How humanism and therapy replaced sin and forgiveness
For Part 1 of this essay, click here.
Philip Rieff’s 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic examined how the therapeutic mentality had swept through secular culture. What was less noted at the time was that the therapeutic focus on self-love was also triumphing over the Christian emphasis on self-sacrifice. Although there are many superficial similarities between the two belief systems, a closer look reveals that humanistic psychology is a counterfeit of Christianity. It has a Christian “feel” but very little to do with Christ or with Christian virtues.
The Therapeutic Virus Corrupted the Christian Code
I’m not suggesting that there was any conscious attempt to counterfeit Christianity. It’s just that many Christians were attracted to humanistic psychology and were (perhaps unconsciously) looking for a way to synthesize it with their faith.
In any event, it wasn’t long before the assumptions of pop psychology had so smoothly and thoroughly permeated the churches that the vast majority of Christians failed to grasp that a fifth column had been invited in. Indeed, many now assume that the therapeutic version of Christianity, with its emphasis on tolerance and natural goodness, is the real thing.
In fact, however, the theory of human potentialism is an attack on the very heart of the Christian faith — the belief that Christ came to save us from our sins. But the self-esteem psychologists didn’t really believe in sin. On the contrary, they believed in the essential goodness of human nature. Maslow was quite up front about this. He once observed that if the doctrine of original sin were true, then his own theories were untenable.
You Think People Are Fundamentally Good … Have You MET Any People?
The central tenet of human potential psychology is that people are basically good. The self-esteem movement rested on the belief that once you “get in touch” with your inner self and discover your essential goodness, self-esteem comes almost automatically. And, sure enough, as Catholics and other Christians learned to accept and esteem themselves, they saw fewer sins to confess.
As I observed a couple of years ago:
One of the things that a great many Catholics discovered almost simultaneously was that they were — to use the lingo of the day — OK. Convinced of their own self-worth, many Catholics abandoned the Sacrament of Penance. Almost overnight, the long lines at the confessional disappeared. Catholics had been so well-schooled in the gospel of self-acceptance that they couldn’t think of any sins they needed to confess.
At this point it would be nice to add something along the lines of, “but then came the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Catholics came to their senses, regained their consciousness of sin, and confessional lines stretched almost as far as the ticket lines at a Taylor Swift concert.”
Of course, under John Paul II and Benedict XVI much lost ground was regained. The publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church provided a reliable guide to the faith, and the initial excesses of the devotees of the humanistic religion seemed to die down. Perhaps those nuns and priests who were most obsessed with self-actualization had already left the Church.
Or, more likely, perhaps the tenets of human potential psychology had soaked so deeply into the culture that no one questioned or noticed them anymore. After all, the therapeutic notion that sin is nothing more than harmless diversity seems to have triumphed over the belief that we are all sinners in need of redemption. The long confessional lines never came back and, to top it all off, church attendance has now fallen to an all-time low. By some natural progression, self-satisfied people who can find no sins to confess will eventually find no reason to go to church.
Evolving into the Opposite
Archbishop Viganò’s contention that the Church is being taken over by Catholics who no longer subscribe to Catholicism, but rather embrace various forms of humanism, may seem a stretch. But his claim is buttressed by the fact that during the last half of the twentieth century something similar happened in the American Church — namely, the substitution of a psychologically based humanistic faith for the Christian faith.
The difference between then and now is that those who embraced human potential psychology didn’t look upon it as a substitute for their faith but as a deepening of it — a conversion to a more highly evolved form of Christianity.
I don’t think that’s true of the current coup in the Church — at least not among the leadership. What’s happening now is more deliberate and more deceptive. What Cardinal Fernandez describes as the “teachings” of Pope Francis are designed not to deepen the Catholic faith but to replace it.
The Tower of Psycho-Babel
Nevertheless, it appears that the two “coups” are related. The entanglement of humanistic psychology with Catholic thought is arguably what made possible the larger coup that is now unfolding.
The first prepared the soil for the second by providing the concepts and vocabulary necessary for shaping the new teachings of Francis — who, incidentally, once taught psychology. We can see the human potential influence on Francis in his fondness for words that seem to be taken straight from Rogers’s nondirective playbook — words such as “listening,” “accompanying,” “sensitivity,” “openness,” “acceptance,” and “inclusivity.”
It’s also telling that, like Maslow, Rogers, and Fromm, Francis downplays the seriousness of sin — even to the extent of advising priests to forgive sins that are unrepented. Like the humanist psychologists of the 1960s and ‘70s, Francis offers us a version of Christianity in which Christ the Redeemer becomes superfluous and we become our own saviors.
Jesus Died for My Self-Esteem
A great many Christians fell for the humanist temptation because it came cloaked in the language of popular psychology. They were seduced into believing that Christianity boils down to self-acceptance and feelings of OK-ness. The fact that in modern times so many Catholics and Protestants (who were mainly attracted to the “power of positive thinking” brand of psychology) were gullible enough to prefer a counterfeit of Christianity to Christianity itself suggests that it could happen again.
We are now in Round Two of the modern humanist assault on Christianity — only this time, the leaders of the assault have not fooled themselves into believing they have discovered a more advanced form of Christianity. Judging from Francis’s insistence that conversion is no longer desirable, we can expect that Christ will eventually be moved to the sidelines of the emerging faith.
Archbishop Viganò’s assertion that the true Church and a false parallel church that seeks to replace it are now contending for the souls of Christians should not be lightly dismissed. Something of a similar nature happened in the Church toward the end of the last century when a psychologized version of Christianity offered itself in place of the true faith. The confusion that resulted is still with us today, and it feeds into the temptation to accept the latest attempt to turn Christianity into humanism.
Let’s not prove to be as gullible again.
This article originally appeared in the August 14, 2024 edition of The Stream.
Pictured above: Pope Francis greets pilgrims
Photo credit: Pixabay
