The Christian Digest [#6] Presents PSYCHOLOGICAL SEDUCTION--The Failure of Modern Psychology--Excerpts from the Book by William Kirk Kilpatrick
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983)

         Editor: In many ways, Christianity and psychology are opposites, despite their seeming similarities. Following are excerpts from the book of a Christian psychologist, William Kirk Kilpatrick, exposing the de-Christianising effect psychology has had upon the world, contrasting true Christianity with psychology, and showing why many psychologists hate Christianity.
         The author is associate professor of educational psychology at Boston College. A graduate of Holy Cross College, he holds degrees from Harvard University and Purdue University. He is a popular lecturer on psychology and religion at colleges and universities around the U.S. Other books he has written are Identity and Intimacy and The Emperor's New Clothes.

WOLF IN THE FOLD
         When people hear I'm involved with both psychology and Christianity, they generally assume I'm working on a synthesis to bring the two closer together, to patch up whatever few remaining differences there might be. "Aren't psychology and religion just two different ways of getting at the same thing?"--It's a question I often hear.
         It is true that popular psychology shares much in common with Eastern religion; in fact, a merger is well under way. But if you're talking about Christianity, it is much truer to say that psychology and religion are competing faiths. If you seriously hold to one set of values, you will logically have to reject the other.
         For non-Christians, popular psychology has a seductive influence. Many seem to turn to it as a substitute for traditional faiths. They may even think of it as a more evolved form of religion--a more efficient and compassionate way of doing good than Christianity. Psychology levels the hills of anxiety and makes the crooked way straight. It is the rod and staff that comforts them.

Psychology's Appeal: Counterfeit Christianity
         The appeal psychology has for both Christians and non-Christians is a complex one. But it is difficult to make sense of it at all unless you understand that it is basically a religious appeal. For the truth is, psychology bears a surface resemblance to Christianity.
         Not doctrinal Christianity, of course. Most psychologists are hostile to that. And naturally enough, so are non-Christians. Nevertheless, there is a certain Christian tone to what psychology says and does: echoes of loving your neighbor as yourself, the promise of being made whole, avoidance of judging others. Those ideas are appealing to most people, no matter what their faith.
         But like most counterfeits, popular psychology does not deliver on its promises. Instead, it leads both Christians and non-Christians away from duty or proper conduct. It is a seduction in the true sense of the word.
         Christianity is more than a psychology, it happens to be better psychology than psychology is.

A Personal Note
         But before I continue, I should first admit that I, too, was a victim of the confusion between psychology and Christianity. My own experience may help to illustrate how it can come about.
         I began to lose interest in the Christian faith in graduate school. That was when I discovered psychology. I didn't realise I was losing interest in Christianity; I merely thought I was adding something on. But before long I had shifted my faith from the one to the other.
         There was no reason not to. As far as I could see, there was no essential difference between the two. I had been reading the most liberal theologians--that is to say, the most psychologised ones--and from what I could gather, the important thing in religion was not Bible or creed but simply loving other people. I thought I could swing that easily enough without the help of church or prayers. Such practices, I assumed, were intended for those who hadn't attained awareness.
         Psychology, in addition, had interesting explanations for almost every type of human behavior, and I had no reason to doubt its version. Erich Fromm said that to love others you first have to love yourself. Didn't that square with what Jesus taught? It certainly made wonderful sense to me; like most other twenty-two-year-olds, I thoroughly loved myself. My new-found Bible was psychologist Carl Rogers's On Becoming a Person. In it, Rogers gently suggested that humans are at heart good and decent creatures with no more natural disposition toward hatred than a rosebud. I looked within and found no hate. There were no bad people, I concluded, only bad environments.
         Rogers's optimistic doctrine coincided with the religious trend of those days. Intellectuals in the church were downplaying sin as though it were an accidental holdover from the Middle Ages.
         Soon I began to blur other lines: those that separated good and evil. It was possible, I found, to transmute good into evil and evil into good by minor adjustments in definition: the loosening of a spring here, the turning of a spindle there. But it was hardly necessary to do so. My consciousness of sin was at a low ebb--the result, no doubt, of a habit of almost total self-acceptance. I had learned to trust my instincts; if I desired something, it must be good. It was hard to see how I could go wrong as long as I was true to my desires and strove for self-fulfillment.
         I became convinced, despite years of Christian training to the contrary, that evil was not a thing that inhered in people, but rather was the result of unjust social conditions and bad environments. My own basic instincts were, I felt, noble and decent. My intention was that all people should grow together in peace, brotherhood, and charity. If society had failed to reach this harmony, that was mainly because individuals had not learned to love themselves. As a teacher I saw an opportunity to remedy this lack of self-love. I would supply the empathy and unconditional acceptance I assumed my students were not getting from their psychologically unsophisticated parents. There would be no Hitlers or Stalins coming out of my classes.
         In all this--this "maturation" process--I saw no need for sacrifice or hard choices. I felt no need to renounce cherished beliefs. They simply melted away like March snowmen. More often than not, the melting-away process was aided and abetted by theologians who were eager to remove difficult parts of the faith.
         As the Christian sphere shrank, the humanist sphere enlarged. I was, in modern parlance, "learning a lot about myself." I found that I could make more allowance for myself than I had previously thought possible. Any inner tendency that I might previously have restrained, I now welcomed with open arms as an old friend. I was learning to accept myself. And the liberality that I extended to myself, I extended to others in a positive debauch of tolerance. I believed that I and the rest of humanity were on the threshold of deeper and more wonderful discoveries about the self. One only had to learn to let go, to float free on the stream of instinct.
         It was an exciting time. I was associating with people who not only felt the same as I did but also seemed far advanced in the art of living, people who by anybody's criteria were exciting. Our conversations were exhilarating, daring, elevated out of the ordinary. Or so I thought. When I was with these companions, I felt as though we made up a secret society, a brilliant gnostic sect surrounded by gray orthodoxy.
         We didn't have a motto, but if we had, I think it would have been "Why not?"
         I never went to the extreme of making a full-blown religion out of psychology. Something in my early Christian training prevented me. In addition, events in my life were beginning to undermine my easy confidence in the possibility of self-salvation.
         There had been no reason to question psychological explanations of life because, until my late twenties, my life had been packed in cotton wool. Now, a series of events unfolded for which my psychological expertise had not prepared me. Although the problems I encountered were not much different from those facing most adults, the idea had somehow seeped into my mind that they wouldn't happen to a self-actualising person (one who has developed himself by self-effort). Between the lines, the psychologists whom I most admired seemed to hint that suffering was not the common lot of humanity, but some kind of foolish mistake that could be avoided by a better understanding of human dynamics.
         I was making a lot of foolish mistakes. My best intentions reaped the worst consequences. My best efforts brought failure--not always, but often enough to put large dents in my plans for self-actualisation.
         My life was getting out of hand, and the only advice I could get from psychologist friends was to open up more. At this point, there was nothing left to open up. Openness surrounded me on all sides, like a pit.
         A reverse process set in. My faith in psychology began, though slowly, to disintegrate. I had put some weight on the psychological scaffold, and it had given way. I still repeated the stock formulas (I was by now teaching psychology), but it was fast becoming apparent that most of it no longer applied to my own life. My life could only appear ridiculous by the commonly accepted standards of self-growth. In terms of self-development, as it was then popularly understood, I was on the road to regression. It was foolishness. And there is no place for being a fool in the psychological system.
         But there was a place for me elsewhere--in the faith I had ignored for over a decade while remaining open to meaning everywhere else. A well-established Christian tradition held that what appeared as foolishness in the eyes of men did not necessarily appear so in the eyes of God. Perhaps that ancient promise warranted another look.
         I did come back to Christianity--real Christianity, not the diluted version. It was a slow return: so slow and reluctant that I would be foolish to hold myself up as any sort of model for imitation. The point I wish to make here is that religion and psychology had become nearly indistinguishable for me. Freud and the church fathers, faith in God and faith in human potential, revelation and self-revelation--all slid together in an easy companionship. As for God, He began to take shape in my mind along the lines of a friendly counselor of the nondirective school. I never balked at doing His will. His will always coincided with my own.

