Tipping points: loveless marriages & abusive churches

en continues to seek to provide a forum for us all to learn as broadly as possible from sinful and shameful abusive actions. Our foremost thoughts and prayers must be with the survivors and victims.

It is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The final straw is small; it barely weighs anything but, added to the burden already carried, it crushes.

When Malcolm Gladwell wrote his book The Tipping Point: how little things can make a big difference, he defined it as ‘the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point – when everyday things reach epidemic proportions’. Anyone who followed the highly acclaimed television drama Succession will have seen this moment reached in season three. Succession ran away with the awards last year, Emmy’s, BAFTA’s and Critics awards, and looks to add more to its growing arsenal in 2022. I doubt many Christians will have watched it. It comes with warnings about explicit language. The setting is far from everyday, and some viewers report that they couldn’t get beyond episode one as no one was likeable. All the characters are self-serving and capable of abhorrent behaviours. It is best likened to a bleak Shakespearean tragi-comedy. Shakespeare’s plays performed unsanitised are also brutal, crude and sexually explicit. But, like Shakespeare, Jesse Armstrong’s writing uses the absurd to convey the depths of the human condition, pathos, disintegration, family loyalty, love and betrayal. At the centre is a domineering man who wields his power cruelly. It is coarse, but like the best literature, it packs a punch. It is a modern depiction of the abuse of power and communicates how bullies function and why they are allowed to continue.