from Theological Issues

Humanistic Psychology and Christianity

A Review of:
The Emperor's New Clothes: The Naked Truth About the New Psychology

(1985, Crossway Books, by William Kirk Kilpatrick)

"When psychologists don the cloak of expert in areas in which they have no more authority than the average man--that is, when they invade religion, ethics, and politics--they will often be found...to be wearing very little, and sometimes nothing at all."

---- The Emperor's New Clothes

Reviewed by Linda Ames Nicolosi

This little out-of-print book is more than fifteen years old, yet it remains well worth reading. It offers a vivid and eye-opening explanation of how much of psychology echoes Christianity--because it not only borrows, but simultaneously erodes, some of that faith's foundational tenets.

In fact, it is ironic, Kilpatrick notes, that "the wholesale importation of psychological ideas into Christianity would not have occurred if psychology did not have a Christian tone and appearance."

Kilpatrick, who is a psychologist himself, isn't suggesting that his profession simply be thrown away. There is much that is useful in it, he says. However, "wheat and weeds have grown up together." Along with psychology's very respectable work, "there is also adrift in the psychology community an abundance of speculation, wishful thinking, contradictory ideas, doubletalk, and ideology disguised as science."

And it is because psychology looks so much like Christianity that many Christian educators, pastors and thinkers have opened their doors to its ideas in order to make their faiths more relevant to contemporary culture.

But those attempts to blend psychology with Christianity have not made Christianity more relevant, Kilpatrick says. Instead, they have instead actually made Christianity superfluous.

For although humanistic psychology bears a surface resemblance to Christianity, it actually counterfeits important Christian beliefs. "Humanistic psychology looks more and more like one of those seemingly benign drugs whose harmful effects don't become apparent until years later," Kilpatrick notes.

Humanistic psychology was first introduced by Dr. Carl Rogers in the 1960's and it gradually became the dominant philosophy underlying much of modern day psychological theory and practice.

Its notable similarities to Christianity:

1. Christianity tells us to love ourselves--so does psychology. "It is very nearly the First Commandment of the psychological society that we should accept ourselves as we are...We are urged to greater self-awareness," Kilpatrick notes, "on the happy assumption that we will like what we find...We are, as the saying goes, OK. We just have to learn to be ourselves."

   Christianity, in contrast, "starts off by saying that we're not OK the way we are. There is something wrong with us--a twist in our natures. And the twist is not removed by liking yourself, but by starting to live in Christ."

   But in the psychological worldview, "since man can perfect himself without God's help, and since there is very little wrong with him in the first place, Christ's sacrifice on the cross becomes both unnecessary and unintelligible." Because psychology sees man as good simply as he is, "much stress is laid on simply being oneself and accepting oneself without need for repentance, forgiveness, or divine grace."

2. Christianity says we should not judge others--psychology does, also.
3. Christianity says we should become like little children--so does psychology.
4. Humanistic psychology stresses loving, sharing and caring for others, as does Christianity. The dignity and value of the person is stressed in both Christianity and humanistic psychology.
5. Ideas about "wholeness and freedom and values" also echo Christian sentiments.

1. Psychology and Christianity both talk about human possibilities and potentials, but psychology treats self-actualization and self-esteem as if they were the purpose of being--speaking of them with "the same reverential tone that a believer uses when speaking of God." And because psychology measures growth in terms of human fulfillment, it slowly habituates the person into thinking primarily in terms of his personal "rights, wants and needs."
2. Psychology places great faith in the power of positive thinking--but in a way that implies that God is irrelevant.
3. In humanistic psychology, "the right to choose" is elevated to the status of a virtue--"apparently," Kilpatrick noted, "the only psychological virtue."
4. Psychology's emphasis on self-fulfillment makes the Christian virtues of obedience to duty, humility, and self-denial seem like encroachments on growth and self-actualization.
5. Humanistic psychology imports Eastern religious beliefs--particularly, the idea that God is within us, rather than wholly "other," as in the Christianity understanding. And in Eastern mysticism, Kilpatrick notes, there is no requirement to live up to the expectations of a personal God. "The East seemed to provide the desired blend of positive thinking (you choose your destiny)," he says, "and mystical shedding of responsibility (just let-it-be) that the West could not or would not."
6. The psychological world is one which is "strikingly devoid of transcendent meaning" in which the only truths are personal truths. Kilpatrick quotes psychologist Carl Rogers: "When an activity feels as though it is valuable or worthwhile, it is worth doing." This attitude," Kilpatrick says, "explains why humanistic therapies are invariably nonjudgmental, and why humanistic education is geared in the direction of having students create their own values."
7. Psychology's "constant harping on the theme of personal goodness tends to reduce the Good News to the status of Nice News. This is because psychology's optimism about human nature implies that there never was any bad news about the human condition to begin with."
8. Psychology raises self-knowledge to the status of a virtue; Christianity does not.
9. Psychology uses essentially utilitarian standards to judge human actions (does the action reduce pain and increase pleasure? Does it help the person function more effectively?). But Christianity introduces the moral-philosophical concept of intrinsic harm to personhood.

   If a pedophile relationship, for example, cannot be clearly shown to have caused measurable psychological harm, psychology cannot claim that the child has been violated by an intrinsic harm of another sort.

   Exactly this quandary challenged the very legitimacy of the American Psychological Association (see "The Pedophilia Debate Continues, and DSM is Changed Again," www.narth.com.) when the A.P.A. published a study showing that among a considerable proportion of male victims of childhood sexual abuse, the relationship was remembered positively. This led some psychologists to hail the study as "good news" and as useful evidence that adult-child sex is "not necessarily harmful."

   Ironically, the A.P.A. was then pressured by negative publicity to make the very odd statement--for a scientific group--that when pedophilia appeared to be psychologically harmless, it still was "morally wrong."

10. Psychology assumes that wrongdoing is due to poor decision-making skills which more and better "education" can resolve. Christianity, in contrast, sees sin--not lack of education--as the root cause of wrongdoing and believes that God's intervention is needed to help us to choose the good above the pleasurable or the merely useful.

    For a good example of this contrast, see "Gay Men Lament the Problem of Unsafe Sex in Poz," www.narth.com, in which a gay man knowingly infected his live-in lover with AIDS. The man feels no guilt for what he did, lamenting that if he had just had more "education," he might have found a way around the temptation to infect his lover -- a temptation he couldn't resist because it added excitement to their sexual encounters.

    Humanistic psychology assumes that we have the inner resources to lead us to do the right thing, if we can just learn to access them, yet in the first-person story described above, the author tells the reader, with a disarming frankness, how he brought a death sentence upon his lover--but after pondering and pondering the situation, his "inner resources" still induced no guilt. In fact, he admits that he might do exactly the same thing again, and he continues to engage in unsafe sex with strangers.

    Psychology promotes a "you decide" approach to moral decision-making, but Christianity says our choices can be right or wrong--and we need a change of heart, or "conversion" to perceive wrongdoing because our sinful natures often blinds us to it. More "education" cannot be reliably counted on to convict us of our wrongdoing.

11. Psychology sees human relationships as egalitarian social contracts based on consent and it has no philosophy to explain these relationships as part of a divinely inspired order. In the psychological ideology, "authority comes from the consent of the governed."

    Christianity, in contrast, understands the parent to gain his authority over the child because the relationship is grounded on a moral order which cannot be revoked even when the relationship is no longer in the interests of one or both parties. The same "natural sovereignty" puts the teacher over the student and the adult over the child.

    Respect for that sacred order generates a sense of obligation. The psychological viewpoint, in contrast, strips the family of its sacramental character and introduces a contract mentality. These traditional modes of authority, "once they are divorced from any concept of the sacred or natural order," soon begin to appear to be "mere arbitrary impositions of will." Children quickly become "mere fellow citizens rather than a sacred trust, and it is difficult to see why one should sacrifice for them," especially when the children themselves have lost the idea that they owe any honor, respect or obedience to their parents.

12. Personal autonomy is so highly valued by psychology that the traditional cultural transmission of values from parent to child, or from teacher to student, is inhibited. Instead, Kilpatrick notes ironically, psychology promotes the fiction that "each child is in his own right, a miniature Socrates."

What, indeed, is the true nature of "family"?

Paradoxically, Kilpatrick notes, the success of family therapy often depends on the family members' sense of sacramental devotion to duty--a duty that isn't, in any practical sense, "in their own interests."

But why should they make such sacrifices, if "family" merely implies a contractual arrangement? What happens when the negatives of that particular family outweigh the positives? Why shouldn't the contract simply be broken? The contract mentality cannot persuade a family member that he should sacrifice his own desires for something that cannot be scientifically demonstrated, such as moral obligation.

Therefore, instead of being inspired to honor their family obligations and to love unconditionally, "parents learn parenting skills, and children learn to honor their contracts rather than their fathers and mothers." The belief in the old moral absolutes, like loyalty to children and parents, may not entirely disappear, but it drops down to the status of "just one more choice" among other choices.

Yet in spite of this contractual mentality, there remains, within most people, a lingering and intuitive sense that "somewhere in their hearts they still bear allegiance to those old notions of family love and loyalty and bearing one another's burdens." That lingering notion, Kilpatrick says, is generated by the remaining moral capital of the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Psychology's contractual mentality is not entirely useless, Kilpatrick admits; it may indeed prove helpful as a tool to help repair broken families. But the problem arises, Kilpatrick says, "when the technique is elevated to the status of a philosophy of life," because it tends to prod the client with "constant encouragements to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of relationships" and with constant reminders that "we only have one life to live" during which to satisfy our wishes.

Humanistic psychology has also been instrumental in changing our fundamental understanding of the definition of family:

"Many in the helping professions have already pounced on the fact that some one-parent families are exceptionally well-run...Some even have a preference for one-parent families. And there is no objecting to this view if your model of family life is simply a utilitarian one based on skills, contracts, and results.

"You can only oppose it from the traditional standpoint that the ideal is a trinity of mother, father, and child, and that somehow this is ordained in the supernatural order of things.

"This may seem like a weak argument, but actually it's not. It's the same reasoning by which we maintain that two arms is the ideal, even though there are many one-armed people who get along quite well. The fact that we can find substitutes or other arrangements to compensate for a damaged limb or a damaged family does not mean that we haven't lost something in the bargain."

The "cloak of neutrality" under which psychology functions--in a privileged manner, like the medical sciences--makes it difficult to criticize psychology's flaws "or even to see them," Kilpatrick notes, and thus paves the way for such movements to pretend they are not movements at all.

Overall, what are the psychological ideologies that are gradually eroding the Christian belief system? Kilpatrick identifies the following--

1. Subjectivism (seeing one's own self as the measure of all things).
2. Moral relativism.
3. The over-valuing of personal autonomy.
4. The high valuing of self-esteem and the rejection of guilt. Although a lowered consciousness of sin may be "good for one's ego in the short run," to the Christian, there will be eternal consequences.
5. Hostility toward traditional and religious authority, with the assumption that religion "imposes" values.
6. The lack of any new meaning system to replace the old one taken away.
7. The labeling of many virtues as "hang-ups"-- for example, the choice to change one's homosexuality may be interpreted as "homophobic"; or the determination to repair a troubled marriage could be seen as a "failure to self-actualize." And many behaviors that were once called perversions--such as sado-masochism, homosexuality, and voyeurism--are relabeled by psychology in morally and psychologically neutral terms as personal "preferences" and "sexual variants."

Note: William Kilpatrick is the author of several other best-selling books, including Psychological Seduction and Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong.