Detouring (Snapshot)
I only recently learned the word “DETOURING.”
Before that, I just called it what the Newfoundlander in me would call it: being the one who calls the crap out.
Right now there is a great deal of exposing happening in both the Church and society at large, and sometimes these two painfully overlap. So I want to name what happens to those who take the heat for shining light in the darkness.
Let’s ground this in something many of us recognise instinctively: a family dynamic.
Maybe it is your own family, or a family you married into. Either way, toxic patterns have been normalised for years. Everyone knows it, but silence keeps the machine running.
Then you arrive and refuse to play along. And suddenly, you become the problem.
Not because you lied.
But because you disrupted the narrative the system depended on.
You did not break the family.
You exposed that it was already broken.
Yet to a dysfunctional system, realism feels like betrayal, and betrayers must be punished.
How DETOURING works:
Instead of confronting harm, the system detours around the truth. Responsibility is diffused, chaos is displaced onto you, cruelty is justified, and the script is flipped so the truth-teller becomes the “problem.”
This is the classic shoot-the-messenger dynamic.
The truth is not attacked. The truth-teller is.
How this shows up in the Church:
A victim names abuse.
A whistleblower names corruption.
A woman names spiritual control.
Suddenly the problem is no longer the harm. It is the person who named it.
Christanese translation:
DETOURING = redirecting the road so the truth never arrives.
You are labelled “the disruptor” precisely because the system is already toxic.
That does not make you the problem. It makes you the witness, and often the collateral damage a broken system is willing to sacrifice to survive.
To all the whistle-blowers exposing toxic patterns in families, churches, and society at large: I salute you. The road is often lonely, but it is righteous, and truth always outlives the lie.
Jesus said people run from the light because it exposes what they want to hide. (John 3:19–21).
—RJB
I only recently learned the word “DETOURING.”
Before that, I just called it what the Newfoundlander in me would call it: being the one who calls the crap out.
Right now there is a great deal of exposing happening in both the Church and society at large, and sometimes these two painfully overlap. So I want to name what happens to those who take the heat for shining light in the darkness.
Let’s ground this in something many of us recognise instinctively: a family dynamic.
Maybe it is your own family, or a family you married into. Either way, toxic patterns have been normalised for years. Everyone knows it, but silence keeps the machine running.
Then you arrive and refuse to play along. And suddenly, you become the problem.
Not because you lied.
But because you disrupted the narrative the system depended on.
You did not break the family.
You exposed that it was already broken.
Yet to a dysfunctional system, realism feels like betrayal, and betrayers must be punished.
How DETOURING works:
Instead of confronting harm, the system detours around the truth. Responsibility is diffused, chaos is displaced onto you, cruelty is justified, and the script is flipped so the truth-teller becomes the “problem.”
This is the classic shoot-the-messenger dynamic.
The truth is not attacked. The truth-teller is.
How this shows up in the Church:
A victim names abuse.
A whistleblower names corruption.
A woman names spiritual control.
Suddenly the problem is no longer the harm. It is the person who named it.
Christanese translation:
DETOURING = redirecting the road so the truth never arrives.
You are labelled “the disruptor” precisely because the system is already toxic.
That does not make you the problem. It makes you the witness, and often the collateral damage a broken system is willing to sacrifice to survive.
To all the whistle-blowers exposing toxic patterns in families, churches, and society at large: I salute you. The road is often lonely, but it is righteous, and truth always outlives the lie.
Jesus said people run from the light because it exposes what they want to hide. (John 3:19–21).
—RJB