The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
         True Christianity does not mix well with psychology. When you try to mix them, you often end up with a watered-down Christianity instead of a Christianised psychology. But the process is subtle and is rarely noticed.
         What happened to me was not unusual. During the late sixties and through the seventies a new climate of psychological ideas settled over Catholic and liberal Protestant congregations. Many of the clergy, nuns, and lay leaders began, out of good intentions, to mix their faith with sociology, psychology, and secular causes. At the same time, many of them elevated personal development to a place all out of proportion to spiritual development. Their faith eventually became so thinned out with admixtures that it was no longer strong enough to sustain them when a personal or social crisis struck. Thousands left the church. When asked in a survey why they had left, one population of former nuns checked off "inability to be me" as the main reason. The faith of the average believer was also shaken. Some stuck it out. Some turned away altogether from their faith. Others joined Christian churches that seemed more certain and unconfused.
         A friend of mine recently asked a Sunday school teacher about the course emphasis and was told, "We are teaching the children to grow, to become whole persons, to question, to choose values." Another, a nun, simply said, "We are showing them how to become whole persons." The first woman ordained as a priest by the Episcopal church was asked by an interviewer if she considered herself to be a woman of strong religious faith. She replied that, no, she did not, "but I do believe in caring, and that's what religion is all about, isn't it?"
         These attempts to make common cause with psychology are examples of "Christianity And." It's a strong temptation to those who fear that Christianity by itself isn't enough. The trouble is that "Christianity And" edges real Christianity aside or prevents it from taking hold.
         This brings us to a final point. The average man is no longer scared to hear that his behavior may lead to Hell, but he thinks twice if he hears that it will lead to the state hospital. I am not saying that we are all on the road to the madhouse--although a case can be made for that position--but I am suggesting that we are all being edged closer to the kind of bleak and colorless life that the state hospital represents. An overserious attitude toward the self is an unhealthy and ultimately defeating preoccupation. It leads not to a society of different and interesting individuals, but to a drab hive of look-alikes and talk-alikes droning the same stories, buzzing with self-concern.
         The point I am getting at is this. Even in purely worldly terms there is no certainty that psychological ideas make us any better off. We have tons of expert advice, plus mountains of revelations about the self. Do we step more lightly or laugh more heartily because of it?
         Being a Christian, then, is not a requirement for following the arguments of this book. The criticism I make is offered on intellectual grounds as well as spiritual ones. Psychology wants us to judge an idea not on whether it will save a man's soul but on whether it will save his sanity. Its goal is to make life more human. It can be demonstrated, I believe, that psychology has rather less to contribute to that goal than is commonly thought, and that Christianity has rather more.

GOOD INTENTIONS
         There is no reason to doubt the generous impulse behind the work of professional psychologists and social scientists. Most of the experts who guide the psychological society have good intentions.
         But there may be reasons to doubt the competence of psychological helpers. A willingness to help does not guarantee a helpful result. Sometimes, as Thoreau wryly observed, the result is the opposite: "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."

Do Psychologists Know How to Help?
         The fact that psychologists are trying to help people often keeps us from asking whether they know how to help. We think it's bad manners to ask a man who is trying to help us if he really knows what he's doing. Of course, it's not just manners that prevent us from questioning psychology. It's also faith--the kind of faith that makes us believe that school teachers are doing what is best for our children. Or the kind of faith that tells you that the man in the clerical collar won't knock you down and steal your wallet. Just the same, we ought to be asking if psychologists really do know how to help. A good deal of research suggests that psychology is ineffective. And there is evidence pointing to the conclusion that psychology is actually harmful.
         The first indication that psychology might be ineffective came in 1952 when Hans Eysenck of the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, discovered that neurotic people who do not receive therapy are as likely to recover as those who do. Psychotherapy, he found, was not any more effective than the simple passage of time. Additional studies by other researchers showed similar results. Then Dr. Eugene Levitt of the Indiana University School of Medicine found that disturbed children who were not treated recovered at the same rate as disturbed children who were. A further indication of the problem was revealed in the results of the extensive Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. The researchers found that uncounseled juvenile delinquents had a lower rate of further trouble than counseled ones. Other studies have shown that untrained lay people do as well as psychiatrists or clinical psychologists in treating patients. And the Rosenham studies indicated that mental hospital staff could not even tell normal people from genuinely disturbed ones. It is possible to go on with the list. It is quite a long one. But I hope this is sufficient to make the point that when psychologists rush in to help, they are not particularly successful.

Psychological Values and Traditional Values
         There is a further point, a more serious charge. Psychology and other social sciences might be doing actual harm to our society. You needn't be a scholar to sense this. In fact, scholarship is often a hindrance to understanding what is really happening. An average parent or a factory laborer is more likely than the professor to catch on when something goes wrong with society. Many parents now feel themselves to be in the position of helpless spectators watching their children nurtured on alien values at school or through the media. The old stories about fairies and witches who stole children away at night and replaced them with changelings seem strangely contemporary.
         A rather blatant example of this body snatching comes from Sweden, perhaps the most therapeutically oriented country in the world, where a law has been passed forbidding parents to spank their children. Further, it is a criminal offense to threaten, ostracise, ridicule, or otherwise "psychologically abuse" children. Presumably this means that parents can no longer raise their voices at their children or send them to their rooms. But there is no evidence that the Swedes are any less melancholy for this enlightenment. By all reports the young people are more bored and restless than ever.

The Failure of the Psychological Faith
         However good-intentioned and however nice, it is not at all clear that the psychological establishment knows how to help. Everywhere there are dark hints that the faith doesn't work. Despite the creation of a virtual army of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychometrists, counselors, and social workers, there has been no letup in the rate of mental illness, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, child abuse, divorce, murder, and general mayhem. Contrary to what one might expect in a society so carefully analyzed and attended to by mental health experts, there has been an increase in all these categories. It sometimes seems there is a direct ratio between the increasing number of helpers and the increasing number of those who need help. The more psychologists we have, the more mental illness we get; the more social workers and probation officers, the more crime; the more teachers, the more ignorance.
         One has to wonder at it all. In plain language, it is suspicious. We are forced to entertain the possibility that psychology and related professions are proposing to solve problems that they themselves have helped to create. We find psychologists raising people's expectations for happiness in this life to an inordinate level, and then we find them dispensing advice about the mid-life crisis and dying. We find psychologists making a virtue out of self-preoccupation, and then we find them surprised at the increased supply of narcissists. We find psychologists advising the courts that there is no such thing as a bad boy or even a bad adult, and then we find them formulating theories to explain the rise in crime. We find psychologists severing the bonds of family life, and then we find them conducting therapy for broken families.

Expectations and Results
         There are too many "ifs," "ands," and "buts" to prove that the rise of psychology has caused the deterioration of the social structure, but there is certainly enough evidence to make doubtful the claim that psychology benefits us. In areas where professionals really do know what they are doing, we expect that it will show and be obvious in the results of their work. Stanislav Andreski, a British sociologist, makes that point clear in comparing psychology and sociology to other professions. He notes that when a profession is based on well-established knowledge, there ought to be a connection between the number of practitioners and the results achieved:
Thus, in a country which has an abundance of telecommunication engineers, the provision of telephonic facilities will normally be better than in a country which has only a few specialists of this kind. The levels of mortality will be lower in countries or regions where there are many doctors and nurses than in places where they are few and far between. Accounts will be more generally and efficiently kept in countries with many trained accountants than where they are scarce.
         And what are the benefits produced by psychology and sociology? Professor Andreski continues:
So, we should find that in countries, regions, institutions or sectors where the services of psychologists are widely used, families are more enduring, bonds between the spouses, siblings, parents and children stronger and warmer, relations between colleagues more harmonious, the treatment of recipients of aid better, vandals, criminals and drug addicts fewer, than in places or groups which do not avail themselves of the psychologists' skills. On this basis we could infer that the blessed country of harmony and peace is of course the United States; and that it ought to have been becoming more and more so during the last quarter of the century in step with the growth in numbers of sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists.
         But this is not what has happened. On the contrary, things appear to be getting worse. Streets are unsafe. Families are in tatters. Suicide cuts off young lives. And when the psychological society attempts to deal with such problems, it often seems to make them worse. The introduction of suicide prevention centers in cities, for instance, is followed by a rise of suicide. Marriage counseling often leads to divorce. And common-sense observation tells us that the introduction of widespread public sex education has done nothing to check the increase of unwanted pregnancies, promiscuity, and venereal disease. There is evidence, rather, that such programs encourage premature sexuality with its attendant problems.
         It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the prescription may be causing the disease. "If we saw," wrote Andreski, "that whenever a fire brigade comes, the flames become even fiercer, we might well begin to wonder what it is that they are squirting, and whether they are not by any chance pouring oil on to the fire."

