likely to get a casserole.

Think, for example, about the way we tend to discuss the poverty of the “underclass” as something too vast and incomprehensible to ever be fixed. (That’s not true, but addressing such poverty would involve more effort and more resources than the relatively simple logistics of rebuilding after a tornado.) So the poor don’t get a casserole.

Or think about how both of these factors come into play when we’re confronted with neighbors in need due to physical or developmental disabilities. On the one hand, we’re willing to help them because they’re perceived as blameless. But when such help is unable to simply and completely fix the problem, we grow stingier, beginning almost to resent their stubborn refusal to be fixed. Thus something like the Americans With Disabilities Act was initially met with a great deal of popular support, but in the years since has become the focus of a backlash.

I’ve long thought about the way that stigmas of supposed sinfulness shape the reprehensible zombie lie of the “undeserving poor” that stunts American life. Poor people who are perceived as anything less than moral exemplars are constantly being condemned as unworthy of a casserole. But now Vacek has me thinking of how that other factor may play a role here — our reticence to respond to problems that aren’t quickly and conclusively fixable.

These things are tied together. Quite often, problems are complicated and intensified due to our refusal to deal with them because of supposed moral stigma. Consider the financial crisis of 2008, which ground the global economy to a halt and threatened to cast us all into a second Great Depression. As the implosion began, there was a clear and obvious solution to contain that crisis — a moratorium on foreclosures, an elimination of debts (in a word, Jubilee). That wasn’t some bleeding-heart liberal idea, but simply the most urgent pragmatic measure to mitigate the unfolding economic disaster. But that didn’t happen. The very idea of it, instead, gave birth to the tea party movement and a resurgent politics of resentment that — like the harm of the Great Recession — continues to this day. Our insistence that those with underwater mortgages weren’t morally deserving of our help made their problem exponentially more difficult to solve, and that difficulty in turn made us even more reluctant to attempt to solve it.


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