All posts by Rod White

We’re letting gambling wreck sports?

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, , , , , , ,

One of my friends said last Monday, “Did you notice I am not wearing green?”

I said, “No.” I honestly had not noticed anything he was wearing.

“This is the first game day in 20 years I have not worn our colors. I’m not even going to watch.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the gambling. I just can’t be sure that anything about the game it true anymore. People are betting on players and even plays. There are just too many good reasons to cheat. I’m done.”

I felt clueless. I thought sports betting was out of control. But I already hated gambling because my mom and dad lived out their retirement near Las Vegas. I can feel Vegas suck the life out of me when I am just passing through. But I have become accustomed to zoning out during the new betting commercials. I know they are over when I hear “Please play responsibly” or “Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.” In Australia they are getting strict about all sorts of life-sucking  “games,” so their tag line is “Chances are you’re about to lose”.

Gambling Stats

I decided to do some research about what is really happening and found out quite a bit I did not know.

The Americans Gaming Association reports that Americans have embraced gambling (they say “gaming”). More than half of all American adults (57%) participated in some form of gambling in 2024-5. 30% gambled at a physical casino, while 21% placed a sports bet. It is a boom time for “gaming.” 90%  of Americans find casino gambling to be acceptable for themselves or others, and 62% now find gambling to be personally acceptable.  134 million American adults, or 53% of the population, visited a casino for gambling or other entertainment purposes in the past 12 months, the highest level of casino visitation on record. Legal Sports Reports gives you more.

In February, a Siena Poll  found that by 50% to 34% Americans support online sports betting being legal in all 50 States. But 65% think it will create compulsive gamblers. 58% say the Federal Govt. should regulate to protect consumers. 63% support the SAFE BET Act. 52% have “chased” a bet (meaning they placed additional, often larger, bets in an attempt to recover money lost from earlier wagers). 37% were ashamed after losing. 20% lost money they couldn’t afford to lose. 34% know someone with an online sports betting problem. Only 9% ever sought help with problem gambling — as SNL said a year ago, that’s because it is “somebody else’s” problem.

A majority of people in the U.S.A. are apparently going with a culture laced with gambling. But, like my friend, some people are getting concerned. For instance, 500 sports gamblers were polled in November in Connecticut; the majority believe corruption is more widespread than just the recent NBA scandal and think advertising for sports gambling leads to incredibly risky betting behavior, or even addiction. A New Yorker article from October noted how the “prop” bet leads to disaster (that is, a bet on a specific occurrence or statistical outcome within a game that does not necessarily affect the game’s final score or margin of victory). This YouTube from Bloomberg lays out the dangers. Trump’s posthumous pardon of Pete Rose for betting on baseball shows how gambling is even reaching into the past to become normalized.

What do Christians say?

Christianity Today kinds of hems and haws since the Bible does not directly name gambling as a sin. They say, “Online gambling isn’t necessarily sinful, but it’s certainly not a careful use of the wealth God has given us.”

Conservative Christians in the UK say: “There are three legitimate ways in which wealth may change hands – by giving, by working for it, or by genuine exchange (including taxation): anything else is virtual theft and so a breaking of the 8th commandment.” As has been said: “Gambling is a kind of robbery by mutual agreement; but it is still robbery, just as dueling, which is murder by mutual agreement, is still treated as murder.” Of the three impulses behind gambling – the desire for gain, the desire for a thrill and the desire for competition, the moral and ethical problems are focused on the desire for gain.

  1. Gambling directly appeals to covetousness and greed “which is idolatry” according to the Apostle Paul (Colossians 3:5). Gambling breaches the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th commandments. It enthrones personal desires in place of God. Jesus warned: “you cannot serve both God and Money” (Matthew 6:24). A greedy and unrepentant person is an idolater who cannot obtain salvation (Ephesians 5:5).
  2. Gambling directly depends on other people incurring financial loss. Jesus said that you should “do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12). But gambling depends on doing to others what we would not have them do to us.

Conservative U.S. Evangelicals in the Gospel Coalition say: Sports betting perpetuates the sins of idolatry, greed, and dissatisfaction with God’s provision. It feeds on vices rather than virtues and godliness. It’s highly addictive. With the ease and convenience of a smartphone app and a credit card, sports betting has become yet another dopamine-inducing “scrolling” activity alongside social media platforms, online pornography, and other addictions just a few clicks away. As a vice disproportionately targeting young men, sports betting has the potential to imperil their current and future ability to love and lead families because of devastating debt. Sports betting is another assault on families already besieged by a litany of negative cultural pressures and obstacles….Don’t be fooled by how destigmatized sports betting has become. Just because you can now do it on your phone from the comfort of your suburban living room, as opposed to in the dimly lit, smoky Vegas casino, doesn’t mean the dangers are less real. The less seedy, more acceptable “brand” of sports betting today is what makes it so concerning.

The Southern Baptists are alarmed: “Gambling factors out God.” The 2017 SBC Resolutions Committee, proposed a resolution adopted by the Convention “on the sin of gambling.” Also, the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission released a publication called Pay to Play: A Practical Guide to Addressing Gambling in the Church. The director says, “We worked hard to produce a theological and practical guide—in addition to an in-depth white paper—that we think will be helpful to pastors as they navigate this growing epidemic.”

Meanwhile, gambling advertising becomes more entertaining, ubiquitous and brazen. For instance, into what are these happy, robotic, multicultural lemmings/bike riders being translated?:

Why is nothing done?

My friend said, “This is a big mess. It has ruined sports for me. Why isn’t anything being done?”

I hadn’t thought about that, so I asked A.I.  Here is the gist of what that know-it-all collected with my gist thrown in.

“Sports betting has not been banned despite its negative effects primarily due to the significant economic benefits for states and the argument that regulation is more effective than prohibition. The complex issue involves a balance of individual freedoms, economic incentives, and social concerns.”

That’s the bottom line. You have to wonder why the government of the people sees the vices of the people as a way to stay in business. I think there is something immoral about that business model, don’t you?

Americans apparently love gambling. It all got started with the lotteries. To be honest the ancient Chinese had a lottery that helped build the Great Wall. But as far as the U.S. goes, the first legal lottery was started by New Hampshire in 1964.

When the Supreme Court overturned Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) with Murphy v. NCAA in 2018, it served to open the floodgates for all forms of gambling. The ruling stemmed from a legal challenge initiated by the state of New Jersey, led at the time by Governor Chris Christie. New Jersey argued that the PASPA violated the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine, which prevents the federal government from forcing states to enforce federal laws or maintain existing state laws.

In the 6-3 majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own”. The Court said the PASPA unconstitutionally dictated what state legislatures could and could not do, thus infringing on state sovereignty. Justice Breyer said he would have preferred New Jersey get a “pyrrhic victory”— winning the right to authorize betting but still being barred from having private businesses run it, in order to respect Congress’s broader goals.

Now there is a multi-billion industry to contend with since many states (though not all, including California) rushed to legalize gambling and reap the revenue. I call it creating  a “fool tax,” to be honest, or receiving an invitation to ruin from your governor.

Key reasons why nothing has been done to ban sports betting include:

  • It is a big money maker for States. Legal sports betting generates billions in tax revenue for state governments, which can be allocated to public services like education and infrastructure. This financial incentive makes it difficult for states to roll back legalization efforts. New York, for example, collected over $876 million in tax revenue from sports betting in 2023. This is probably the main reason sports betting is running rampant: the governments are addicted.
  • Our governments are dominated by rapacious corporations. The sports betting industry, with major players like FanDuel and DraftKings, has a powerful lobbying presence and has deeply integrated itself into sports media and culture through advertising and sponsorships, making it an “indispensable” part of the sporting experience. This is the second big reason. Our pirate capitalism sees a victim, milks them dry and leaves the carcass.

The rest of the main reasons are more speculative and moral. These reasons change if people we more educated, healthier and less subject to corporate domination.

  • Prohibition does not work very well. The historical failure of attempts to ban popular, but potentially harmful, activities (like alcohol during Prohibition or the War on Drugs) suggests that an overarching ban would not eliminate sports betting but merely drive it into an unregulated, illegal black market. $150B was illegally gambled on college sports, alone, in 2018, before the Supreme Court decision. The American Gaming Association (AGA) argues legal markets bring consumers out of predatory illegal operations and provide transparency and consumer protections. It remains to be proven that legal markets are less predatory or more transparent.
  • Regulation is seen as a better approach. Instead of a full ban, the prevailing approach in the U.S. has been state-level regulation following the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to overturn the federal ban. This allows states to implement consumer protections and allocate funds for problem gambling treatment and research. Critics justly argue such measures are often inadequate. By the time the corporations have brainwashed the public, warnings by governments seem faint, at best. Public health of any kind is poorly funded.
  • Americans think you should have the right to harm yourself. Proponents of legal sports betting argue that adults should have the freedom to choose how to spend their money and time, provided they do so responsibly. “Responsible gambling” is an oxymoron to many Christians. But such reasoning prevails when it comes to gun control, cannabis, and, apparently, murdering Venezuelans. The saying, “I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission” is becoming common sense.
  • The people want it. There is a significant public appetite for sports betting, with millions of Americans participating in the activity. Legalization acknowledges and caters to this demand. But “want” in the U.S. is determined by what consumers buy in the economy as designed by the dominant corporations. They have also wanted processed food, gas guzzlers and McMansions, to name a few products that were not in society’s or their own best interests. We psychotherapists would generally contend that people “want” a lot of things for reasons they do not fully understand and often do not want when they do.

I think gambling preys upon desire and calls it a “game.” It is only fun when it does not include money. When it is a for-profit enterprise, gambling is always a scam — I’m with the Australians, “You are about to lose.” It is a “thrill” when it is risky, but satisfying that desire usually just leads to needing more thrill to avoid dealing with one’s true needs or desires.

The fact that this deregulation is happening when most of the betting is happening on a phone app makes gambling even more damning. The internet feeds on desire. Digital platforms thrive by exploiting human wants—for connection, information, status, or novelty—using algorithms to trigger dopamine hits, creating endless loops of seeking, consuming, and craving that drive engagement, problematic use, and consumerism, turning desires into constant, often unfulfillable, digital appetites. The online world capitalizes on our innate needs, turning them into addictive patterns through self-presentation, fear of missing out (FoMO), and hyper-stimulation, shaping our search for fulfillment in ways that benefit platforms more than users.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 KJV). This applies to the CEOs of gambling corporations and the government officials who enable them. It applies to the inherent corruption of the end users and the self-deception capabilities within human nature. Our desires and motivations are often untrustworthy and self-destructive. We need God in the middle of our gambling and a society that looks out for our hearts and health, not just our consumption habits.

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Yesterday was Catherine Doherty Day! Get to know the “Baroness” who became an anti-racism activist and spiritual director. She was Thomas Merton’s spiritual mother.  She is celebrated at The Transhistorical Body.

We cannot “skip grades” in spiritual development

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, ,

Let’s start with Morton Kelsey, the agnostic pastor who met God through Jungian therapy and became a spiritual guide for others. He knows quite a bit about not graduating from previous “grades” in spiritual development, yet he is positive about our capacity to keep moving along the inner way. Here is a quote from one of his more than 50 books:

“We can grow at any time. The human being is far more plastic than most of us ordinarily believe. However, the task that we need to learn, the development we need to achieve, can only be accomplished earlier or later at a much higher cost than at its proper time. Much of psychotherapy consists of providing the environment in which people can live through a stage that they missed before. Spiritual direction…will involve this kind of direction and counseling and companionship for the simple reasons that the various stages each provide essential elements in a full and mature religious life. We cannot skip grades in spiritual development.” – Companions on the Inner Way

Inhibited spiritual development

The metaphor of “skipping grades” does not completely suit Kelsey’s point, since we don’t pass tests to get from one stage of development to another and no one can really judge what our final mark should be. But the metaphor does picture our need to cross boundaries of maturation to get into further stages. Jesus called the process moving along the “narrow way that leads to life.” And we know he was well acquainted with people who  stubbornly stayed on the way that leads to death.

As a psychotherapist, I am accustomed to exploring the past to find unfinished psychological issues. As a spiritual director, I accompany my companions on their parallel journey into wholeness. Along the way we bump into incomplete loves and assumptions that inhibit their growth and joy. As a developing person, I am also on the way. None of us are managing to skip grades, as much as we might like to.

We might start exploring entire sides of ourselves at 50, even, and wonder what we were doing at twenty. Whenever we become aware, some of us get excited to see the new possibilities; but others are daunted at the work they see ahead. My client’s development may start very basically: they need to survive and get to square one. Soon they may feel some confidence and receive some affirmation. Then they are likely to discover that the  lacks they note and the abundance they feel both hint at the possibility of trust and happiness. God wastes nothing; it can all come to good. My own experience and the experience of others convinces me we often have unfinished work from the past stages of our development that either blocks us from progressing or taints the development we have achieved. What needs to get finished can cause us a lot of suffering. But God is with us.

One thing that helps us keep moving through the suffering on our narrow way is  understanding the stages of how we develop so we can identify what we are still carrying  or even reliving from our past — especially from our childhood or adolescence. Exploring the way we grow also helps examine our adult development (or lack of it), which is often left unpondered, as if becoming an adult were the end point. Kelsey inspired me to look at it all again in seven stages and look for the kind of things that keep us “held back” so to speak.

The seven stages of our spiritual development

Nothing I am about to list is particularly new. I’ve written about it myself, many times. But I found it useful to explore it again, now that I am where I am today. You are probably down the road to life somewhere new, yourself. Let’s see if we can note what is unfinished and could use some love from you and maybe some new choices.

Stage 1

Knowing what you now know about how your family was working when you were born, imagine how you were being prepared for your spiritual journey.

Children are like tender plants. They can be educated, but mostly they must be allowed to unfold so they are open to relating to a loving God who can give them confidence in the ultimate nature of the universe. Faith takes root early. If they are not tended with grace  they can be closed to that possibility and live in deep-rooted fear or worthlessness because of what they have experienced with the humans on which they relied. Fear and shame also take root early. The most essential element in early Christian nurture is consistent human warmth and understanding, kindness and love. Unless people receive these things as children they find it very difficult to believe in them as adults.

We learned a lot by the time we got to kindergarten. How did you learn to see the world? What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

Sunday school – Christ Church Denver

Stage 2

Try to remember being you in elementary school. By the age of 3-4 we are able to store memories, but first-hand experiences are more likely to be stored when we have language more developed in our growing brain. How did you experience God as a child? Did your environment encourage spirituality?

In the stage of early childhood we begin to develop our sense of personhood and distinguish between inner and outer awareness. That “I am who I am” is called the ego. We need that self awareness to differentiate our spiritual awareness within it. Later on, we may need to let go of aspects of the view of self we developed as a child, but you can’t give up what you have not achieved. At this stage we learn language to express ourselves. We develop our left brain with reading and math, and our right brain with music, painting and stories. A great need in this stage is acceptance by others for who I am becoming. If I am nurtured with warmth and love I will take on the values of my parents and develop a conscience. If I am controlled and punished or violated, I may turn to violence and fear. We should avoid leading children to dig into the unconscious at this point. We’re not ready for that.

We developed an enduring view of self through reflection and comparison by 4th or 5th grade. Can you remember what is was like to see yourself and be seen (or not)? What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

Stage 3

Think back on your teen years and your early twenties. Our struggle for autonomy took a winding road to get where we arrived. We needed to rebel against the structures that formed us to either make them our own or go another way. What did you do? Did you have anyone to trust with your spiritual journey?

Sometime between 11 and 15 (and earlier all the time, it seems) our hormones push us into puberty and we come to the first bloom of our sense of autonomy. During this stage we test everything and are tested, this includes psychologically and spiritually. In the U.S. we have generally lost the formal initiation rites traditional cultures have, so many are left alone to find their own way. At this point in life, it is useful if caring adults are understanding of the process: parents and, especially, another trusted adult who can help us deal with fears and doubts about ourselves and God. Rebellion against the religious values of parents is almost necessary if we are ever to have faith of our own. It is during this stage that young people become open to the unconscious and to spiritual awareness. Check our Robert Johnson’s take on the process in He and She.

The pressure to become adults may have resulted in a significant season of depression by the end of our teen years. Who had you become by then? How did it feel? Who or what did you trust? Did you experience God? Make a commitment? Set a direction? Get derailed? What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

Stage 4

You can probably remember your late twenties (if you aren’t there right now). You may never have really moved beyond them. Early adulthood often includes our most life-changing and enduring experiences of God and community, but sometimes results in our long-lasting distance from both. You may be in the middle of the troubles associated with finding your own way and deciding how to align.

The process of differentiation and reorientation that began with puberty may take a long time for many people, and some get arrested at this point. Young adulthood is a continuation for the foundation of sexual intimacy, vocation/career, individuality and mutual responsibility. We must be led by our own convictions and establish our own patterns. We may have many professions over our lifetime, but we should complete this stage by becoming proficient in one. In the postmodern era, it seems like this is one of the most emotionally trying stages of development. The fruitless search for meaning young adults face and the gnawing sense that their present work and future opportunities are slim often lead to despair and avoidance. All the drawing power of our screens does the greatest damage here: porn, games, gambling, shopping, presenting our image, comparison, and relationships apps. The confusion and despair can be met with spiritual direction and companionship, but many churches are dominated by inattentive old people, so that can be hard to find.

How are you doing or how did you do? Did you come to a full sense of yourself? Find a place in the world? Did you form an adult relationship with God? Or did you get sidetracked or are still in the middle of it? By this time you have a life story. How do you tell it? How did you tell it? What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

Stage 5

Can you name what your middle age has been like, if you are there? The transition can be confusing. Middle age is when we are most likely to experience running into the wall of the unfinished development of our previous stages. It is a struggle to get into the future or into deeper realms of ourselves when we are stuck in our past.

This fifth stage might hit precociously spiritual people during puberty or young adulthood, but more likely comes between 35 and 50. It is often called the midlife crisis. We have developed and achieved some status, perhaps. But we are not satisfied and death is becoming more real. The children may be less needy or gone and the profession may feel old or unsuitable. Some people may return to childhood faith and move beyond it into deeper meaning. Others may look at their struggle and pronounce it purposeless. Toggling between beauty and boredom, bounty and bitterness is not uncommon. Our society gives little help with a search for meaning, and religion seems coopted by the endless power struggle all around us. Some accept fundamentalism in the Christian or political sense and give up their independence and critical capacities, as we can presently see. This is a time in life when fellow strugglers and spiritual directors are crucial. We are confronting our inner depth but also looking into the abyss.

How are you doing or how did you do it? Did you get into the second half of your life or are you still working on that? By this time, others may have saddled you with a life story. How do they tell it? Are you stuck in their view of you?  Are you disappointed that your idealization of yourself is not accomplished? Can you connect with God and others with a deeper spiritual awareness yet? What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

Stage 6

Eventually, our bodies tell us we are old. Most of us do not have a plan for that time and many of us realize we need to develop the spiritual and relational resources we are missing.

Old age is not always a golden age because we have not successfully passed through the first five stages effectively. Most of us have more time to explore the possibilities, however. We may have less family obligations and more disposable income. We can simplify our lives and focus on what is most important to us. Many people allow their religious and creative impulses to emerge. Many interesting books and biographies are written by people in this stage because we are drawn to remember and take stock of our lives. Most of us become more able to accept our flaws and reconcile with others. But some of us are overcome by the fears that were held back by our resilience, which is now waning.

What is your story of this stage? You may think of your past as your story, but old age is also a wonderful time to develop. What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

Stage 7

The final stage, of course, which we will definitely not be skipping is death. In this age when centenarians are being minted at an unprecedented rate, it makes sense to consider what it means to die, and what it means to be dying for quite some time.

Some may see their final days as “there is nothing to be done but grin and bear it.” Younger people who doubt any life beyond this one, often feel like old people just rub their noses in their mortality — the nursing homes are full of their parents. Helping the dying die well is a valuable service for which more and more people are needed. Preparing to die by living well and knowing how to die well is a worthy endeavor at any stage. Paul was wise enough to know “I die daily.” He said, “To die is gain.” It made him brave to face his end no matter when it happened.

If you are in this stage, thank God you are still reading and thinking along with us. We need your wisdom, prayer and love. We even need your frailty to call out our compassion. Accompanying you to death helps us honor our own death and encourages us to get serious about what comes next. How are you doing with the Lord’s promise of eternal, abundant life? It is never too late to move beyond what blocks our experience of life. Like Kelsey taught, “We can grow at any time. The human being is far more plastic than most of us ordinarily believe.” What needs to be loved, understood or finished?

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Today is John and Betty Stam Day! Get to know these interesting examples of missionary passion at The Transhistorical Body. 

Your “values” might be undercutting your God-given worth

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, ,

When I served as a pastor, I often had a tough time with my leaders in the Brethren in Christ Church — not because we did not love each other, but because I groaned under their direction. Granted, I was theological friends with Christians like bell hooks who were preaching an ethic of love and I pondered making friends with Buddhists. What’s more, I was rather vocal about the antichrist ethics of capitalism and attempts by the U.S. to dominate the world militarily and economically. So I made them groan a bit, too — I think they thought I was very liberal.

The beautiful BIC

I, on the other hand, regularly told them, when I got the chance, that I thought they were the ones who were very “liberal,” in that they readily adopted post-Enlightenment philosophies as the basis for their theology. Even though they were supposedly rooted in antiestablishment Anabaptism, they relentlessly “left the farm” (as they liked to say), to more effectively compete in the present “marketplace” of ideas. They succeeded, to an extent, in growing churches filled with enculturated Christians.

My disappointment with the BIC, by whom I am ordained and licensed, was activated again when one of my spiritual direction clients brought up their personal “values.” I was literally triggered by the term and maybe went just a little beyond the bounds of my usual restraint. Let it suffice to say my appreciation for my companion was too great to let them stay subject to a word that has infiltrated the church and undercut our faith for over 140 years, now.

BIC Values

The subject of values was a main point of dispute for me with my leaders. I did not organize any marches, but I am sure I spoke up much more than they preferred.

In the year 2000 a General Conference of the Brethren in Christ adopted a new identity statement enumerating our “values.” That word may be the least Anabaptist, Pietist or Wesleyan one they could have chosen to describe our basic beliefs. I would have preferred “distinctives” or “aspirations” or “convictions.” Instead we got the straight business-plan title “Core Values” without too much thought as to why. (They are still being used). I assume they thought my critique was “urban.”

Each statement is fine, even if they do have the tortured sound of being committee compromises. But by calling them “values” they undermined my attempts to introduce radical Christianity to people who had lost it or never had it. The prospective Jesus followers I met already had “values.” But they had lost “virtue” or any sense of transcendent “morality.”

The word “values” got a new definition

When I was in college, I often saw students carrying around a big fat paperback of Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy. He is the father of the modern, abstract use of the word “values,” in the sense of moral or social principles. His thinking was popularized in the early 20th century by sociologists and anthropologists, notably Max Weber.

Nietzsche in 1882

Nietzsche was a pioneer in undermining the traditional Christian thinking that dominated Europe. He was definitely thinking outside the box. Before he went officially “mad,” probably due to the same kind of brain disorder that affected his father and brother, he famously wrote of the “transvaluation of all values” (Umwertung aller Werte). That meant he was cheering along the process of revaluing what was valuable. He was the man who said “God is dead,” meaning that in the modern era, belief in God and the accompanying Christian morality had lost its power and influence in society, leading to a moral vacuum humanity would have to fill.

He challenged traditional classical and Judeo-Christian virtues and asserted these moral standards were human-created rather than transcendent truths. It was in the 1880s that Nietzsche began to speak of “values” in the way we now use the word to talk about the moral assumptions and attitudes of a given society. He used the word consciously and repeatedly, to demonstrate the momentous transition human history had made. He thought describing the “transvaluation of values” was revealing the revolution which was underway, a revolution against both the classical virtues and the Judaic-Christian ones – against the very idea of a transcendent morality.

Others developing value theory (“axiology” after the Greek word for “worthy” or “deserving”) immediately pushed back, arguing for the objective existence of values, independent of human desires. But by the time Theodore Roosevelt used the word in the early 1900’s, it is well on its way to describing relativized beliefs that are socially constructed. The beliefs of the world were moving toward what we have today where, as Nietzsche noted, the powerful often have and impose values which normal, weak people do not come up with on their own. The transcendent morality revealed in Jesus was replaced by the survival of the fittest ideas. Now Donald Trump is a value unto himself and, even among the poor, the enrichment of oligarchs is of utmost importance, as they say it should be, even as they attempt to recreate the world in their image.

What we “value” could be deadly

Who would have thought the Brethren in Christ would become the handmaidens of Nietzsche?

Values, as we now understand that word, do not have to be virtues; they can be personally-sourced beliefs, opinions, attitudes, feelings, habits, preferences –- whatever any individual, group, or society happens to value, at any time, for any reason. One cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone’s virtues are as good as anyone else’s, or that everyone has a right to their own virtues. Only values can claim such moral equality and neutrality. This impartial, “non-judgmental” (as we now say) sense of values –- values as “value-free”–- is now so firmly entrenched in our vocabulary and sensibility that one can hardly imagine a time without it.

My issue with the use of “core values” to describe our discipleship had quite a bit of Teddy Roosevelt pragmatism in it. I still think most Christians in the U.S. are heavy on principle and light on action. Their faith is proving unsustainable as we speak. That’s why I like bell hooks’ ethic of love so much — it is all about how you live, not just what you think or believe.

It is hard to see belief systems in the New Testament at all; the writings are all about creating something by the power of the Holy Spirit; they are more about following Jesus than worshipping him at a distance, if we choose to do so. It is ironic that the powerless of the world regularly claim their freedom by not “drinking the kool-aid” of anyone imposing some principle on them when that very act shows how they “drank the kool-aid” of reducing themselves down to a set of personal values. All the while they could have been following Jesus who actually is a law unto himself, and who faced his detractors, imprisoned in their sense of worth, with “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.”

What if I don’t value billionaires?

The people I have served were much more moved by the valuation of the “invisible hand” than the conviction of the Holy Spirit. What most people value these days is almost totally subsumed under making a good deal. My cousins asked me at most Thanksgiving dinners, “How is the church business going? Is your church getting bigger?” Advice columnists ask, “Are you better off with him or without him?” Put that last phrase into AI and it says, “Ultimately, the decision is personal and should prioritize your own happiness and well-being.” That is about all we’ve got these days: what I value, more or less.

Our government is littered with big hands grasping at a diminishing public trough. What if I don’t believe they are really job creators? What if I don’t value the way they assign my value? What if Jesus, the great I AM, makes me who I am?

Ellen Meiksins Wood observed, that a capitalist society is a society in which social relations are “embedded in the economy” rather than the “economy being embedded in social relations.” What she meant is we cannot account for the complexity of the capitalist mode of production as if it were an expression of human motives, desires and values. Capitalism is not simply an expression of the human tendency to “truck, barter and exchange.” Now it is a power that compels us to govern our whole lives in a transactional and commodifying way. It is not merely a matter of free people making choices, it is a compulsion, so much so, that a popular slur by our rulers is calling someone a “socialist.”

Under capitalism, many other aspects of human nature — such as the need for love, solidarity, and individuality — are secondary to the values associated with profit-seeking, or, if being kind, with “personal satisfaction” or “self-realization.” The word “values” is loaded with monetary value, quid pro quo, even with an evaluation of empathy as too weak to be sustainable.

I think the word “values” is loaded with the worst kind of autonomy: Godless, loveless, aloneness. The thoughts that: “I am responsible for what is important,” “I assign worth,” “My everyday choices to consume one thing over another is what gives me an identity” are overwhelming and subjugating. Thus the BIC reduced themselves with their “core values” to another set of choices, a product. It did not set itself apart from the world, it willingly adapted itself to the principles of the world.

But let’s remember after all this: Jesus is greater than our core values. There were undoubtedly many people in the crowd he confronted in John 8 who did not hear him and just “write him off“ with, “You have a right to your own opinion.” They followed him. The BIC is full of those kind of people, too.

Forgive yourself: You’ll not only feel better, you’ll be better

Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , , , ,

We usually think of forgiveness as a relational matter. They hurt me; they need to apologize. I did some wrong; I have to admit it and ask forgiveness. You may theoretically believe that is true, right? But living it out in the real world can be difficult. It is much easier to blame or avoid than reconcile.

We need to figure out forgiveness to save the world from its perpetual lack of reconciliation. As we do that, we actualize our own true self and get reconciled inside. Because forgiveness is not just between two people, is also an internal, psychological, and spiritual necessity. You also have a relationship with yourself, too. If we don’t sort out all the different voices that make up our inner dialogue, there is perpetual conflict going on inside of us, too!

For instance, last week I put out my weekly blog post a day earlier than I intended —  no big deal really. But I made the mistake because I thought Sunday was Monday! I was ready to call some computer someone somewhere to find out why my machines were all off! I finally figured out I was off and felt ashamed of myself for jumping to a wrong conclusion that cost me an hour of turmoil — so embarrassing! I accepted my “sin,” but the feelings of guilt and shame stuck with me. I did a dumb thing. Then I felt ashamed because I couldn’t let go of those feelings! What a flawed psychotherapist! I was not forgiving myself. I needed some inner reconciliation. Otherwise, I might have carried around my secret shame right through the terrific meeting at Salt and Light!

We know Jesus will forgive our sins when we confess our sins. But will we cooperate by forgiving ourselves? Some would say “Forgiving yourself is not that important if Jesus already did it.” Maybe. But I know a lot of people who are forgiven in principle but have never experienced a minute of that forgiveness in their hearts. Their presentation of themselves in the world is forgiven, which is good as far as that goes. But their inner being is unforgiving, critical, harsh and living under the law of some childhood jungle in which they grew up. Maybe you aren’t fully forgiven by Jesus if you won’t forgive yourself.

by Jaroslav Samoilenko

Hard on yourself?

How many times have I heard, “I think it will all get better if I just try harder. I’m having trouble doing what I want to do, but when I do, it will all be fine.” Such a person never even gets to square one of life with Jesus because they are still negotiating whether his lovingkindness is something they can live in and express, especially toward themselves. As a matter of fact, they may be quite loving to others but hard as nails with themselves. They might have a loud inner voice that even says, “Look how bad you are at forgiving yourself!” Or even harder, “If you don’t love others rightly, you’ll be damned!” Or very logical, “If you ‘forgive yourself,’ pretty soon you’ll never confess a sin and not even be a Christian!” Rather than letting guilt and shame pass through like regular emotions, every criticism and failure sticks to them like they are flypaper, until it is hard to hear the voice of love for all the buzzing. Does any of this sound familiar?

Do you struggle with forgiving yourself? Probably. I think most of us have been quite confused about  the subject. Most of us seem to be balancing whether we are too easy on ourselves, or rationalizing our bad behavior — at times wondering whether we are too hard on ourselves, and at times condemning ourselves. Such questions are what any wise person would want to ponder, of course. But the Bible tends to go beyond them. Paul assumes we are all unjustifiable (Romans 3:23), and we’re all likely to think too highly of ourselves (Romans 12:3). His remedy is not to admit we are self-condemning and self-congratulating at the same time; he wants us to accept where we are at and accept that Jesus is with us there. Likewise, Jeremiah asserts that we deceive ourselves about our condition; we’re a mystery to ourselves, but God can truly interpret our hearts (Jeremiah 17:9-10).

Don’t you think it qualifies as a “sin” to hold ourselves in contempt even when God prizes us and has forgiven our sin (2 Corinthians 2:6-8)? Let’s consider how to forgive ourselves and be reconciled inside as well as out. Then we might be able to feel God’s compassion in our anguished souls. If you already feel some resistance to the very thought of that, this post might be for you, especially.

Why forgive ourselves?

Only God can forgive sin, so we are not talking about that, OK? I’m talking about cooperating with the Spirit of forgiveness beating on the door of our guilt and shame. We’ve been gods to ourselves and it is strangely different to come at our sense of responsibility for being good from the place of being forgiven. We are born again by forgiveness and, like so many things in Christ, we need to grow up into it.

Remember: All who are in Christ are freed from condemnation (Romans 8:1) and freed to love (Galatians 5:13). We are meant to display the mercies of God as sinners forgiven of their sins (1 Timothy 1:15-16).

Extending grace and kindness to oneself and others is the transformation God effects in those who have received His grace and kindness. God’s kindness leads to repentance, that is, the Presence of kindness leads us to agree with God’s loving way of seeing us. Such gentleness is only possible for us because Jesus has set us free from the power of sin, the tyranny of self-rule, and the oppression of evil. Jesus said “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8). The starting point of forgiving ourselves is experiencing God’s forgiveness.

Keys to forgiving yourself

Clarify responsibility

Blame is tricky. Sometimes we blame ourselves for the injuries other people cause. For instance, many neglected or abused children think they must be to blame for not being cared for because they are unlovable. On the other hand, we sometimes blame others for things that are really all about us —  it is called projection. What we find shameful or unbearable, we cast on others and despise it, or assume someone else made us feel and act as we do.

When we are blaming ourselves or others, we need to sit back and do some mentalizing. Before we start reacting inside with self-loathing or outside with abusive behavior, we need clarity: What is mine and what belongs to someone else? What might be coming at me from the society, in general?

“Clarifying” who is responsible for the injury might sound like we could get caught in an endless inventory of our troubles, as if more clarity is all we need. But I think we need to go deeper than that. I am really talking about simple self-care. We feel better when our feet are on the solid ground of reality, even if that reality initially causes us some pain.

One of the reasons we shy away from clarity is because we feel things about it. We might be angry. We might have unfinished business with a perpetrator we have displaced  on people who bumped into our trigger. We might feel confused, even paralyzed. But we need to risk seeing it all clearly, since if we do not clarify who to forgive: ourselves, others, or whoever, lack of forgiveness will probably make us sick. It’s terrifying to face our pain, and so it seems easier to take the blame for it or cast the blame for it. But it is better to have a clear look at what is really going on so we can be appropriately responsible and appropriately gracious. It is deeper to have compassion for ourselves. Clarifying who needs forgiving is a good first step.

Renounce the dark comfort of your badness

You have probably heard someone say this, too, ” God can’t forgive me; I’m beyond grace.” I heard someone say on TV the other night, “I’ll see my mother again in hell.” Sometimes an unwillingness to seek forgiveness and live in God’s grace is a matter of pride – I did it my way. But more likely, doing life our own way is a matter of despair — it is all we think we can do, we’re alone. You may hear a voice that tells you. “You need to earn God’s favor and that of others.” But then you likely have another voice chime in to say, “You are too flawed to do that. You keep trying and you never make it.”

Self-justification is the universal spiritual disease that leads to spiritual death (Romans 6:23). Self-condemnation also leads to spiritual death: “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). We need to give up both of them. We need to be forgiven by God and then work with her to forgive ourselves — feel the love of God healing us and the power of God transforming us.

 Seek repair/make amends/foment reconciliation

 One of the best feelings in life is to sincerely say, “I am sorry I did that to you. Please forgive me.” I think someone read that line and immediately thought sarcastically, “Right.”  Some of us choke on the words “Please forgive me” because they are among the most vulnerable words one can say. They admit we’re guilty. We did something bad. We did not earn it. We are not perfect. We need something from the other person: forgiveness.

As hard as each may be, every act of forgiveness changes the world a little more, or at least stops it from going down the drain so fast. Jesus is quite radical when he tells us to go to our brother and sister and win them to a reconciled relationship (Matt. 18). That’s what God was doing in Jesus. His whole life is an invitation to connect in love, forever. His suffering is not just to fulfill some cosmic law, it is the natural process of being self-giving. When we acknowledge our responsibility for pain or the responsibility of others and seek to make things right, our experience of God’s love and forgiveness opens up, maybe even because someone forgives us or receives our forgiveness! When I experience the forgiveness of God and others I can extend it more readily to myself. (Ephesians 4)

The same experience Jesus describes going on between people, needs to go on inside us. We need to seek repair and foment wholeness in our hearts, as broken as they may be. We are prone to duking it out inside. The things we say to ourselves! I won’t write any examples because they are often unprintable. The shame that locks us into a secret view of ourselves that haunts our days! Forgiveness is an inside and out revolution.

Love with abandon

Jesus identified loving God with your whole heart and loving your neighbor as you love yourself as the two greatest commandments. He told his disciples to “Love one another as I have love you” – he assumed, of course, his disciples were letting  him love them. We are all invited to walk in love with Jesus. All of Christ’s teachings assume some new spiritual thing will happen in us, including that we will love ourselves like we experience God loving us. I am not sure we can keep loving others authentically if we do not experience the lovingkindness of God in our souls — and 95% of us want to do that.

Jesus is given over to love. He loves with abandon. Love requires courage and boldness because love is always costly and opens us to possible suffering. No one who has friends, lovers, children or a mate has never suffered for love. It calls for sacrifice. It is sometimes unrequited. It is easily misunderstood. Sometimes we refuse to forgive because we are protecting ourselves from the demands of love. Maybe right now you resent being told you need to do something you don’t feel like doing or don’t think you can do. Maybe you think it is unjust to forgive or you fear you will be diminished if you give into a bad person. But love and intimacy are only possible when we are vulnerable to being hurt again.

Love is kind — not only to others but to ourselves. Love keeps no record of wrongs — not only of others but of ourselves. Those are lovely seed-thoughts from 1 Corinthians 13. Our spiritual instincts tell us that even though our failure to forgive ourselves hinders our love for others, our meager attempts at doing it, met by the meager love others show for us is not for nothing. The process of bravely loving others facilitates self-forgiveness, too.

As soon as you read those lines, you may have noticed how you are not kind to yourself and how your record of your wrongs is quite complete. But don’t give up on yourself! God won’t. John lovingly writes to his disciples (1 John 3), “Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us, for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”

Get help

If you are hard on yourself and struggle with forgiving yourself, a therapist might help. Most people think forgiving others and being forgiven is the right way to go. Even so, more and more people these days are shying away from love because conflict and break ups could happen. They feel unprepared and unskilled in a fundamental feature of intimacy: forgiveness. A therapist might help you get started on better relationships with others and with yourself in many ways, including learning how to forgive yourself.

Nuremburg: The first casualty of war is psychiatry?

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Psychological growth, , , , , , ,
Russell Crowe, Leo Woodall, Rami Malek

Nuremburg, the repeatable morality play

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many countries across Europe and occupied them with systematic brutality. They inflicted 27 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone and exterminated two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population. Proposals for how to punish the defeated Nazi leaders ranged from a show trial (the Soviet Union) to summary executions (the United Kingdom). In mid-1945, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed to convene a joint tribunal in Nuremberg, occupied Germany, with the Nuremberg Charter as its legal instrument. For nearly a year, beginning in November of 1945, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) tried 22 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the political, military, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial was not just to convict the defendants but also to collect irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite.

Since the year of the tribunal, every generation has created a cinematic history lesson about the Nuremburg Trials. There is so much to learn and feel about the drama of seeing the captured Nazis being tried according to a new idea for international law. As the films try to make sense of what happened and preserve the memory, they also offer a look at the generation who made them.

Judgement at Nuremburg in 1961 had an all-star cast. It was based on a Teleplay by Abby Mann.

Nuremburg, a TV mini series  in 2000, starring Alec Baldwin, was based on Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico.

Now Nuremberg in 2025 has another all-star cast. This time, the film focuses on a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek. It is based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai.

The most recent re-telling is a very engaging movie for being mostly dialogue and courtroom scenes. The gist is: a WW2 psychiatrist evaluates Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Goering. [See this TIME review for more]

The movie circles around the growing relationship between Douglas Kelley and Goering. Kelley’s open mind is a perfect opportunity for Goering to plot whatever advantage he can achieve. Kelley is plagued by conscience, the Reichmaster is not. Goering plays on the psychiatrist’s sympathies and weaknesses as he positions himself to become a noble victim. His behavior is a textbook case of an anti-social personality disorder strategy many now call DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) painted on a large, disturbing canvas.

Some have said the other psychiatrist who was brought in to join Douglas Kelley, Gustave Gilbert (played in the film by Colin Hanks), might have been the better psychiatrist on which to base the movie. The book he wrote, unlike Kelley’s, was quite well-received, mainly because Gilbert made a diagnosis and then proved it. But I think the filmmakers made the right decision to focus on Kelley. His empathy and his own troubled soul, which finally led him to suicide many years later, seems much more appropriate in our very unsure age, which is once again being seduced into subjugation by tyrants.

[Philosopher and filmmaker, Matthew Cooke, is dead set against these tyrants who are subject to their “dark triad” and so subjecting us all to their will.]

The amiable psychopath

Gilbert’s book is far from useless, however. In it he labeled Goering an “amiable psychopath” in an era in which the term “psychopath” was just coming into focus with some definition.  You can read about it in his collected notes: Nuremburg Diary.

There Gilbert recounts the life history of the number two Nazi. He says Goering’s  physical and intellectual “constitution” played its part in his rise to the top and aided his sadistic, aggressive leadership. But it was the cold Prussian home he experienced as a child that nurtured his lack of authentic feeling for others and led to his brutality.  He was fed on Teutonic legends and Junker militarism. As a result, Goering believed deeply in loyalty to the Kaiser, military chivalry, military aristocracy, and German superiority. Peaceful or democratic people were repulsive to him. He was never able to take punishment or to benefit from disapproval, so he became completely self-centered. The Nazi party provided the perfect opportunity for gaining power, for loyalty to an absolute Führer, for sadistic excitement, for revenge against enemies, and for unlimited financial gain. Play acting as an amiable nobleman served the needs of his fantasy image. At Nuremberg he gave a fine performance, but the final evidence of all the atrocities spoiled his heroic pose.

In the movie, Goering seems like a devoted husband and father. Kelley is portrayed as a delivery man keeping the family ties alive while Goering is in prison and his wife and daughter are in hiding. It is as hard to tell what he actually is in the movie as it is hard to unmask a sociopath in real life. One of the key strategies of psychopaths is to skillfully appear normal, even noble. So it is useful to list how these people work. It is typical to see these traits that make them “amiable.”

  • Superficial Charm and Narcissism: Goering was noted for his outgoing, flamboyant personality and a powerful charisma that could charm people, including his prison psychiatrist and other captors. His ability to form appealing, though superficial,  connections probably extended to his personal and family life, where he could maintain the appearance of a normal, loving relationship.
  • Lack of Empathy, Not Lack of All Emotion: Psychopathy is primarily characterized by a lack of empathy and shame, and a disregard for the rights and feelings of others, particularly those outside one’s immediate “circle.” It does not mean a complete absence of all emotion. Psychopaths can experience anger, excitement, and even a form of possessive “affection” for people they view as an extension of themselves or their property.
  • Family as an Extension of Self/Status: For a narcissist and psychopath like Goering, his wife and daughter were part of his curated life and status. He displayed meticulous attention to his body and image, and his family and servants were also well attended-to as extensions of himself. Their well-being and loyalty reflected positively on him and his image of being a powerful, successful man. His primary concern at Nuremberg was that his family was all right, which aligns with protecting his “possessions” or legacy.
  • Compartmentalization: Psychopaths are adept at compartmentalizing their lives.  Goering was able be intricately involved in the horrors of the Nazi regime — including planning the “final solution,” which he claimed was not his department, and at the same time was able to maintain a functional home life that appeared charmed. It is fascinating how he can demonstrate an extreme level of moral detachment and  separate his public atrocities from his private self-image.

In essence, Goering’s “warm” relationships were likely a form of selective attachment to people who served his self-image, status, and personal fantasies, rather than true, empathetic love that could extend to humanity in general. His actions demonstrated a profound lack of empathy and conscience, which are core features of psychopathy, despite his ability to maintain seemingly normal, even charming, interpersonal relationships.

Kelley facing the true Goering

Psychiatry becomes a casualty

Do you think it is indicative of our era that we would recast the Nuremburg trials by having a psychiatrist be the main protagonist? In 1961 the star was a judge (Spencer Tracey was a respectable 61 years old). In 2000 the star was a sexually-challenged prosecutor (Alec Baldwin was a 42-year old playing Justice Jackson at 53). In 2025 the star is a faulty psychiatrist (Egyptian, Rami Malek, 44, playing 33-year-old Kelley — beautifully, I might add, with a bit of Mr. Robot thrown in).

We see Douglas Kelley as flawed but also caring, daring and quick to learn. His experiences highlight the weaknesses of psychotherapy when it is subject to the culture and the state. And they highlight the inevitable weaknesses of psychotherapists when they try to navigate the mysteries of unique beings in flawed systems.

Here are his main failures that open his psychiatry to death blows:

  • He is seduced by a powerful narcissist, who is probably on the malignant narcissist to psychopath spectrum (my research). If a therapist loves his client (as I always do), it is a short walk to erasing the therapist-patient boundary that keeps a clinician within ethical guidelines and delivers the best care to the client. Kelley is gradually lured into the spider web where the lie can eat him.
  • When asked to break confidentiality, he does. Confidentiality is the bedrock of client-therapist trust. Kelley wants to maintain it, at first, and keeps many secrets from his superiors (like knowing the whereabouts of Goering’s family). But in the end he provides all his material and insight to the prosecutors.

Some would say maintaining the privacy of  a psychopath violates a psychotherapist’s “duty to inform.” That duty is a legal and ethical obligation for therapists to break patient confidentiality in specific circumstances, most notably when a client poses a serious and imminent threat to themselves or others. Often it is called the “duty to warn” or “duty to protect,” that requires therapists to take reasonable steps to prevent harm, which may include warning the potential victim, notifying law enforcement, or seeking higher levels of care for the client. It is a critical exception to the rule of confidentiality, designed to balance the need for a safe therapeutic relationship with the responsibility to protect public safety.

  • He connects secretly with Goering’s family in the name of fact-finding (today we might call it “systems work”). This is another aspect of Kelley’s deceptive behavior. He isn’t merely collecting facts, he is delighting in the affection of Goering’s daughter. He could have had a dialog with his superior, but in the hysteria of war and the lack of trust in his commander, there s a lot of room for his defense. While watching the movie, I often wondered out loud, “Who is the Nazi here?” In several places the prosecutor also has doubts about how to apply laws that the countries sitting in judgment have also blatantly violated. How is Kelley supposed to follow his rules?
  • He makes friends with his client. I wrote my dissertation on multiple relationships so I was especially interested in his dilemma. Boundaries were almost impossible to keep within the several small communities in which he was operating: 1) the military with its prohibitive regulations and demands for obedience to a commanding officer, 2) the German prisoners, who all had psychological needs and who were part of a tight-knit group with their own prohibitions and assumptions, 3) the Goering family system, in which he acted as a text book example of operating outside prescribed boundaries, not having informed consent in any number of ways.  Many critics point out the present ethics codes still assume a Eurocentric cityscape where individuals can decide their own fate and act autonomously, which no one in Kelley’s circumstances could, including him.
  • From the outset, he Intends to capitalize on his experience by writing a book. After all, he has an eyewitness intimacy with the authors of evil we need to understand. That’s not bad logic. His colleague, Gustav Gilbert, as I said, also wrote a book in which he delivered the verdict that all these people were disordered. Kelley’s book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminal, has more sympathy, pathos and uncertainty. When it comes to any therapist writing a book about their clients, I asked a colleague if confidentiality were required after a client was dead — after all, one cannot get permission to tell their story, since they have died. They said. “That’s right, you can’t.”
  • He would not consult and was probably too young and inexperienced for the job. Therapists are bound to refer clients to other, more competent, helpers when  they do not have the expertise to treat them. Kelley needed a lot of help and should have found it. But it is hard to imagine the clinician who had the credentials to be thrown into the cells of the unique and deranged people Kelley encountered, right? His assignment was to “keep them alive” and he failed in the eyes of his commander because Goering had a cyanide pill stashed in the uniform the higher-ups allowed him to retain. As with the rest of Kelley’s ethical missteps, there is a lot of room for forgiveness if not absolution. It would seem that the first casualty of war is not only the public truth, but the private, as well.

I imagined myself parachuted into Nuremburg after enjoying the fruitful work of helping men with PTSD, as Kelley had been doing. It seemed like a nightmare. I could relate to Kelley’s fascination and eagerness to meet these once-in-a-lifetime clients, to learn, and to be special. But he obviously did not know a great deal about sociopathy and its sister maladies or he definitely would have taken a different tack with Goering. And he probably would have taken another course with all the prisoners as a group, since they all had engaged in creating or or had been drawn into the sociopathic society of the Third Reich, a pathocracy.

As a Christian looking in from the outside, socially, and looking out from the inside, beyond ordinary awareness, I was not too surprised, just consistently sad as I watched the Nuremburg morality play rerun for our generation. The movie was so realistic, some people might call in cynical. But I think it was just being as clear as it could be: everyone has a unique story and many of us are not only fighting the traumas of normal life, we are beset by the disruption we face in our very genes.

The road to life is narrow for many reasons. I have to admit that my clients often end up on a spiritual journey, even when I am not overtly Christian with them. They need a deeper route to take, because the usual resources of society and the law are simply not enough to help them heal and grow, inside or out. Nuremburg pointed this out this lack in every character. Some may call it cynical for that reason, but I call it realistic. The Savior was not welcomed. There was very little of God in movie, but who but Jesus had any hope of making goodness out of hanging 22 devils? Wonderful things followed the horrors of the two great wars of the 20th century. But here we are again only 80 years later, facing the same sociopaths, only now there is not enough faith or even enough trust in the law to face them down.  Or so it only appears, I hope.

*****

Today is Hild Day! Meet this great leader from the 7th century church in Northumbria at the Transhistorical Body. 

Moving into the third level of awareness in everyday life

A life in the Spirit, Music, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , , ,

I went to a large memorial service recently. It was full of stories and very moving because the woman being remembered was influential and beloved. I went because she prayed for me.

When we first landed in Philadelphia to plant a church, I knew we were likely to fail if we did not call on gifted people to pray for us. I collected scores of people to intercede who got a regular letter listing our triumphs and trials. Grace Holland was among the first to join in. Whenever I saw her she told me how she was praying and often had a question about something in our letter that intrigued her. She might not have known how much that meant to me; and she might not have really cared, since praying was a reward in itself for her.

Grace’s family is so full of faith and the wildness missionary kids often carry it would have been hard not to have an interesting and spiritually-stimulating morning at the memorial they held. I had a wonderful time. In fact, I have kept mentalizing about it, which led me to write this post.

As a person who has led many meetings for stories, teaching, ceremony and worship, I know members of an audience are not having a singular experience. At any given moment, someone is receiving what is offered with their ordinary awareness, perhaps exclusively. Others will be experiencing it with their spiritual awareness. Still others are blessed in their deepest hearts with an awareness of the presence of God.

Thomas  Keating, the main instigator in the Centering Prayer movement which got rolling in the 1970s, drew a simple target graphic to explain his common-sense description of what is happening when we turn toward God. I have been re-reading Cynthia Bourgeault’s classic expansion on his chart in Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.

Ordinary awareness

Some people who attended the funeral probably experienced it entirely with their ordinary awareness. They might have been children. They could have been a distant relation or acquaintance unfamiliar with the family or their brand of Christianity and were caught up with the curiosity of it all. Or they may have been spiritually undeveloped due to lack of opportunity or resistance. People with childhood trauma or children of parents who did not nurture a secure attachment often find it difficult to connect with other people or God and spend much of their time feeling so responsible for their well-being they can’t do anything else.

Ordinary awareness is the reflexive consciousness that only humans have, as far as we know. I have several pictures of a son staring at his fist as a baby coming to the realization he is a separate being from his mother. We all have the capacity to stand outside ourselves and look upon ourselves in the third person. We come to know ourselves as distinct from others with attributes and gifts that need to be expressed to “be ourselves.”

So I experienced the funeral with my ordinary awareness. For instance, I thought I had left with plenty of time to spare after the long drive from Philly to Harrisburg. But I actually just made it to the memorial in time, since the turnpike was jammed due to a car having caught fire. We saw it melted on the shoulder with its poor owners watching the firemen mop up. The feelings stuck with me. Then I entered a large meeting room with quite a few people I had not seen for years and a few I did not want to see. My “monkey mind” was hopping.

At any given moment our awareness is full of stimulating things coming at us which often  stimulate things we have stored up: random thoughts, memories, associations and sensations. We get “triggered,” we like to say, and habitual reactions may lead to a chain reaction that can set off our anxiety. If we did not have that sense of “self” that can step back and see what is going on, we might not be able to endure the chaos. That self-reflexive “I” is probing and measuring the universe all day, and even when we dream it asks things like, “How am I doing?” “Is it safe here?”  “What did she mean by that?” “Am I OK?”

Bourgeault says, “Another name for ‘ordinary awareness’ is ‘egoic thinking.’ It is the normal functioning zone of the human mind. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Ph.D., a bishop, a nuclear physicist; how brilliantly intellectual or intensely devout you may be. Without spiritual training, your sense of the world and your sense of yourself will be formed at this level of awareness. Even the so-called self-awareness tools of our times, from psychotherapy to Meyers-Briggs  personality typing to the enneagram, spend most of their effort merely resorting and clarifying the characteristics: ‘I am an INFP,’ ‘a gut-centered type,’ ‘a five,’ etc. This may add insights into the workings of the personality, but it’s till ordinary awareness.

Spiritual awareness

The funeral lasted about two hours. So there was a lot of opportunity for ordinary awareness. Plus I had to catch up with some old friends which occupied my mind and heart with pleasantries and tragedies.

Thinking together about our experience afterward, my wife and I realized that shortly after we arrived we had already soaked up the emotion swirling around the room, as a psychologist and psychotherapist might be prone to do. We were primed to be moved beyond our ordinary awareness and into our spiritual awareness. Grace was a well-known worshiper, so a time for that was  included. Almost with the first note, both of us began to cry. And we were drawn beyond ourselves.

As the worship continued, it would have been hard to miss the experience of spiritual awareness all humans are equipped to have whether someone was a Jesus follower of not. The meeting was like a first glimpse of Yosemite Valley, which seems to make everyone pause with awe. I first experienced such wonder under the stars in the Anza-Borrego desert. You may have felt it during a beautiful fall sunset last week. At times I have been drawn in when my friends were dancing or we were meeting an emergency together. And, of course, babies have been born.

Bourgeault says “spiritual awareness is actually a way of perceiving, just as ordinary awareness is a way of perceiving. As with ordinary awareness, there is a sense of identity or selfhood generated through this mode of perception. The big difference between them is that whereas ordinary awareness perceives through self-reflective consciousness, which splits the world into subject and object;  spiritual awareness perceives through an intuitive grasp of the whole and an innate sense of belonging. It’s something like sounding the note G on the piano and instantly hearing the D and the B that surround it and make it a chord. And since spiritual awareness is perception based on harmony, the sense of selfhood arising out of it is not plagued by that sense of isolation and anxiety that dominates life at the ordinary level of awareness.“

Holy Spirit awareness.

I was delighted with the smorgasbord of spiritual food we shared with Grace Holland’s family. I think she would have loved it – even the parts she thought we not fully baked yet. She would have loved how the meeting regularly veered into a thin place where we could reach into the bull’s-eye of the target, the goal Father Keating called our “divine awareness.”

The moment in the meeting I remember most, and these moments are usually relatively fleeting for all of us, was when we sang one of Grace’s favorite songs. Her son, Mike, recounted it was a tune that might pop into her ordinary awareness and lead her beyond it at any moment. I have also been moved by it since Maranatha Music released it on Praise 4 in 1980: “I Love you Lord.”

The song arose in the late 1970’s when it tumbled out during Laurie Klein’s quiet time before her toddler woke up. It found its way to Jack Hayford’s Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, which I visited. It was recorded by several musicians in the budding Christian music scene, including 2nd Chapter of Acts, who I followed. It gained general  recognition when Maranatha! Music published it and now Korean choirs sing it, too.

As we sang it, I felt the presence of God course through my body. I was one with God, with those gathered and with everyone who has sang that song throughout my life and throughout the world. I enjoy remembering that experience.

We all have a place at the center of us where our own being and God’s being are mysteriously interwoven, even if we are not aware of it. Bourgeault says, “The divine indwelling is the cornerstone of contemplative prayer. Thomas Keating refers to it as ‘our personal big bang,’ for it reveals the Source of our own being – the explosion of divine love into form which first gave rise to our personal life. It also reveals the direction our heart must travel for a constantly renewed intimacy with this Source. As we enter contemplative prayer, we draw near the wellspring from which our being flows.“

The whole world is full of glory

The big, noisy funeral I attended did not have much silence at all. Maybe I will leave that as a request for own funeral. But I carried a silent place with me as I attended which has been formed by years of attention to God-with-us. We meet God deep within us and all around us. It is beautiful when a song flows out of your personal, private quiet time. But the whole earth is full of the glory of God. We meet God-with-us wherever we go. We can’t make an appointment, per se, but we can expect that glory to erupt into our awareness.

Bourgeault points out that ordinary awareness and spiritual awareness are both necessary for functioning in this world. “But the idea in spiritual transformation is to integrate and reprioritize these levels so that our ordinary awareness is in alignment with and in service to our spiritual awareness (which in turn, as we have seen, is in service to the divine awareness). In that alignment our being flows rightly, from innermost out. When something needs to be done in the outer world, we have sufficient ego strength to do it. But unlike ordinary awareness, which is always doing things to assert itself or fulfill itself, action grounded in our spiritual awareness merely flows out of the divine abundance without regard to outcome or any need to draw attention to itself.”

To hear her family and pastors talk about her, the heart of God and Grace’s own heart were in a deep embrace at the center of her and much of her action flowed from that abundant life. I took that away as a lesson. But more so, I experienced its legacy at her funeral and joined with her in the eternal life of it.

The president who drove Christians back to basic faith

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If you are hesitant to have faith in Jesus and express it these days, I am not surprised. I think many of us already feel burned and the unburned have felt the heat. If we say anything in public it might be on camera for Homeland Security to discover, or some social media coup-collaborator might go after you! For instance, I advertised my research presentation on Facebook and about 1000 people took a look at the post. I put my psychology/Christianity integration work out there and people listened. Despite positive impact, there is one comment I keep thinking about: “Amazing the hate in the hearts of people under the guise of research it simply exposes bias and lack of critical objectivity.”

The comment was another example of DARVO by a rather religious person I rather like – in the flesh, at least. He did not deny Trump is a sociopath, directly, he went straight to attacking me, personally, as someone with hate in my heart pumping out research that lacks objectivity. This was all in the cause of defending the victimized president and his followers. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — that’s how it works.

Golden Trump at the merch site at CPAC in 2021 (AP/John Raoux). Click for source

But Trump is no victim. He even has worshipers. Millions of Americans have faith in him. The comparison has been made for years between how the children of Israel freely combined their gold to make a calf to worship while Moses was up in on the mountain receiving the law and the shocking number of Americans who worship Trump.

I am amazed they so freely give up their rights as Americans under the law. As poorly as those laws protect many citizens in this historic republic of the rich, they are better than nothing. Nevertheless, people follow Trump, who remodels the White house with gold while denying the poor their average-$187-per-person monthly SNAP benefit. Then one of them ferrets me out in my obscure space in the blogosphere to call me full of hate toward the poor president.

It all makes me want to set the next impossible goal in the hope we can apply the truth in Jesus to the present disaster our federal government is creating. So here goes. Here’s another shot at the basics of faith in Jesus tuned for our time.

Love them all

I come from an era when people used to dress in rainbow wigs to get noticed at sports stadiums holding up a signed that said “John 3:16.” I was embarrassed but still approved of their audacity. They were determined to get the basics of Christian faith before as many eyes as possible. We’ve always got to try something.

We’ve got to try something or people might miss the truth in John 3:16: The promise of eternal life in Jesus is made to every single person, everyone, all of them. Love them all. Even love your enemies.

Mexican congressman Braulio Guerra sits atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall that divides Tijuana, Mexico, from California on March 1, 2017. Twitter/@BraulioPRI

This loving includes the immigrants Stephen Miller demonizes. I have been to our southern border where so many immigrants arrive and quite a few scale the wall. It did not take me too long before I was having dinner with a young couple from Honduras who took the risk to try to get into the U.S. with their baby! It was not hard to love them.

Love them in Honduras. Love them in Mexico. And love those strangers when they get into the U.S. by legal means or not. That’s Christianity now and forever. Loving Donald Trump does not take precedence. The U.S. does not take precedence. God loves everyone in the world.

Christian community is adaptable and porous

We just finished the All Saints Day triduum, which celebrates the saints, the “whosoever” who followed Jesus, who are part of the transhistorical body of Christ. I celebrate them in a blog I keep as my online altar of remembrance and admiration.

The history of the church is an astounding story of discernment and inclusion, especially if you don’t emphasize the corrupt parts of it. It’s too bad the over-emphasis on STEM courses is making  such history-keeping obsolete. After the 2008 financial debacle, students started gravitating toward majors they believed offered them greater job security. So, according to my grandson at Pitt, it is hard to find a student who  reads any book these days, much less history books.

The lack of reading apparently includes reading the Bible. According to a 2024 article, from  2011-2021 “Bible Users” — which are people who interact with Scripture in any medium at least three or four times a year (apart from in church) hovered between 50 percent to 60 percent of the U.S. population. But in 2024, the number of Bible Users was down to 38%. That means in the last few years, millions of Americans have not even glanced at a Bible for any significant reason. It shows.

Meanwhile, in China, Xi is cracking down on the wildly adaptable and porous, often underground church, arresting the leader of one large element just before Trump arrived last week. [PBS video]

The Chinese church has continued to grow, even as their government tried to Sinicize it,  that is, conform it to the Communist Party line about what is acceptable Chinese culture. Their perseverance is another example of how the church has grown and changed throughout its history. Christian community has been repeatedly corrupted by men, primarily, since its conception, who have seen it as an opportunity to get some power. But the Chinese, Congolese and Brazilian churches give me hope these days, even as the church in my own country is tied up with a deluded need to protect an endangered past, even tied to a form of nationalism that belies the transnational nature of the church.

The church is always the hope of undermining cruel and corrupt leaders, even the sociopaths who always know the weaknesses in a person or a nation and exploit them. People of faith always upend the status quo because the church never depends on it to be itself; it is the body of Christ in any culture.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem for his last week of upending, he named himself the rejected “cornerstone” and said the kingdom of God would be taken away from the rejecters  “and given to a people who will produce its fruit. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed” (Matt. 21). When the motley crew called the church, the body of Christ in action, produces the fruit of the kingdom of God we are the rock that helps rejecters not get crushed.

Eternal life cannot be caged

The point of having eternal life cannot be reduced to an argument about whether my trans grandchild has been duped by woke fools or by the medical model of solving human conundrums. Love them all. Let them in.

Like John 3:16 says , trust in the risen Jesus transcends the latest expression of lies and greed directing the deceivable. Nevertheless, we have several versions of the Trump Bible, from which he profits. Some people have such a weak grasp of the Bible and the history of the church that they have been duped by the latest tyrant! It is not the first time, unfortunately.

But as all Bible readers know and all church historians can verify, wise men go home another way.  Disciples leave their nets. Centurions can repent of their murders. Women can become the first apostles. Believers like Paul and Silas can sing open their prison doors and save their jailers. Martyrs, like those Rome killed, upend state propaganda. Saints like Francis of Assisi and John Wesley, as flawed as they are, change their corrupted church and violent governments profoundly, starting with their own transformation and dogged conviction.

Eternal life cannot be caged. To experience our freedom and receive our joy, we must act out our faith, no matter the mess in which we find ourselves.

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Today is Martin de Porres Day! Get to know this Peruvian champion of the poor at The Transhistorical Body.

Understanding and responding to a “sociopath”

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At the CAPS East Conference last week, I presented my research on sociopaths. I have been collecting it all year. If you follow this blog (thank you!), you have probably run into some of what I have learned. If  you want to get into the finished product with me (and I wish you would), I have put links to my previous posts at the end of this one, along with a link to the powerpoint I used in my presentation, which includes the reference list.

It all started with Trump’s portrait.

Like I keep saying, when I first saw Donald Trump’s “official portrait” I marveled at the audacious grandiosity of it. There is no hint of humility or welcome in it. It is designed to intimidate. It matches his endless talk about “winning.”  I admit I ignored it. I laughed it off.

But after his re-election, I decided I needed to turn back and face what we are all facing in that face. Now we know how disorienting and frightening it is to be dominated by a sociopathic president. When I started researching it, I mostly knew the stereotypes associated with sociopathy — which I just learned how to pronounce properly after church a couple of weeks ago during the coffee hour. I think I began by googling, “what is the go-to book about sociopaths?”

I found the book and started with it: The Sociopath Next Door. Martha Stout’s classic from 2005 reads like a prophecy these days. It is academic enough. But its strongest point is its collection of case studies which prove her point: you might run into a sociopath next door and there are responses you should have ready when you do.

Barry Goldwater, Mary Trump’s Book, Anton Ashcroft

Can you diagnose someone you’ve never met?

I just suggested Trump is a sociopath. People asked me if I were afraid I had offended someone when I did the same at the conference. The president already has us scared to exercise our consciences in the face of the uncertainty of what my happen to us! I was not afraid to present my arrangement of evidence-based psychological study integrated with my Christian practice.

The most arguable thing I did was suggest Trump fit the definition. Because I agree that a professional cannot effectively diagnose someone they have never met. At the same time I also agree with people who say that diagnoses, in general, are rather suggestive and subjective even when one does know a person. I also agree with thoughtful people who say the ethics about diagnosing public figures may be outdated.

The APA formally added the Goldwater Rule to the ethics code in 1973, some time after Barry Goldwater won his libel case against Fact Magazine. Fact  published a survey of psychiatrists regarding his mental fitness to be president. He was not found to be fit. He lost by a landslide in 1964.

Like many ethics rules, the Goldwater Rule is roundly debated, especially when it is seen in light of a psychotherapist’s general duty to give warning when they know or even suspect sexual predators and murderous people are likely to act.  With A.I. and years of constant exposure,  writings, and history we can access about people like Donald Trump, things may be different than in 1973. Unlike most people on the Anti-social Personality Disorder spectrum, Trump does all his sinning brazenly, like tearing down the East Wing of the White House last week.

We have a lot of evidence for Trump’s sociopathy. For instance, Trump’s niece, Mary, a clinical psychologist, wrote the book (pictured above). She and Michael D’Antonio, a biographer, provide quite a bit of evidence for Trump being a sociopath. For instance, his mother was sick for a year when he was 2. His father Fred trained his sons to be “killers,” no empathy or vulnerability allowed. In the Art of the Deal Trump recalls giving his music teacher a black eye as an elementary kid. He was banished to military school at 13 where he was a loud-mouthed bully. George Conway put all the evidence together in an ad sponsored by his Anti-Psychopath Pac. (Access via Bing. I think he is banned on Google).

Anton Ashcroft (seen above), working in forensic psychology in 2016,  wrote Donald Trump: Narcissist, Psychopath or representative of the people? He claims, though he has never met Trump, it is his duty to warn people before they normalize his behavior. Your conscience will have to be your guide when his evidence calls for your conclusion.

2016 seems like a long time ago, now that Trump is fomenting a war with Venezuela and Mike Johnson refuses to let the House of Representatives convene. Ashcroft’s resistance is to a bygone ethics which presume an orderly set of institutions and common assumptions about propriety. Those presumptions are gone, it seems. So his diagnosis may be more relevant than ever, now that the traits of 4% of the population, many of whom are in prison (unless Trump has pardoned them), are being worked into the government, into world society, and into our individual lives.

No one has ever known what to do when the people on the sociopath spectrum — the People of the Lie as M. Scott Peck named them, get into power (which they normally don’t). People either try to avoid them or kill them. But killing them is not an immediate option for me. So I have been trying to understand them, at least, and discerning the most helpful responses God can suggest.

The research leads to the right questions

Martha Stout’s book is a plea to people of conscience to recognize and resist the ruthless among them. Her book formed the heart of my presentation. She helped me learn how NPD, ASPD, sociopathy and psychopathy form a spectrum of disorders coming into prominence in this “age of monsters.”

Counselors and educators can provide a truth-telling service to the unsuspecting society who cannot fathom the lack of conscience and single-minded will to power this 4% of the population suffers under.

We need to clarify what we are dealing with.

  • The definition of these people has become a bit muddy.
  • Is there really no cure for Anti-social Personality Disorder?
  • The idea of conscience needs to be clearer.
  • Are the assumptions about conscience fading with the diminishing influence of Judeo-Christian morality?
  • The factors, other than immorality, which cause sociopathy, need to be better researched and known.
  • Treatment options and interventions need to be more available to therapists, parents and law enforcement.

How do we respond to a person who has no guilt or shame, even biologically? I offered eight ways to respond and zeroed in on protecting our individual and societal consciences. I also highlighted the increasingly prevalent strategy of domination people on the ASPD spectrum use called DARVO — V.P. Vance has become as expert.

The definition of “sociopath”

I use the term “sociopath,” even though “psychopath” might work just as well. Neither term has a well-differentiated definition and neither appears in APA’s DSM – the repository of approved definitions for psychotherapists and researchers. But both terms are titles for ongoing study on the disorder. The American Psychological Association (APA) developed the term Anti-social Personality Disorder (ASPD)  because the terms sociopath and psychopath stigmatized people who got labeled that way.

Here are the criteria for ASPD:  1) failure to conform to social norms, 2) deceitfulness, manipulativeness, 3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead, 4) irritability, aggressiveness, 5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, 6) consistent irresponsibility, 7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

Martha Stout adds color to the list to make it clearer: 1) sociopathic charisma, 2) a grandiose sense of self worth, 3) the need for stimulation, risk taking, 4) pathological lying, defrauding, 5) callousness, no empathy, the inability to bond.

What do we do with a sociopath?

I say we have one planted in the White House and he must be removed before the weed comes to its inevitably rotten fruit. He is shamelessly pasting his picture over our lives. He would like to carve himself in Mt. Rushmore, put a Trump Arch in Washington DC and receive a Nobel Peace prize for settling conflicts he did not settle, even as he creates conflict that makes the whole world unsettled. His lies have a Wikipedia page. 

When we encounter people on the ASPD spectrum in our daily lives, even if we are not certain, we must do our best to discern the motivation behind their behavior and respond to them as they are, not according to their deceptions or our idealizations. We must attend to our personal health and the health of society. We might not have all the solutions or have the power to effect the necessary changes — but our voices matter; our responses matter. Having a clear conscience before God and others matters.

We can have some empathy for the conscienceless and imagine the horror they would experience, if they had the capacity to do so. Martha Stout says:

Imagine — if you can — not having a conscience, none at all,
no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do,
no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.
Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken…
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life?
What will you do with your huge and secret advantage?

We can love sociopaths with everlasting love. We might be able to help them. But don’t offer sociopaths pity and don’t waste your time shaming them (which is essentially negative pity). Never assume they are like you, with your guilt, shame and doubts; they are not. Keep asking, “What are they doing with their huge, secret advantage?” And tell the truth about your answers — to yourself and to everyone who will listen.

My previous blog posts on this subject. 

Say “No” now: It won’t get better. (April 7, 2025)

Is a sociopath training you for evil?: 8 ways to spot one and survive them. (May 12, 2025)

Recognizing DARVO is the first step to freedom: 5 practical responses. (August 25, 2025)

Your conscience is in danger: The Bible can help.  (October 20, 2025)

The slides for my presentation, which include the references are here: Google Slides

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Today is Kolano Sabia Day! As a person among the royal families leading the “Spice Islands” he represents a fascinating story of colonial evangelism — its sordid beginnings and its lasting impact.  Get the story at The Transhistorical Body. 

Your conscience is in danger: The Bible can help

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I was energized as I walked along Market St. on a beautiful day last Saturday. We periodically shouted “No Kings!” and “This is what democracy looks like,” and it felt good to hear my voice right out loud — there in public, and all. At one point we caught up with a couple of people in blow-up unicorn outfits. It looked like they might be young parents on a date — instead of the baby, their stroller carried a boombox. It was nice.

As we exercised our bodies we were exercising our consciences. Both have a tendency to get flabby. The latter desperately needs the restoration of a daily exercise routine before it gets burned out completely by the conflagration of kooks and crooks dominating our lives right now.

The dark side of conscience

I have spent quite a bit of time studying sociopath spectrum of humanity in the last few months. These are the people, probably not more than 5% of us, who either have a broken or missing conscience.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) collects these folks under the description “Anti-social Personality Disorder” (ASPD). The ASPD person has a severely wounded, inactive, broken or absent conscience. Conscienceless behavior is their distinctive across the spectrum. They are shameless.

The TV loves these people. You’d think they are around every corner, mostly carrying knives — they are not. But they make for good stories because they are strange and frightening. And we all know we might meet one and suspect we share some of their traits. Think Joe Goldberg in You, Dexter Morgan in Dexter, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, to name a few. Eric Cartman fits the description, too. They are more generally men, it seems, but women demonstrate the behavior, too. They are conscience-challenged, to say the least.

A conscience is the inner sense or faculty that allows a person to distinguish between right and wrong and guides their moral decisions. It acts as a moral compass, influencing behavior and causing feelings of guilt or pleasure based on whether actions align with one’s values and, importantly, fit in with one’s relationships. Hindus see this capacity as a seventh sense, beyond our five physical senses and beyond our ordinary awareness; it is “higher consciousness.” Contemplative Christians see it as spiritual awareness, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the place of intimacy with God and personal transformation.

Sociopath training

Conscience is considered a universal human ability, though its judgment can be shaped by experience and upbringing. It is what is happening in the deepest part of us, but not just that. Conscience needs a bond to form and to stay strong. That’s why many observers right now are wondering if we can fight off totalitarianism, since the opposition cannot unite. Postmodern, technology-isolated people have bonding issues.

Our bonding issues may have made us ripe for sociopathic manipulation. I think the  sociopaths are shaping our behaviors right now. The president is their leader. The innumerable lawsuits being filed are all about combatting behavior on the ASPD spectrum.

A sociopath cannot bond, most of the time. According to Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door),  leaders with no seventh sense, no inner awareness, no gut instinct for good, no spiritual connection can hypnotize the group conscience which leads to catastrophe.

ASPD leaders and ASPD-influenced systems make enemies “its,” not people, and see them as mere impediments to what is good, threats to safety and prosperity — and they find people to hate these “its” with them. Stephen Miller regularly strokes this proclivity in humanity. At Charlie Kirk’s funeral he said:

The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil, We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil. And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good….

And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Why don’t we follow our individual consciences and follow sociopaths instead? Stout says we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences. Our basic instinct to bond and be acceptable in community can be turned bad. This has been demonstrated repeatedly, beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment to see if he could get college students to shock other undergrads who were getting wrong answers. They gave up their power to the authorities and shocked! A sociopath knows this tendency and plays it. Bullying works.

Protecting your conscience

If you are a Christian, you probably agree with the New Testament writers who teach that our consciences can be injured, and blunted — and if you develop a “hardened heart,” it can wreck your all-important bond with God. There is a lot of healthy discussion in the Bible about maintaining a conscience that resembles Jesus’ and stays open to the Spirit of God. But let me give you the teaching in just one little book: 1 Timothy.

But the aim of such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith. Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions. (1:5-7)

The antidote to sociopath leaders may be as simple as dancing down the street in a unicorn costume — exercising stubborn joy (which, Jesus says, no one can take away from us), in the face of domination.

Paul reminds Timothy of heart, mind and soul — his spiritual awareness: pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith, as he stokes his courage to keep teaching the gospel. Timothy needs a strong inner life. Because it seems like he was up against some shameless, ASPD-type people who won’t stop talking nonsense and people are believing them.

This charge I commit to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies made earlier about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, having faith and a good conscience. By rejecting conscience, certain persons have suffered shipwreck in the faith; among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have turned over to Satan, so that they may be taught not to blaspheme. (1:18-20)

One’s conscience is in danger if it is not in good shape. The speaker at our beginning rally before the march chided us for being spiritually flabby, essentially. I took exception since I was, after all, in attendance. But she knew that one protest does not make a transformation. Sociopaths never rest. For instance, last week the White House hired Kurt Olsen, the Stop the Steal lawyer, to investigate the 2020 election (!). The resistance cannot rest, either.

It is possible that Hymenaeus and Alexander did not completely reject conscience out of some evil agency. They may have been born without the capacity to have a conscience because of amygdala defects, or their environment was so traumatizing it made them shameless in order to survive — and ASPD appears to be heritable, too.

When Paul “turned them over to Satan” he did not condemn them to hell. He just recognized their intractability. They needed something more than regular church community to teach them.

The word blaspheme, here and many places in the New Testament,  is a direct transliteration from Greek. It means slander, defamation, or reviling, especially against God, and includes speech that defames others. Hymenaeus and Alexander were not just impious, they were bond breakers, dividers, loveless.

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. (4:1-2)

When the Spirit “expressly says” something we primarily hear it with the seventh sense, which is the main reason we should keep it in shape. The message is mainly tested in community, which is why we need to stay connected to discerning believers. That sense can be dulled. A conscience can even be cauterized so it becomes impermeable to grace, joy and love.

Lies are the poison of conscience. Donald Trump’s lies have their own Wikipedia page. They are the main tool of sociopaths who only care about “winning.” Jesus calls liars children of the devil. The capacity of A.I. and our media in general to spread lies is breathtaking. Hopefully you have some children whose consciences are not seared who can build a new society in the wild years ahead.

If you feel like you must be living in the “later times,” you might be right. Pundits, protesters, prophets and preachers are working overtime to stand against the present “hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.” I thank God for that. We need all the help we can get. Because, as Paul teaches Timothy, having a living relationship with God, which keeps our consciences soft and clear, is the daily, fundamental step, not just in our self-care but in the formation of a society worth living in.

It might be a kairos time for renewal

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The president of Sojourners, Adam Russell Taylor, is prophetically optimistic about what might emerge from the rubble of this fractious, darkening time. As he pondered what’s going on, he drew from what he learned in the 1990’s from South Africans, especially Desmond Tutu. He faced the question: “Will we meet the opportunity of this Kairos moment like they did?” You are probably asking your own questions – or avoiding them.

A kairos moment is the perfect, critical, or opportune time to say or do a particular thing. The ancient Greek concept of kairos is a qualitative kind of time, which is different from the quantitative, linear concept of chronos. In a kairos moment, like Taylor says we are in, the weight and meaning of the situation matter more than the duration. We tend to sense a kairos moment when we run into it, if we are aware enough. We respond to one rather than  create one.

I was also in South Africa in the 90’s, not long after I came to Philadelphia to help plant Circle of Hope [link to the book]. The Philadelphia Leadership Foundation recruited members from its ranks to create a multiethnic mediation team to apply some skills to bridging what divides our city. We travelled to South Africa to learn from the experts. Unfortunately, our time with Tutu was cancelled because he was an important guy and needed more elsewhere.

We did not become an ongoing force for change as a group, but I know we carried some great lessons to apply to our individual situations when the time was right. The church and the dreamers in the world have spent a lot of time since the 90’s filling our minds and hearts with a yearning for justice and equality. They have salted the Earth and made a difference. Maybe more of what they planted is about to come up at just the right time, right now. I think we could see some fruit when millions of young people around the world took to the streets this year to demand an end to the mass killing of Gazans. Trump is flying to the Middle East to take credit for a cease fire deal. But millions of people caring for the poor and oppressed was what really turned the tide. And one day all that caring applied to the rest of what is being broken will win the day after the oligarchs and their enablers are dust — or so Taylor and I hope.

Here is part of what Adam Russell Taylor wrote in an editorial for Sojourners last week.

I first learned about the theological concept of kairos while studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa in 1996. South African faith leaders taught me that, as compared to chronos, or time as we know it and traditionally experience it, kairos moments are precipitated by times in which our current reality becomes so pernicious and fraudulent that God can create a moment of opportunity for propitious action and transformation.

As I think about the alarming things we’ve seen in the U.S. this year—eviscerated foreign aid, a gutted federal workforce, tax cuts for the 1% at the expense of Medicaid and food stamps, National Guard troops deployed against U.S. cities, indiscriminate immigration raids, an almost complete retreat on addressing our climate crisis, attacks on media outlets and free speech, and other tactics that mirror authoritarian regimes—I’m increasingly sensing that we are in the midst of a kairos moment. Further signs came to a head this past week with the horror of five mass shootings in one weekend, a costly government shutdown, and an alarming and bizarre summoning of 800 generals and admirals to the White House in which President Donald Trump pledged to dangerously misuse the military to come after the “enemy from within.”

We are not the first nation or the first Christians to face a kairos moment. In July 1985, South Africa was in an even deeper crisis. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency and dramatically escalated mass detentions, repression, and state violence while cracking down on the media. Despite growing international opposition, the apartheid state was doubling down on its repression. Many church leaders in South Africa, especially in the Dutch Reformed Church, misused and weaponized the Bible to justify the apartheid system of racial separation and oppression. Meanwhile, many other Christians remained silent and complacent in the face of increasing repression, staying on the sidelines of the anti-apartheid struggle.

In response, a group of South African church leaders, theologians, and Christian activists gathered to pen the Kairos Document, an open-ended document of faith-inspired resistance to apartheid. Its authors critiqued “state theology,” which they defined as Christianity that justifies “the status quo with its racism, capitalism, and totalitarianism” and “blesses injustice, canonizes the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience, and apathy.” They also critiqued factions of the church who accepted the argument that the South African government’s repression was justified to maintain law and order, as well as those within the church who pleaded for racial reconciliation without first attending to injustice.

“We are a divided Church precisely because not all the members of our Churches have taken sides against oppression,” wrote the authors. “Unity and reconciliation within the Church itself is only possible around God and Jesus Christ who are to be found on the side of the poor and the oppressed.” [Full article]

That weed-strewn kairos

For thirty years I have been inspired by the faithfulness and tenacity of the people who led the movement to overturn apartheid in South Africa and build a new nation. I don’t think their vision had a long shelf life, after Mandela. But their improved nation still chugs along. And the seeds of justice and people power they planted have grown into several generations of people who can’t be easily turned by more promises built on the lies of power-hungry men.

We’ll see what the seeds planted in the U.S. finally become when the sunshine of this kairos moment dawns on them. It could be amazing. People like Adam Russell Taylor, Desmond Tutu and probably you will feel the urge to sprout from the rubble like plucky spiritual weeds always do.