Divine Disappointment and Mortal Shame: A Review of "Is God Disappointed in Me?"
Divine Disappointment and Mortal Shame: A Review of "Is God Disappointed in Me?"
The book's answer is "No!" My answer is "Yes... But only because He has so much hope."
Is God Disappointed in Me?: Removing Shame from a Gospel of Grace
By: Kurt Francom
Published: 2024
190 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Our parents expect that we will do certain things—perhaps it’s cleaning our rooms, perhaps it’s becoming a doctor—when we don't, they're disappointed. We have a tendency to view God in the same fashion; He also has expectations, and when we fail to meet them we imagine that He is similarly disappointed. Francom claims this is a false belief. Because of God’s omniscience and infinite love, He cannot be disappointed. When we think He might be it leads to shame, which prevents us from accessing His love.
What’s the author’s angle?
Francom is the director of Leading Saints, an organization whose primary focus is providing advice and resources for the lay leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He’s also heavily involved with Warrior Heart a Christian men’s organization that runs retreats with a focus on addiction recovery. This book is part of those focuses and a personal expression of Francom’s approach to leadership and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
What’s My Angle?
I’ve known Francom for going on ten years. As such I’ve been privy to his argument that God cannot be disappointed from his initial epiphany all the way down to his full, book-length treatment of the subject. As I’ve watched the idea develop, I’ve raised numerous objections. To Francom’s great credit most of these objections are at least acknowledged in the book. I suspect that I wasn’t the only one to raise these objections, but I fancy that he first heard of them from me.
My name is listed in the book’s acknowledgments but it’s pretty generic. I had hoped for something more like “And thanks to Ross Richey, if not for his relentless criticism, unending negativity, poor character, and dark soul, the book would have been less accurate, but probably more inspiring.”
Who should read this book?
Despite my many criticisms, I still think everyone should read this book. Although there are nuances Francom overlooks (see the rest of the review) it brings up numerous engaging questions (see below). These are important for everyone to grapple with, not just those who are religious.
I- Can God be disappointed?
The title of this book asks the question “Is God disappointed in me?” Francom answers with a resounding “No!” God not only is not disappointed in you, He can’t be disappointed, period. This has always struck me as a very bold statement. What’s his argument?
Francom asserts that to be disappointed one must be surprised. Given this clearly God cannot be disappointed, because His omniscience makes Him incapable of surprise. Case closed. Everyone can go home. Or you can read the rest of the book, which explains the negative effects of imagining (incorrectly) that not only can God be disappointed, He is disappointed…in you! Endlessly disappointed at the mistakes you’ve made, the opportunities you’ve squandered, and the sins you’ve committed. Of course not everyone believes this all the time, but enough people believe it enough of the time that, in Francom’s telling, it’s a big problem. This sense of deep and perpetual disappointment causes a spiral of shame which only makes all of the problems you’re trying to overcome even worse. We will get to shame by and by, but first I think we need to take a closer look at Francom’s initial assumptions, while also going on a little tangent:
I’m not sure how many non-Latter-day Saints are going to end up reading this review. Probably not a ton, but regardless I’ll do my best to make it non-denominational, though that may be difficult. (In some respects Latter-day Saints have a very different conception of God than many Christians.) I bring this up now because we’re going to be jumping right into the deep end.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is led by fifteen prophets and apostles. Three of these apostles form the First Presidency, with one being designated as The Prophet and President of the Church. This office is currently held by Russell M. Nelson. Outside of the First Presidency, the remaining twelve apostles form the Quorum of the Twelve apostles, modeled on Jesus’ original twelve apostles.
With that background, I’d like to direct your attention to a clip from a eulogy given by one apostle, Elder Holland, for another apostle, Elder Ballard, on the occasion of his funeral in 2023. Speaking of when he was recently called to a high level position within the church and finding out he would be working closely with Elder Ballard, who terrified him, Elder Holland said the following:
That night in my bedroom I dropped to my knees in a state of despair. I knew I was going to disappoint Elder Ballard, the First Presidency, the Lord, myself, everyone in this new assignment. I wept.
