The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  But the change that was being brought about, in America at any rate, was to an extent camouflaged by the fact that various forms of “liberal” behavior were taking place at a very conservative time.

  No one illustrates this more clearly than Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was close to the Republicans, to the Eisenhower administration, and to Billy Graham’s National Association for Evangelicals. He was a conservative on racial issues, notoriously advising a young African-American woman not “to provoke matters” by marrying the white man she was in love with. At the same time, and important from our point of view, in his landmark work The Power of Positive Thinking, alongside chapters entitled “Try Prayer Power” and “How to Use Faith in Healing,” Peale was paralleling Spock in advocating far more liberal patterns of parenting, and establishing himself as one of the country’s leading proponents of psychological counseling. While he may be best known for his book having occupied the top slot in the New York Times best-seller lists for a record-breaking ninety-eight weeks, his more important contribution was his establishment in 1953 of a new type of hybrid organization, the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry (AFRP). This had two primary tasks—the provision of psychological training for clerics and the offer of counseling to the public.

  A WARMER GOD: PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY

  By the time the AFRP was formed, in fact, psychology had invaded pastoral counseling to the extent that Brooks Holifield could announce the “Renaissance of Pastoral Psychology.” In 1939, pastoral psychology courses in seminaries were rare. But by 1950, four out of five theology schools had one or more people listed as “psychologists” on their faculty. In 1947, the Journal for Clinical Pastoral Work and the Journal of Pastoral Care were founded; Pastoral Psychology appeared three years later. The latter soon had sixteen thousand subscribers, seven-eighths of them ministers. By 1955, three out of four American seminaries either had their own clinical training programs or were sending their students to approved clinical courses elsewhere, and seven universities, including the University of Chicago, had established advanced graduate programs in pastoral psychology, pastoral counseling or pastoral theology. By the end of the decade, 117 centers for clinical pastoral education had been established.

  This was something of a turning point. Freud, though radical in so many ways, had always insisted that humans had limits, and that there were restrictions to what theory could achieve, and in this sense (if in no other) he came close, in mood at least, to traditional religion. But that went against the optimism of the post-war years. What was wanted now was what came to be called “humanistic psychology,” in which the emphasis was on a person’s ability to persevere, to overcome, to triumph; it is now that the words “potential” and “growth” begin to appear and re-appear, and this was reflected not just in therapy but in religion, too. About now, in sermons and in theological works, God becomes warmer, less forbidding, less judgmental.11

  Alongside the professional journals in pastoral counseling came the textbooks, and here two stood out. The first was Seward Hiltner’s Pastoral Counseling and the second was Carl Rogers’s Counseling and Psychotherapy. Between them, these faced head-on the central dilemma posed when psychology was set alongside religion. Humanistic psychology, especially of the non-directive type proposed by Carl Rogers, was democratic and anti-authoritarian. Doris Mode, of the Institute for Rankian Psychoanalysis, objected: “A permissive atmosphere where nothing occurs but an echo of the clients’ own attitudes would indeed be empty of all value and judgment, and thereby of all therapy also.” She did not see how Rogerian therapy could work. Under his system, the therapist was so passive and non-judgmental, expressing no blame at any point, that she felt the therapist had abandoned all values of his own, the end result, she said, being a spiritual vacuum that prevented the patient (client) from ever becoming whole. “If God were not judgmental,” wrote Mode, “there would be no meaning to life, and if he were not loving, there would be no fulfillment. Both of these concepts must flow through the therapist to the client if he is to become whole again.” Is the concept of wholeness here being used in a psychological or a theological way?

  The fuzziness at the heart of the enterprise was shown by the fact that many of the mental health professionals in the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry were themselves reluctant to subscribe to any body of religious dogma or doctrine. In 1956, Iago Gladston, chairman of the research committee, admitted that he “dreaded to commit himself to another man’s concept of God” and refused to accept the “propriety” of spiritual counseling, preferring to await further research which would “give the answer as to whether spiritual therapy is a pious hope or an actuality.” In the AFRP, psychology took precedence over prayer and scripture reading.12

  The church showed some resistance to certain of these developments, in particular psychoanalysis. Monsignor Fulton Sheen condemned psychoanalysis as a form of escapism, no more than an “unsatisfactory mix of materialism, hedonism, infantilism and eroticism”; and, in contrast to the confessional, therapy offered no norms or standards. “There are no more disintegrated people in the world than the patients of Freudian analysis.” This intransigence didn’t last, however, because in February 1954 Pope Pius XII gave a tentative go-ahead for pastoral psychology, after which more than 2,500 ministers took advantage of a summer course on the subject, held at St. John’s University in Minnesota.

