499 - Correlates and Causes

Correlates and Causes
By John I. Snyder

A classic confusion between correlates and causes has led many social scientists to make unwarranted and extravagant conclusions regarding the origins of various social evils. This is especially noticeable in the study of crime and violence. It has long been observed that in the location or "site" where one finds high concentrations of crime such as mugging, rape, robbery, assault, one regularly observes other factors such as poor housing, overcrowding, racial imbalances, poverty, slums, and drug addiction, which may be said to "go along with" the crime. Such accompanying facts are referred to as correlates.

The crunch comes when one of these correlates is advanced as a candidate for the cause of crime. By now we are all acquainted with the formulas: poverty causes theft and muggings, television violence causes street violence, slums and overcrowding cause gang warfare, unemployment causes burglaries, and the like. Such connections are made so often that they are perceived by the general public as virtually unchallengeable in the question of crime causation.

However, more cautious sociologists are wary of such simple connections. Many suspect that it is largely one's politics or ideology which determines the linkage rather than any necessary relation which exists between the facts and the interpretation. Some prefer to speak not so much of a "cause" as of a network or "web of causation" in which many factors play a role in bringing about the conditions which seem to be "criminogenic."¹ No single fact, therefore, may easily be isolated as "the cause."

When one sees the skies darkening, the air pressure falling, the wind rising, the temperature changing, the humidity increasing, one is fairly safe in assuming that rain is on the way. However, it is not possible to view any one of these facts as the cause of rain. They simply "go with" it, and may themselves all be brought about by some other common factor. They remain correlates.

This confusion has spilled into theology in the form of the self-esteem

John Snyder is a member of the staff of the First Presbyterian Church, Concord, California. He received a Th.D. from the University of BaseI where he studied New Testament interpretation and theology. He is also a graduate of Princeton TheoIogical Seminary and Southern California College. He teaches in the area of biblical studies at New College Berkeley where he is an adjunct member of the faculty.
¹ Gwynn NettIer, Explaining Crime (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), pp. 295, 320, 337.

500 - Correlates and Causes

gospel in current fashion. It is no longer unusual to hear that the lack of self-esteem is the root cause of all social evils, or that behind sin as rebellion is the specter of a negative self-image. In other words, it is asserted that the human self-esteem problem causes the sin of rebellion and all that flows from this rupture in the relationship between the Creator and God's creatures.

Notice the following assertions by a self-esteem gospeler regarding the anatomy of sin:

If Scripture must interpret Scripture, then we can approach the word evil the way we peel an onion. The outer layers are labeled murder, rape, exploitation, oppression, etc. Then as we continue to peel away more layers, we come to contributing sins like covetousness, greed, and jealousy. On still deeper levels, closer to the center, we find insecurity and inferiority. Next comes fear, also called lack of trust, because fear is the precise opposite of trust. Peel this layer away and you find the final nucleus--a negative self-image, a lack of self-esteem.²

Lack of trust makes us unable to love barring an act of God's grace. So every human becomes fearful, then angry, then rebellious.³

Here we have a clear doctrine of causation which reduces all the complexities of human evil to one "core." This, it is believed, is the irreducible, non-negotiable bedrock of human sin.

Initially, we may be startled not so much by the simplicity of this view of sin as by the surprising tameness of it. To discover that behind all of history's bloody wars, unrestrained greed, racism, violence, cruelty, injustice, deception, arrogance, and lust is a lack of self-esteem is to be faced with a result far out of proportion to its cause. We simply expect rather more somehow.

But the central issue is one of elementary logic. It is probably true that the loss of self-esteem is part of the fall of humanity and constitutes a piece of the universal human condition, but this negative self-image is really only one correlate among many in a network of interrelated factors which completes the whole picture of humanity estranged from God. As fallen people, we are dishonest, lustful, selfish, envious, proud, sick, anxious, fearful, lonely, low in self-esteem. Indeed, we have a right to expect that reconciliation with God will have a positive impact upon these tragic aspects of life. However, if it is argued that this one correlate of the fall should be isolated and identified as the one primal cause of sin, then why could not any other correlate be cited just as easily? Some other feature of negative human behavior could be assigned equal causal value depending upon one's private philosophy as to what human life is about. But how could such a theory of causation be proved? Or even disproved? We need a great deal more than mere statement.

² Robert Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (Waco: Word Books, 1982), p. 123.
³ "Schuller Clarifies His View of Sin," Christianity Today, August 10, 1984, p. 21.