This is one of the most senior members of the Church, and he certainly seemed to feel that it was possible to disappoint God. How do we square this with Francom’s assertion that it’s not. Is Elder Holland perhaps not aware of God’s omniscience? Is this an example of what Francom is talking about? Are we to assume that even someone as dedicated and faithful as Elder Holland could be brought low by incorrectly assuming God could be disappointed?
I would offer up an alternative explanation. I think Elder Holland is using a different definition for disappointment than Francom. Francom’s definition of disappointment is too narrow, and beyond that legalistic. I (and presumably Elder Holland) don’t believe that disappointment has to necessarily involve surprise. Allow me to offer my own example:
One of my children was terrible at doing homework (something he inherited from me). Every year we’d go to Parent Teacher Conference and his teachers would mention this fact. They would go on to note the negative effect it was having on his grades. Every time he would swear to do better, and over the following weeks he would claim to be on top of things and doing great. And yet, when the next Parent Teacher Conference arrived I would once again be told that he was still having the same problems he was having the last time. Was I surprised? Not in the slightest. Was I disappointed? Very. Most importantly, did I love him any less? Of course not, in fact, if possible, I might have loved him a little bit more, because I understood his struggles.
I’ll leave you to make your own judgment on God’s capacity for disappointment. Because the real meat of the book is how one’s perception of this disappointment affects a person. This is where we talk about shame.
II- The recent centrality of shame
It’s entirely understandable to ask why someone might do a bad thing—something that they know they shouldn’t do, and yet they do it anyway. This is a question people have been asking for as long as there have been people. Lately, it seems to me that a new answer has emerged, a new ideology if you will: We do bad things because we think we’re bad people, and bad people are obviously going to do bad things. And what makes us think we’re bad people? Shame.
As you can see from the subtitle, Francom wants to “remove shame from a gospel of grace”.1 But he’s certainly not the first to target shame specifically. I claim no particular expertise in this area, but I know that many people point to Brené Brown, as the most vocal anti-shame activist, if not also the first person to really draw broad attention to the topic. I’ve read one of her books, and while I found her charismatic and funny, I was also left with a lot of questions. Obviously feeling bad can encourage people to improve, so how does this square with shame being a bad thing rather than a good thing? Brown and others separate these bad feelings into two different categories: shame, and guilt. Guilt is good, but shame is bad.
As these anti-shame activists explain it, guilt is feeling that our actions have been flawed, and desiring to make amends, while shame is a feeling that we ourselves are flawed and therefore unworthy of love. Shame fundamentally changes our perception of ourself. Francom mentions this distinction, but also (to his credit) claims that it is overly simplistic. In his telling, shame is what happens when we repeatedly do things we feel guilty about. As this repetition happens we go from feeling guilt about a one time action we can fix, to the shame of feeling that, if we keep doing these bad things, then we must be bad people who inherently do these bad things. As Francom tells it, it changes our identity.
Francom identifies three components which shift a behavior from something we feel guilty about to something we’re ashamed of:
The behavior carries a stigma
It is done repeatedly
Carries some level of enjoyment.2
His examples range from the relatively benign, like binging on social media, all the way up to the truly destructive, for example hardcore substance abuse. And he argues that once you have fallen prey to shame about such behaviors, recovery becomes much more difficult, because you have come to believe you’re incapable of recovery. You’re no longer worthy of God’s love. God is disappointed in you, and He is always going to be disappointed in you. So what point is there in trying?
As a result of this process, shame ends up as the main cause of all long-term wickedness and suffering. In the mundane sense, it prevents improvement. In the more spiritual sense, the only true wickedness is unrepented evil, and the only true suffering is being cut off from the love of God, and shame results in both conditions.
