Evangelical Reformation

How did practical minded mainstream Americans buy into the “I have a right to do my thing” mantra of the hippies?

Americans have a reputation for being practical people, not philosophical eggheads. Yet, there is nothing at all practical about assigning the individual the right to do his own thing.

Common sense insists that doing so will result in chaos. For example, if you tell a college student that he has the right to do his own thing, do you think he will go to class? Do you think that instead he might get his girlfriend pregnant and then bail out on her?

This is precisely where that philosophy has led. We find the rubble all around us.

We understand why college students would buy into this philosophy. During those idyllic days with no spouse and kids to support and mom and dad footing the bill, it is not hard to choose between responsibility and fun. Give them a philosophy that makes doing their thing noble, and of course they will immediately grasp its profound wisdom.

But one would think that mom and dad would know better. Well, they did, that is until a psychologist named Carl Rogers came along.

Just as an aside, it seems that every society adopts its own gods. The Canaanites chose Baal, the Europeans, after rejecting Christianity, opted for philosophy. Americans, in our post-Christian pagan state have deified psychology.

As Isaiah demonstrates so graphically, idolatry is idiotic, making fools out of its followers. Philosophy has made fools out of intellectual Europeans. Psychology is doing likewise for Americans.

Rogers taught that we optimize ourselves as human beings by accepting ourselves unconditionally, i.e. feeling good about ourselves regardless of how bad we live. A bad self-image is the ultimate disease and unconditional self-acceptance is the cure.

However, we can only accept ourselves unconditionally if significant others accept us unconditionally. This means that allowing our kids to do their own thing will not turn them into unbridled hedonists, but will make them into psychological saints—wholesome, actualized individuals.

This belief that unconditional acceptance fixes broken people and makes them into the persons they were meant to be dovetails beautifully with the gospel denuded of repentance, described in the past two postings.

In the absence of repentance, the gospel is reduced to unconditional acceptance. Though this is an unbiblical message, in our culture shaped by the psychology of Carl Rogers it feels right.

Rogers taught us that unconditional acceptance provides the power to change and grow. The gospel stripped of repentance seems to be saying the God agrees. It seems the grace is synonymous with is unconditional acceptance. Salvation comes through a realization that God accepts me “just as I am.”

Change comes, not from repentance, but from this realization that God accepts me apart from any intent to change—even though I am living with my girlfriend, watching pornography, and smoking pot. As I experience God’s grace, His unconditional acceptance, I change will come spontaneously.

This is a life-changing gospel in the sense that it gives people freedom from guilt without change of lifestyle—sort of like spiritual Paxil offered free at your church pharmacy. This is not a biblical gospel and, as George Barna has demonstrated, the promised change in behavior is not occurring.

However, evangelicals are hooked on the message because it is extremely comfortable, fits well with secular culture, and sells well.

Evangelicals have sold a lot of this elixir to their Republican friends. Now these politicians know the God feels good about them regardless of self-serving pork and political duplicity.

Polls reveal that the American voters are not accepting them unconditionally. They may make it, but only because the political alternative is worse.

Make it or not, one can only hope that the voters’ ire will generate enough repentance-producing guilt to produce some change in their behavior.

This blog and recent postings are ultimately dealing with a very practical issue—how we can live life effectively. All of us seek to find out how we can be happy and successful, how we can be healthy, well-adjusted human beings, how we can have good relationships, how we can be productive. In contemporary secular and evangelical societies, many of the answers to those questions come from psychology. We adopt those psychological views because we believe they are based on good research. We have been asking, what if they are not based on good research?

We have also noted that there is good reason to ask that question. Since these psychological concepts have become dominant in our thinking—part of our secular and evangelical subcultures, we have experienced negative trends in precisely the areas of life to which these concepts have been applied, e.g. mental health, marriage, etc. Therefore, we have good reason to question their validity.

But that leads us to the question, what about the research that supports them. In light of the fact that they have a foundation in good research, should we not continue to use them? Maybe the failure in the various areas in question is not the psychological concepts we have adopted, but something else. Or maybe the failure is because we have not applied these concepts aggressively and consistently enough.

My point in recent posts is that the solid research foundation of the psychological personality theories that are shaping our secular and evangelical cultures is a myth. We believe that ideas such as self-esteem and unconditional acceptance are rooted in a psychological theory that is scientifically validated. That is not true. As an aside, we evangelicals also believe that they have been theologically researched and are biblically based. They are not.

