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Saving Therapy: Exploring the Religious Self-help Literature

By Wendy Kaminer

"Religious writers justify their reliance on psychology by praising it for 'catching up' to some eternal truths, but they've also found a way to make the temporal truths of psychology palatable. Religious leaders once condemned psychoanalysis for its moral neutrality Now popular religious literature equates illness with sin which makes psychology a penitential technique, if not a form of exorcism. While religious writers stress repeatedly that psychology is only a spiritual tool, some therapists might consider religion only a therapeutic one. But whether psychology has caught up to religion, infiltrated it, or been adopted by it, the most popular versions of both psychology and religion are becoming less and less distinguishable. Like Macy's and Gimbel's, therapists and religious leaders are happily staking out a common market. "

GODLESSNESS has long been considered un-American. Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right not to worship at all. As any child of the Cold War knows, atheism and Communism are inextricably bound, as were Americanism and Protestantism a hundred years ago. This is a Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) country, pundits and politicians still regularly proclaim. Presidents are still expected to attend church and profess a deep, abiding faith in the Judaeo-Christian God to whom survivors of the 60s are reportedly returning.¹

Intolerance of disbelief is a subtext of much popular religious literature. If not condemned, nonbelievers are pitied and patronized. If not considered sinful, atheism is mourned as a corrosive, selfdefeating dysfunction. Of course, religious writers who lack conviction that they offer a better way would hardly be religious at all (or maybe

Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer, is visiting scholar at Radcliffe College. She has also taught at Tufts University. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, Ms., and The Village Yoice, and she is the author of Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain and Politics of Unpaid Work (1984) and A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality (1990). This essay will be included in her forthcoming By the Book: America's Self-Help Habit.

¹See, "A Time to Seek," Newsweek December 17,1990, p. 50,

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they wouldn't be writers). Their certainty of belief is worth noting because of its importance as a marketing tool, because of the place their books occupy in the publishing business and popular culture. Straddling the secular and sacred, popular religious books are hybrids, using self-help /success primer language and techniques to instruct, inspire, or indoctrinate religious belief, on the grand scale.

Doubtful self-help authors don't sell many books, sacred or secular. Their readers seek answers, formulas, and guarantees, not inquiry and speculation. The tentative or tortured theologies of William James, Dostoevsky, or Kafka would not answer the needs of people who read M. Scott Peck, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, Harold Kushner, and other writers reviewed here.

Theology may be, in fact, too grand a term for the attitudes and proclamations that popular religious books comprise. These are not, in general, books of argument; they don't engage readers in dialogues and explorations. Requiring practically nothing of readers intellectually, they continue a tradition of popular spiritualism dating back more than a century. ("An academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all," William James said of nineteenth-century mind-cure literature.²) Instead of reasoning or arguing, most popular religious authors pronounce, admitting no distinctions between opinion, desire, and truth.

This is, in part, an occupational hazard, or perquisite, depending on your point of view. Her style "is the oracular," a critic said of Mary Baker Eddy.³ "God loves you" is not a provable or even arguable assertion. But these books are not billed as simple declarations of belief. They are marketed as primers on personality development and psychotherapy, child rearing, spouse abuse, depression, and despair, as well as the search for love, happiness, and salvation. Readers who find the answers to existential questions and various social crises less than self-evident should seek their counseling elsewhere.

It seems indisputable, however, that hordes of people do find comfort, and maybe guidance, in these books. Sales are most impressive. M. Scott Peck's first book, The Road Less Traveled, has been years on The New York Times best-seller list. Sales of books by Harold Kushner, Charles Swindoll, Gordon MacDonald, and James Dobson are in or near the millions, too. It would be both futile and presumptious to deny the benefits experienced by so many satisfied consumers. In fact, the effects of blockbuster best-sellers on the millions of people who read them are impossible to quantify. But, if popularity were proof of value or integrity, we would have to respect scientology, EST, war, football, prostitution, and Naziism as great successes. So, the testimonials of several million readers are not

²William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 96.

³Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston), p. 9.

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exactly relevant to this critique. Whether we assume the helpfulness of these books for many individuals, or consider it unknowable, we can evaluate their messages and consider their impact on the culture.

As a skeptical, secular humanist, Jewish, feminist, intellectual lawyer, currently residing in the Ivy League, I belong to a number of groups disdained by many conservative religious writers (who dominate the field), and I'm probably not the target audience even for the less doctrinaire. So, as is probably evident by now, I was rarely engaged, except as a critic, by the books under review. Whether that makes my analysis more or less worthwhile is not for me to say. As a critic, however, I do want to note that the writers I scorn, scorn me, which feels rather liberating. In their eyes, I am someone who has not seen the light, or perversely refuses to look at it, so I know I cannot wound them.

I

Smugness, coupled with false humility, is a common, central trait of popular religious writers. They like to quote themselves, clumsily recreating self-serving conversations with others, citing passages from their earlier books; they are their own authorities. Disclaiming their own greatness, modestly presenting themselves as fellow seekers, fallible and struggling, they carefully repeat the praise they get from others. Other people are always telling them how wonderful they are. M. Scott Peck's patients regularly thank him for his insights and compassion, paying tribute. "You really do care for me after all," one woman says, all aglow.⁴ "You're one of the few people, Scotty, who has ever understood me," a member of one of Peck's community workshops says, after Peck has summed him up in a paragraph.⁵ James Dobson is fond of reprinting testimonial letters he receives from readers and listeners (He also has a radio show.).⁶ The generally likable David Seamands introduces his first book with the tearful praise he receives from one of his mentors: "David, I've never heard a sermon quite like that before. I believe what you have found is the answer."⁷ Charles Swindoll admits that a man who praises him for his compassion, openmindedness, and humor has got him "pegged."⁸

The sanctimony is surely heartfelt, but it's also a marketing tool. In order to sell their messages, popular religious writers have to sell themselves. Since there is little substance to their books-little in the way of information, arguments, or new ideas-their power of persuasion is purely personal, deriving solely from trust in the authorial voice and the portraits they paint of themselves. To feel reassured or

⁴M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 172.

⁵M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 123.

⁶James Dobson, Love Must Be Tough (Waco, Texas: Word Publishing, 1983).

⁷David Searnands, Healing for Damaged Emotions (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1981), P. 11.

⁸Charles Swindoll, Come Before Winter and Share My Hope (New York: Living Books, 1985), p. 406.

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enlightened by these books, you have to like the authors and believe in them, trusting in their certitude.

Precisely what are these authors certain about? Some common attitudes or preoccupations emerge from a sampling of more than thirty popular Christian books:⁹

(1) The universe is essentially a moral, just, and ordered place, in which everything happens for the best or, at least, can be put to good use. Faith illuminates the silver linings; it makes happiness and salvation available to everyone.

(2) The universe is not a place to navigate alone. Self-sufficiency, or the pretense of it, is a sin. We are not the masters of our fate. We must acknowledge our dependence upon God; by submitting, we receive God's love.

(3) American individualism, "selfism," competitiveness, and the ethic of achievement are sinful, too, as well as being unhealthy, isolating us from God and each other, focusing our energies on worldly pursuits, fostering the arrogant illusion of self-sufficiency.

(4) Loving yourself, however, is as important as loving your neighbor; it is the basis for a healthy relationship with God (which is essentially individual, not communal). Loving yourself is even a scriptural imperative. Low self-esteem is sinful, like self-sufficiency. It's an affront to God, who loves you, warts and all.