All of this is, as they say, “Big, if true”.
III- Shame is one branch, it’s not the root
I’m always leery of monocausal explanations. Which is what this description of shame appears to be. But beyond this general categorical objection, I have more specific objections to centering shame in this fashion. These objections fall into two buckets: religious and secular
Let’s start with the religious:
If shame, as constructed by Francom, Brown, and others, is such a huge deal why doesn’t it appear in the scriptures, or for my Latter-day Saint audience why hasn’t it been the subject of a General Conference talk?3 What we do find if we look at the scriptures and conference talks are constant exhortations to keep the commandments. We should be doing certain things and not doing other things! And yet if you listen to the anti-shame crusaders it is the continual expectations placed on us by these commandments and the fact that we’re constantly falling short which causes shame, which then causes the separation from God mentioned above. I won’t go so far as to claim that the scriptures are saying the exact opposite of what the anti-shame crusaders are saying, but you’re going to search in vain for full-throated support of the idea that shame is the main cause of unhappiness.
This is not to say that there’s not something potentially bad going on here. I think the bigger problem is that, when we consider what kinds of attitudes and emotions might cause us to be more likely to sin, there are all sorts of things in play. Francom seems to be describing something fairly narrow. I’ll cover all of the various buckets, including Francom’s in a moment, but first let’s try to steelman his argument a little bit.
The closest the scriptures come to talking about shame being bad and different than guilt is 2 Corinthians 7:10:
For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.
You could make the argument that godly sorrow is guilt, and worldly sorrow is shame. That when we sorrow because of what the world thinks of us, that’s shame. And when we allow worldly disappointment, which is everywhere, to convince us that godly disappointment is equally ubiquitous, that’s also worldly sorrow.
I remain unconvinced, but it is clear that “the world” is very much a part of the phenomena Francom is attempting to describe, so let’s move to the secular part of my objections.
After Francom explains his three components of shame (stigma, repetition, and enjoyment) he goes on to give the following example of how this might operate in even a relatively benign situation:
…this shame trifecta tactic also works against all of us in our daily lives.
Imagine you are a busy mother doing your best to raise wonderful children. You find yourself hyper-focused on some social media clips related to an “influencer” you enjoy following. You lose track of time until your six-year-old reminds you that she is starving. You notice it is almost 3 p.m. and you still haven’t fed your children lunch. You immediately feel guilt, but then the adversary [the devil] wants to move you past guilt into shame so that he can alter your perceived identity. You will then think about how your behavior as a mom is atypical, since most parents feed their children on time (stigma), this is one of many parental slipups you have had that week (repetition), and you realize you enjoy your social media time too much (payoff). You suddenly fall into the shame trifecta. You begin to believe you are a negligent mother and that God must be disappointed in who you are (identity).
Notice how contemporary everything about this example is. For most of recorded history a mother would just be glad that she had enough food for her children—the fact that there was food would overwhelm any guilt that it wasn’t served precisely on time. Add to that the wacky 21st century condition of being distracted by a stranger who makes her living broadcasting her life to the world. A condition which is further exacerbated by algorithms which do everything they can to encourage the repetition the mother is now feeling shame about!
On the one hand all of this is a counterargument to the point I mentioned above. It could be that the reason it’s not talked about in the scriptures, or by Latter-day Saint General Authorities is that it’s too recent—thus the need for this book. On the other hand, Francom doesn’t ever play up, or even mention this angle. I would agree that shame is as old as time itself (e.g. see Adam and Eve hiding their nakedness) but the modern world seems to trigger it in unique and disturbing ways. This needs to be part of the discussion.
All of this takes us to the other secular objection I have. As long as we’re talking about what’s happening recently. There has also been a recent focus on therapeutic rumination. That’s a completely separate discussion, and I don’t want to get side-tracked, but you can read all about it in my recent review of the book Bad Therapy. The point I want to bring up is that constant introspection can cause more harm than good. We can see that in the example Francom offers up. Not only is the mother engaged in introspection on her current mistake, this spirals into an examination of all of her other slip-ups. Francom calls this pattern shame, but from another perspective it just looks like maladaptive introspection.
Obviously the ideal is not zero introspection—identifying that she got distracted by social media and taking steps to make sure it doesn’t become an ongoing problem is a good thing. But delving into the depths of her soul to uncover all the evidence ever of her being a bad mother, and using it to reframe her entire identity, seems completely over the top. And yet, to be fair to Francom, some people are doing it, and it’s not working.
IV- What actually works?
At some level the key question is not whether God can be disappointed in you. Or whether shame is a leading cause of wickedness. The primary question is: what works?
From a religious perspective, a belief system (like the one Francom suggests in this book) works if it results in desires and behaviors that are in alignment with divine desires and behaviors. From a secular perspective, we’re searching for counsel that makes us better people.
Most people, throughout most of human history, believed that if you suffered negative consequences as a result of some action, that you would be less likely to perform that same action in the future. Thus whether it was pain, sadness, guilt, or shame, these emotions would encourage people to change their behavior in the future. If they did not, only then would it be appropriate to give these emotions a different label. In such cases it would be worthwhile to talk about the difference between godly sorrow which invites repentance and worldly sorrow which invites despair.4
I have certainly known people who felt nothing that would be identified as shame, but felt sorrow that a life of dissipation and debauchery didn’t end up getting them all the things they wanted. Which is to say that I agree there’s a dividing line between negative experiences which result in durable changes, and those that don’t, but I wouldn’t draw it in the same place as Francom. I would draw it on either side of hope, and the closely related principle of faith.
We’re obviously long overdue for my definition of disappointment, so here it is: disappointment is when events don't match our hopes and expectations for them. Francom asserts that God can’t be surprised, and probably by the same token He can’t have false expectations, but can He hope? We already mentioned divine desires, that seems pretty similar.
Asking whether God can hope is a theologically tricky area, and Latter-day Saint beliefs might point to a different answer than other Christian denominations. There’s a well known passage in our canon where God weeps. Francom even admits that this looks a lot like disappointment.5 Whether it is or not we both agree it shows His tremendous love and empathy. If we can be sad, He can be sad, and if we can hope, then He can hope.
To return to my example, I always hoped that this time my son would develop discipline and do his homework, even if I knew that in the short term he wouldn’t. In the long run however, his hope (and mine) drew him forward to a better future. This is the side of things I want to focus on, the side of hope. Francom does something which seems similar, but ends up being very different, he wants to focus on God’s love, rather than God’s hope. In some sense this is entirely understandable. God’s love is foundational to everything. But I don’t think it operates quite the way Francom claims it does. I would argue that the addition of hope and expectation is a critical component.
To illustrate what I mean consider this assertion from the book:
When we remember how much God loves us, we will want to do nothing more than “hold on to” His commandments.
If just “remember[ing] how much God loves us” was sufficient to banish all of our wicked desires, this world would be a very different place. I think holding on to His commandments requires something more; it requires effort, and this effort is driven by hope, both ours and God’s. While it may be true, as I mentioned above, that God can’t have false expectations, He definitely has expectations, and He asks us to exercise hope and faith towards meeting those expectations.
At this point let’s leave the rarified realm of theology, for the practical realm of raising children. Francom recommends something similar to the quote above with raising children. In the Church there is an expectation that every young man will serve a proselytizing mission when he turns eighteen. These young missionaries are one of the things we’re best known for. Francom’s son is only five, but Francom considers what he will do if he doesn’t want to go on a mission. One possible course of action would be to firm up his expectations, apply pressure, and push his son in the direction of the mission. Alternatively:
What if, instead, I offered grace? What if I continue to share with him the joys and blessings of my mission, but I let go of the expectation for him to serve his own mission? By offering that grace to him, what will it do for our relationship? Will he want to be closer to me? Will he want to be more like me? Or will it cause him to be more casual about his commitment to the gospel? I can’t control my son’s actions; I simply want to be more like the Great Grace Giver.
