did you ever do the myers-briggs personality test?
you get grouped into either an extrovert or an introvert (sorry ambiverts, you don’t exist in this one). you get grouped into either sensing or intuitive, feeling or thinking, and perceiving or judging. and yeah-yeah personality-science and yeah-yeah the “real world does this too” (looking at you business students) but i gotta talk about it anyway. because have you ever been on the other end of a church personality test? this shit is something else.
the pentecostals of my church-cult days loved personality profiling. i’m not sure if it’s because they preferred it to the nuance of humanity, or because it helped them pick their next up-and-coming-cult-leaders based on temperament, but it’s all the same really. myers-briggs was a big favourite, as was the sanguine-melancholy-choleric-phlegmatic test (anyone know the name of this? does it have a name or did we just make it up?!)
i had a conversation with one of my old high-school and church pals recently about how absurd this is and i just keep coming back to it. we were sixteen, youth assistant leaders, and attending leaders meetings with the rest of the leadership team — consenting, 18+ adults. while some of the leaders were in their late teens, 18-19ish, many of them were in their early-mid twenties. all of them had us personality profiled along with the adults.
so i was sixteen, doing a personality test with adults, and that personality test would be used to understand me by these adults, to profile me, for the rest of my church days. literally.
at sixteen, i could barely do the dishes when i was told.
at sixteen, i was going through some big life shit.
at sixteen, i was in my last year of high school. apparently thats a big deal.
at sixteen, i was heartbroken over my dumb high school boyfriend. right?
at sixteen, i was finding my feet, my friendships, defining what mattered to me.
make it make sense.
at sixteen, i was still deciding who i was.
well, i should have been.
but these personality profiles, used in this way…
they take that decision away.
and i gotta say, i embraced these types with fervour. i loved the way they helped us make sense of the world. i loved the way they helped me make sense of myself. i loved the way they allowed me to give language to the parts of myself i considered strong, the traits i loved, and the areas that were not my strong points. but that’s the thing, right? they give you language for yourself, language to help you understand elements of you. but they do not define you. they should not box you. they should not be the second thing you say after your name, as though that is your most important or memorable trait.
you can be an extrovert and still need alone time. you can be an introvert and still love people. these nuances are forgotten when we box people in as one thing and one thing only.
these nuances are forgotten when we use these tests as be-all-end-alls with people.
these nuances are forgotten when we profile people in these culty spaces that want us to sign ourselves up to a lifetime of being the lazy phlegmatic (or maybe you have adhd) or the countless other combinations they come up with.
i remember sitting around the room when we redid the test at a staff meeting. i was 18, doing data entry for the visitors team at church. i still find it hilarious that data entry in churches exist. they really are just little businesses not paying taxes and keeping track of all your data, babes. we got our results back on this week, and the person who had been measuring our results looked at us all and laughingly said “only one of you was honest about your faults, literally everyone else skipped questions or only answered positive things about themselves”
that one person was me.
i don’t know if any of the real adults in the room had the capacity to feel ashamed that they didn’t know themselves enough to answer honestly, that they didn’t know how to share the bad things, but it doesn’t surprise me that they’d have that type of hubris. they, like me, were also trained to not show weakness. they were the ones teaching me to not show weakness. to not show our flaws. to present ourselves as polished and perfect, else we give the wrong idea of what the church is. they were just further along in the journey. i just hadn’t learned the tricks of hiding my flaws entirely, yet. i hadn’t figured out what personality type they needed me to be. i hadn’t realised they’d want to box me in to that type with my church roles forever.
weird that they put so much stock in a test they couldn’t even be honest in.
there’s so many stories like this. i have them. my friends have them.
“are you sure you’re an enfp? because i’m an enfp and we’re not the same”
“it never would have worked, you’re both enfp types”
“cholerics are natural born leaders, they were bound to get the promotion”
“oh an enfp and an intj are a great match you guys will be great”
i guess it’s like having a really obsessed co-worker who really loves myers-briggs constantly telling you about your type. which is kind of annoying obviously because they keep calling your Jess instead of Jasmine so they don’t even know your name but insist they know everything about you… but instead of one co-worker who’s a bit annoying but you can shake them off, it was the entire leadership of a church congregation (from pastors to assistants to leaders — the whole gang) and you can’t really ignore an entire cultural value.
i will forever find it wild how much emphasis is put on this kind of profiling in pentecostal cultish spaces. i will forever be against profiling children this way — it just teaches them to lean in one particular direction without giving them the space to grow into who they really are. i will forever find myself having a beer with an old friend, talking about this stuff, and just thinking: thank fuck i don’t have that weight on my shoulders anymore. you know, the weight of expectation. the weight of what other people think and expect. it’s always there, because they always talk about it.
they want you to be safe. they want you predictable. they want to put the ones they understand the most and can mould the most into leadership spaces. myers-briggs is one of their favourite tools for that.
and i’m so glad i haven’t had to think of myers-briggs for fucking years.