What is Going on with Evangelical Christians???

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Donald Trump continues to give my clinical mind plenty of “stuff” to play with though much of what he does and so is very scary for the sake of my country. One thing that staggers my imagination is how that he is handily winning the evangelical Christian vote over a much more egregiously Christian candidate, Ted Cruz, and in spite of stances and statements which are anti-thetical to everything Christians stand for. It is as if evangelical Christians have said, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.” He can so or do anything and his numbers will continue to rise. In fact several months ago, he brazenly declared that he could stand in the streets of New York city and shoot somebody and “my numbers would still go up.” And even with that contemptuous observation about his constituency, he numbers continued to rise!

Two significant evangelical pastors have endorsed him. Jerry Falwell Jr, the son of the founder of the Moral Majority and the present founder of Liberty University, declared Trump an “outstanding Christian” as he endorsed him at Liberty University and then proceeded to listen to Trump use expressions like “What the hell” several times in his speech before the student body. I was thirty years old before I used that expression! And the pastor of First Baptist of Dallas, Robert Jeffress, endorsed him early in the campaign but did not cover his awkwardness real well. When Trump opened his arms to embrace the pastor, I remember noting that the pastor looked like a girl at the high school prom who was forced to embrace a disgusting football jock who she found repulsive.

But I think I understand why the Christian constituency is willing to overlook basic teachings of their faith and support such an unsavory man. Early in the campaign I was listening to one of Trump’s speeches on TV and had to share with my wife, “Wow, I understand why he is so popular! I want to give him at ‘atta boy.'” For his populist fervor and rhetoric appealed so readily to memories of my past when his simplistic solution to complex problemsappealed to me. “Make America Great Again” appeals to me still on some unconscious level though my reptilian brain is now countered by self-reflection.

Several evangelical voices have dared to confront their “family” and pose the question, “What about simple decency?” For example, Trump has publicly made fun for one of his critics for having a physical deformity, a physical deformity similar to what Jesus described as a “withered hand.” (This man’s entire arm was “withered”.) And on another occasion, he ridiculed a Fox commentator who is disabled from the waist down for not being able to stand on his own two feet. I was, and still am horrified with these two events. And evangelical Christians merely overlook it! And, furthermore, Trump has repeatedly revealed on TV that he has incestuous thoughts about his beautiful daughter but we never hear anything about that…other than Trevor Noah!

I can just imagine what other countries are thinking now as they witness this spectacle. And, the amusement and horror are justified as this phenomena does reveal something about our character, not just that of the Republican party.

Trump, Romney, and Courage

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I am resurrecting this blog after a long hiatus.  I should explain that my past as a mental health professional will be reflected in my human emphasis to the political scene.  And the current campaign for the presidency of my country, the United States, provides so much fodder for this emphasis.  Yes, we are all individuals but we “individuals” always coalesce into groups which are very revealing about our individual…and often hidden…predilictions.

Today I’d like to focus on Mitt Romney and the courage he demonstrated yesterday.  He dared to attack current GOP front runner, Donald Trump, by suggesting that Trump has tax issue that could prove to be very problematic.  I do not think that Romney is stupid and he knew that Trump would fire back with venom and would point out the obvious that Romney himself appeared to have tax issues four years ago when he was the GOP nominee.  Well, of course Trump responded immediately with his “Tweet” obsession and castigated Romney as being “a dope,” as “awkward and goofy,” and “looked the fool” on his own tax issues in 2012.  Well, of course, Trump is right on target.  BUT, most politicians would confront Romney on these issues without being to rudely personal and personally insulting.  But Trump has consistently been completely without consideration of commonplace civilities in this campaign, revealing a nascent…well, maybe not so “nascent”… sociopathic disregard that most of us have to not undress someone that we oppose and even dislike.  This is because of a social contract, “I will not ‘undress’ you, if you will not undress me.”

