# The high cost of false doctrine > [!quote] > "they said if I believed enough, then my my knee would be healed and it's not. So, and then they start ruminating, what's wrong with me? I must be a bad person. May maybe I'm not saved. Maybe God doesn't love me." Holly Pivec and an unnamed guest author argue that NAR teaching should be evaluated by the harm it produces, not only by whether it is doctrinally wrong — and they supply a mechanism. The mechanism is an attribution loop. The teaching promises that sufficient faith produces healing. When healing does not arrive, the doctrine has an explanation ready, and it is never "the teaching was mistaken." It is the believer's faith deficit. So the follower ruminates toward self-blame — *maybe I'm not saved, maybe God doesn't love me* — and the teaching is never touched by its own failure. Disconfirmation is absorbed by the person, not the system. The proposed alternative is not sharper doctrine for its own sake but a **theology of suffering** — Paul's thorn, Job — framed as *pastorally protective*, because it removes the obligation to read unanswered prayer as a personal defect. A second thread: churches adjudicate but do not equip. "I rarely see churches or a leader say, let's talk about discernment ... I want you to be equipped and this is how you do it and this is how you're trained." Verdicts about particular teachers expire with the controversy; method transfers to the next claim. Discernment is framed as an act of love, and its absence as "counterfeit love" — loving someone on the basis of error. The closing anecdote makes the shame mechanism concrete. At a service where congregants were being "slain in the spirit," one man simply did not fall. The pastor pressed him repeatedly ("dude, go down"), with catchers waiting. The man answered honestly: "I want to go down but I'm not feeling it." The pastor moved on, then told several hundred people that "some people are more susceptible to the Holy Spirit and other people just have to learn." The man returned to his seat publicly humiliated for telling the truth. The guest notes he would carry it for years — "until hopefully he came out of that, that it wasn't him. It was the false teaching." Recovery is a reattribution: moving fault from the person back to the system. ## Caveats The prevalence claims rest on a single vivid anecdote and on reported speech; the clip offers no data. "Counterfeit love" is defined rather than argued, which insulates the position — anyone loving inside NAR is by construction not really loving. And the clip names depression, anxiety, and shame without offering any resource to a viewer who recognizes themselves. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Unfalsifiable Promises Transfer Their Failure to the Believer]] — the attribution loop is the claim this note promotes - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Prophetic Authority Without Accountability Becomes Unfalsifiable]] — the same insulation viewed from the prophet's side rather than the follower's - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Religious Conditioning Produces Physiological Responses That Override Critical Thinking]] — the slain-in-the-spirit anecdote is the limit case: the conditioning failed to fire, and the person was punished for it - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/The Institution Protects the Prophet Not the Congregation]] — the pastor's public reframing protects the practice at the man's expense - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Charismatic Damage Control Runs on DARVO That Recasts Victims as Biased Outsiders]] — the same inversion in miniature: the harmed party is made the offender for "not getting with the program" - [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/Lit · Kabbalah and the Passion Translation]] — companion in the same batch, which credits Pivec by name - [[3. Resources/MOCs/NAR and Charismatic Authority Critique MOC]] — applies-in: the MOC lists this note under Connected Notes (synthesis 2026-07-24). ## Source - [Reader: The High Cost of False Doctrine | Holly Pivec](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyb61w64cp7drzr0enxgmh2x) *(vault source note pending next Readwise sync)*