(5) Evil is a kind of personality disorder, which is not to deny the existence of Satan. Personality disorders may be weapons of Satan, who, like a bad parent, deprives you of self-esteem and plays upon your weaknesses.

(6) God is a good parent, loving and trustworthy, who asks only that you allow yourself to be redeemed. Salvation is a function of faith.

What's interesting about these familiar messages is their blend of religion, popular psychology, and popular communitarian critiques of American culture. Although many, if not most, religious books are published by religious presses and speak to subcultures of believers, especially conservative Christians, they partake in prevailing mainstream notions about goodness, health, selfhood, and social relations. The boundary between theology and social science has been crossed before, notably by William James and, more recently, by Joshua Liebman, whose 1948 best-seller, Peace of Mind, looked forward to a redemptive collaboration between religion and psychoanalysis. Divinity schools have long offered courses in pastoral counseling. And, on the margins of denominational religion, from New Thought and Christian Science to New Age, spiritualism has sought credibility in pseudo-science, fashioning a weird physics of cosmic energy, while

⁹Harold Kushner, the only bestselling Jewish writer in the field, shares some of these views, but offers a significantly different image of God and our relationship with the divine.

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borrowing from new theories about the human psyche and the power of imagination. "Thoughts are things," proponents of New Thought used to say. But the marriage of religion and pscyhology has been tentative and episodic, disrupted by Freud, and marked by periods of considerable hostility on both sides for much of this century. Now, we're witnessing not just a truce, but a remarkable accommodation.

Many religious writers would minimize or dismiss the effect of psychology on religion, fiercely denying that it has made doctrinal changes, but it does seem to have influenced the tone and packaging of religious appeals. There are few warnings about fire and brimstone and lots of encomiums to mercy and grace. God is invariably portrayed as the ideal parent whose love you can never exhaust; you can only reject it. Do our notions of good parenting derive from our relations with God, as religious writers suggest, or is our vision of God shaped by our parents? How you answer that question probably determines whether, at heart, you're a cleric or a shrink.

Meanwhile, Christian therapy is a burgeoning field. Like Dolly Parton singing Gershwin, Christian crossovers to psychology combine a kind of pastoral counseling with the practice of individual or family therapy, often focusing on popular problems of addiction and abuse. Christian therapists at the Minirth-Meier psychiatric clinic in Texas produce a successful series of wellness or recovery books in conjunction with Thomas Nelson, a leading religious trade publisher. Dealing with the problem of codependency, the "disease" from which everyone-alcoholics, overeaters, and compulsive shoppers-is trying to recover, the Minirth-Meier books are practically indistinguishable from self-help books published by secular presses, except for their reliance on Jesus, "The most effective means for overcoming codependent relationships is to establish a relationship with Christ Himself," Frank Minirth, co-founder of the Minirth-Meier clinic, writes.¹⁰ David Seamands, former missionary and pastor, now a professor of pastoral ministries, also draws heavily on popular psychology, stressing that the insights of psychotherapists come from God and that counseling is God's work. M. Scott Peck stresses that mental and spiritual problems are one.

Complementing this embrace of psychology by religious writers is the increasing religiosity of popular psychology. Therapists are urged to heed their client's spiritual needs, and twelve-step groups, part of the phenomenally successful recovery movement, are overtly religious. Rooted in Alcoholics Anonymous and the Oxford Group, they stress submission to a Higher Power, describing addiction-to food, sex, alcohol, or shopping-as enthrallment to a false god. For people struggling with addictions and personality disorders, real and imagined, the messages from religion and psychology are compatible and clear: Therapy is a door to redemption, and faith is a door to recovery.

¹⁰Robert Hernfelt, Frank Minirth, and Paul Meier, Love is Choice (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1989), p. 277.

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Religious writers justify their reliance on psychology by praising it for "catching up" to some eternal truths, but they've also found a way to make the temporal truths of psychology palatable. Religious leaders once condemned psychoanalysis for its moral neutrality (Freud made everyone "nice," Fulton Sheen complained.).¹¹ Now popular religious literature equates illness with sin (Satan works through personality disorders.), which makes psychology a penitential technique, if not a form of exorcism. While religious writers stress repeatedly that psychology is only a spiritual too], some therapists might consider religion only a therapeutic one. But whether psychology has caught up to religion, infiltrated it, or been adopted by it, the most popular versions of both psychology and religion are becoming less and less distinguishable. Like Macy's and Gimbel's, therapists and religious leaders are happily staking out a common market.

II

M. Scott Peck is the most successful, widely known Christian therapist with the broadest mainstream audience. His books turn up on the most unexpected shelves, even in the homes of people you'd swear were agnostic. But Peck is in touch with his times. In the past fifteen years, his own career path as an expert and best-selling author has taken him from a generalized, inclusive belief in God to Christianity, and from the conduct of individual therapy to workshops in building community. All of this is in keeping with cultural trends toward organized religion and the idealization of community.

Peck did not turn to Christianity until after publication of his first book, The Road Less Traveled (1978). It cloaked a familiar, popularized account of psychotherapy in the vague, non-demominational, "Star Wars" sort of spirituality that was popular in the late 70s. Psychotherapy is presented as an act of love. Emotional growth is said to involve acceptance of God. People "grow in the direction of belief."¹² In 1980, at the age of 43, Peck was baptized, as he reveals in the introduction to his second book, People of the Lie, a discussion of evil and demonic possession. "We must ultimately belong either to God or the Devil," he warns.¹³ His third and latest book, The Different Drum, a paean to community and a description of his own accomplishments as a leader in community building techniques, draws upon Robert Bellah's trendsetting book, Habits of the Heart (1985).

Despite his conversion, Peck is the least doctrinaire of the popular Christian writers and, so, the most accessible to non-Christians with amorphous spiritual yearnings. The image of God that emerges from his books is a cross between a gentle patriarch and a New Age life force. Although Peck has devoted an entire book to the subject of evil (and occasionally notes that life is hard), he shares the optimism and

¹¹Fulton Sheen, Peace of Soul (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), p. 70.

¹²Peck, The Road Less Traveled, p. 223.

¹³Peck, People of the Lie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 83.

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belief in salvation of most popular Christian writers, and, like virtually all self-help writers, he assures readers that everything is possible once the right techniques are mastered. "With total discipline we can solve all problems," he promises in the opening pages of his first book, and discipline itself is only a "system of techniques." As for evil, it is "strangely ineffective as a social force,"¹⁴ which would surprise anyone who's even heard of genocide. Through Christ, "the defeat of evil is utterly assured,"¹⁵ and "the human race is spiritually progressing. We are growing toward godhead."¹⁶

Peck's style, too, is "oracular," as well as upbeat. He's an amateurish writer who favors short, declarative sentences, and sometimes the unchanging rhythm of them is soporific. "It's like reading a million fortune cookies," I thought about his first book, until I got used to it. Contemplating suffering, redemption, and various existential uncertainties, he's Hamlet played by Polonius.

What is there to analyze in books of platitudes billed as revelations? Sometimes all you can say in response to his assertions is "Oh." We learn that "human beings are profoundly different and profoundly similar,"¹⁷ and "Truth is reality. That which is false is unreal." "Ultimately love is everything," he says, paraphrasing the Beatles, promising us that "the mystery of love will be examined in later portions of this work." Indeed, we soon learn that love is the "energy for discipline," which is itself the "means of human spiritual evolution."¹⁸ Oh.

It's likely that even Peck's most avid readers would have trouble explaining or even paraphrasing his ideas. (When Mary Baker Eddy's followers talked about Christian Science, Mark Twain observed, "they do not use their own language; but the book's; they pour out the book's showy incoherencies.") Talking about Peck's theology, people often talk simply about Peck. He's loving, wise, patient, firm yet kind, they say, describing the perfect parent (and the God who emerges from most of these books). Or, they ruminate very generally on themes and buzzwords that run through most contemporary self-help literatureself-awareness and self-esteem, spiritual growth (or evolution), and the discovery of a loving, omniscient force outside one's self.

Submission to this force-voluntary surrender of the self to God-is a traditional enough religious goal. It is very strongly stressed by all the Protestant writers, as well as in the more secularized recovery movement. If salvation, or recovery, is a struggle, it's a struggle of the will. ("I took back my will," people say at A.A. meetings, explaining their lapses.) Peck defines evil as the "unsubmitted will. It's almost tempting to think that the problem of evil lies in the will itself.

¹⁴Peck, The Road Less Traveled, pp. 16, 77, 279.

¹⁵Peck, People of the Lie, p. 205.

¹⁶Peck, The Road Less Traveled, pp. 267, 270.

¹⁷Peck, The Different Drum, p. 176.

¹⁸Peck, The Road Less Traveled, pp. 44, 22, 8 1.

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There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will, which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil."¹⁹ Ultimately, the only good thing one can will is willlessness.

Liberals, romantics, and any student of totalitarianism may find this chilling. There is surely enough recent historical evidence associating submission, not independence of will, with enslavement to evil. In their eagerness to submit, not everyone can distinguish God from the devil.

Popular religious writers address this problem briefly, breezily, or incoherently, if at all. James Dobson, perhaps the most unabashedly authoritarian of the lot, is concerned with the problem of permissiveness, not submission. A Christian family counselor, he seems obsessed with vanquishing rebellious children, asserting that the task of a parent is to " 'conquer' the will."²⁰ Charles Swindoll concedes that there are "cultic leaders" who take advantage of submissiveness: "Any minister who requires blind loyalty and unquestioning obedience is suspect," he says, but that's all he says. "With all that cleared up we are now ready for some positive input into the correct mentality of a servant,"²¹ he concludes, as if the holocaust might have been prevented with a homily. M. Scott Peck offers this guide to distinguishing true and false religions: "Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox. Falsity [by] onesidedness and failure to integrate the whole."²² Oh.

To true believers, I suppose, the difference between the false and the true is simply self-evident. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous remark about obscenity, "I know it when I see it," may be all we can finally say about God. But that's not saying much in a world in which some die and kill for Mah, some for Christ, and some for ideologies, while others send their savings to Jim Bakker. I'm not suggesting that religious writers are responsible for curing mass hysteria, meanness, bad judgment, and bad faith. But writers regarded as experts on God who preach submission share some of the blame for its consequences.

Swindoll, Dobson, Peck, and others would probably respond that they only lead readers toward what's true, and we can only take their word for that. Or they might deny that they ignore the problem of submissiveness, pointing to the occasional sentence acknowledging it. Peck admits that there is such a thing as "unhealthy nationalism,"²³ but he doesn't blame it on the abdication of will he preaches, to which we owe the Nuremburg defense.

It is, at first, a little surprising to see more rhetoric about submission

¹⁹Peck, People of the Lie, pp. 78-79, 83.

²⁰James Dobson, Parenting Isn't For Cowards (Waco, Texas: Word Publications, 1987), P. 89.

²¹Charles Swindoll, Improving Your Serve (Waco, Texas: Word Publications, 1982), p. 83,84.

²²Peck, The Different Drum, p. 240.

²³Ibid., p. 288.

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than individual freedom of action and thought in what are, after all, American self-help books. Religious teachings about submission are, ,on their face, at odds with the mystique of individualism and the self-willed, self-made person. Individualism is rather out of fashion (and religious writers rail against it), but it is still an important strain of Americanism. To an American audience it would still seem important, at least, to explain that in voluntary submission to God lies freedom. Fulton Sheen did this eloquently in his best-selling book, Peace of Soul (1949):

To the extent that we abandon our personality to Him, He will take possession of our will and work in us... by almost imperceptible suggestions that rise up from within... He suggests to us; we are never conscious of being under command. Thus our service to Him becomes the highest form of liberty.²⁴

Popular religious writers today rarely rise to Sheen's rhetorical heights. (Literacy and standards for popular writing have declined in the past forty years.) But it is also worth noting that Sheen was writing in opposition to emerging postwar personal development movements. Peace of Soul is, in some ways, an answer to Joshua Liebman's Peace Of Mind and a powerful diatribe against psychoanalysis. Not writing from within the tradition he was attacking, as religious self-help writers partly do, Sheen could explore the nature of submission directly, without subterfuge. His message about submission is complex but clear, undiluted by the rhetoric about doing it your way that is common in self-help literature. Nor does he seem compelled to profess periodically that he has no special insights about God, as self-help writers today are expected to do. That's how they make their authority palatable-how they reconcile the mandate for self-surrender with the quest for self-improvement.

Self-help writers, religious or not, also like to present themselves as mere facilitators of spiritual, personal, or professional development, saying that saving yourself or succeeding is an individual process. Everyone has his or her own road to traverse. (They never address the potential conflicts this poses with their calls for community.) Self-help generally carries on a tradition of pietism, in some peculiarly mercantile American way. But the individualizing of religious experience, or spiritual journeys, is partial, leaving no one independent of God. Only the process is individualized, not the ultimate truth that the process is aimed at uncovering. There may be many roads but only one destination-the true and only God. Often the experts share in God's glory.

Like their secular counterparts, religious self-help writers are rarely honest on the subject of authority and submission. They almost always claim a fellowship with their readers, admitting their own fallacies, sins, and neuroses: Gordon MacDonald devotes a book to his

²⁴Sheen, Peace of Soul, p. 188.

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repentance of adultery, and M. Scott Peck briefly confesses a character disorder. But disclaiming expertise, self-proclaimed experts can only be liars or frauds. Peck mentions the need to tolerate ambiguity and talks about not leading, but he always sounds quite sure of himself, and he's marketed as a leader and a seer. He bemoans our tendency to "let our authorities do our thinking for us,"²⁵ but it is a tendency on which he himself thrives.

That Peck views himself as an authority to whom others should submit is clear in his descriptions of encounters with individual patients and groups involved in community building. People who challenge him are generally presented as evil or, at best, spiritually unevolved; in any case, they're always wrong. A psychologist who drops out of one of his community building workshops, claiming that a group of nearly sixty people cannot become a community in two days, apparently gets her comeuppance. After she left, "the remaining 58 of us became a community," Peck reports, another claim we can only take on faith. People who "slip away" from his workshops once community has been formed, perhaps "just cannot bear that much love," Peck muses.²⁶ People who do not share his vision of community and disrupt his groups are evil. Virtually his only reported failure in community building is blamed on a evil woman member who can match his power and gained "enough allies against me to polarize the group and keep it that way."²⁷ Somehow, I long to hear her side of it.

I wonder about his individual therapeutic failures, too, as well as his successes. Practically the only patients he can't help seem to be the ones who willfully reject his wise authority. It's not exactly that Peck is never wrong; it's just that he seems only to err on the side of goodness, believing people can be better than they are.

Peck's case studies are hard to believe, partly because his recreation of dialogue is so clumsy. (He has no ear; everyone sounds alike.) Case studies are routinely fictionalized; maybe we're not meant to take them literally. Peck's cases are pat, self-serving little moral tales that often end with his startlingly incisive diagnosis. He likes telling patients "face to face what [he] thinks of [them,]" which rarely takes more than a paragraph. By revealing his "positive feelings" for one patient, he cures her of promiscuity and leads her to a happy life: "From among her dozens of lovers Marcia immediately picked one and established a meaningful relationship with him which eventually led to a highly successful and satisfying marriage."²⁸

Lucky Marcia. Charlene is a more interesting figure, perhaps the most interesting of Peck's patients-the archetypal evil one who will not be redeemed. She's dishonest, withholding information "for no other reason than to keep control of the show." (Maybe she didn't

²⁵Peck, People of the Lie, p. 258.

²⁶Peck, A Different Drum, p. 130.

²⁷Ibid, p. 124.

²⁸Peck, The Road Less Traveled, pp. 170, 17 1.

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trust him.) She's also sexually aggressive, not just haplessly promiscuous like Marcia. She comes on to him, and he's repelled, "nauseated," which is a clue to her malevolence. "Certainly I usually have no difficulty feeling warmly toward patients who entrust their love to me," Peck assures us.²⁹

Peck presents Charlene as quite sick (He later discovers she's bad.), and works with her for nearly four years. She does not progress; indeed, at one point she rejects God, crying out that she does not want to "live for him." What further proof have we of Charlene's evil? How does he "sum up" the "alien" force in her? Well, there's her attitude toward the weather. Charlene only liked "grey days dismal days," either because "they made the rest of us miserable," Peck suggests or because "she love[d] them for their ugliness and vibrate[d] to something in them so utterly alien that we have no name for it."³⁰ Maybe she was simply depressed.

Despite Charlene's perversity, it seems that Peck is patient and compassionate, as usual. Charlene's ultimate failure as a patient is just that-her failure, not his. She leaves uncured mainly because of "her failure to regress," to become a child with him, innocent and truly trusting.³¹

Unless you trust Peck absolutely, it's impossible to know whether or not Charlene was evil and incurable. It does seem likely that their relationship, if it existed, was fraught with power plays. What he apparently disliked most about her, apart from sexual aggressiveness, was her willfulness and desire for control. "Charlene's desire to make a conquest of me, to toy with me, to utterly control our relationship, knew no bounds." And she does enjoy a "petty" victory over him in the end, terminating the relationship over his objections in a "remarkable tour deforce."³²

Charlene's case is worth describing not just because Peck takes so much time with it, but because as a depiction of evil, she's so predictable. That is, she is what you would expect Peck to choose as an embodiment of evil: a sexually aggressive, controlling female patient who challenges his authority and will not play the child to his perfect parent. Peck's most memorable evil characters are stereotypically evil women. Apart from Charlene, there are a dreadful dominatrix and a couple of selfish, narcissistic mothers. Peck suggests, in passing, that bad mothers cause schizophrenia. "I frequently found the mothers of schizophrenics to be extraordinarily narcissistic individuals."³³ Readers aware of evidence that schizophrenia is a genetically transmitted disease may question Peck's motives and judgment. But maybe they can't bear that much love.

For some people, even loving psychotherapy is not redemptive. (In

²⁹Peck, People of the Lie, pp. 154, 155.

³⁰Ibid., p. 173.

³¹Ibid., p. 159.

³²Ibid., p. 176.

³³Peck, The Road Less Traveled, p. 163.

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hindsight, Peck says he might recommend an exorcism for Charlene.) Despite their optimism, Christian writers generally maintain a belief in the darker side of human beings, or original sin. The insistence that we are each born with dispositions, personalities, is a common theme, which partly underlies traditional religious opposition to psychoanalysis. It chose nurture over nature in explanations of human behavior, religious writers complain: Conceiving of every infant as as a tabula rasa, psychoanalysis absolved people of ultimate responsibility for their acts, blaming their parents instead. Psychoanalysts were also accused of ignoring the destructive force of the individual will (They chose instinct over will, Fulton Sheen asserted.), not to mention Satan.

III

What popular religious writers don't recognize is that the human will unaided can also be a force for good. Peck says that good, healthy people are those who "do what God wants them to do rather than what they would desire."³⁴ But perhaps goodness is a matter of maintaining your own sense (not God's) of what's right and marrying it to what you want to do. Perhaps goodness is the marriage of principle and desire. Believers, like Peck, essentially agree, but they add that only God can lead us to the altar. (It's just that, as Fulton Sheen said, God's suggestions are almost imperceptible, so we don't feel we're being led.) Of course, faith in the mere possibility of being good without God is fundamentally irreligious. If there is goodness without God, then religion is, at best, a fairy tale. At worst, it corrupts people with lies. "Religion is only good for good people," Mary McCarthy said.³⁵

It is probably neither reasonable nor realistic to expect popular religious writers even to entertain the possibility of godless people being good. Harold Kushner, departing from the Protestant writers, admits that atheists may be good, but they can't be happy. Instead, goodness is presented as proof that God exists (You can only reason your way to faith by assuming your conclusions). Goodness proves God's grace, and grace proves the futility of human striving. In Peace of Mind, Joshua Liebman describes the self as an achievement, but the popular Protestant writers would probably disagree. Out of popular teachings about salvation by grace, the self emerges as a kind of liability, a burden to be shed, a cage to be transcended. Grace is the blessing that saves us from the cursed self.

Focusing on grace, popular Protestant literature offers readers not only the promise of salvation but also the assurance that they need not push themselves too hard or fret about their failures. "Grace says you have nothing to give, nothing to earn, nothing to pay," Charles Swindoll writes in Grace Awakening.³⁶ This reminder that you cannot

³⁴Peck, People of the Lie, p. 78.

³⁵Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1946), p. 23.

³⁶Charles Swindoll, Grace Awakening (Waco, Texas: Word Publications, 1990), p. 87.

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earn God's love duplicates, or is duplicated by, the recovery movement message that a good parent loves you unconditionally; discussions of grace are blended with popular psychology as religious writers address what they claim is the special problem of "burn-out" and "perfectionism" among Christians striving to be good, but feeling bad. You have to love yourself as your neighbor, almost everybody says. You have to love yourself in order to receive God's grace.

Self-esteem is hardly an original theme for self-help writers today, and perfectionism is part of what more secular or, at least, nondemoninational writers consider the disease of codependency. Twelve-step groups are filled with people bemoaning their drive to be perfect, their low self-esteem, and the "shaming" behavior of their abusive parents. "Christians can be such shamers!" Swindoll remarks,³⁷ shamelessly borrowing some jargon.

Christians are said to be particularly prone to burn-out and perfectionism because of their ethic of service, not to mention their high moral standards. The emphasis on personal performance is still a kind of sin, as David Seamands explains: "The performance based Christian life comes from the malignant virus of sinful pride-a pride which encourages us to build our lives upon a deadly lie that everything depends on what we do."³⁸ Perfectionism and the "shame" it generates are also said to reflect a distorted, sinful view of God as an abusive, "shaming" parent. But burn-out is the kind of problem people are proud to have: "We just can't help being good," you imagine them sighing. James Dobson rather pridefully suggests that Christians are especially susceptible to parent burn-out because "the family ranks near the top of our value system and our way of life focuses on self-sacrifice and commitment to others,"³⁹ as if non-Christians are naturally more selfish and care less about their kids.

Christians also have a special cure for stress and over-achieving, and when they're not psychologizing about the perils of gracelessness, the experts are upbeat about the promise of grace, which has the appeal of what is otherwise condemned as permissiveness. For too long we've been surrounded by too many "do's and don't's,"⁴⁰ Charles Swindoll says, offering readers freedom from strict rules about behavior. Not that Swindoll is loathe to set down rules about belief. The doctrine of salvation by works is heresy, he proclaims. But his focus is on the liberating power of realizing that you are not held accountable for your deeds, only for your willingness to believe; you need not, cannot, justify yourself or work your way to heaven. "In fact, the individual whose track record is morally pure has no better chance at earning God's favor than the individual who has made a wreck and waste of his life."⁴¹

³⁷Ibid., p. 231.

³⁸David Searnands, Healing Grace (Wheaton, EL: Victor Books, 1988), p. 26.

³⁹Jarnes Dobson, Parenting Isn't for Cowards (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1987), p. 131.

⁴⁰Charies Swindoll, Grace Awakening, p. xv.

⁴¹Ibid., p. 25.

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If some people find this comforting, others will think it's grossly unfair. That the doctrine of grace can excuse, encourage, or at least trivialize bad behavior is a familiar charge. The equally familiar reply is that people who embrace Christ and are blessed with grace naturally behave well. But the promise of salvation extends, of course, to sinners who come to Jesus late in life, without much time left for good behavior, which may arouse resentment in their victims or other people who sinned less. Charles Stanley has the salve for this: Not everyone in heaven is equal, he explains in Etemal Security, envisioning heaven as a sort of fiefdom in which people who led good lives constitute the aristocracy and sinners are the serfs.⁴²

Popular proponents of grace rarely consider its conceivable inequities, however, or feel the need, as Stanley does, to assure us that God is fair. Swindoll would probably condemn the concept of a fair God as an Old Testament legalism. Grace means no good deeds go rewarded while no bad deeds go punished. The good news is that God is not fair.

Legalism, which Swindoll associates with Judaism, is one of his favorite diabolisms, along with intellectualism and humanism-a belief in the efficacy of human endeavor. Writing about "this Satanic pressurized system we call the world, "⁴³ Swindoll partakes in the traditional evangelical disdain for worldly activity that has been tempered in recent decades by the religious right's political activism.

He partakes even more passionately in the tradition of antiintellectualism, describing reason as a barrier to faith and including among his favorite targets intellectuals, academics, and the Ivy League. To express disdain for religious pluralism, he mocks what he calls "the Harvard approach" to spreading God's word. "The thinking behind this method is: Let's discuss all the world's religions. Since it's reason-centered, it attracts both genuine and pseudo-intellectuals no one ever gets saved!"⁴⁴ Some most likely get damned, if Swindoll is right about intellectualism and the problem of "secularism" of which it is a part. He sees "secular thought" as a dangerous virus from which Christians are not immune: "Many a believer has surrendered his mind to the world system.... Humanism, secularism, intellectualism, and materialism have invaded our thinking."⁴⁵

Swindoll would vigorously deny the obvious: that he encourages readers not to think. It's true that he bemoans the decline of reading, but that's a little like a pornographer bemoaning the decline of moral values. Swindoll only wants readers to think as he does, and as Christ did before him. The goal is "to think so much like Christ that our minds operate on a different plane than others around us."⁴⁶ Only some knowledge is dangerous, he'd say. Knowledge of Scripture is

⁴²Charles Stanley, Eternal Security (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1990).

⁴³Swindoll, Come Before Winter, p. 114.

⁴⁴Ibid., pp. 148-149.

⁴⁵Charles Swindoll, Improving Your Serve (Waco, Texas: Word Publications, 1981), p. 133.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 84.

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redemptive. Like a Maoist, Swindoll lays down rules about proper and improper or subversive thinking. For him, the enemy within is "European liberalism, with its subtle narcotic of humanism and socialism."⁴⁷

If intellectualism is a sin, Swindoll is a virtuous man. His books are disorganized, derivative collections of anecdotes, platitudes, complaints about modern life, and frequent evocations of Scripture. Chatty, colloquial, and not always grammatical, Swindoll is the Andy Rooney of conservative Christian preachers. "Yourself, yourself, yourself. We're up to here with self!," he announces,⁴⁸ sounding just like Rooney declaring that he's sick and tired of digging through the Cracker Jacks to find the prize. Swindoll's carefully cultivated "common man" image is at the center of his books. He presents himself as a plain-talking, commonsensical, amiable, and virile preacher, taking care to tell us several times that he's an ex-Marine. He's a muscular Christian, a "champion of purity," an archetypal nineteenth century Protestant American male.

Twentieth century non-Christian American females, among others, will find little respect, much less comfort, in his books. He's a firm believer in very traditional sex roles and the importance of something called "female femininity" and "male masculinity." Men and women have five respective major needs, he claims regarding the sexes as separate, uniformly different species. Men's needs include admiration and an attractive spouse; women need financial security and a commitment to family life.⁴⁹ He's also anti-Semitic. Hebrews were "religious but not Godly,"⁵⁰ legalistic but also, Swindoll implies, hypocritical. If they considered God's relationship to humanity a bargain, a deal, they failed to keep their end of it. The Hebrews whom God led out of Egypt were a "thankless crowd," always complaining and incapable of faith, even in the face of miracles like the parting of the sea. I'm not sure how God felt about their skepticism, but Swindoll, for one, "cannot excuse their forgetting [God's] unconditional promise."⁵¹ In another discussion of "the Exodus crowd," Swindoll implies that the holocaust was a kind of recompense for turning away from God, a "warning" of where idolatry, carnality, and other sins may lead you-to Dachau, I guess.⁵²

Oh well, no writer can please everyone, and Swindoll does make clear that his books are intended for Christians, whom he portrays as a spiritual elite with vaguely defined powers. "God has somehow placed into the Christian's insides a special something, that extra inner reservoir of power that is more than a match for the stuff life throws at us." Non-Christians are "victims, trapped and bound like slaves in a

⁴⁷Swindoll, Come Before Winter, p. 164.

⁴⁸Swindoll, Improving Your Serve, p. 39.

⁴⁹Swindoll, Grace Awakening, p. 256.

⁵⁰Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip (Waco, Texas: Word Publications, 1982), p. 197.

⁵¹Swindoll, Dropping Your Guard (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 35, 38.

⁵²Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip, pp. 199, 200.

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fierce and endless struggle unable to choose righteous paths consistently."⁵³ Like a sidewalk psychic, Swindoll flatters his Christian audience: "... [Y]ou are different. You wouldn't have read this far if you weren't... you are tired of the superficial. You want to be a force for good in a world of evil."⁵⁴

What advice does Swindoll offer to help you reach this goal? Improving Your Serve, the first in a highly successful series of three tennis metaphor titles, consists of the usual maxims about the trouble with me-ism and looking out for number one, laments about alienation, and reminders of the joys of Christ's love, Christian thinking, and an ethic of service. Precisely how do you become an "authentic" Christian servant? "By a radical transformation within. By a renewed thought pattern that demonstrates authentic Godlikeness." Oh. His next book, Strengthening Your Grip, takes off from a complaint about the "aimlessness" of contemporary American culture, offering inspirational messages about getting a grip on everything from money to prayer. The third book in this series, Dropping Your Guard, claims to be about "the value of open relationships." It, too, complains about me-ism and celebrates the joys of sharing.

Swindoll has a genuine talent for assembling the same book several times, blending whatever popular cultural wisdom may exist at the moment with his religious beliefs into "bite size chunks we don't gag on."⁵⁵ Sometimes the results are bizarre. In his collection of little inspirational writings, Come Before Winter, he blithely mines the sacred and mundane in random sequences of inspirational sound bites. One moment he's talking about sleeping in church; then he's delivering thirty-second sermons about jealousy, determination, and the problem of witch-hunting. After some platitudes about living with pain, he lists twenty-five character traits "generally found in creative, innovative people." All this appears in a book that's billed as advice for people in times of stress and sadness. Swindoll is not one to be bound by a theme. Between bites about "Tough Days" and "Why Do We Suffer?," he offers advice about writing "Letters of Reference."

Maybe he's simply post-modern. Like a newscaster who can recite an update on world hunger and fashion trends between commercials without segues, Swindoll shifts from the existential to the practical, devoting as much time and passion to such topics as "remembering names" as he does to his views on salvation. Maybe no topic is too small for God's attention. Maybe goodness lies in our willingness to care about details, to write letters of reference as carefully as we pray. Or maybe Swindoll was just filling up pages. In any case, self-help books often confuse the trivial and the tragic. Child abuse, for example, is defined in codependency literature to include everything from inadequate assistance with homework to rape. Religious writers

⁵³Swindoll, Come Before Winter, pp. 199-202,

⁵⁴Swindoll, Improving Your Serve, p. 211.

⁵⁵Ibid., p. 48.

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often address the minutia of daily life as if our souls always hang in the balance.

IV

Gordon MacDonald takes aim at wasting time. Every minute we have must be used wisely ("Time must be budgeted!") in order for us to enjoy a "God pleasing lifestyle," and in order for us to grow. "Unseized time will flow in the direction of one's relative weakness."⁵⁶ Disorderliness is not quite sinful, but sin, MacDonald reminds us, is a kind of disorder. We must organize within for Christ, who shouldn't have to dwell amid our messes.

MacDonald relies less on Scripture than does Swindoll, and more on popular psychology. Sometimes Scripture is an occasion for psychologizing: John the Baptist had good parents, we're told. Bad people, or, rather, "driven" people "gratified only by accomplishment," had bad parents and suffered "early experience[s] of serious deprivation or shame. " MacDonald borrows recovery techniques, as well as jargon; he recommends "journalling," a popular twelve step technique, to help one hear God speak. He also talks a lot about his own struggle to order his inner world, as recovery authors talk about their struggles with addiction.⁵⁷

MacDonald seems to have a genuine passion for organization, considering it serious business indeed. "A disorganized spirit often means lack of inner serenity." This makes him somewhat more distant than Swindoll. Like a schoolmarm he slaps your wrist instead of your back. "The Christian who wants to grow will always take notes when sermons are being preached or Bible classes are being taught,"⁵⁸ we're told. Not taking notes is wasting time.

In this quest to manage time, MacDonald is aided by an apparent obsession with categorization, which makes him a natural self-help writer. He loves making lists, devising labels, dividing the universe into neat, knowable component parts. He's more of a taxonomist than a theologian. The private world, for example, can be neatly divided into five sectors, which conveniently divide his book, Ordering Your Private World. Sector one is "Motivation;" sector two is "Use of Time;" sector three is "Wisdom and Knowledge;" sector four is "Spiritual Strength;" sector five is "Restoration." Prayer should also be organized, and MacDonald has a system:

In order to systematically pray around the world, I have divided up the continents in such a way that I can pray for each one of them: Sunday, Latin America; Monday, Central America; Tuesday, North America; Wednesday, Europe; Thursday, Africa; Friday, Asia; and Saturday, the nations of the Pacific.⁵⁹

⁵⁶Gordon MacDonald, Ordering Your Private World (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1984), pp. 68,75.

⁵⁷Ibid., pp. 31,45.

⁵⁸Ibid., pp. 116,111-112.

⁵⁹Ibid., p. 156.

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People, too, are systematically divided into types. In Renewing Your Spiritual Passion, MacDonald's next book, focusing on Christian burn-out, he lists the five kinds of people who "affect spiritual passion": (1) Very Resourceful People (VRPs) "ignite our passion"; (2) Very Important People (VIPs) "share our passion"; (3) Very Trainable People (VTPs), "catch our passion." Those are the three good kinds of people. The two bad kinds are: (1) Very Nice People (VNPs), who "enjoy our passion", and (2) Very Draining People (VDPs), who "sap our passion."⁶⁰

I imagine MacDonald as one of those people with a very neat desk. I imagine, too, that, having organized it so well, the world must seem quite manageable to him. But something went awry, something fell out of place, because his third book in this series is called Rebuilding Your Broken World. In it, MacDonald confesses to adultery and chronicles his repentance and reordering. "I am Gordon and I am a sinner," he announces in the A.A. tradition. He tells us about the evil he discovered in himself while exploring his inner space. He can't obliterate the evil because it's original sin, but he can manage it. Soon he's listing the four sources of temptations, four principles of rebuilding, and seven ways to defend against sin. All's right with the world once again.

V

While MacDonald counsels adulterers, James Dobson helps out adulterees-mostly women whose husbands have strayed-as well as the wives of batterers and alcoholics. Dobson, host of a popular radio show, is a Christian family counselor, a psychologist, not a minister, by profession. He assures readers that the Bible is his bellwether, that he would never offer advice that contradicted it, and I believe him. Love Must Be Tough, his recent book on troubled marriages, is like a sacralized "Can This Marriage Be Saved" column in a woman's magazine.

In the self-help tradition, Dobson uses anecdotes about marital conflict to illustrate his rules about resolving it. Women should not appease their errant husbands. Instead, "the vulnerable spouse," who always seems to be the wife, should "open the cage door and let the trapped partner out!"⁶¹ Call his bluff. Love is tough.

It is a little disquieting to imagine women blindly applying Dobson's general rules to their idiosyncratic situations, but that is what self-help readers do. It is even more disquieting to contemplate the stereotypes upon which Dobson's rules are based: All marital conflicts are essentially alike only if all people are, too. In Dobson's world, wives nag, sometimes facilitating their own abuse. "I have seen women belittle and berate their husbands until they set them aflame with

⁶⁰Gordon MacDonald, Renewing Your Spiritual Passion (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1986), pp. 69-88.

⁶¹James Dobson, Love Must Be Tough, p. 45.

