What A Difference Fifty Years Can Make

Psychology, Sin, and Bigotry

In 1960--more than half a century ago--a prominent psychologist, O. Hobart Mowrer wrote the following in the American Psychologist:

For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch-making.  But at length we have discovered that to be "free" in this sense, i.e., to have the excuse of being "sick" rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost.  This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in Existentialism which we are presently witnessing.  In becoming amoral, ethically neutral, and "free" we have cut the very roots of our being; lost our deepest sense of self-hood and identity; and with neurotics themselves, find ourselves asking: "who am I?"  O. Hobart Mowrer, "Sin, the Lesser of Two Evils," American Psychologist, XV (1960), pp. 301-304.

Fast forward to the present decade.
  The pervasive attempt to expunge sin from human being-ness, replacing it with "sickness", has developed still further now that we are fifty years down the track.  In the present climate "sickness" is a no-no.  The identification of another as "sick" is pilloried as pejorative discrimination.  It has been trumped by the politics of identity.  In the sixties and seventies, sin was re-categorised as sickness; now sickness has been re-categorised not an illness at all, but as one's true identity.  "I am who I am.  Human being-ness necessarily involves the realisation and acceptance by me (and others) of who I really am.  If society maintains a primitive prejudice against my identity, society, not me, commits a great sin, and is itself evil." 

We see it all around us.  "I am gay.  I am bi-sexual.  I am trans-sexual.  I am trans-gendered."  This is sufficiently widespread that Facebook has had to "create" fifty gender and sexual categories to provide sufficient choices for people to proclaim their self-identity.  Those who dare criticise, let alone condemn as immoral, the self-identity of the new human being-ness represent what is the true evil. Not "sickness", mind, but evil.

Sin initially was parsed as "sickness"; then it morphed from "sickness" into self-identity; but the concept of "sin" did not depart the lexicon.  Rather, sin was imputed to anyone who did not accept and support one's new self-identity.  The cardinal sin has now become bigotry--if one dares maintain a critical rejection of another's self-identity, true evil has become unmasked.  Both the bigot and his perverse "identity" require execration and rejection and judgment, and, ultimately, punishment.

What will be the consequences of all this?  More self-loathing.  More true moral guilt.  More hopelessness.  More lashing out.  More ceaseless threshing.

Mowrer again:

Recovery (constructive change, redemption) is most assuredly attained, not by helping a person reject and rise above his sins, but by helping him accept them.  This is the paradox which we have not at all understood and which is the very crux of the problem.  Just so long as a person lives under the shadow of real, unacknowledged, and unexpiated guilt, he cannot (if he has any character at all) "accept himself"; and all our efforts to reassure and accept him will avail nothing.  He will continue to hate himself and to suffer the inevitable consequences of self-hatred.  But the moment he (with or without "assistance") begins to accept his guilt and sinfulness, the possibility of radical reformation opens up; and with this, the individual may legitimately, though not without pain and effort, pass from deep, pervasive self-rejection and self-torture to a new freedom, of self-respect and peace. [Ibid.]

The strategy of the Church need not change.  Fifty years ago when perversions were rebranded as "sicknesses" faithful Christians and churches demurred, and continued to call such things sinful and evil, using the scriptural lexicon, not pop-psychology's inanity-du-jour.  The message was: stop sinning.  Repent.  God has promised not just to cleanse, but to forgive and make whole. 

Now pop-psychology has moved on from "sickness" to "identity".  Now not to accept and champion the self-identity of another is to commit grave harm.  But the Christian response has not changed.  No matter what evasive labels are given to sin and its perversions, sins and perversions they remain.  The only possibility of escape is to accept the judgement of God, return to Him, and plead His loving forgiveness through Christ.  Only under the gentle yoke of Christ will the deep, pervasive self-rejection and self-torture cease, to be overtaken by a new freedom, new self-respect and wholesome peace. 

Back in the day, pop-psychology slammed Christianity as stupid fundamentalist ignorance.  Now that the diagnosis of "sickness" has been upstaged by "identity", pop-psychology indicts Christianity not just with ignorance, but with hateful bigotry, worth punishment.  But the abiding truth has not changed one iota.  We will continue to proclaim the eternal message: stop sinning; turn to Christ; be cleansed and made whole.  Nothing less will suffice.