I have come face to face with bullies before, back on the playground on my youth and the “playground” of my adulthood.  They scared me.  I knew they saw my foibles and could readily strip me naked and would readily do so if I confronted them, for they had no limits.  “Civility” is a contrivance, yes a “falsity” that we agree upon, but occasionally a sociopath comes along who reveals just how specious that contrivance is.  It is scary to have witnessed just how readily this current slate of GOP candidates have cowered before this sociopath.

We are such scared little critters.  I confess, I am.  But I’m gaining courage in my old age and thus I am speaking out here in this cyber black hole which is the only format I really have.  This powerlessness is because of the powerlessness and cowardice that has charactized my life.  But, perhaps I am now “growing a pair.”

The Pleasure of Being a Victim

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In my country there currently a rise of “victimhood,” best illustrated by the current standoff in Burns, Oregon by right-wing armed extremists.  These men have succumbed to the siren call of politicians on the far right who routinely appeal to a profound sense of alienation and despair in the hearts of the disenfranchised often who happen to be “low-information voters.”  One of the most popular pieces of red-meat these politicians toss out there is, “President Obama is coming to take your guns.”  And related to this fear is the fear of “government/Presidential over reach” which is the suspicion that the government is intruding too far into individual freedoms.

I grew up in this madness, though the version I lived through never led to anything like we are witnessing today.  My father was the patriarch in my early life and he often brought home right-wing fears that evoked fears that were already in my youthful heart as I was discovering that life was capricious all too often.  But dad never would have participated in an armed insurrection.  And another factor in my life was hyper-conservative fundamentalist Christianity which presented me with a “loving” God who was always ready to pinch the heads off of any miscreant and that the world was a really bad place, merely a temporary abode we must endure before we go to heaven and pluck on harps and fawn over Jesus for quatrillions of years.  In my study of religious history, this style of religion is termed “the religion of the dispossessed.”  And my family roots, as well as denominational roots, stemmed from the post-Civil War era when Southerners were first dealing with the alienation that comes from having one’s life wrenched from them by some invading force.

But fear is just a fundamental dimension of human experience.  Human culture is a contrivance that has evolved to help us deal with this fear…usually by completely avoiding it…but also by providing adaptations that allow us to invest in the common good and realize that in spite of the fact that life is transitory and capricious it is a worthwhile and important endeavor.  And I think that religion, and other expressions of faith, can provide a helpful accommodation, but only if we can avoid the challenge of using our accommodation only to escape of the vulnerability that is intrinsic to the human experience.

I have fear, often a lot of it, usually in the form of anxiety.  But for some reason, I can now cope with it more effectively than when I was a child and so without the need for stockpiles of guns and ammunition, belief in an absent Despotic Deity, or even bowing before my country’s true God—consumerism.  So, what does this get me?  Well, if I take it down to MacDonald’s in the morning and lie about my age, and given them a dollar, they will give me a senior cup of coffee.  I don’t think there is anything to “get” other than the simple pleasure of life, the beauty of this world and being here to experience it and be able to handle my frustration that it will not last long enough to satisfy the demands of my ego.

But, this approach denies me the great delight and satisfaction of victim hood, knowing that “they” are always out there to get me, mistreat me, and shame me.  It was so ego-rewarding back then to know that my tribe was a “band of brothers” beleaguered by forces greater than I/we could control but that “we” were together in our faith and knew firmly that we were believing and doing the right thing.  And if anyone should challenge our belief system, we would merely rely on the comforting premise, “We are right, and they are wrong.”  And we knew this because God was leading us.  And armed men in Oregon have the same comfort today, knowing they are “right” and they are willing even to die and to kill because if their convictions.

But this emphasis on “being right” and certainty of having acquired this status always stems from a deep-seated lack of security and feeling of “wrongness”.  This existential doubt is buried deep in the unconscious and, of course, those driven by those subterranean forces never will consider its influence in the choices they make.  To consider these “influences” that are beyond the grasp of consciousness would require a knowledge of the mystery of life, feelings of not being as much in control as once thought, existential doubt all of which lead ultimately to a need of faith.

These feelings of powerlessness often evoke an expression of physical power often in the form of overt aggression.  The pain felt within has to find expression and inevitably leads to acting out, a phenomena vividly illustrated by anthropologist Rene Girard in his classic book, “Violence and the Sacred.”

(New York Times article related to the above:  The delight of victimhood—http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/opinion/sunday/the-real-victims-of-victimhood.html)

 

 

Freedom and Determinism

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“Freedom and determinism” was one of the first “big thoughts” that I encountered in college and I have wrestled with the notion ever since.  One image that helped me along the way came from psychologist Rollo May, I think, when he likened freedom without limits to being like a river without banks; for, a river without banks would be useless and also possibly destructive.  One of the best ways of summing up my clinical practice was that I frequently assisting clients who had too much freedom in their hearts and were “acting out.”  The clinical term was, “impulse control disorders.”

I want to share some of the thoughts of May, gleaned from his book, “Psychology and the Human Dilemma”:

The inseparable relation of self and world also implies responsibility.  The term means “responding,” “response to.”  I cannot, in other words, become a self except as I am engaged continuously in responding to the world of which I am a part.

What is interesting here is that the patient moves toward freedom and responsibility in his living as he becomes more conscious of the deterministic experiences in his life. That is, as explores how he was rejected or over protected or how he was hated as a child, how his repressed bodily needs drive him, how his personal history as a member of a minority group, let us say, conditions his development, and even as he becomes conscious of his of being a member of Western culture at a particular traumatic moment in the historical evolution of that society, he finds his margin of freedom likewise enlarged.  As he becomes more conscious of the infinite deterministic forces in his life, he becomes more free.

Freedom is, thus, not the opposite to determinism.  Freedom is the capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it might be on the side of one particular response among several other possible ones.

We are prone to see ourselves as “above” history and to fail to see that our psychology, and even modern science itself, are historical products like any other aspect of culture.

May’s book brings to my mind the word contingency, making me aware of just our contingent our very existence is.  We cannot truthfully declare, as did one poet, “I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul.” But we do have that power presented above as “awareness” of our contingent, finite, and mysterious world…and of the “contingent, finite, and mysterious” nature of our very own personal existence.

Wisdom from Walt Whitman

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This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…

This is stunningly insightful, sounding like something straight out of the Old Testament…perhaps the Book of Psalms. And I really was grabbed by the advice to “argue not concerning God” as I see so clearly now the foolishness of such argumentation. His point is relevant to an observation I read recently on an evangelical blog in which the pastor noted he had given up apologetics, realizing that the primary point had always been to prove that he was right and the other fellow was wrong! The need to convert or to win someone to our way of thinking runs the risk of amounting to nothing more than an effort to satisfy our ego’s desire to have the entire world see the world just as we do.

I really liked Whitman’s admonishment, “argue not concerning God.”  Now, I ask, “Why bother to argue?”  I now have firm, faith-based, confidence in God and have no need to argue for His existence.  In fact, arguing for God’s existence has a predicate of profound doubt of His existence; for, otherwise, why would you need to argue?  From my experience, the need to “prove” that God exists springs from a deep-seated existential doubt of my own existence.  It is almost as if I’m saying, “Hey, I am so insecure about my own existence that I must believe in a God who is “out there” and as I long as I can do so I will know that I exist.  The need to argue for His existence was always to prove that I was “right” and in compete disregard for the “Rightness” that was given me in the person of Christ.  But, argumentation always kept the matter within the realm of my ego, that dimension of the human heart which is what Jesus had in mind for us to escape with…and I paraphrase…his admonishment, “Get over yourself!”

Oh, sure, I understand the “transcendent” and “immanent” dimensions of deity…so, yes He is “out there” and “in here” but why sweat the issue if you really believe that?  I believe the message of Jesus was, “Chill out.  I gotcha covered.  Don’t sweat it.”  But that is not enough for guilt-ridden Christians who are still enslaved by the law that Jesus said he had fulfilled.

e e cummings and His Struggle for Individuality

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to be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

I so love the poet e e cummings! He was so intrinsically rebellious, refusing even the givens of punctuation and syntax in the English language. He must have been a tough kid to teach in high school, and if he’d live in modern times would have merited the label “oppositional defiant disorder” and been referred to an overly compliant and rule-oriented mental health counselor for therapy!

But it is painful to be outside the comfort zone provided by our tribe. Carl Jung has described the process of escaping the clutches of the tribe as “individuation” and he said that the effort and the experience always includes a profound sense of loneliness.

The loneliness and alienation of poets is beautifully captured by Theodore Roethke in his poem, “Dolor.”:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paperclip, comma
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

 

 

 

 

Why Donald Trump Appeals to Me

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Well, at least on some level!.  When I listen to him speak, on some level I too want to say, “Atta boy! You tell’em.”  Many times when I watch him speak I find that deep-seated resonance with his arrogant certainty as he resurrects a ghost from my past when certainty was available and comforted my young soul which was beginning to come to grips with the capricious world I found myself ensconced in.  Trump promises to take us back to yesteryear when “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” was assured to all of us who would simply affirm our faith in “the way things are” and not dare to question the specious nature of that status quo.

My country, and humankind, are now wrestling with a new world that is burgeoning all around us but is very scary as it deprives some of us of the certainties that we have imbibed of for all of our life. It is much simpler to “hunker down” and passionately repeat the bromides that we grew up with, disregarding their lunacy, and taking comfort with like-minded souls who happen to be just like ourselves.  There is no room for “difference” and in fact there is fear of “difference,” thus the frequent demand of extremist groups for “purity” not realizing that “purity” and “danger” go hand in hand.  See anthropologist Mary Douglas’ book, “Purity and Danger.”

Hyper-conservatives always emphasis purity because they believe Truth is an objective fact, readily available to human reason.  They fail to consider that those who disagree with them also employ “reason,” dismissing “their” use of reason as faulty.  They cannot dare to consider that their reason too is “faulty” as it is human nature to reason in such a way that his/her prejudices and biases are confirmed.  It would be too scary to consider this possibility…and might even require humility and faith, two qualities that are difficult or even impossible for ideological extremists.

 

 

Consciousness and Epistemology

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Epistemology continues to fascinate me as I see it playing such a critical role in world events. The violence that is so prevalent seems to always spring from someone or some group taking their ideology too seriously which always parallels taking themselves too seriously.  What we “know” is relevant to consciousness itself and careful attention from an epistemological perspective can teach us that we can “know” a whole lot and not be conscious.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk in Albuqurque, New Mexico addressed this issue in today’s meditation, declaring, “Consciousness is the subtle and all-embracing mystery within and between everything. It is like the air we breathe, take for granted and undervalue. Consciousness is not the seeing, but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower, but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer, but that which underlies and observes me observing. You must step back from your compulsiveness and your attachment to yourself to be truly conscious.”

Rohr is pointing out that without some capacity for meta-cognition, we will be adrift on our own pet thoughts which will inevitably be those that we have acquired by birth and upbringing in our tribe.  These thoughts will be based on premises that are not subject to questioning, for to question them would be too threatening to our self-percept.  This reminds me of something that Maria Papova pointed out several months ago in the on-line journal, Brain Pickings, when discussing Hannah Arendt and her work on Nazi Germany.  She noted that Arendt argued that the Nazi atrocities were often carried out by “good” people who merely lacked the self-critical capacity of meta-cognition and merely followed orders.

 

Shakespeare and the Unconscious

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“I have within me that which passeth show.  These are but the suits of woe.”