SELF-ESTEEM
         "It's important to like yourself."
         "If you don't like yourself, nobody else will."
         "Jimmy's problem is his poor self-esteem."
         How many times have we heard these or similar sentiments? The taxi driver is as likely to express them as the teacher, the plumber as readily as the psychologist. In fact, we're all pretty much convinced that self-esteem is the key to any number of problems.
         This business of liking oneself has become for us almost a first principle. It seems self-evident, in the same category with "the sky is blue." No one is inclined to dispute it. Psychology, of course, didn't invent the notion, but it has capitalised on it. You might say it is the "good news" of the psychological gospel.
         So when I undertake to criticise the idea of self-esteem, it is with trepidation. It is like criticising the proposition "babies are lovable." Nevertheless, the idea does require a closer look, because ideas, like dinnerware, usually come in sets, and some of the notions that accompany the faith in self-esteem are not so charming as little babies.
         Self-help books, for example, will often start off by asking you to love yourself, but before long they are telling you you're not responsible for other people and that you shouldn't waste time living up to others' expectations. Most of us know also that "feeling good about myself" is sometimes a handy excuse for doing self-centered or even selfish things. We say, "I won't be much good to others if I'm not good to myself," and the next thing we do is send our three-year-old off to daycare for fifty hours a week or dip into family funds so we can take a day at the races.
         Our response to the question "Should you like yourself?" has to be tempered with common sense. Our answer should be "That depends" or "Under what circumstances?" All of us, I take it, would like to see the self-rejecting teenager who frets over her popularity learn to relax and accept herself. The main question, I suppose, is should she continue to like herself when she is spreading vicious rumors or when she callously manipulates others to improve her social standing. Are we, in other words, to like ourselves regardless of how we behave?

How the Christian View Differs
         Now the psychological answer to this question is to say that if we truly like ourselves, these other things won't happen--or they won't happen as much. According to this view, people who realise their self-worth don't have any need to do ugly or unkind things. And this is the point, please note, where Christianity and psychology part company. People will continue to behave badly, says the Christian, because human nature is twisted, and liking yourself doesn't remove the twist. But psychological theory doesn't take account of the Fall of man; it takes the position that there are no bad natural inclinations. As a consequence there is no reason we shouldn't accept ourselves as we are.
         Although, as I say, this is a point of conflict between Christianity and psychology, some Christians do not see it as such because, at first glance, the psychological view and the Christian one seem to correspond. Christianity also tells us we ought to love ourselves but for an entirely different reason: because God loves us. We are not centers of wholeness and goodness all by ourselves. We are of infinite worth because we are the apple of God's eye. He loves us as a mother loves her child.
         The reason Christians have to be careful about mixing these two views of self-esteem is because the psychological perspective reduces the good news of the Gospel to the status of "nice news"--"nice" because there was never any bad news in the first place. If psychology's great optimism about raw human nature is correct, then Christianity is not necessary: Christ's redemptive action on the cross becomes superfluous. After all, why should He have suffered and died to redeem us if there is nothing wrong with us? If all we need do to find wholeness is just be ourselves, then His death sums up to a meaningless gesture, a noble but unneeded self-sacrifice.
         Clearly then, Christians cannot accept the doctrine of natural goodness implied in most theories of self-esteem. The question is why anyone would want to accept it. It is worth noting that Freud himself did not believe it. He believed something quite the opposite: "Man is a wolf to man," he observed in Civilization and Its Discontents. Yet his opinion on this matter is largely ignored or evaded today. We prefer to keep our faith in human nature. But the claim for human goodness requires much faith. And that for the very good reason that it is denied at every turn by certain well-known facts: crime statistics, terrorism, war, slavery, concentration camps, brutal parents, ungrateful children, the meanness of everyday behavior. G.K. Chesterton once observed that the doctrine of fallen man is the only Christian belief for which there is overwhelming empirical evidence.

The Weakness of the Psychological Position
         Should we love ourselves? Yes, we should. But once you remove the Christian rationale for self-love, it is difficult to see on what other grounds it might be based.
         The next thing to see is that this attitude toward the self flatly contradicts the Christian one. The idea that "your worth is determined by you" is about as far from the Gospel message as one could travel. Our Lord's greatest wrath wasn't directed at obvious sinners like Mary Magdalene but at those who were convinced of their own worth. And He never asked His disciples to have self-confidence, only to have faith in Him. There is not the slightest hint in the New Testament that we should have faith in ourselves. As for the proof of our worth, it lies in the fact that God has made us His children and Christ has redeemed us.

WISHFUL THINKING
         Do you know the story of The Little Engine That Could? I enjoy the part where he repeats over and over "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can," until the refrain has the rhythm of a steam-driven piston. It's a fine story to read to children and also a perfect illustration of positive thinking. It should be tempered, of course, with other kinds of stories so a child will be prepared for those times in life when the tracks ahead are blown up or the bridge is washed out.
         While a positive mental attitude can summon strengths and energies we didn't know we had, it can't accomplish miracles. Yet, one of the curious things about a secularised society is this: the less it believes in God, the more it believes in miracles. A paradoxical fact about our supposedly hard-headed nation is that so many grown-ups nourish their minds on the adult equivalent of the Little Engine story. The literature of popular psychology is almost exclusively a literature of positive thinking taken to the extreme. Read the most popular psychology titles, and see what miracles are possible. Would you like to cure your cancer? Prevent jet planes from crashing? Fly (without a plane)? Live forever? All these things, you will be told, can be accomplished by mind power.

Positive Thinking or Pretense?
         Popular psychology really has little choice but to adopt this wishful thinking. Its idea about self-esteem is unrealistically based to begin with: the logic of the premise forces the conclusion. Once you elect to believe that you are the pick of the crop simply because you believe it, you are already involved in a fiction. And the initial fraud has to be covered by another and another. Thus, one celebrated psychologist tells us: "You can stand naked in front of a mirror and tell yourself how attractive you are." Yes, you can do that; you can also tell yourself you are rich and brilliant. It may or may not be true. But supposing it is not; what is the point of the pretense?
         Please understand that I'm not suggesting we belittle ourselves. Nor do I deny the kernel of truth in positive thinking: when we practice self-confidence we often do appear more attractive to others. If my colleagues would confine themselves to pep talks on this level, I doubt I would object so much. But, of course, it doesn't stop there. The further suggestion is that, since we determine all things for ourselves, we can get along without religion, community, tradition, and family. This isn't merely a suggestion: it is the persistent claim of psychologist after psychologist, book after book.
         This is far more harmful stuff than thinking yourself a bit more attractive than you really are. The man who takes the doctrine of autonomy to heart and empties his life of past ties and traditional supports will usually find--perhaps too late--that his inner self won't fill up the hole that is left. The idea that we can love ourselves so much that we won't need the love and help of others is a fiction. None of the statistics suggest it. In fact, they all point the other way: societies that concentrate on the self fall victim to higher rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide than do societies that rely on tradition and community. And do we need statistics to prove what we know deep in our heart?
         What about the times when our whole destiny hung upon the health of a sick child? Or the times we've wept through the night, clawing at our pillow out of loneliness? True, some people pass beyond these kinds of vulnerability, but often that is because their personality has withered rather than grown. The man who is autonomous of his family and friends is in the same category as the plant that is autonomous of its soil.

Dogmatic Open-mindedness
         People talk about the importance of keeping an open mind. There is such a thing, however, as being dogmatically open-minded. We've all met people who seem more interested in the search for truth than in its acquisition. Their central aim and doctrine is to keep their mind free.
         The trouble with this attitude is that the mind soon becomes a slave to the self and to the self's desires. A truly free mind has to maintain a certain independence from self, just as a good teacher has to maintain a certain independence from the wishes of his students. We would feel cheated, for instance, if we hired a tutor to help our son with his math deficiency and the tutor played catch with him instead, on the grounds that that is what the boy wanted to do.
         It is sometimes difficult for the mind to face realities, especially if they are uncomfortable realities. But that, at least in part, is what a mind is for. G.K. Chesterton relates a friendly luncheon debate with a broadminded acquaintance: "My friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely forever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid."
         A lack of solidity is the overriding problem with self-oriented psychology. The set of beliefs that accompany it do not appear to rest on anything firm. Push a bit on the notion that we are wholly good in our nature, and it falls over. Take society away, and you have Lord of the Flies.

THE BURDEN OF SELF

The Self as God
         Where does psychological seriousness come from? Let me propose an answer that may seem strange at first. It comes from the attempt to take the place of God.
         I said earlier that concentration on the self often leads to a brash denial of the need for community and tradition. And that, of course, throws people back on their own resources. A similar sort of thing happens with the role God takes in our lives. The self-cultivator doesn't necessarily stop believing in God, but his concept of God will likely change. If we want to get on with our self-actualisation, we will probably favor the kind of God Who doesn't interfere in the affairs of men: a God Who will just let us be ourselves. We will begin to adjust our idea of God to correspond with our ideas about human potential. The more self-reliant we feel ourselves becoming, the less we will feel a need to rely on Him. We will believe we can do for ourselves many of the things that pious people ask God to do.
         From here it is just a small step to the belief that the self is a kind of god. Carl Jung believed something of this sort. In his Answer to Job, he seems to suggest that God is in many ways inferior to man and that He would like nothing better than to become a man on a permanent basis. One of Erich Fromm's books is entitled You Shall Be As Gods. Will Schutz, a popular psychologist, writes, "I am everywhere, I am omniscient, I am God." A participant in an EST seminar will be told, "You are the supreme being."

SIN AND SELF-ACCEPTANCE
         Christianity doesn't make sense without sin. If we are not sinners, turned away from God, then there was no reason for God to become a man, and no reason for Him to die. Our slavery to sin is the thing that Christ came to free us from. That is the most fundamental Christian belief. It follows that if you have no consciousness of sin, you simply won't be able to see the point of Christianity. We can put the matter more strongly and say that once you grant the notion that people are sinless, you must admit that Christianity is all wrong.
         Now it is possible to create a climate in which people have very little sense of sin and, therefore, little chance of comprehending what Christianity is all about. We know it is possible because that is the climate that exists today. The fact is, psychology has been enormously successful in its program to get people to accept themselves--or at least to accept the idea that they ought to accept themselves. Even when people do not, in fact, feel good about themselves, they have the belief they ought to feel good. Even when they feel guilty, they are convinced it is only neurotic guilt: not a matter for expiation but for explanation.

Changing Beliefs Instead of Behavior
         Besides creating in us the idea that we should feel good about ourselves, psychology leads us to place a high premium on integration and harmony of personality. The problem here is that for those who still believe in sin, beliefs and actions are often out of harmony. "For I do not do the good I want," wrote Saint Paul, "but the evil I do not want is what I do."
         One way to handle this discrepancy between our beliefs and our sinful inclinations is to repent, pray for grace and forgiveness, and struggle on in the belief that God will forge a greater harmony for us out of our battle with sin. That is the Christian approach. The new psychological idea seems to be that we should have harmony at any price. If our actions aren't in line with our beliefs, then we ought to change the beliefs (beliefs being considerably easier to change than behavior).
         This, upon examination, is what a lot of the talk about "improving your self-concept" amounts to. It means that if your self-concept won't let you feel good about having casual sex, and yet you still want casual sex, then you ought to adjust your self-concept accordingly. The alternative is feeling bad about yourself, and that seems an almost unacceptable alternative these days.

When Sin Becomes Second Nature
         The fact that we can and do get used to things to the point where they become second nature, says nothing for their rightness or wrongness. Some people grow accustomed to being slaves, others to being prostitutes. "Do not," wrote Chesterton, "be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked .... It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital person, and that you are a paralytic." This is the problem with the habit of ready self-acceptance. Like other habits, it sometimes puts a stop to thought and paralyzes our ability to make appropriate responses.
         This, of course, is what Christianity has always said about habits of sin. Part of the problem with seeing our own sinfulness is that the more we sin, the more our ability to see sin is clouded. When a man is drunk, drunkenness does not seem like such a bad thing unless he is drunk to the point of throwing up.

Taking People Seriously
         The reason Christianity takes sin seriously is that it takes people seriously. It won't let us off with childish excuses for our behavior, because our behavior is held to count most highly. When Christianity talks about the dignity of the person, it gives that phrase an extraordinarily high meaning against which the world's casual use of the phrase is child's talk.
         Christianity is a high calling. One of the obstacles to seeing this is our distorted view of Who God is. Some of us have succumbed to the idea that if He exists at all, He must be made in the image and likeness of our more understanding and good-natured therapists. This, of course, reduces us to the image and likeness of clients and hospital patients. It is only as we begin again to realise the utter purity and holiness of God that we begin to appreciate that He simply cannot wink at sin like some friar out of the Canterbury Tales.
         If we are God's children or even only His servants, then what we do is, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance, "wildly charged with significance." If we are called to participate in God's creation, then it can be no small matter whether we do our part well or badly. God does not, if Scripture is any indication, look upon our behavior as a species of interesting natural phenomenon. On the contrary, there is a distinct impression that He looks upon us the way a king regards a knight who is sent on an important mission or as a father looks upon a son for whom he has high hopes.
         Why then are we so quick to accept every new psychological pronouncement? Once again I return to the thesis that psychology derives much of its acceptability from its resemblance to Christianity. Because it has transferred the language of Christianity to its own uses, it is able to play on Christian sentiments to an extraordinary degree. I think for many of us psychology seems to provide a way of getting Christianity "on the cheap."
         For instance, one of the themes that runs through both Christianity and psychology is the idea that we shouldn't make judgments about one another. Our Lord said "judge not," and if nothing else, the psychological society does seem faithful to that. This nonjudgmental attitude, which gives psychology a Christian aura, perhaps accounts for the present inclination to drop the whole matter of sin. Too much talk of sin doesn't seem to square with our duty to judge not.

What "Judge Not" Really Means
         But "judge not" means we are not to judge a man's inner state. It does not mean we are not to judge his acts. Christ did not say to the woman caught in adultery, "That's O.K. You really haven't done anything wrong." He told her to "sin no more." This distinction tends to get lost, however, in our therapeutic society. Instead of maintaining the attitude "hate the sin and love the sinner," we are no longer sure if we have any right to hate the sin or even to call it that. In fact, the Christian injunctions have been nearly reversed. We now refrain from judging a person's acts but spend all sorts of energy trying to judge his moods and motivations, which is properly God's function, not ours.

ON BEING BORN AGAIN
         The goals of psychology may be roughly summarised under headings such as "adjustment," "coping," "harmony," "fulfillment," "self-confidence," "improved relationships," and so on. These are worthy goals for Christian and non-Christian alike. But they should never be confused with the Christian program for mankind--although regrettably they often are. The Christian idea is quite different. It has to do not with an adjustment but with a transformation; not with getting a tune-up but with getting a new engine. Christianity says you have to be born again. That is the long and the short of it. Get fulfillment and wholeness and harmony if you can, but whether you succeed or not you will still need to be born again.

The Spiritual Needs of Psychologists
         If a slight mid-course correction is all you think you need, then you may well profit from what the psychological world has to offer. You shouldn't be surprised, however, if you find that it is not enough for your psychologist. For many psychologists, adjustment to ordinary life seems to be the thing furthest from their minds. On the contrary, there has always been a mystical streak in psychology.
         I doubt whether the average person realises how deep and wide that streak is or that it touches some of the most prominent names in psychology. Carl Jung, for example, centered his theory in an esoteric religious tradition; Wilhelm Reich suffered from messianic delusions; Erich Fromm was strongly inclined to Buddhist thought; Abraham Maslow concentrated his later writings on religion and peak experiences. This "religious" tradition in psychology carries down to some of the most respected and influential present-day psychologists. The attempt to get beyond the ordinary seems, for instance, now to be the main concern of both Carl Rogers and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, both of whom report having contacted spirits of the dead.
         From some sectors of psychology, it is true, this type of thing is looked on with embarrassment. But it is simply too widespread for the psychological community to do much about. In the event of a heresy trial, half the congregation would have to be excommunicated. Thus, one may attend a convention of psychologists, as I did once, where participants talk credulously of astral projection, reincarnation, the nonreality of matter, and "the transcendent spirit of oneness."
         Much of the philosophy behind this is muddled and amateurish. But it does prove one point: in and of itself, psychology is not a satisfactory vision. Here are experts who have access to the most sophisticated and rational analysis psychology has to offer, and they prefer instead to practice yoga and meditation and consult with mediums and gurus. This growing "spiritual" trend within psychology can be taken as a further corroboration of the point with which I began this chapter. It pays Christianity the compliment of admitting what Christians have maintained all along: we need to get ourselves on a different level.