Similar to the quote above, Francom argues that if his son just knows how much he loves him that will be the thing most likely to make him want to go on a mission. My argument would be that letting go of expectations does not in fact work. Enforcing expectations may be a good idea, but abandoning them is not.
God has expectations, and He’s constantly urging us to exercise faith (i.e. to allow hope to drive belief) towards fulfilling those expectations. Offering our hope for their future to our children is one of the best things we can do for them. Yes, that does translate into expectations, and there’s a whole separate discussion to be had about how those expectations should be framed, encouraged, and yes, on occasion enforced. But abandoning them entirely in order to avoid disappointment and potentially shame is the wrong way to go.
To be clear, I agree that we need to exercise unconditional love for our children, but we need to have powerful hopes for our children as well. If we’re hoping that children will do good things, we have to offer up a vision for what those good things are, and express our hopes, and yes also our expectation that they will do those good things. When they fail in those expectations, hope diminishes. This is disappointment. If God can hope, if He can want good things for us, good things we prove incapable of grasping, then He can be disappointed. But the disappointment experienced both by earthly parents and by our Heavenly Father does not equal a decrease in love.
If we were to identify a direction for society as a whole, it seems clear that it’s heading in the direction Francom recommends—a lowering of expectations. Certainly if we’re talking about the narrow realm of the expectation within the Church that young men (and women) should serve a proselytizing mission, this has massively decreased. If this lowering of expectations worked, then we would see an increase in the number of missionaries and an increase in the retention of young adults within the Church, and yet we’re seeing the exact opposite.
Looking at society as a whole this process should yield less parental estrangement, instead we’re seeing an increase, what some call an epidemic. When we consider the all important question of what works, I don’t see any evidence for the course Francom lays out.
V- So what do I see?
Out of this discussion I see three broad possibilities:
The first, Francom is entirely correct. Shame is an enormous problem, and many of the tools we use to encourage good behavior instead heighten shame. This makes repentance and experiencing the love of God more difficult. Key to this increase in shame is the incorrect idea that God can be disappointed in us. If we get rid of this idea, and work to banish shame more generally we will have greater peace, be more righteous and more spiritual. Beyond that we will achieve better outcomes for both our children and young people more broadly as they are able to fully experience God’s love because they will no longer feel that they need to earn it.
The second possibility is that Francom is somewhat correct, but has oversimplified things.6 First off not everyone ends up with the same catastrophic outcome from shame. Whether you label it shame or guilt many people use these negative feelings to become better people and draw closer to God. For those that do descend into a spiral of negativity, this has quite a bit to do with the world we live in. The repetition, which constitutes a key component of Francom’s model of shame, is something which is being driven by very recent developments which includes things like ubiquitous internet pornography, abundance driven envy, historically unprecedented expectations, incredibly potent social media and drugs. By ignoring the effects of pernicious technology, Francom is essentially forfeiting the game in order to make sure he doesn’t lose it, rather than making an effort to understand the new rules and continue to win.
I think in part this has to do with some of Francom’s personal biases. That is one of the benefits and curses of being close to an author. You end up reading between the lines, for good or ill. And in that space I can see that a great deal of the book comes out of his relationship and work with the addiction community, where ceasing to play the game is a far better course of action than losing it over, and over, and over again. As such, I have no doubt that the concepts he lays out in this book have great relevance to those in a desperate struggle with addiction. (Which to be clear does not include Francom, he’s just Christ-like enough that he spends a lot of time with those who are.) As someone’s addiction begins to define them, it becomes hard to imagine that they’ll ever be worthy of love, even God’s love
But do these points have the same relevance to those who aren’t in the depths of despair? I’m not sure. Obviously everyone is broken, and everyone needs Christ’s atonement, but that doesn’t mean we all experience “shame” in the same way a heroin or pornography addict does. Or that we need the same advice.
