Religion and Psychology

Buying high and selling low is not a very smart strategy on the stock market. Yet, with respect to the ideas that are floated through the culture, it is the strategy that Christians tend to follow, according to Paul Vitz, the noted professor of psychology at New York University. “Somehow the Christian world is always buying into secular ideas at the top of their influence, and selling out Christian ideas just when they have no place to go but up,” writes Vitz. Especially serious is the eagerness to buy overpriced ideas in which the culturally knowing are fast losing confidence. I was going to write that nowhere is this dismal practice more manifest than in the field of psychology. But then I was checked by the thought of recent church pronouncements on economics, Third World development, world peace, and political justice. So it is more accurate to say that, in psychology as elsewhere, the ideas of yesteryear enjoy a vaguely sanctified afterlife under the auspices of religion.

In seminary teaching and administration, in pastoral counseling, and in dicta on sexuality, tattered ideas of psychological health are embraced with the enthusiasm of fresh discovery. It is doubtful whether Paul, Augustine, Francis, Luther, Wesley, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer could get past the battery of psychological tests employed by most Protestant seminaries today. (Roman Catholic seminaries are taking just about anyone they can get.) As for pastoral counseling, it is no surprise that thousands of disillusioned clergy have put out their shingles as psychotherapists. The clergy’s transition from pastoral counselors to psychotherapists goes without a hitch, since there was little that was distinctively Christian in their training for the former role. But now there is a growing band of psychologists and psychiatrists warning the churches that they have bought tainted goods, and urging them to reappropriate a peculiarly Biblical wisdom about mental and spiritual health.

RJ

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Richard John Neuhaus

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Buying high and selling low is not a very smart strategy on the stock market. Yet, with respect to the ideas that are floated through the culture, it is the strategy that Christians tend to follow, according to Paul Vitz, the noted professor of psychology at New York University. “Somehow the Christian world is always buying into secular ideas at the top of their influence, and selling out Christian ideas just when they have no place to go but up,” writes Vitz. Especially serious is the eagerness to buy overpriced ideas in which the culturally knowing are fast losing confidence. I was going to write that nowhere is this dismal practice more manifest than in the field of psychology. But then I was checked by the thought of recent church pronouncements on economics, Third World development, world peace, and political justice. So it is more accurate to say that, in psychology as elsewhere, the ideas of yesteryear enjoy a vaguely sanctified afterlife under the auspices of religion.

In seminary teaching and administration, in pastoral counseling, and in dicta on sexuality, tattered ideas of psychological health are embraced with the enthusiasm of fresh discovery. It is doubtful whether Paul, Augustine, Francis, Luther, Wesley, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer could get past the battery of psychological tests employed by most Protestant seminaries today. (Roman Catholic seminaries are taking just about anyone they can get.) As for pastoral counseling, it is no surprise that thousands of disillusioned clergy have put out their shingles as psychotherapists. The clergy’s transition from pastoral counselors to psychotherapists goes without a hitch, since there was little that was distinctively Christian in their training for the former role. But now there is a growing band of psychologists and psychiatrists warning the churches that they have bought tainted goods, and urging them to reappropriate a peculiarly Biblical wisdom about mental and spiritual health.