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rage," he writes. Husbands are seduced by beautiful divorcees: "We must never underestimate the power of sexual chemistry existing between an attractive, needy, available woman and virtually any man on the face of the earth." Women fall into adultery not out of lust, but because they feel neglected by their husbands.⁶²

Maybe some of Dobson's readers run true to type. Maybe some are helped by his advice. Dobson himself seems a stereotype, with predictable prejudices about the evils of modern American life. He prefaces a discussion of homosexuality with this warning: "CAUTION: SENSITIVE INFORMATION FOLLOWS... If you have a weak stomach or don't wish to know the more unpleasant facts about homosexuality, I encourage you to skip the remainder of this section." He disdains feminism, the "so-called woman's movement," for teaching women selfishness and turning them away from God. He disdains women, assuming that they're malleable creatures who need to be fed the right programs. Summing up the "New Woman," he says, "[H]er new system of values has been programmed for her by feminist organizations and publications almost as though a computer software package were keypunched into her brain."⁶³

Children, too, are creatures to be tamed, in Dobson's view. Dare to Discipline, a primer on child rearing, presents the parent-child relationship as a series of power plays. (If this reflects the relationship between God and humankind, Swindoll might be wrong about grace.) Defiant children, under ten years of age, should be spanked: "[P]lain is a marvelous purifier the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely." To discipline older children, remember that "the shoulder muscle is a surprisingly useful source of minor pain."⁶⁴

Dare to Discipline was written in 1970 before there was much public concern about child abuse. But, in his attitudes toward children, Dobson is no slave to fashion. In his 1987 book, Parenting Isn't for Cowards, he still endorses corporal punishment, and he's still preoccupied with breaking strong-willed children, driven by a "raw desire for power. "⁶⁵

For Dobson there are essentially only two types of children, compliant and willful (guess which he prefers), and he begins Parenting Isn't for Cowards with a report on his own parent poll about compliance and willfullness. Strong-willed children outnumber compliant children by about two to one; they're stressful, hard to handle, and ultimately less likely to succeed. Compliant children are better students, who are more likely to become well-adjusted adolescents and successful adults.

These "facts" are interesting only as indications of Dobson's

⁶²Ibid., pp. 150,16.

⁶³Ibid., pp. 164,159.

⁶⁴James Dobson, Dare to Discipline (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1973), pp. 16, 23, 27.

⁶⁵Dobson, Parenting Isn't for Cowards, p. 110.

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prejudices; the poll from which they were gleaned seems worthless. The terms "compliant" and "willful" were not defined. Parental labeling of children was purely subjective, as were parental assessments of their children's success as young adults. In the self-help world, however, a poll like this is what passes for scholarship, and it helps give Dobson an aura of expertise.

But Dobson doesn't really need empirical evidence that willfulness is bad, or at least problematic; for him, that's an article of faith. A child who rebels against his parents is more likely to rebel against God, and Dobson stresses that strong-willed children, especially, must be taught about "divine accountability." They must be taught that God's laws are enforced: "The wages of sin is death and children have a right to understand that fact." Dobson fondly recalls his own mother's teachings about "heaven and hell and the great Judgment Day when those who have been covered by the blood of Jesus will be separated eternally from those who have not."⁶⁶ In Dobson's book, God believes in tough love, too.

If this unabashed authoritarianism is currently out of vogue, it does provide a measure of the fist inside the velvet glove of grace. If God is portrayed as the perfect parent of recovery literature, God is still a parent who expects to be obeyed. Grace entails the promise of forgiveness only if we come around in the end. (It's not too late, preachers on 42nd Street proclaim into their microphones, but, someday, it will be.) Dying in disbelief, we risk damnation. Given this omnipresent threat of dreadful retribution, God's well-publicized expectation that we obey out of love, not fear, seems a little unrealistic.

Believers might reply that loving obedience can only be experienced, not imagined or explained, though explaining is precisely what self-help writers aim to do. Moreover, to question the possibility of obedience without fear is to question the larger religious ideal of loving self-surrender, which popular Christian writers tend to present as fairly easy.

David Seamands, at least, admits that it's hard. "Self-surrender is the ultimate crisis because it represents the ultimate spiritual battle," he advises. "It may take a long time to travel from conversion to self-surrender."⁶⁷ Seamands describes surrender of the will to Christ the way addiction experts describe recovery: as a process, not an event. You can promise to be guided by God's will ever after, but you must carry out that promise day by day.

Seamands focuses on the barriers one encounters along the way, between conversion and surrender, familiar barriers such as "the perfectionist complex." He calls it "the most disturbing emotional problem among evangelical Christians" (self-help writers like hyperbole). Perfectionism is characterized by "tyranny of the oughts

⁶⁶Ibid., pp. 106,107.

⁶⁷David Searnands, Putting Away Childish Things (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1982), pp. 122,125.

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self-depreciation... anxiety [and] legalism... anger [and] denial." The cure, of course, is grace, or rather the "process of growth in grace."⁶⁸ The causes include "unpleasable parents" and "unpredicatable home situations."

Like M. Scott Peck and the Minirth-Meier authors, Seamands is a Christian counselor, offering instruction in psychology as well as religion. His basic message, too, is that mental and spiritual health are entwined: "The mechanisms of our personalities which we use in faith are the same instruments through which our feelings operate." Thus, religious dysfunction-atheism or a belief in salvation by works-is attributed to psychological dysfunctions such as paranoia or low self-esteem, which are attributed to (what else?) dysfunctional families and Satan, too. (Low self-esteem is "the most powerful psychological weapon that Satan uses against Christians."⁶⁹)

Searnands, thus, neatly reconciles religion and psychology and provides his Christian audience with what may be genuinely helpful: simple, commonsensical lessons about personality development and the relationship of temperament to faith. (Christians may have emotional problems, too, he assures them.) He's not as relentlessly self-aggrandizing as his colleagues, or competitors, so the lessons seem more sincere. They're also more interesting because Seamands ventures into what could be dangerous ground, the psychoanalysis of religious belief, except that he only psychoanalyzes disbelief.

Bad relationships with God derive from bad relationships with parents, or, as Seamands says, Christians with "damaged love receptors" can't receive God's love and distort the divine character, presuming God to be untrustworthy, critical, and "unpleasable," like their parents. This is more or less conventional wisdom in popular Protestant literature, but Seamands elaborates on it, with some thoughtfulness, recognizing that what you tell people about God is "filtered through" their personalities. He concedes that "the facetious remark'Man creates God in his own image'-contains an element of truth."⁷⁰ What he does not, and perhaps cannot, consider is the possibility that a "healthy" Christian outlook reflects temperament and conditioning, too-not truth.

VI

Whether we analyze faith or the lack of it probably depends upon whether we're one of the faithful. The intellectual effort to explain or to categorize, to "lay bare the causes" of attitudes and beliefs, is essentially hostile, as William James observed: It's a "method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy."⁷¹ But, as

⁶⁸David Seamands, Healing for Damaged Emotions (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1981), pp. 79-93.

⁶⁹Ibid., pp. 117,49.

⁷⁰David Seamands, Healing of Memories (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1985), pp. 100-103,97.

⁷¹William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 11-12.

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James also pointed out, faith reflects a willingness, a capacity, to believe: "Our belief in truth itself that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire?"⁷² The truths we choose are also functions of our temperament, and some temperaments are unable to believe in any truth at all; some "never are [or] could be converted."⁷³

It is the failure of popular Protestant writers to recognize this-that some people are temperamentally incapable of Christian belief-that I find most troubling, particularly in the context of their views on salvation. In the end, we are saved by belief and damned by the lack of it, even if we live well and try hard to believe but cannot. "The Holy Spirit does not condemn us because we have failed to be good. He convicts us, says Jesus, 'about sin, because men do not believe in Me.' Grace brings us to the place of real guilt, real guilt for our only sin-failing to believe in Jesus Christ and trust Him for right relatedness to God."⁷⁴

As an article of faith, this doctrine of salvation by grace and grace alone is remarkably unappealing to me. It takes, I think, remarkable disregard for justice to idealize a God who so values belief over action. I prefer the God who looks down upon us (in a very old joke) and says, "I wish they'd stop worrying about whether or not I exist and start obeying my commandments."

Is it possible to posit moral standards in a godless world? Most popular religious writers don't even raise the question (though they answer it implicitly, blaming modern immorality on godlessness). Harold Kushner, at least, considers the possibility of ethical humanism before rejecting it, devoting his most recent book to the subject of Who Needs God? (We do, of course.) Faith in some God, one God, is essential to our construct of a moral world, he concludes. (God's suggestion that we obey the laws of God without the certainty of the existence of God is, in this view, wishful thinking.) Like the Protestant writers, Kushner associates godlessness with moral relativism: Without God, matters of morality become mere matters of "personal taste," he warns.⁷⁵ But he doesn't fully acknowledge that our tastes in God are also personal and idiosyncratic. It is as difficult for us to agree about the nature of the one true God as it is for us to reach consensus on hard questions like abortion. What difference does God make?

Kushner addresses our deep divisions about God mostly by denying them, claiming, in the end, that we have a shared sense of injustice that comes from God. Our differences are differences in detail, he might say, and Kushner is tolerant of different approaches to God. ("Religions can disagree and still each be true."⁷⁶) He describes a sort of

⁷²William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 9.

⁷³James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 204.

⁷⁴David Seamands, Healing Grace (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1988), p. 137.

⁷⁵Harold Kushner, Who Needs God (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), p. 71.

⁷⁶Ibid., p. 196.

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moral umbrella of monotheism, not insisting on the superiority of any particular denomination.

Like A Scott Peck, Kushner speaks to a broad, non-denominational audience, with vaguely articulated questions about God, or simply a sense of existential unease. His first bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, offers an accessible reading of the Book of Job that will comfort people who don't like imagining God as a bully. Evil exists because God is powerless to eradicate it, Kushner believes. God is not testing us or showing divine power (as one of the Minirth-Meier authors suggests); God is not carrying out some master plan that requires a little evil along the way. Kushner is refreshingly critical of the platitudes inflicted upon people who sustain terrible losses: Losing your children or being crippled in a senseless accident is not simply "for the best." Evil cannot be rationalized or sacralized. God grieves with us over injustices that God can only give us strength to bear.⁷⁷

Not everyone will find solace in this view. It requires that we give up a belief in God's omnipotence and in the notion that everything happens for good reason. It requires us to believe in randomness, the possibility of inexplicable bad luck, A lot of us prefer to believe in sin, original or derivative, regarding evil as moral recompense or karma. Kushner's notion of evil is a challenging one; it presents us with a universe that even God cannot entirely control.

Uncertainty, however, is not what we seek in religion, and Kushner assures us in his latest book, Who Needs God?, that the universe is ordered and purposeful after all. Or, at least, he has chosen to believe that it is. "We seem to need to see the world as one that makes sense,"⁷⁸ he observes, as if our need for God proves that God exists. Popular religious writers generally assume that mystery itself proves God. M. Scott Peck points to recoveries he can't explain as signs of grace, as if whatever he doesn't understand is holy.

To describe religion as wishful thinking is not to deny its usefulness or power. Faith can be self-fulfilling, as James suggested: To leap across an abyss, you are better served by faith than doubt. "In such a cas...e the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled."⁷⁹ Kushner seems to agree: "[Ylou become a certain kind of person when you choose to believe that there is a pattern and purpose to the universe.... Certain things seem worth making the effort to do, and and others seem less scary.... And both you and the world are better off."⁸⁰

Like most self-help writers, Kushner does, sometimes, seem to be talking to children. He is a laborious writer, the kind who quotes an

⁷⁷In his 1948 book Peace of Mind, Joshua Liebman offered a similar explanation of evil, rejecting the image of God as omnipotent.

⁷⁸Kushner, Who Needs God, p. 196.

⁷⁹William James, "Is Life Worth Living," in The Will to Believe, p. 59.

⁸⁰Kushner, Who Needs God, p. 34.

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Oscar Wilde epigram and then explains it. But he is also friendly and unpretentious, and he doesn't strive for effects he can't achieve. His style is familiar; he relies on the usual anecdotes about people he's counseled and references to popular culture. (Self-help writers invoke TV shows and popular songs the way academics invoke Foucault.) In his first book, Kushner also tells his own story about the tragic death of his son. When Bad Things Happen to Good People is an interesting book because there's anger and uncertainty in it, the shadow of a spiritual crisis. "It is all right to be angry at God,"⁸¹ Kushner says.

He still offers many of the same familiar messages found in popular Protestant literature. He denigrates self-sufficiency, American individualism, and competitiveness, and he celebrates community. (Americans do penance by buying books that criticize the way they live.) He talks about the importance of self-esteem, asserting that "one of the primary goals of religion is to teach people to like themselves and feel good about themselves."⁸² But Kushner does present a different vision of God and a different model for our relationship with God.

We can be angry with God, and we can argue with God. We are not called so strongly to submit. "Obedience is not necessarily the highest religious virtue," Kushner says. "God is mature enough to derive pleasure from our growing up, not from our dependence on Him. [Religion] should call upon us to grow, to dare, even to choose wrongly at times and learn from our mistakes rather than being repeatedly pulled back from the brink of using our own minds."⁸³ God makes moral demands on us, Kushner affirms, but he hints that we are actively engaged with God, that we collaborate with God in shaping ourselves and our world.

Some will call this heresy or hubris; some will simply find it unsatisfactory. It is not a terribly popular image of God. (I'm not even sure Kushner endorses it.) The notion that our relationship with God is, in part, collegial qualifies the ideal of self-surrender with selfreliance, with the image of Moses walking up Mt. Sinai.

VII

Alienation and anomie aside, there are worse credos for a participatory democracy than the belief that actions matter. Nineteenthcentury liberal Protestantism may have been materialistic, imperialistic, and naive about the power of men, and an occasional woman, to shape their environments, but at least they were encouraged to try. Now popular religion, like a twelve-step group, reminds us that we're powerless.

What's missing in much popular religious literature today is a model for ethical action in the world. Focusing on the individual relationship

⁸¹Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon, 1981), p. 108.

⁸²Kushner, Who Needs God, p. 198.

⁸³Harold Kushner, When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 127,132.

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with God, on the state of individual belief, while disparaging individualism, most popular religious writers offer no thoughtful discussion about moral behavior, giving us no basis for community. Practicing their own brand of legalism, they offer a laundry list of moral wrongs-abortion, homosexuality, adultery, atheism, and rebellionbut no guidance in resolving moral dilemmas. Harold Kushner, at least offers some comfort, acknowledging the pain of placing your aging parent in a nursing home, suggesting that one goal of religion is to help us find peace when we have made "honest painful choices about our lives." M. Scott Peck pays some attention to citizenship, calling generally for grass roots, communal activism. But people convinced of their own helplessness as individuals, seeking the surrender of will, don't come together in democratic companionship; they come together as mobs, bereft of both self and community.