Before the 1960s very few Christians, conservative or liberal, Protestant or Catholic, spoke of “my relationship with God/Jesus.” Rather they used different language to point to their religious convictions, based either on the terms used in the Bible or in the Christian tradition – e.g., a child of God, a son of God, a disciple, following Jesus, walking with Jesus, a baptized believer, a believer, and so on.
What brought the revolution in description from the 1960s onwards which affected ALL kinds of Christians – fundamentalist, conservative, protestant, catholic, liberal and progressive – who hold all kinds of “values” and doctrines?
No version of the Bible in use at that time used the word “relationship” and neither did any official Book of Liturgy! Thus how could a non-biblical word/expression triumph and be the word to sum up the religious experience of being in touch with God?
The answer begins with the arrival of the therapeutic culture in the 1960s, but there is more to it than that.
After World War II several hundred (mostly Jewish) professional psychologists and psychiatrists changed the culture of the USA (and then of much of western society) by introducing psychotherapy into the popular market place. One thinks of the names of Freud, Adler and Maslow and then the popularizers like Rabbi Joshua Liebman, Rabbi Harold Kushner [When Bad Things happen to Good People], and columnists like Ann Landers and Joyce Brothers.
What did they do? And why did they do it? Here is the answer of Andrew R. Heinze, who has researched this topic more than anyone else:
“To reckon with the myths and realities of Jewish neurosis, those popular psychologists emphasized the psychologically crippling effects of religious persecution and orthodox dogma, defended the neurotic as a creative force in society, and presented the once-ghettorized Jews as an examplar of psychic survival in modern civilization.” [ Jews and the American Soul, Princeton Univ Press, 2005]
Thus there began what was to become the rapid advance of psychotherapy in the USA with its new explanations of human nature and the self, offered first to Jews and then by Jews to Christians and fellow Americans.
This advance was not primarily because of the secularization of American society, or the arrival of emphasis on human rights, or the loss of the Protestant work ethic, although these things certainly helped erode the received view of human nature and the soul. Rather, it was through the adapting of what Jewish scholars and popularists had first applied to Jewish people to bring them out of the ghetto-mindset and holocaust-mindset into the mainstream of US society to other Americans, especially to Christians.
What happened to the USA in and from the 1960s has been well explained by Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, but it is to Heinze’s fascinating and learned book that we must turn for the details of the origins of the Therapeutic as a major reality in shaping American lives and society.
Because of the triumph of the therapeutic in explaining who and what we are, the whole tone of American life and religion changed – e.g., notice how often we say “I feel” when we really mean, “I think” or “I believe’; and notice also how difficult it is for people to speak objectively about views, which they hold, without getting emotionally involved in commending or defending them (for they feel personally attacked if their views are subjected to discussion).
In the churches, notice how descriptions of salvation, the nature of sin, the Christian life, communion with God, public worship, and so on and so forth have all been touched and often deeply affected by this therapeutic culture. So has the translating of the Bible, Christian music and liturgy and books on maintaining good marriages (here most especially is it most evident even amongst those who wish to maintain “patriarchy” and biblical manhood!).
Here, as an obvious example, I simply point to the widespread use of the word “relationship” in popular Christian discourse by all kinds of religious persons. At the horizontal level it refers to any kind of sexual union with another person (be it fornication or adultery, sodomy or pederasty, holy matrimony or friendship) and at the vertical level to any kind of felt or perceived union with Divinity. This word communicates “feeling” and is “experiential” and subjective. From a truly biblical or classical position – Christian or Jewish -- its constant use causes believers to lose (a) the divinely ordered relation of holy matrimony as a union of two persons as one flesh for life, and related to this the sense of a family with permanent relatives; and (b) the divinely given by grace ordered relation from God [the Father through the Son] to the believing sinful person for salvation and sanctification in the Body of Christ. [And we have really descended to the lowest in theological terms when we speak of the relationships between the members of the Holy Trinity!!!]
Jews and the American Soul is required reading for those who really have a desire to know why American culture and religion is so deeply therapeutic in all its forms, conservative and liberal. The therapeutic is here to stay it seems but at least it s worth knowing what it is and where it came from!
Finally, if you want to now more about the recent past and present trends read One Nation under Therapy, by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, St Martin’s Press, 2004.
drpetertoon@yahoo.com January 25, 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment