Its easy to get into an us vs. them attitude in life. It the Christians against the schemes of the world.
I teach Christians interested in learning biblically authentic ways to help others work through emotional and relationship problems. As we study psychological techniques, many of my students rail against the secularism, the individualism, and the lack of a biblical anthropology found in mainstream psychology. And they are right to do so. But as a result of our critique of psychology, we often end up being zenophobics. We begin to think that those secularists have created our problems. “They” turned from God and developed atheistic, human-centered, evolutionary theories that explain the world apart from God.
What I find most interesting is that the “they” we often refer to is really “us.” Throughout the course of history, God-fearing, faithful, men and women have made decisions that seemed right in their own eyes but had far-reaching, negative results. Start at the beginning of time. Adam and Eve choose their own power over dependency on God. Abram chooses Hagar to fulfill God’s promises but creates the beginnings of the conflict between Jews and Arabs.
Lot’s daughters choose to have children with their drunken father and so start the races of the Moabites and the Ammonites—two enemies of God’s people. In modern history, Rene Descartes (a believer in God) chooses to disbelieve everything he cannot prove. The founding director of theWorcester State Hospital believes that the soul cannot be diseased and so doesn’t believe that the 6 hours of daily Christian education offered in his hospital plays any part of the positive results the patients had. As a result, the hospital stopped the good work of healing minds through the Gospel.
My point: people of faith are usually behind the foolish choices we’ve made. We, not they, have done what was right in our own eyes and so have conceived social dynamics that have later created misery upon misery. So, lets stop whining about how society is going to hell in a handbasket and realize our own active and passive choices have lead to much of our present day problems.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 
Phil,
I agree with your point, but I don’t think it demonstrates what you want it to. I would include concepts like reparative therapy, and groups like Exodus, as examples of misery-creating social dynamics that are promulgated solely on faith-based, or authority-based, thinking.
In this context, I see “atheist psychology,” or psychology w/o a reference to a deity, as “non-magical thinking psychology,” or “differentiation of self psychology,” or “clear boundary psychology,”or even “rationalism psychology.”
Obviously, your point here is not evangelization, but it has been my experience that one of the themes of all of the Abrahamic faiths is, in fact, the deliberate promulgation of an us/them mentality (a theme both explicitly and implicitly supported by the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Koran).
As Yahweh rails against atheists as foolish, is it really so surprising that your students follow his example?
I would have to disagree here. I see much of the problem in psychology is its over evangelistic point of view (but covered up in the cloak of neutrality). Much of psychology is not supported by the research but by a way of seeing things. Consider this one piece. When psychology describes gender identity growth as moving linearly from confusion to comparison to tolerance to acceptance to pride to synthesis that is not just describing but beginning to prescribe an outcome. What is this model missing? Attribution. We make attributions about what is good/bad and whether we accept one model or another we will move toward one thing and away from another. And yet the model listed above ignores the values inserted.
My point is simply that whatever our viewpoint is, we tend to try to promulgate it. Christianity isn’t any different. The issue lies as to whether it is the right religion or a false one.
Phil,
I agree with both of your observations regarding hidden evangelization and the lack of research (most “theories” would be more correctly named “hypotheses”). However, I’m not sure that I’m following your example. I recognize the model you are using as a non-dominant cultural identity model, going from not identifying with your culture at all, all the way to synthesizing your identities as both a member of the dominant culture as well as your own (obviously, culture can be substituted for gender, race, SEC, etc.). But attribution is already inherent in the model, in the fact that every phase is an attribution, with both internal and external elements (if you are using attribution theory differently, please let me know). Now, you could have a meta-attribution about the model itself, which to me would speak to the value of non-privileged identities, diversity, etc. For example, traditionally, in this country, White, male, Protestant, upper-middle class, people in general (and therapists in particular) have tended to place the highest value on their cultural attributes, and devalue others (which is why we have models such as the one above in the first place).
Making attributions isn’t done in a vacuum; many internal and external factors go into the process. My point is that no one, religious or secular, gets a free pass based on authority, inner convictions, tradition, or the proclamation that your preferred worldview has been vetted by the creator of the universe.
I agree; Christianity isn’t any different. So it should go under the same scrutiny as any and every other worldview.
Thanks for the correspondence.
You said, “christianity isn’t any different. So it should go under the same scrutiny as any and every other worldview.”
Yup, including the naturalistic, scientistic worldviews. The only problem is who descies the rules for scrutiny? That’s what I love about philosophies of science writing.
Thanks for the stimulating comments.