MORAL EDUCATION

The Traditional Approach to Morality: Four Rules
         One point I have stressed is that psychology doesn't understand human nature nearly so well as it thinks. There is a deeper psychology that was once understood not only by Christians but by all people everywhere. It didn't require elaborate theorising because it was simply what people had found to be true, generation after generation. Just as you learned that you had better not nail too close to the edge or you would split the wood, and just as you learned to slope your roofs in a northern country, you also learned that human beings ought to act thus and so or else certain consequences would follow.
         Take this matter of moral education. Our ancestors, whether they were Christian or not, believed four things about teaching morality:
         1. There was a right way to behave and a wrong way.
         2. You learned the right way by being trained in it.
         3. You also needed models of virtue to imitate.
         4. These models could be found in stories of wisdom and courage.
         Let us look at the good sense of this. First, there is a right way to behave. Can we prove this? No, not strictly. You cannot prove that friendship, loyalty, courage, honesty, and justice are better than betrayal, treachery, cowardice, deceit, and injustice. But then neither can you prove that a roof that doesn't leak is better than one that does. People with common sense don't try to prove it. In fact, it is usually a mistake to try to prove the obvious. Think of the parent who foolishly tries to give a logical case against dishonesty every time her toddler tells a lie. The case against it is not logical but definitional. Good boys and girls do not lie.
         Second: you learned to do the right thing by being trained in it. It isn't enough to know how to play tennis from reading a manual. You have to practice it. Virtue, too, must be practiced until it becomes habitual. It has to be in the "muscles" as much as in the mind. It is all to the good to have a handy set of moral principles; but unless you are accustomed to putting them into practice, they won't be of much use when a difficult moral test comes. When such tests come, they do not arrive under ideal circumstances. When we are tired, angry, or afraid, or when the temptation is overwhelmingly attractive, it is more prudent for us to rely on our training than on our good intentions. A moral situation, as our ancestors understood, is more like a physical struggle than a mental problem. If we have been educated properly, we respond like a trained boxer who, when attacked, automatically blocks and counterpunches. Without training, we will end up more often than not flat on our backs.
         Third: you need training in the virtues, but you also need models to imitate. Training is demanding. We need something to keep us at it, something to motivate us. In the abstract we know that virtue is its own reward and that we should be good simply because it is good to be good. But we seem to require more. Here again, athletic training provides an analogy. It should be enough for the aspiring gymnast to know that gymnastic exercises are worth doing in and for themselves. Done well, they have a natural grace and power that few other activities can match. But what do we find if we look into the young gymnast's room? On the wall is a poster of the Olympic champion, and over there are more pictures cut out of magazines, and on the desk are stories and clippings about heroes of the gymnastic world. When we have someone to identify with, someone we admire, and someone who does what we do, only better, we have found ourselves something to train toward. It is, of course, the same with character training. Virtue is its own reward, but we need moral models to make it seem worthwhile on our way toward it. We need someone to tell us, "Here is what good people do; here is what heroic people do"; and even, "Here is what exciting people do. If you want to be like them, do likewise."
         This brings us to the fourth point and explains why the chief means of moral education in classical and heroic societies was the telling of stories. Long before the Greeks learned their ethics from Aristotle, they learned them from The Iliad and The Odyssey. Here are Achilles and Odysseus and Hector and Penelope. Here they are acting well, and here they are not. This is the way the Greeks approached moral education; the Romans, the Irish, and the Icelanders did the same. Later on, when Christianity swept the world, it was the Gospel story, not the Christian ethic, that captured men's hearts.

The Modern Approach to Teaching Values
         The modern world thinks it has grown up and does not need stories. When you have your heart set on autonomy, as much of our society does, stories can only be seen as limiting and confining. We prefer to think of the self not as a character-in-a-story but as a character-at-large bound to nothing but its own development. And this is the view that the new psychological programs of moral education encourage.
         We do not need to go into the background of this movement. Let it suffice to say that the new psychological solution began by rejecting the past out of hand. It was decided that although students were to be encouraged to think about values, they must be free to choose. No indoctrination should take place, no set of values should be given priority. Tolerance for other points of view should prevail. Like so many other things, morality was to be entrusted to the democratic decision-making process.
         The main thing to notice here is the absence of those things our ancestors thought important for moral education. There is no suggestion that right and wrong can actually be known, no training in virtue, no models to imitate, and finally, no stories.

Objections to the New Approach
         1. Traditional morality is at a disadvantage from the outset. The ground rules set down by the value educators insist on a nonjudgmental attitude. If you happen to believe in the distinction between right and wrong, you must leave it at the door. This amounts to saying, "Concede our major premise, and then we will begin the argument." Although it is all wrapped up in high-sounding talk about impartiality, it is really no different from the man who invites you to come into the boxing ring with one arm tied behind your back.
         2. A nonjudgmental approach undermines any character training that may have taken place. The heart is trained, as well as the mind, so that the virtuous person learns not only to distinguish between good and evil but to love the one and hate the other. The idea that all things are open to discussion and all values are welcome in the classroom is a subtle form of conditioning that deprives us of our inbred repugnance to vice or debased values. Evenhanded, dispassionate discussions erode moral sentiments and habituate students to the notion that moral questions are merely intellectual problems rather than human problems that ought to call up strong emotions. The proper response to a house guest who attempts to seduce your wife is to send him packing, not to discuss with him the merits of seduction.
         3. The concentration on moral dilemmas puts the cart before the horse. Before students begin to think about the qualifications, exceptions, and fine points that surround difficult cases they will seldom or never face, they need to build the kind of character that will allow them to act well in the very clear-cut situations they face daily. If you are thinking of taking a boat on a pond, a course in sailing will serve you much better than one on celestial navigation. The great danger of the open-ended method of moral education is that students will come away with the impression that morality is not a solid and obvious thing but a series of quandaries subject to innumerable interpretations and qualifications. From here, of course, it is only a short step to finding the appropriate provisos and saving clauses necessary to make one's own conscience comfortable in all situations.
         4. In other crucial matters we do not wait upon our child's free choice before training him in good habits. Why should we do so, then, in matters of morality, which are, after all, far more important than learning to brush one's teeth or button one's coat? We would be shocked to find a parent who left it up to the child to find out for himself that playing in the street is a dangerous thing. May we not be at least as surprised at educators who allow children to devise their own moral content? You will not find this method in any other field of education. A good science teacher, for example, may sometimes use an inquiry method, but his students are not simply left to themselves to discover what Galileo, Newton, and Einstein discovered. There are laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics that any conscientious teacher will want to teach and not simply leave up to chance.
         5. To know the good is not necessarily to do the good. It is naive to suppose that once we have clarified a value or made a proper moral judgment we will then act accordingly. The hard part of morality lies in actually doing the thing we know to be right. It is reasonable to ask why contemporary moral educators have not seen this. The answer is twofold. On the one hand they have a great faith in education, and on the other they have a great trust in human nature. By and large they are bound to the theory that there is no such thing as a bad boy, only an ignorant one. That is why their whole effort is bent toward getting the boy to think for himself--something he presumably has never done before. This is the same attitude that supposes that driver education will prevent accidents, that alcohol education will prevent drunkenness, and that sex education will prevent venereal disease. They do not. And neither does modern moral education prevent immorality. The problem with human beings is not simply a lack of education.

THE DISMAL SCIENCE: 1984 AND BEYOND

The Pressure to Forget
         Our transformation into a psychological society has brought with it a new set of values. They are shallow and selfish values for the most part, and they are the ruling values. But that is not the worst side of the situation. The disturbing thing is the very effective suppression of alternatives. It is difficult to remember what the old values are, let alone to pass them on.
         Much of this suppression is accomplished by the manipulation and manufacture of words. Think of the phrases that have recently slipped into the language: "communications skills," "stress management," "conflict resolution," "group process," "interpersonal dynamics," and so on. The first thing we notice about this talk is that, like [George Orwell's] Newspeak, it is singularly drab. The second thing we notice is that it's confusing. It seems to say in effect, "You don't have the expertise to understand these things; you'd better let us take charge." I find that this kind of talk always has a hypnotic effect on me. "The proposed program (thrum) is a synthesis (thrum) of values clarification and behavior modification (thrum) and the application of cybernetic models (thrum) for understanding the human as an information processing being (thrum-thrum)." The average person doesn't know what this means, but the speaker always seems to be quite sure of himself. And so, still in a trance, we tend to nod in agreement: "Yes, yes. If you think that's what we should be doing, then by all means apply, uhm, er, the cybernetic model."

Manipulating Reality
         The manipulation of words, as Orwell realised, is also the manipulation of reality. If you call a certain deed "murder," it summons up one reality to the mind. Call it "pro-choice," and the reality seems different. This is often the effect of the social sciences on language. Meanings get turned on their heads. The man who assaults you is called a "victim." A woman who leaves her family is called "courageous."
         These are rather flagrant manipulations, but there are more subtle ones. Take the use of a term such as "parenting experience." It seems harmless enough. But is it? The words mother and father have powerful moral and emotional connotations. They speak to a world of family ties, demands, common goals, and mutual love. Images come to mind of babies in bassinets and family suppers and stringing ornaments on Christmas trees and helping out with homework and steering clear of father at income tax time. What images does "parenting experience" call to mind? What images is it meant to convey?
         I suspect none. The words mother and father remind us of what a family ought to be and that without one we are incomplete. But this isn't a fashionable idea. Autonomous individuals have a higher priority than families in the social science world. And so "parenting experience" is the term of choice. It's more abstract and conjures up no images of strong emotional ties. It's an "experience" like any other experience you might want to try out on your road to actualisation. Nothing final about it.
         To advance the cause of the autonomous person, the old concepts and loyalties need to be forgotten. The old ideas that blood is thicker than water or that children should be obedient or that families ought to stick together must lose currency. But to accomplish that goal, language must be reworked into forms that are understood only by experts, forms that make you and me feel ignorant and, therefore, all the more susceptible to intervention. Most of us have some idea how to rear children, but how does one "parent" them?
         Terms like these may be considered as only interim steps. After "parenting experience" has done its work of softening up the body politic, what comes next? The "adult-offspring experience"? "The reproducer-reproducee relationship"? It is no good saying that the words you use don't matter. They matter immensely. Try to imagine a world where people are addressed only by their numbers.

Weakening Loyalties
         There are some ironies here, the chief one being that though the psychological society talks the language of freedom, it seems intent on doing the same kind of thing that police states do. The worst indecency of the totalitarian mind is that it wants to wipe out all special ties of emotion or allegiance such as might exist between husband and wife or parent and child. These kinds of loyalties threaten the only allegiance considered important, the one owed to Big Brother. It is in this atmosphere, of course, that children willingly denounce their parents to the secret police.
         The business of the psychological society also seems to be the business of weakening loyalties. It's done in the name of personal independence, to be sure, but the result will be the same. The fact is that the breakdown of natural groupings usually heralds less freedom, not more. One thing you notice about totalitarian states is that they have little use for the family or the parish or the local government. They like nothing better than to liberate the individual from his local bonds. So we must be as wary of an excessive individualism as we are of collectivism. The one leads to the other. Look over your shoulder as you back away from those intrusive family members and those parish busybodies and see what you are backing into.
         If we are headed toward any more individualism than we already have, we are headed in a mistaken direction. But the mistake is difficult to correct because it is so hard to spot in the first place. What we will be able to see is, as I have suggested, tied to the words and concepts available to us. If your attention is directed over here where the shouting and the slogans are, you might not notice that over there something of importance has quietly disappeared. One man creates a disturbance in this corner, and at the other end of the room his partner walks off with the silver.

Wanderers?
         Most people at one time or another have had the conviction (or perhaps only the uneasy sensation) of not feeling quite at home in this world. This happens to you even when you are at home and even when home has all the coziness imaginable. I think everyone knows what I mean. You can come at this experience from two angles: the negative experience we all have of missing out on some important thing that we can't put our finger on, and the positive experience of feeling that, beyond all reason, something very important waits somewhere for us. The sense of the first is conveyed by Charles Dickens in a letter to a friend: "Why is it," he wrote at the pinnacle of his career, "that... a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" And Huxley wrote, "Sooner or later one asks even of Beethoven, even of Shakespeare, `Is that all?'"
         C.S. Lewis described the positive aspect of this desire as well as anyone has. He called it "the inconsolable longing."
You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, "Here at last is the thing I was made for."
         The joy of which Lewis speaks is not the joy of fulfillment or satisfaction, but rather the joy of unfulfillment: a glimpse of something farther off, "news from a country we have never visited." Whatever is there is gone as soon as it is found. Yet it bears down upon us the sense that we are living as exiles. For a moment our amnesia is lifted. Wherever home is, we feel we have not yet found it--and strangely we are glad.

The Desire that Won't Be Satisfied
         Built into the very core of human nature is a desire that no natural happiness will satisfy and beside which other desires seem insignificant. We remain under the conviction that this--whatever we have--is not quite it. At the deepest level we find not the inner harmony which some psychologists profess to see, but a radical incompleteness: our whole nature seems anticipatory, preparatory.
         There it is. You've experienced it. And you don't have to be a Christian or even a theist to experience it. Augustine had the experience long before his conversion. So did Lewis. Indeed, Lewis fought, kicking and struggling, against the possibility that the source of his longing and the God of traditional religion might be one and the same. Of his "search for God," Lewis said, "They might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat."

The Unchanging Message
         One of the main differences between the Christian message and the psychological one lies precisely here: the Christian message does not change, while the psychological one changes constantly. Psychologists are forever engaged in building new roads, formulating new concepts, and carrying on more research. The explanation for this is partly scientific curiosity and partly the humanitarian concern for improving our lot--good things, of course. But could it also be that this constant jockeying stems from a basic failure--the failure to find a message that really satisfies? Why does psychological insight never seem enough? Why do clients keep showing up for booster shots of analysis as though there were one insight they have missed? Could it be intended that all such efforts to make a personal or social utopia are doomed because this is not the right place for us to settle down?
         Although Christians as individuals need improvement, they maintain without arrogance that the Christian message does not. It doesn't need to change because it satisfies as it is. Christians hold that they already have the truth that answers the inconsolable longing and that will eventually fill every need.

THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR
         When I was in college our history teachers told us that the most radical change in all history came with the advent of secularism. I only half understood. Twenty is not a good age for grasping the possibility that the world you grew up in might be deficient in crucial ways.
         What they meant, of course, is that the world has lost its sense of the sacred. Every age but our own has recognised that the world is haunted by something uncanny and splendorous, something magical--something that requires sacred times, sacred places, and sacred ceremonies.

The Loss of the Sacred
         All this bespeaks a spirit that has been lost or debased today. But to say the present age has lost the sense of the sacred is not to say it has forgotten all about God, because even a thoroughgoing secularist may retain a vague belief. It means, rather, to have forgotten Who God is, His overwhelming nature. The secular mind does not always find it necessary to deny God, but it must always reduce Him to a comfortable size. Above all else He must be a manageable God who does not watch or judge.
         For example, a recent popular film depicts God as a cigar-smoking older man whose agenda for the human race contains nothing that would be offensive to a reader of The New York Times.
         What is especially shocking about these entertainments is that they are so casually accepted by the public. One would think that God had become a tame animal to be taken out and put on display for our amusement. A dangerous attitude, that. One thinks of the tourists to Yellowstone Park each year who get mauled because they fail to heed the signs instructing them that the bears are not tame.

Psychology and the Sacred
         No frame of mind could be better constructed to resist the sacred than the one we are encouraged in today. Think of a youngster surrounded by wealth, waited on by servants, catered to and indulged--a spoiled little master. Put him in a normal home where everyone is expected to pitch in, and he will not only be unable to accept it, he will hardly comprehend it. He has no psychological preparation for it. That child's situation is like our own. We are psychologically ill-prepared to recognise or accept the demands of the sacred realm. The proper conditions are absent. Assertiveness, self-attention, and the like are not the kind of practice we need for taking our place in the Dance.

Habits of Mind
         There are psychological habits of mind, in particular, that interfere with our ability to appreciate the sacred. They are subjectivism and reductionism. The two overlap, but let us see if we can tease them apart in order to look at their effects.

Subjectivism
         The person who has allowed himself to lapse into a subjectivist frame of mind believes that no idea or object is of any more value than any other idea or object. If you get to arguing with him, you quickly find that he has no idea of higher or lower, better or worse. He is set on the equality of all ideas and will give equal weight to the Word of God and the opinions of rock stars.

Reductionism
         Here we come back to the traditional belief that it is the sacred things that give meaning to the rest of life. The effect of suppressing the sacred vision has not been to make life more sunny and rational but to make it more absurd. Psychologists have a habit of reductionism, of saying "this is nothing but this." Think of behaviorism, which tells us that all behavior, no matter how worthy it may appear, is nothing but a chain of conditioned responses. Or Freudian psychology, which claims that we are nothing but a system of psychic pumps, valves, and drains. Or physiological psychology, which says that behavior is nothing but electrical impulses leaping across synapses.
         Notice that in all cases the this we end up with seems considerably less than the this we started off with. Psychological thinking is reductionist in the full sense of the word. It reduces or makes smaller. It is always in the business of ripping the curtain aside so that we may see that the Wizard [of Oz] is only a little man. This approach amounts to saying that there is nothing behind things, or very little.
         Our modern approaches to schooling provide an example. It is no secret that public schools are rife with vandalism and violence, that they harbor youngsters who respect neither learning nor their teachers. Part of the reason, I think, is that the schools have lost their status as special places, places set apart. Now schools may not be holy places, but it is proper to place them above profane life. That has always, until recently, been the consensus. Expressions such as "hallowed halls," "temple of learning" and "groves of academe" are reminders of that attitude. The school, as one educator recently put it, "is not an extension of the street, the movie theater, a rock concert, or a playground."
         I find the quote of special interest, because it comes from a man who fifteen years earlier had helped pioneer the effort to blend school and street, an effort that he now suggests had the result not of elevating students but of reducing the schools to the level of the things around them. Schools, he now says, should be special places with special requirements such as dress codes because "the way one dresses is an indication of an attitude toward a situation. And the way one is expected to dress indicates what that attitude ought to be." Such symbols, he observes, not only reflect feelings but create them just as "kneeling in church, for example, reflects a sense of reverence but also engenders reverence."
         This author, Neil Postman, has most recently written about the disappearance of childhood. He says, and I think there can be little doubt he is correct, that the distinctions and dividing lines between children and adults have largely vanished. We are used to speaking glibly about social change, but this is a change of the first magnitude. Quite suddenly, children are talking and behaving in ways that would have been considered improper for adults only a short time ago. Adult sexual behavior? Yes, but along with that, adult cynicism and adult crime and adult depression, alcoholism, and suicide.

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT
         Much of present-day psychology takes its character from the American spirit. Think of a rather staid and formal European who immigrates to these shores and gradually adopts our more relaxed habits and casual attitudes. Something like that happened with psychology. Once it moved from Europe to America it adopted a spirit of autonomy and equality.
         The point is, many of the attitudes you find in psychology are simply American attitudes.
         You will find similar sentiments all through American history, which is why it should be no surprise that the American spirit is not always in harmony with the sacred one. Notions of hierarchy and submission will not go down well with people who wrested their freedom from a monarchy. The first Americans were fond of saying "We have no king here!" or "Don't tread on me!" or "One man's as good as another."
         That attitude prevails to this day. Equality is still the main plank of our platform. You can see there's not much room for an idea like subjection to God to slip in.

SECULAR TEMPTATIONS
         The classic example of [Christians'] misguided desire for relevance occurred in 1967 in Los Angeles when a large Catholic school system staffed by nuns invited Carl Rogers and his colleagues from the Western Behavioral Science Institute to carry on an experiment in "educational innovation" within their system. What ensued was an intense program of encounter groups lasting more than two years. It started off as one of those well-intentioned efforts we discussed in an earlier chapter, but the effect was not unlike the effect of inviting the devil into the convent at Loudun. At the beginning of the project there were six hundred nuns and fifty-nine schools: a college, eight high schools, and fifty elementary schools. A year following the project's completion, according to William Coulson, one of the project leaders, "there were two schools and no nuns." The nuns had cut their ties with the Catholic church and had set themselves up as a secular order. From there, many drifted out of the religious life altogether.
         Although the events leading up to the secession were complicated by several factors, including the conservative nature of the Los Angeles archdiocese and a rising tide of feminism within some Catholic orders, there can be little doubt that Rogers's influence was a decisive, if not the decisive, element. Coulson, who seems to have mixed feelings about the outcome, gives the credit (or blame) to Rogers's group. "We did some job," he observed. Having read transcripts of parts of the encounter sessions, my own impression is that Rogers had effected something like a conversion. Many of the nuns confessed they had never felt so spiritually alive. Since I had been more or less converted to the faith of humanistic psychology merely by reading Rogers, I can well imagine the impact that two years of personal contact must have had.

ANSWERS TO SUFFERING
         The topic of this chapter is pain. If you are like me, you want to avoid it. But what do you do when it comes anyway? How do you explain the deaths in life that visit us despite our best efforts to sail away from them?
         I am certainly not going to argue that we should go looking for pain. I take it for granted that we all want to subtract from the total of pain, not add to it. Neither am I going to argue that psychological approaches do not relieve pain. They sometimes do. The real test of a theory or way of life, however, is not whether it can relieve pain but what it says about the pain it cannot relieve. And this is where, I believe, psychology lets us down and Christianity supports us, for in psychology suffering has no meaning while in Christianity it has great meaning.
         Now when you deprive someone of the sense that there is meaning in his suffering, you only compound the pain. Dumb, meaningless suffering is harder to take than suffering that seems to have a purpose. Injuries suffered as a result of carelessness are more galling than injuries suffered in a successful rescue attempt. Just remember how you felt the last time you carelessly smashed your thumb with a hammer, and compare that to how you would feel about a similar injury sustained while breaking down a door to free a child from a burning building. In the first case you will be inclined to curse your luck, and if you're like me, your mind will crowd with black and bitter thoughts about the absurd stupidity of life. In the second case you will be inclined to shrug off the pain. You will say, "It's nothing, really," and things of that sort because you can see your pain as a necessary part of a good deed.
         By and large, psychology is forced into the first attitude about pain. No matter how gently it may proceed with your case, there will always be the implication that not only is your pain quite unfortunate but also quite useless; it doesn't do you or anyone else any good. In addition, you will be encouraged to believe that suffering is a mistake that can be avoided by rational living. "It's too bad you smashed your thumb," psychologists say in effect. "That was careless of you, or careless of your parents not to teach you proper hammering. But once you become fully aware and self-actualising, you'll find that type of thing won't happen anymore. Let's see if we can't organise your life to avoid those mistakes."
         What all this means, of course, is that your past suffering was worthless. The only good it has done, perhaps, has been to get you to the psychologist's office.

Is Suffering Wasted?
         Christianity, on the other hand, says that suffering can be redemptive. Not all suffering, but any suffering that is joined to Christ's. That doesn't mean the church requires you to make a formal declaration of intent whenever you're in pain. The least hope or willingness that some good might be brought out of your misery is all God needs. The upshot is an attitude toward pain that is quite different from the psychological one. If you think your pain is senseless--in the same category with the carelessly smashed thumb--Christianity replies, "Don't be too sure. Don't be too sure you haven't been on some kind of rescue mission."

LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN
         We have developed a habit in our society of judging an idea not on its merits but on the sentiments it arouses in us. We will elect a president not because we have thoroughly grasped the issues at stake in an election but because this man strikes us as compassionate or that man strikes us as honest. One of the main reasons for the popularity of psychology lies here. It manages to arouse the proper sentiments in us: it seems to be on the side of the angels.

More Counterfeit Christianity
         This is particularly true of psychology's ideas about children. Those ideas appear to strike the right note--the right note for Christians anyway. In much psychological writing and thinking there is an echo of Christ's admonition to become like little children--not in so many words, of course, but in the suggestion that there is something special and wondrous about children and in the further suggestion that adults have something of great value to learn from them. So there are two points of similarity: children possess certain virtues in an exceptional degree; and ideas about children are, when properly understood, ideas about what adults should be like. These apparent similarities only add to the confusion Christians have about psychology.
         I want to argue, however, that there is actually very little similarity in ideas here, only a similarity of sentiment. The shopper next to you in the bookstore may be stocking up on The Magic Years, Peter Pan, and stuffed unicorns, but there is still no reason to suppose that his ideas about children coincide with yours. His heart may be in the right place, but you can't conclude that his head is. And if the head isn't in the right place, it is often a good bet that the heart won't be there for long either. This is one reason why Christianity insists on doctrine: it's a corrective to wandering sentiment.
         When psychology errs, it is usually a matter of having its head in the wrong place, not its heart. Nevertheless, it won't do to be ruled by sentiment in such an important matter as understanding children and rearing them. The fact that you have a special reverence for children doesn't mean you will do them any good. If your ideas aren't sound, you may even do them harm. It's important to be clear, then, about what psychologists mean when they hold up children for our imitation. It is usually not at all what Christians mean.
         The real question at work here is what accounts for the happiness of children. Of course, you first have to grant that children are happier than adults. That seems more doubtful now than it did just a short time ago, and there are always disturbing exceptions to the rule, but I think we can still call it the rule. Just ask yourself whether you would rather have the task of getting a child out of a depressed mood or an adult. The child can easily be distracted with a story or an ice cream. If these things fail, you can always tickle him. With an adult it is not so easy; the mood is generally deeper and darker. At any rate, if we concede the point about the child's greater happiness, our next step is to examine the differences between the psychological explanation and the Christian one. There are four distinctions to be made.