  As a result of these various changes, one can say that in America by the mid-1950s, Carl Rogers (and to a lesser extent Abraham Maslow and Rollo May) was more important than Sigmund Freud, and this marks the maturation of the “psychological turn,” the point at which a psychological model of “fulfillment” and “wholeness” began to outweigh the religious concept of “salvation.” This was true not least because of the media’s burgeoning interest in “personal fulfillment,” an obsession that would last for many years and has recently seen a resurgence. Alongside this, less emphasis was now placed on self-mastery than on self-expression.

  “OOZING” INTO THE FUTURE

  All these matters came to a head in the late 1950s when both Maslow and Rogers attempted to explain and clarify what was happening. At a psychology conference in Cincinnati in the autumn of 1959, Maslow spoke of what he called the “total collapse of all sources of values outside the individual.” He argued that there had been a breakdown of authority, a realization (even then) that neither economic prosperity nor political democracy was able to provide life with value and meaning, and that “there is no place else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values.” Rogers was equally forthright. His main interest was what he called the “self-actualized” individual, by which he meant “the person who is living the process of the good life.” He had found, he said, that such individuals did not depend on the judgment of others or on their own past behavior, nor did they have any need for guiding principles. Instead, he said in his book On Becoming a Person, they looked within. “I find that increasingly such individuals are able to trust their total organismic reaction to a new situation because they discover to an ever-increasing degree that if they are open to their experience, doing what ‘feels right’ proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying.”13

  There was a growing awareness also, says Alan Petigny, that truth could not be accessed through sacred texts, Sunday school, or an amorphous set of norms commonly known as “the American way.” Nor, for that matter, could science provide the answer, despite its enormous prestige in answering questions of fact. This is where the self-actualizing theories of Carl Rogers came in.

  One basic difference between Rogers and Freud lay in the fact that Rogers did not believe, as Freudians did, that therapy needed to be a five-day-a-week affair, lasting for months or years on end before it was effective. Humanistic psychologists thought that situational factors were as important as the early years and the subject’s relationship with his or her parents. The “self-actual
izing tendency,” popularized by Rogers, was specifically designed to be political in the widest sense, encouraging people to develop “an optimistic, self-determined, positive philosophy about human existence rather than one that is cynical, negative, and externally determined.” As he himself put it, “it is the client [not the patient, note] who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process.” The therapist, he said elsewhere, should “prize” the client and “demystify” the practice of therapy.

  His theories took no account of possible disease processes, unconscious motivation or developmental history. Rogers saw people as being on an endless growth journey, “a journey which is sometimes blocked by negative or incongruent images of oneself”; and freeing them so that they might accelerate the journey became the great challenge of humanistic psychology. This is what came to be called the Human Potential Movement, expressed through more than three hundred “growth centers” in the United States.

  At the same time, as Richard Evans points out in his biography, Rogers was responsible for a new level of discontent. “The discrepancy between what people are ordinarily able to make happen in their relationships and what they have come to believe is possible to make happen . . . is the cause of much disruption in their lives.” Essentially, the Rogers view is “the more the better. . . . Rogers would have you believe that the more congruence, the more honesty, the more intimacy, the more closeness, the more empathy, the better.” He concedes that Rogers has changed the way we all think about human relationships, and given us a new way to be with one another, “an ethical basis for human interaction”; but his methods allow little role for power, status, culture, history, technology or politics, and this is why, perhaps, they have not always brought the lasting change that is promised.

  Rogers’s most characteristic idea, self-actualization, “implies that the person is acceptantly aware of what’s going on within and is consequently changing practically every moment and is moving on in complexity.” “I ooze toward my future,” he famously said. Rogers saw a division between the ideal self and the real self, his research showing, he believed, that people did not value all aspects of their self equally, and that what was important for therapy was the picture of the self that they would like to be, as compared with the self as they currently perceived it.14

  A HIGHER HUMANISM: THE NEW INTIMACY

  In his “client-centered” therapy, Rogers concentrated on the present, accepted the client as a separate person without judging him or her, as an equal, rather than perceiving the relationship as one of the doctor “above” the client. It was this attitude as much as anything else that led him to create what came to be called “encounter groups,” which he thought were “one of the most significant social inventions of this century because it is a way of eliminating alienation and loneliness, of getting people into better communication with one another, of helping them develop fresh insights into themselves, and helping them get feedback from others so that they perceive how they are received by others.” He thought that it would not be a bad idea if universities allowed students time to participate in client-centered therapy, which might help toward the full development of their personality “and provide for an opportunity to become more self-actualized.” (He noted that the universities had never taken to psychoanalysis.)