For those who believe that these concepts are supported by research, I challenge you to find the research—not assertions that the research has been done, but the research itself. It does not exist. Not only does it not exist, but it cannot exist. That is because the human being is too complex to understand through research. He is also too profound. Behaviorism claims that we have no will, that we are merely biological machines programmed by society, that, like computers, we have no choice but to respond to that programming. Despite the best efforts of B.F. Skinner, it is impossible to prove that thesis through research. The area of the will is inaccessible to research from a practical standpoint. Researchers must try to discover from the outside what is on the inside, and the barrier is just too high. What is more, extensive evidence would argue to the contrary. At the core of Carl Rogers’ personality theory is the belief that the human being has a self-actualizing tendency that provides dependable guidance. That belief also is out of reach of research and bucks a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

This lack of a foundation in research and the evidence of failure of these concepts when applied to human beings leaves us with the question posed by Francis Schaeffer, “How then should we live?” The question should drive us back to Scripture. Psychology can provide help on peripheral issues, but not core issues. In fact, the core concepts of every field must be drawn from Scripture or they are consigned to failure. Education, psychology, philosophy, ethics, biology, and every other field must begin with the Bible. Scripture asserts that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Whatever the field, we must begin with Scripture. Peripherals can come from empirical learning—research, but the core cannot.

Most psychotherapeutic approaches are based on some personality theory. In previous posts, I have been saying that, despite claims to the contrary, these theories are not, and cannot be supported by scientific research. What is my basis for making this assertion?

Psychology may be ineffective, especially in the development of major theoretical structures, because work with humans presents the researcher with an overwhelming number of variables. For example, in the study of anger, the researcher would need to consider genetic factors, physiological factors such as potential brain injuries, health, and diet, the past nurturing of the subject, the person’s present situation including various relationships and stresses, his lifestyle and thought patterns, the individual’s spiritual life, and many other factors. Within each of these categories, there exists virtually thousands, if not millions, of other potential variables. In a scientific study, the task of the researcher is to isolate variables so that he can study the influence of one variable on another. In the study of human personality, the overwhelming number of variables makes this task extremely difficult, if not impossible. The researcher may use control groups and other methods in an attempt to overcome these complexities. Yet, the task is daunting.

And the challenge becomes heightened as the researcher seeks to broaden the scope of inquiry. A study determining the correlation between blood pressure and anger would seem a relatively easy experiment. However, even a simple experiment such as this would include serious challenges. The researcher would need to establish some criterion or criteria for determining levels of anger such as providing the subject with a scale of 1 to 5, and defining the symptoms at each level. It is apparent that such an approach is rather subjective. There is also the challenge of determining what impact being involved in an experiment would have on the subject’s blood pressure. The real challenge in this type of experiment is filtering out factors that are affecting blood pressure other than anger. For example, it would be interesting to determine if gender issues might effect the results. If the subjects were male, it would be interesting to determine if having a female take the blood pressure would produce different results that having a male perform this task. The age, appearance, and personality of the person taking the blood pressure might even be a factor. Time of day, temperature of the room, the atmosphere within the room, lighting, time since the subject’s last meal and what he ate, number of other people in the room, comfort of the chair on which the person is seated, and many other factors could influence the results.

A good researcher will seek to standardize as many factors as he can. However, as we can see, it is virtually impossible to account for every factor. No doubt the person’s health, what he is thinking about at the moment, previous bad experiences with experiments, and a multitude of other variables also come into play.

Even if the researcher was able to filter out all of these extraneous variables, because this is a relatively simple experiment it does not tell us a great deal about human beings. If the researcher seeks to delve into more profound issues, such as the relationship of marital happiness to anger, the difficulties increase exponentially. Among the challenges is the question of cause and effect. In studying the connect between anger and marital happiness, it would be difficult to determine whether the anger disrupted marital happiness or the lack of marital happiness created the anger, or whether each was influencing the other to some degree. The latter would probably be the case, which would make understanding the relationship between the two all the more complex, and lead to the question of what level of influence each of these factors exerted over the other.

The point is that in dealing with human beings there seems to be no end to the complexities, and the more comprehensive the objective of a study, the more complex it becomes. Therefore, being scientific about even simple issues is difficult, and dealing scientifically with overarching psychological topics is virtually impossible. This is at least one reason why social sciences have not produced the results enjoyed by natural sciences. It also explains why the personality theories developed by psychologists cannot be good science. We can discover some things about people through research, but a broad personality theory is beyond the scope of scientific research.

In our next post, we plan to deal with another factor placing the development of personality theories beyond the realm of scientific research.