501 - Correlates and Causes

II

It may be thought curious that this sort of connection -making is one of the key elements in the rise of a superstition: a woman who wears a piece of jewelry every time she happens to fight with her husband may permanently retire the piece to her jewelry box; a gambler who wins when he coincidentally wears his lucky necktie refuses to roll the dice without it. Transplanting this method to the realm of social science or theology does not enhance its credentials as a way of reaching conclusions.

Incidentally, from the theologian's point of view, how does the theory fit logically with the biblical teaching regarding our solidarity with Adam? Did Adam sin because of a self-esteem problem? If he did, then what are we to make of the assertion that the human self-esteem problem came as a result of the fall? If he did not, then obviously there must be something more fundamental lurking behind sin's cause than a negative self-image.

Another related problem with this juggling of correlates and causes is the very notion that sin is caused. This borrowing from a particular school of social science makes human evil comfortably reasonable, and therefore our judgment of it inevitably becomes less severe. We come to "understand" it. "He has such a low self-image (or bad childhood or bad marriage, etc.), it's no wonder he did it." It is for this reason that many theologians have cast a suspicious eye upon any theory which attempts to find reasons behind evil.

A simple confirmation of this sympathizing tendency is to observe bow little real prophetic preaching is generated by the self-esteem gospel. How do these preachers measure up to a Jeremiah? Or an Ezekiel? Or a Paul?

III

When evil is made to seem only rational, serious social consequences follow as well. We have already banished irrational evil (evil for which we see no apparent reasons) to the realm of "sickness," so that the most extraordinarily shocking crimes are routinely granted immunity from punishment. That leaves us with only the more rational offenses to deal with. But now the traditional legal principle of allocating guilt according to the rationality (plotting and premeditation) of the crime is in danger of turning against us as we are "enlightened" and come more to "understand" evil, for its very rationality may itself become the avenue of escape for the offender. "We now understand his reasons for doing it," says the sympathetic, enlightened observer who proceeds to engineer alternate behavior patterns. By this process of elimination, we are progressively defining evil out of existence.

Legally, we are left with no clear guide to evaluating or even identifying the foe, since evil outranges our simple principles. It casually

502 - Correlates and Causes

assumes the form of rationality at one moment, discards it at another, then without warning grabs it up again, thus suggesting that it possesses a sort of independence, or life of its own, being free to change its mask at will.⁴ It is because of evil's relative independence-dare we call it "transcendence"?--that even though it makes liberal use of our reason, it can in turn never be fully explained by it. Even to trace the most highly sophisticated machinations which produced the horror of Auschwitz can only describe how it happened, but never why it happened.

Evil may be properly approached and fought only when it is allowed to retain its essentially irrational character. To search for reasons behind the irrational is a contradiction in terms. Sin is somewhat like a "surd" in mathematics.⁵ One simply cannot "go behind" rebellion against God's love and will in order to analyze what causes it. Lying somewhere on the remote boundaries of human freedom, the source of sin must remain, from a human point of view, an impenetrable mystery.

This "mystery of iniquity" is in part like a complicated spy or mystery novel; it betrays plots wrapped up within plots and schemes behind schemes where even the most brilliant, self-assured, and sophisticated mastermind is shown in the end to be but a leaf blown about in a storm of other "principalities and powers" of which he is, unwittingly, merely their accomplice and their stooge.

But there is another part, a more hidden stratum, of evil which speaks not so much of plot and scheme as of randomness and caprice, not so much of sophistication as of banality, of shrewd calculation as of lunacy. It suggests a raw ego, a sulking will set in fixed opposition to the divine will.

IV

Whatever strengths the self-esteem gospel may possess, it clearly falters on the old confusion of correlates and causes. No amount of mere assertion can magically transform a correlate into a cause. The notion that the correlate of self-esteem can be labelled the fundamental cause of sin is entirely incapable of proof, and, as an instrument of social analysis, is dangerous and misleading.

Moreover, since this view represents a social science approach to theology, it may be viewed against the background of other popular social-engineering programs: to reduce the rate of robbery, raise the income levels of potential offenders; if ignorance causes wars, then raise the general level of awareness and education; if low self-esteem causes sin and social chaos, raise the level of self-esteem. These programs are no more valuable than the assumptions with which they begin.

⁴ This is surely not an absolute independence as in some form of dualism, since evil, being a perversion of the good, needs good to exist. Evil is independent of reason but not independent of good.
⁵ G.B. Caird, The Truth of the Gospel (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 74.

503 - Correlates and Causes

To the extent that this theory makes evil rational-therefore "understandable" and ultimately manageable-it undercuts the possibility of judgment upon it by making us tolerant of it; and by making our view of human nature vulnerable to the next development in sociology or trend in popular psychology, we find ourselves building our theological house upon the sand.