Truth
Religion in Psychology
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 05 November 2006
The Miracle Of Religious Conversion
Forever we read wonderful stories about how crooks, alcoholics and drug addicts are cured by religion. Ten or twenty years ago, the New York Times was reporting about “Eddie”, a youth who announced he’d been saved, had given up drugs and crime, and was going to nightly revival services. “Eddie’s tale of salvation is as old as the Gospels”, wrote Daniel Goleman in the NYT. Let us hope Eddie is still on the straight and narrow, but careful social studies do not support the general impression of the miracle of religious conversion.
Repeatedly, it has been found that people can be introduced to religion and seem to respond, but few make any permanent change in their lifestyle. Indeed, donkeys’ years ago, some of the earliest psychological studies found that delinquents in their teens took to religion when they were taught it, but follow up studies showed, not that most of them had stopped being delinquent, but that they had become religious delinguents!
No doubt, believers look on the Godfather films in which murderous gangsters attend mass then go about their main business of intimidation as showing some sort of power of God. Perhaps it is better that they are Catholic gangsters because otherwise they might be killing Presidents or cabinet members, or whatever. Those of us in the real world see it as pure hypocrisy, and neither Catholic priests nor Protestant pastors seem ready to complain about the morals of their Christian flocks, whatever denomination they are. They appreciate they are all getting moolah out of the crookery, and that is more important than morals to them.
A Mass Conversion of Psychologists?
Anyway, hacks trying to gain favour with Christian readers are just as hypocritical, and hardly ever put their parables into the context of established research. It has some strange effect on psychologists too, according to the report. They were so impressed by these stories and so unimpressed by the much more scientific survey evidence, that they all decided, even atheistic psychologists, that there was something in this religion thing. Daniel Goleman wrote:
The emerging wisdom in psychology is that at least some varieties of religious experience are beneficial for mental health.
It was “emerging” for him, but psychologists right back to Starbuck around 1900 knew it. Notice, he is not saying much—simply that some religious experience can be beneficial. The same sort of surveys that showed people were not turned good by turning to religion also showed that some religious people did benefit from better health and mental health than the average Joes and Janes. It is news to no one except overpaid hacks. What is not at all clear is that religion makes people better. Rather, people of a particular type of personality, one that gives them an aversion to drinking, crime and drugs, are partial to religion. The reason is that religion teaches against these bad habits, so they see religion as their natural home. That those in the population averse to bad habits become religious skews the statistics, but it is not that religion makes people good, it is that good people choose religion. The counter fact that many religious people continue to practice bad habits suggests that it is no cure for them, and the effect of religion on delinquent youth confirms it.
To read newspaper hacks you would imagine that scientists were peculiarly stupid people, quite unable to understand what science has already established. Daniel Goleman says that suddenly psychiatrists were finding religion, and all because of stories about Eddie and his converted friends among the louts, yobs and muggers of the world. One Dr David Rosenhan, a psychologist at Stanford University, was cited as having awoken to the power for good of religion though he was among the atheistic psychologists of the world. Of course, we have only the hack’s account, and he is certain to be putting his own spin on to the story, as well as his own ignorance.
No modern psychologist has ever doubted the power of suggestion, and autosuggestion or Couéism, which gives rise to the placebo effect and to the benefits of TLC. Belief in a figmentary father can have beneficial effects, but so can belief in a rabbit’s foot. Perhaps the notion of a heavenly father is the more powerful, but it remains very much weaker than certainty, and whatever small percentage of people benefit ought to be weighed against the bad effects of religion, its authoritarianism, and intolerance, the sheer divisiveness of it especially in a multicultural world. That is much harder to weigh up than a single anecdote that someone seems to have been cured of a destructive habit, but history as well as modern times show they are rather serious consequences of religion.
Seeing Things Differently
Dr Rosenhan says the belief of the Christian students he studied gave them the advantage of helping them to see things differently. As an example he gave a statement from a student suffering from cancer who said:
God cures in three ways—with medicine, by prayer and by death.
What is different about this except that the end of life is considered a cure, presumably because this student thinks she will revive in a new life free of any illness? This is a comfort only because she believes fairy tales that religionists have told her. Rosenhan’s reported comment was:
Her beliefs allowed her to face her illness more calmly.
Anyone in the least logical wants to know “more calmly than what?”. The answer we have to presume is “more calmly than those who do not believe in a fantasy father”, but any base for comparison should be with people who have not been brought up with the threat of post mortem hell and promise of post mortem heaven. Those brought up with a healthy attitude to life and to death have no such fears or hopes. They know that when they are dead they are at complete peace with no fears or hopes or feelings or senses, but utter serenity because their minds have ceased to work and they have permanently lost all consciousness. Children in the west are brought up with heaven and hell, and so are anxious about their imaginary post mortem life. Knowing there is no such thing takes much of the fear out of death. A fear of dying might remain, but dying is something we experience while we are still alive. Once we have died, we experience nothing.
Spiritual Life
The NYT goes on to tell us:
The emerging consensus among psychologists studying religion is that the spiritual life is more often of psychological benefit than not.