I have no doubt that the phenomenon Francom describes is real. That many people get so caught up in a weird negative spiral (what he labels as shame) that they begin to imagine that Christ’s atonement doesn’t apply to them or that God doesn’t love them. And that this can happen, even when their offenses may seem comparatively minor. (Like the example above of forgetting to feed their children.) But again, this seems like a recent phenomenon. Shame, whatever your definition, operates very differently now than it did in the past. Rather than comparing ourselves to a nearby community of dozens we’re comparing ourselves to millions of people all over the world. This can be overwhelming. In the end we’re only competing with ourselves, but it is a competition nonetheless.
This takes us to our third possibility: We should still be playing the game and trying to win. God has expectations of us, and we should have expectations of our children. It is true that winning is difficult, more so now than ever before. We should reject easy answers, pat solutions, and monocausal explanations for success. But God still expects us to try our best to win, and we have to hope that our children will win as well. Not all of those hopes will come to pass, and when they don’t disappointment enters the picture, but that’s only because hope was there in the first place.
Francom talks a lot about grace. Brad Wilcox, currently First Counselor in the Young Men General Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, delivered a talk about grace at BYU back in 2011. It’s always stuck with me, and I know Francom is familiar with it as well. In this talk he explains that grace is like a parent paying for piano lessons. The parent isn’t doing this because they expect that the child will eventually be good enough at the piano that they’ll pay them back for these lessons. They’re doing it because they hope that the child will grow to love the piano, and that maybe someday they’ll be good enough to really do something incredible with it. Perhaps they’ll even play Carnegie Hall.
Whatever happens with the child—whether they fight the lessons every step of the way, and eventually quit, or whether they do well enough to play some hymns on their mission, but don’t go any farther, or whether they do eventually reach the heights of skill their parents dreamed of—their parents love never changes. But it’s still important that the parents had that vision of what was possible, a sense of hope that could be used to inspire the child as they tapped out their first tentative notes. This grand vision must inevitably contain the potential for disappointment, in order to be a grand vision. And yes, it may be necessary to throw out the vision at some point to avoid the disappointment, but this should be the last resort. We should hold on to the grand vision, and even the disappointment it must inevitably contain for as long as possible. And if we have lost it we should strive to get it back.
This earthly existence is not just about enduring bad things, even if we do so with grace, it’s about glorifying God. To do that we need to have hope, we need to stretch, and occasionally that’s going to result in disappointment. And that’s just fine.
I know it’s been awhile, and this is a pretty niche subject, after a long wait, but I promised Francom that I would tell him what I really thought of his book! But now that summer is over, things are going to start happening. Or at least that’s what I hope, but I’m leaving open the possibility of disappointment.
I’m only now wondering, why is it “a” gospel of grace, rather than “the” gospel of grace? The former seems tentative, and less monotheistic than I would expect…
This definition, while useful, limits the shame Francom is talking about to a very narrow slice of what the rest of the world means when it discusses shame.
I’m open to being proved wrong here, but the search I conducted didn’t turn up anything making this specific claim, nor any talks that seemed even close.
In Roman Catholic theology despair is a mortal sin, and represents the complete and voluntary abandonment of hope for salvation. I see some parallels between this and the concept of shame that Francom and others are pushing, but despair would appear to be at the very limits of what they’re discussing.
Francom argues that God’s weeping can’t be out of disappointment because the thing that God is weeping over, the wickedness of his children, could not be a surprise to him.
Also given the space requirements of my review I may have oversimplified things as well. For example Francom discusses the idea that there is a pendulum with heart/love on one side, and behavior/commandments on the other, which touches on a few of these points. Though I would maintain that I have accurately recounted the core thesis of the book in spite of this omission.