Four Differences
         1. A good deal of psychological thinking about children comes under the heading of naturalism--the conviction that the spontaneous, unsolicited way is always the right way. In this view nature knows best, and innocent children who are supposed to live closer to the state of nature are gifted with that natural wisdom. The way to a healthier, more uninhibited life, then, is to become more childlike. Along with this view goes a lot of talk about how children are like seedlings or buds who will naturally bloom into flowers if adults don't thwart their growth. The implication is that adults, too, have a child within that has probably not been allowed to unfold, and with which the wise adult will want to get back in touch.
         The Christian position, by contrast, says that these little flowers of the field need cultivation. It isn't enough just to let them grow. A good gardener will not stand by and watch weeds and insects take over the garden, and a good parent will not let a child tend his own nursery. The difference between the two viewpoints is considerable. The first places a faith in human nature that most people are unwilling to put in nature herself; the second assumes that children like everyone else are fallen: some of their instincts are healthy and need to be cultivated, others are not and need to be discouraged. If there is a lesson to learn from children, naturalism is not it.
         2. Another supposition in psychological thinking is that the child is happier because he is freer. Freer, that is, to express himself--not to pretend to like squash, as an adult dinner guest might feel constrained to do; freer from convention--to be able to turn his interest to his toy truck once adult conversation grows boring; freer from worry and responsibility--no bills to pay, no dinners to prepare. And the message for adults? Quite obviously, free yourself.
         Except--and here is where the Christian view comes in--when adults act on this message and free themselves, it is children who will always pay the price. A moment's reflection tells us this is so. It makes a tremendous difference to a boy's or girl's happiness when his or her parents begin to flirt with freedom. It is at that precise point where the father or mother declares his or her freedom from the family that the freedoms of the child are reduced to nearly nothing. I mean freedom from insecurity, from doubt, from fear. The truth is that a child's happiness is much less likely to be linked to his freedom, which after all is quite limited, than to his sense that he belongs to a secure and ordered system. He is free to play at knights or cowboys because the gates of his castle or fort are kept by sturdy guardians. He is free to let his fantasies roam because he has a pair of mighty genie to conjure up meals three times a day. No matter how much he may complain about the privileges of his older brother, or wonder aloud why he can't stay up like his parents, nine-tenths of his felicity comes from having a snug place in a roofed and four-walled hierarchy. And this brings us along to another curious omission in the psychologist's account of things.
         3. There can exist side by side in a certain kind of person a desire for childhood innocence along with a complete disdain for authority. Any number of self-help writers will encourage you to become more childlike and trusting, and yet at the same time insist that you brook no interference in your life from any source. You are to be wide-eyed and guileless, and at the same time as independent as any sea captain. Nearly every reader will have read this kind of advice or met the kind of person who believes it. And very patiently we must remind them that they have conveniently forgotten a large fact: little children do not get on very well in the world without mothers and fathers. To suppose that you can have the special freedom of the adult and the special happiness of the child is a confusion of two different worlds. The point is this: much of the sentimental talk about returning to childhood that we hear from popular psychologists and others is based on incompatible expectations. It may sound Christian, but it is nothing like Christianity--nothing like common sense for that matter. They want to be like little children, but they don't want a father. They may as well go to a restaurant and order soup without the bowl.
         All of which is to say that they have latched on to some fetching ideas but have not bothered to think them through. Christianity, on the other hand, holds you to certain realistic requirements. There is in the long run, it says, only one way to regain the trustfulness and bliss of children and that is to have a Father in Heaven. The most consistent image of God in the New Testament is the image of Him as a Father; the most consistent image of us is as His children. This can only mean that God wants of us the same obedience that we ask of our children, but it also means that just as our children are dependent on us for all their needs, we can depend on God our Father for all of ours. And just as we want our children to trust us, we should trust God. This is not easy. Like the child who does not understand why his father has to put a stinging antiseptic on his scraped knee, we may not understand everything our Heavenly Father does for our good. Like any good father He will go ahead and give us the first aid we need despite our whining and protests, but how much better for us to display that trust in Him that we are so pleased to see in our own children.
         Some people will find it hard to understand how dependence and obedience go together with joy. They have probably been misled by too many stories of the "bad boy" type so common in American fiction--that is, the bad boy who seems to have so much fun. They should take a closer look at real life bad boys. More often than not they will find, an inch below that ruddy, grinning surface, a driven compulsion to escalate every matter out of all proportion until it finds arms and hearts strong enough to contain it. The child who has the true spirit of obedience has, by contrast, a lightheartedness that his reckless companion can seldom attain. The one has the fun of disobeying, the other has what literary critic Roger Sale calls "the deeper delight of obeying."
         4. There is nothing more telling in the difference between the Christian and psychological views about returning to childhood than the respective paths we are advised to follow. With psychology it is the path of bigness; with Christianity, the path of smallness. Much psychological advice centers around ways to increase your self-esteem, enhance your self-worth, and so on. "You are the most important person in the world"--that sort of thing. Christ, on the other hand, told us to become like little children.
         The right angle of course is humility. It puts you in a position to see how wondrous things are.
         We should indeed become like little children, but we should be clear what we mean by this. The happiness of children (and their particular virtue) comes not from their freedom, or from their self-awareness, or from their self-esteem (these are all adult and adolescent preoccupations) but from their sense of marvel and from the security that a properly ordered adult society provides.

THE LARGER VISION

The Misplaced Measure
         Our present culture has been called "the psychological society." To us psychology seems like a big thing, but that is because we have misplaced the measuring stick. A husky boy seems large to his companions until he puts on his father's coat. Then he may appear merely ridiculous. If the psychological explanations of life and death, joy and pain seem impressive to us, it is because we have forgotten or never known how much larger the Christian explanation is. We speak glibly nowadays about the importance of the person, but only Christianity, it seems, is willing to draw him large as life, warts and all. Christianity is larger in the sense that a biography is larger than an application form, or as a novel catches the full character of a man where a case study cannot. It is as full of the richness and detail of life as psychology is not.
         It is larger also because it has a larger vision. We think of people as large-spirited in two senses. First, because they are full of charity, and second, because they have a large vision of life. This doesn't mean they have a rosy view, only one that takes more things into account.
         In the case of Christianity most people will concede that the charity is there, but how about the vision? The average man who is not a Christian thinks of the faith as a gray, grim, affair. Popular psychology, by contrast, will often appear to him as a psychic liberator--an intoxicating, vine-clad Bacchus. This, I believe, is a mistake, the kind made by people who really know very little about psychology, and even less about Christianity. If you are looking for new worlds to explore, you had best look beyond psychology. It has the illusion of depth, but then so do facing mirrors, and I am afraid psychology is very much like one of those hall of mirrors you find in an amusement park. You get to see different facets and reflections of yourself, but that is all you see. A hall of mirrors is in reality only a room, and sooner or later you will want to find your way out. You will want to find a door.
         At this point, of course, I am bound to remind you that Christ talked in exactly those terms: "I am the door; if anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture." That is decidedly not a message you will find in psychology. You don't have to believe it, but whether you do or not, you are hardly justified in calling Christianity the dull sister. If you are looking for new worlds to explore, you will need to find the door into them. Christianity has always claimed to have that door, and all the evidence suggests that it opens on a much wider vision than the rest of the world has imagined.

Like Him
         There is a curious problem at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel and also Mark's. I am sure you've come up against it. Our Lord says "Follow Me," and the apostles simply leave their nets and follow Him. We are tempted to wonder what else He said to them or what reasons He gave. Something seems to have been left out of the narrative.
         What is left out, of course, is the immense strength of our Lord's personality. Ronald Knox gets to the heart of the matter in asking, "What was the magic of voice or look that drew them away, in those early days when no miracles had yet been done, when the campaign of preaching had not yet been opened?... The tremendous impact which His force of character made on people--do you remember how, according to Saint John, His captors in the garden went back and fell to the ground when He said, `I am Jesus of Nazareth'?" (John 18:6.)
         The force of that personality is undiminished. Ages afterward, countless men and women still leave everything behind to follow Him. There is nothing in the annals of history to match that particular personality. Next to it, the psychological models of health and wholeness are dust and nonsense.
         "True personality lies ahead," as Lewis observed, but this is the direction in which it lies. "It does not yet appear what we shall be," wrote Saint John, "but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him." (1 John 3:2.)
         Like Him. That is the kind of self that lies in store for us. Whatever self we have now is but the palest foreshadowing of true self. Our souls receive personality from God. They are designed to be filled by Him. The danger for us all comes when we crowd them full of our own petty ambitions and our shortsighted ideas of fulfillment and leave no room for the work that must be done in us.
         We shall be most ourselves when we become the self God intends us to be. And that, truly, will be a self to marvel at!

"THE WISDOM OF MAN (PSYCHOLOGY)
--IS FOOLISHNESS TO GOD!"--1 Cor.3:19.
--"And He sheweth the diviners (psychologists) to be crazy!"--Isa.44:25.