Maybe, for believers, but what of the social consequences if belief is to be encouraged for that reason? Goleman was, of course, writing long before 9/11 and the subsequent invention of the war on terror. The war on terror is quite plainly an invention of the right wing political theorists, the philosophers, as they style themselves in Washington who wanted a bogey man to replace the one they had been foolish enough to kill off, communism. This too is psychology at work. Terror is the replacement for communism, the common enemy meant to keep Americans shivering and voting for the jack-booted tough guys needed to keep them safe in their beds. These same tough guys at the same time do everything that they can to stir up anger in those that they want to accuse of being terrorists, so how Americans cannot see it as an obvious plot is hard for anyone with an average IQ to appreciate. You have to admit the plot works, just as the timeless plot to keep ignorant people going to the churches to hear the sermons of their hate-all ministers works, and the plot works to have newspapers run by the same right wing billionaires paying hypocritical and opportunistic hacks to write the propaganda they do.
Goleman says the psychologists “accept their subjects’ beliefs at face value” to explore their effect. That is all very well except that it is shockingly bad technique, if it is true. Extensive work since the 1950s shows that religiosity cannot be taken at face value, and if that is what these psychologists are doing, they must be getting shockingly bad, unclear and inconclusive results, not the wonders that are being claimed. Religious people by their own styling and habits fall into several different groups, and the attitudes of these groups, teased out by questionnaires are anything but nice.
One psychologist specified is Dr Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist at Harvard, who became the best-selling author of The Spiritual Life of Children. We learn that:
The book showed that even children from nonreligious families had active spiritual lives.
It is an interesting thing that hacks use words like “spiritual” without the least idea what they mean. One imagines that Coles was quite careful to explain what he meant by it, but Daniel Goleman is not. It is a meaningless word in the sense that no two people will agree on what it does mean. It does not, for example, generally mean what it obviously should mean—pertaining to spirits. The religious apologists who could not bear the findings of the psychologists in the last century, tried the ploy of complaining that the word “religion” had not been properly defined, even though most of the studies were not studying religion in any abstract sense but were studying specifically Christian religion, so its characteristics were pretty obvious. Yet these same people who denied the validity of these studies because the word “religion” was not defined, bandy about the even less distinct word “spirituality” as if it was as common as bathwater. But then Christian apologetics is utterly unprincipled. Apologists are modern sophists, and their worthless “skills” ought to be exposed.
What is “the spiritual life of children”? Here the word “spiritual” looks, and in the title of the book seems to be meant to be read, as if it means “religious”, a common synonym of it. Most children are brought up in America, where 85 percent or more people profess to be Christians, as Christians, so it ought not to be surprising that from an early age they have a “spiritual” life, meaning an awareness of, and sharing in, the religious life of their parents. We discover that Allen Bergin, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, opined:
There is a spiritual dimension of human experience which the field of psychology cannot ignore.
One can hardly imagine that a professor at Brigham Young university will be free of religious prejudice, and here he means “religious” when he says “spiritual”. One thing is perpetual, and that is that religious believers will never let any evidence against a religious instinct count, whereas any evidence that can be scaped together for it counts tenfold. There is not a scintilla of evidence for a religious instinct. Much work by honest psychologists has shown it, and it is this that should count rather than that concocted by people who are grinding their religious axe. At least Bergin disabused Daniel Goleman of any suggestion that religious or spiritual influence was uniformly beneficial. It is not.
Yep! The Mass Conversion of Psychologists
But if psychologists generally are seeing religion more favourably, one must wonder to what extent they are the objective scientists they ought to be. After all, a time was when psychologists were amongst the best thinkers and were almost uniformly non-believers in any religion, as any proper scientist should be. Well, Bergin seems to have the answer himself. He reported that a national survey of 414 psychotherapists showed they had “an unexpected personal investment in religion”. That is bad news for psychotherapy. 77 percent agreed with the statement, “I try to live by my religious beliefs”, though only 29 percent thought religion was important in therapy. Some remained old school though. Albert Ellis, a psychologist in Manhattan, rightly wrote:
Religiosity is in many respects equivalent to irrational thinking and emotional disturbance.
Now religious people will rejoice that psychotherapists are getting religious, but, though their religious patients might find their treatment successful, the trouble is they will become less successful in general. Psychotherapy has obviously attracted a lot of extrinsic believers, who realize they can make a few easy bucks out of it. They are leaving science behind and the trouble with what remains is that it will become like astrology. That too has some successes, but they are no reason for making it compulsory in schools. If psychotherapists want to use religion in their therapies then they ought to become ordained and counsel people as ministers, and leave proper psychology to the scientists. Some of them do. At least these are honest, honesty not always being a principle at all closely held by the religious. Some religious therapists offer clients psychotherapy in a given faith. Fundamentalist Christians are one and Orthodox Jews another.
As long as their beliefs are upfront, patients can see and be wary. If they insist in putting their money into quackery, like anything religious, it is a case of caveat emptor. Good money goes in with no certainty that anything will come out until you are dead. That is a good deal for rogues, but not so good for people who are sick.