  One of the results of his therapeutic technique, he said, in which the therapist was more a “skill facilitator” than a therapist in the conventional way, was that self-hatred decreased, people became more accepting of themselves, more confident, more constructive. They were moving, he said, from a preoccupation with guilt (the religious imperative) to a preoccupation with identity, shifting from a political view of life to a more philosophical one. There was, however, a danger that the preoccupation with identity was taking the spontaneity out of life. Part of the success of his approach, he said, was owing to the fact that “[t]he churches ceased some time ago to have a significant societal influence.”15

  Rogers concluded that men and women are “incurably social” animals and that “a new configuration” was emerging, “a higher humanism,” in which people had a desire for authenticity and eschewed the old acceptance of authority for authority’s sake, whether in government, military, church, corporation or school; there was abroad a new wish for intimacy, a distrust of the abstractions of science, and a conviction that “within ourselves lie undiscovered worlds.” This “new configuration,” he concluded, engenders “almost the antithesis of Puritan man, with his strict beliefs and strong controls over behavior, who founded our country. [The new man] is very different from the person who brought about the Industrial Revolution, with his ambition, productivity and greed, and competitiveness. He is deeply opposed to the Communist culture with its controls on individual thought and behavior in the interest of the state. His characteristics and his behavior run strongly counter to the orthodoxies and dogmas of the major Western religions—Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism.” In a way, he said, we were seeing a return to the situation of classical Greece or the Renaissance. Given all this, in the modern world what he called “situation ethics” were better than “some absolute ethic,” as for instance laid down by religion.16

  SITUATION ETHICS

  This phrase “situation ethics” refers to a movement within religious circles that ran parallel to what was happening in psychology. Traditionally, religious ethics took their color from the Bible or the Ten Commandments, and were held to apply everywhere and in all situations—to be “universal.” In 1954, Reverend Ernest Bruder, a prominent figure in the pastoral care movement, wrote a highly critical review of Monsignor Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul, which as we have seen was a response to Liebman’s Peace of Mind (see p. 352).

  Bruder pilloried Sheen for giving the impression that “peace of soul” was a state which could be reached only by accepting the thinking and dictates of others. This was not “peace,” claimed Bruder, but an “unhealthy resignation to authority.” Religious doctrine encouraged an unhealthy state of affairs, he went on, and many agreed. Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr and Joseph Fletcher all advocated that their fellow Americans oppose “legalism,” as the Sheen approach was called, and cultivate a non-authoritarian moral code “by looking inward and submitting to God’s love,” thereby challenging the universality of moral principles. Tillich put the new approach well: “Let us suppose that a student comes to me faced with a difficult moral decision. In counseling him I don’t quote the Ten Commandments, or the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, or any humanistic ethics. Instead, I tell him to find out what the commandment of agape in his situation is, and then decide for it even if traditions and conventions stand against his decision.”

  In other words, the one axiom to follow was the commandment of agape, or the law of love.

  In the 1950s, religious leaders began promoting “situation ethics,” and in 1966, Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics: The New Morality was published, selling 150,000 copies in the first two years. Fletcher became an intellectual celebrity. Vatican II (1962–65) went so far as to consider what is changeable and what is universal in a moral context.17

  THE APOTHEOSIS OF OPTIMISM

  Arguably, the people who benefited most from these changes, albeit not for a decade or more, were women. The United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination, opened up its clergy to women in 1956. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians followed suit in relatively short order. The late 1940s had seen the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham’s Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947). Particularly among those educated to university level, attitudes toward women working, having careers and even becoming president changed markedly. In the late 1940s, several st
ates repealed laws preventing women serving on juries, more women were going to college (37.1 percent as against 31.6 percent), Equal Opportunity Day was instituted in 1956 and within two years thirty state governors had given it their public support. More women were willing to abandon their virginity before marriage, and more men agreed that it did not matter if their brides were not virgins on their wedding day. The availability of the contraceptive pill in 1960 naturally had a big effect on behavior, and gradually on attitudes, too.

  The 1950s saw much less disparaging of women, though many still felt that their biological imperative was motherhood and the kitchen. Abraham Maslow applied his understanding of humanistic psychology to women as much as to men, and in the late 1960s women would find his and Carl Rogers’s theories very helpful in what became known as consciousness-raising groups. Betty Friedan, in her highly successful The Feminine Mystique (1963), used many Maslovian and Rogerian concepts such as self-actualization.

  One last, and rather different, factor that came into play was, paradoxically enough, science. By the end of the 1950s, it was being increasingly recognized that science, however successful it was in solving questions of fact and in producing new technologies that made life more agreeable, did not solve the enduring questions relating, for instance, to beauty, courage, loyalty—the “realities by which men live in the fullest sense,” as Howard Keniston of the University of Michigan put it. Intuitive understanding, he said, “is the only access we have to the deepest and highest aspects of our individual and collective lives.” Not everyone would have agreed with his words, or their implications, but even Albert Einstein had said that “objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.”18