Hamlet uttered these words one day when moping about the castle he was confronted by his family about his despondent mood.  He was saying, “Hey, you think this is depressed.  This is nothing.  This is only a cloak of depression; but I have within me the real thing.”

Shakespeare knew that life was but a “show”, a display of what was going on within our hearts, individually and collectively.  He was the greatest psychiatrist that we have any real record of, though I think Jesus Christ and Lao Tzu…to name but two…could have given him a run for his money if we had more of a record of their wisdom.  Shakespeare had a grasp of the human heart because he had a grasp of his own heart and could therefore convey this wisdom in the characters of his plays.  Without this ability to sublimate into thoughts, concepts, and literary contrivance he well might have ended up escaping into the abyss of alcohol or some other worser fate.

The Bard knew of the unconscious realm long before Freud and Jung made it popular.  He was familiar with the heart’s ravenous impulsivity, its abysmal darkness which knows no restraint, which would not permit civilization without the intervention of the gods who provided that marvelous contrivance which we know today as the neocortex.  And, though he had no knowledge of modern neurological science, with his God-given intelligence, intuition, and humility he knew “it” was there though he could not define it as we can today.

I look at the insanity of our world today…and reflect back on my own, realizing that it is not a thing of the past…and wonder, “Why do we do this to ourselves?”  I then am reminded of my gifted guru, Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk in Albuqurque, Nm., who has interpreted the words of Jesus who on the cross said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” to mean, “Father, forgive them for they are unconscious.” And I reflect back on the stupid, ugly, self-serving, and mean-spirited things I have done and said in the name of religion and realize just how much I had no idea what I was doing and saying.  And, yes, that ignorance is still with me, no doubt!

 

 

Waging the War we Are

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“We wage the war we are.”

I probably use this quote from W. H. Auden more than any other, in this venue and also in my day to day life.  And, yes, it is very telling for my life is, and always has been a war zone most of these sixty-three years.  Of course, I carefully contained this warfare inside my canned-Christian veneer.  Yeah, I kinda identify with Ben Carson!!!

Auden was an astute observer of the human heart as are all great poets.  He made this poetic observation in recognition of his own conflicted heart and his poetry revealed recognition of the turmoil that rages inside the heart of all human beings.  Yes, “most men live lives of quiet desperation” but Auden knew that beneath the surface of this “quiet desperation” warfare was simmering, mercifully kept under control beneath the social veneer.  Well, most of the time anyway!

Why?  Where does this conflict come from?  Simply stated, we are spiritual beings temporarily confined within a mortal body.  And, a spiritual being is infinite by definition and does not really fit inside what the philosophers call the world of “form.  To illustrate, I am now so very aware of just how I want everything! I don’t want to deal with privation and on some level it even angers me!  Why should I have to want anything? Who dares to get in my path at Wal Mart, or cut me off in traffic, or fail to laugh at my jokes, or scoff at my literary acumen?  How dare them?  On some level I have the narcissitic illusion that the world is my oyster and though I cover it up with this carefully contrived social veneer, I often catch gut-level, reptilian brain, unmitigated hunger surging in my heart.  I want it all!

Though this is a literary exaggeration, it is an honest reflection of “waging the war” that I am.   For, I do have these frustrations and fears and now realize I’ve had them all my life but have kept them carefully pent up, knowing that to do otherwise would not be prudent.  And this “prudence” is what makes us human as without social sensitivities we would all be at war with each other literally. But at some point in our life, it is imperative that we find private venues where we can air these “grievances” about life and hopefully discover that an individual, or group of individuals, can assure us that they are fighting the same battle.  I have been blessed with these venues.

The current terrorist crisis in France is an illustration of what happens when we cannot recognize our own internal warfare.  Until we can own this internal conflagration, we will always see it “out there” and seek to obliterate it.  “We wage the war we are” often by battling that vast category we call “them,” a convenient category comprised of those qualities of our own that we do not wish to own up to.  Yes, this is true for Daesh but also for “us.”