Historically, evangelicals have been more circumspect than others (or shall we say more paranoic?) about the intrusion of secularism into the church. Promiscuous hospitality to ideas is left to the liberals. So it is strange and amazing how evangelical churches have welcomed into their fellowship the spirit of Carl Rogers, who in 1922 quite explicitly rejected orthodox Christianity.
One reason Rogers has been so un-questioningly welcomed is his low profile. He did not come in the front door and has remained largely incognito. William Kirk Kilpatrick has aptly referred to him as “the quiet revolutionary” (see accompanying article). Many church people who have drunk deeply of Rogers’s spirit, and fluently speak his language, have no idea who the man is. I want to raise his profile a bit.
Let me say at the outset that I consider it quite possible for pagan insights to help the church, if they are properly adapted. But we must be aggressively critical, testing the spirits, to make sure that the gospel of Jesus, and the Christian life, are furthered by these pagan elements, and not hindered or contradicted by them.
Unconditional Acceptance And Christian Love
At the heart of Rogers’s therapy is an idea something like Christian love. If you go to a Rogerian therapist for “counseling,” you probably will not get much counseling—in the sense of advice about how to solve your problems. But you probably will come away feeling more self-confident, liking yourself better. You will be more aware of your feelings about whatever is bothering you, and more accepting of them.
The reason is that the therapist will bathe you in a warm atmosphere of “empathy.” You are sure that if you just hauled off and told people some of the shocking things you have done and thought and felt, you would be in for a gagging dose of condemnation. So you tend to keep your mouth shut. And your feelings get clogged up, too, so that you are not even sure what they are. How surprised you are, then, when the therapist looks at you with those empathic eyes that say, “I’d really like to hear about you. Please tell me your story, and don’t hold anything back, because we have lots of time; and absolutely no matter what you tell me, there is now no condemnation.”
The theoretical result of this active listening (and, ideally, this is just about all a Rogerian therapist will do) is a kind of emotional liberation. Because somebody actively and unconditionally accepts me just as I am (without one plea), I am gradually set free to accept myself. I am freed to be the self that I truly am. I do not need to be defensive, because there is no longer anything to defend myself against. And being undefensive, I become accepting of others, regardless of their faults. The therapist’s acceptance of me translates into my acceptance of others.
This looks suspiciously like the Christian dynamic of love: Through Christ’s love God “reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Through the power of his empathy, the therapist is a kind of savior. By first loving us (reconciling us to himself), he sets us free from our spiritual bondage and the darkness of our self-deception, and he frees us to love one another (gives us the ministry of reconciliation). This similarity leads many church people to feel that the Rogerian is spiritual kin.
But a moment’s reflection will caution us against leaning too heavily on this comparison. Christian love is sacrificial. Jesus humbled himself, took up a very nasty cross, and died for our salvation. That is what his love meant. And Christians whose love is formed by his also give themselves up for each other. Easy, comfortable, profitable “love” is always under deep suspicion, in Christian terms, of not being love at all.
And Rogerian empathy does not even begin to qualify as sacrifice. First of all, it is a technique that students in clinical psychology learn in graduate school. They are given lists of empathic phrases to use on clients and encouraged to memorize them. They then practice these phrases on one another, using videotaping equipment to critique one another’s empathy. But Christian love is not a technique to be learned. It is not a skill you hone in graduate school. Also, the therapeutic context is wrong for sacrifice. The therapist is not sacrificing time and energy; you pay him $65 an hour for switching on those empathic eyes.
So, it is a big mistake to confuse Rogerian empathy with Christian love. But the confusion is not without basis. Listening to others with genuine interest, being attentively present to someone in pain, giving him to know you are with him, despite his faults—these are ways that Christian love is expressed. Rogerian empathy is not love, but it is a shape love often needs to take. If there is no place in our demeanor for accepting people despite their sins, then surely we are not mature Christians. If we are so wrapped up in our own projects and problems that we cannot pay attention to other people’s problems, then surely love does not abide in us. So Christians can learn from Carl Rogers.
Acceptance And Forgiveness
Jesus managed to be open to sinners, gracious and unconditionally accepting, without ceasing to be strict. But Christians have always found it hard to maintain both tendencies. Emphasizing strict standards of behavior tends to degenerate into an ungracious legalism in which we become unable to express the unconditional love of Christ. And if we stress forgiveness very strongly we tend to veer into mere tolerance—accepting just any behavior and abandoning ethical standards. Rogers, having no allegiance to Jesus, has, of course, no concern to retain both dimensions of Christian spirituality.
In Rogerian theory the therapist is nonjudgmental, 100 percent accepting (“gracious”). This may sound like Christian grace, but it means the Rogerian has no ethical standards. If Josef Mengele gets depressed and goes to a Rogerian for counseling, and if the conversation comes around to the hideous medical experiments he performed on Jewish babies, the therapist will try to draw out Mengele’s feelings about this. And if it turns out Mengele has no regret and thinks he was doing a fine thing, the Rogerian will have no standard by which to judge that. Feelings are feelings, after all.
I don’t want to give the impression that Rogers would personally have no qualms about Mengele’s crimes. He believes, rather optimistically, that nobody completely in touch with his feelings would be like Mengele. If we are just totally nonjudgmental with each other, we will all be completely natural; and if we are natural, we will be good. But “good” does not mean that we live by any ethical standards; it just means that we do what comes naturally.
Nothing you tell the therapist will cause him to reject you, and this is very important in the Rogerian framework, because it enables you to become honest with yourself and accept yourself, and thus to be yourself—which is the whole aim of therapy. There is no pressure from the Rogerian quarter to be responsible to others, to set limits to your appetites, to bring yourself into line with some standard like the Ten Commandments.
If this is grace, it is grace without forgiveness. This is not because the Rogerian withholds forgiveness, but because in his scheme there is absolutely nothing to forgive. Any need you may feel for forgiveness is strictly a mistake, because there is no standard against which to transgress. Our Lord assumes that a person has violated a standard (sinned), and then he goes on to accept him despite the violation (forgives him). The Rogerian assumes that persons have only fallen into the illusion of thinking they must live up to certain expectations, and then he cuts through this illusion by accepting them.
Self-Realization And Self-Centeredness
To this point, I have spoken primarily to the therapist-client relationship. But many people who have never visited a Rogerian therapist think and act on Rogerian principles. Recently I asked some pastors about the influence of humanistic psychology in their congregations.
One thing that came out strongly was that the emphasis on self-fulfillment has begotten a spirit of self-centeredness among Christians. Instead of focusing on who God is and what he requires of them, and how they can serve others inside and outside the church, evangelical Christians have begun focusing on the satisfaction of their own “needs.”
The Rogerian ideal of self-acceptance without standards means that self-fulfillment is cut off from any notion of self-discipline. So church people tend to see pastors, youth leaders, and Christian educators less as authorities with a teaching to be accepted in obedient gratitude, than as “facilitators,” enablers, people to “draw us out” and “bring out the best in us.”
“I think there’s a desire for preaching to be targeted to meet very specific human needs,” said one pastor. “And when a person is hurting, and comes on Sunday morning, there’s a growing desire to have that need met and less desire to discipline oneself in worship, to come under God’s Word with the understanding that as we grow in him, other areas will be addressed.
“I think the evangelical church has a rough time worshiping,” he went on, “because a lot of times people come to see what they can get out of it. And if something happens in one church and they don’t like it, they go someplace else, rotating around, always having their needs met. So there is a real lack of commitment to the Lord and to worshiping him.”
It is typical of the Rogerian spirit to think that to be free and self-fulfilled is to be free from responsibility to others. The pastor of a suburban church told me about a discussion preparatory to forming a study group: “I talked a little about commitment to the study, and one of the young ladies said, ‘If we make it a group where there is a duty to attend, it will take all the joy out of it.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’
“And she said, ‘Well, some evening or day I just may not feel like coming. And if I come because I have to be there, then there’s no joy in it.’ ”
“The thing most lacking is an understanding of responsibility,” said a second pastor. “Nobody feels responsible to anyone else, but only to themselves. It’s tough as nails to get people to feel responsible for others.”
The suburban pastor mentioned a man whose wife has been dying of a degenerative disease for the last three or four years. The man feels like “bailing out of the marriage” because he has no opportunity for sex and for the kind of communication with his wife that would meet his needs. And the Rogerian emphasis on meeting one’s needs, along with the absence of any concept of responsibility to others, would seem to encourage bailing out of such a marriage.
Again, though, the biblical emphasis is different. Christians are called to bear one another’s burdens and to stand by the marriage partner in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health. And the Bible also emphasizes that living through your trials with God’s help makes you into a mature person, builds Christian character. This life is not supposed to be a setting for the satisfaction of the immediately obvious needs of the Rogerian “organism”; instead, it is a preparatory school for God’s kingdom. So if the Christian’s “needs” are not met, he will not be surprised or feel he has been cheated. If he is frustrated, he will as likely conclude that he is being given an opportunity for spiritual growth—growth in patience, forbearance, self-control, forgiveness, and kindness.
Becoming A Person
The Rogerian emphasis on self-fulfillment leads to self-centeredness because, paradoxically, the Rogerian self has no center—no orientation, no community, no doctrine, no principles. It is only within something like the Christian community, where you have a responsibility to other people delineated by certain expectations (“law”), that the self can develop. Because Rogerian grace is a grace without demands, the Rogerian self is a self without substance.
It is ironical, then, that one of Rogers’s most widely read books should be titled On Becoming a Person. To become thoroughly Rogerian is to cut oneself off from a necessary condition for becoming a mature, complete person—that of being responsible to others.
One pastor I spoke with had started his ministry in a Rogerian style. “The Rogerian notion [of not imposing one’s beliefs on others, but just reflecting back their feelings to them] got me off the hook early in my ministry, clouded over the necessity to clarify my own belief system and apply it to life.” After a few years, however, this sort of ministry began to seem empty. “I began to think: I’m wasting my time and theirs, if all I do is read back people’s feelings all day.”
But wrenching himself free from Rogers was not easy, for the spirit of radical toleration was an intimidating and oppressive one: “I was afraid to believe, or to share with people, that there was an objective truth. Whatever people could live with—that was their truth. And that was sacrosanct, something I shouldn’t meddle with. But there was something in me, too, that said I should believe in something and communicate that belief to others.”
I said to the pastor, “When you feel constrained to deal with people, not in terms of your beliefs, but only as a facilitator of their feelings, you can’t really be yourself. You have to become abstract, and in a way lose your identity.”
He replied, “I was feeling like nobody.”
I am glad to report that he has now recovered his sense of identity and has a vigorous Christian ministry.
Confusing Rogerian theory with Christianity can make it a basic philosophy of life. As the experience of this pastor demonstrates, if Rogerians were to succeed in consistently living out this philosophy (which they very seldom do), they would lose identity and cease to be persons in any but the most minimal sense of the word.
All this helps us to understand why the Christian influenced by Rogers can become self-centered, for unlike God’s forgiving acceptance proclaimed in Christ, Rogerian empathy seems more likely to lead to narcissism than to love of neighbor. The Rogerian client seems to get focused on his own needs, rather than his neighbor’s. He learns to seek to be served by others—to find ways of causing others to “meet his needs.” Because the Rogerian does not stand for anything ethical, his liberation through empathy leads, not to love of neighbor, but at most to a bland toleration of neighbor. True, he is no longer threatened by his neighbor. But since he is not committed to anything beyond his own “organism,” this independence cannot amount to an active and firmly shaped love.
Self-Growth And Listening To The “Organism”
A couple of times already I have used the strange word “organism” in explaining Rogers’s ideas, and it is a very important word indeed. It refers to his notion of a person who is “fully functioning.” The idea corresponds to what Christians would call “maturity” or “holiness.”
To Rogers, a fully functioning person is totally in touch with his basic needs. He gives unimpeded expression to the spontaneous, culture-naked course of his “organism.” You might say he lives by instinct, except that “instinct” would then have to include needs for artistic and intellectual expression as well as needs for food and sex and so forth. Rogers believes that if we can just become thoroughly natural and uninhibited, we will be perfect. All distortion of ourselves, all failure to grow as persons, is because we listen to “external” voices and “authorities” rather than to the demands of our natural selves.
Rogers is an optimist about human nature but a pessimist about culture, systems of morality, dogmas, and traditions. In this he is just the opposite of Christians, who distrust human nature and think that if anything is to be redeemed of it, this will have to be through taming and shaping it with biblical principles and the Christian tradition. The “external” authority of God’s revealed Word is our only hope of becoming sanctified, mature, whole persons.
So it is alarming if Christians start using the Bible as just one more way of listening to their organisms. But according to the pastors I talked to, this tendency is already at work in the evangelical churches. As one of them remarked, “There is a move to say, ‘Let’s get together for a Bible study, and no one read a commentary, no one do a lot of study; but let’s just read Scripture and share what it means to us.’ ” This pastor said he appreciated people wanting to apply Scripture to their lives, “But if they don’t have any disciplined way of studying it, it just becomes part of the process of self-understanding and has no meaning independently of what we feel we need. Whatever it says to me at this moment, that’s what it means.”
Thus the Bible is demoted to the status of Rogerian “facilitator.” This helps to explain a difference that one of the pastors noted between the prayer concerns typical of evangelicals today and what concerned an earlier generation of evangelicals: “The theme is always our personal needs: a new car, a better job, we’re looking to sell our house, we want to go to this school or that school. Very seldom do you hear someone saying, ‘I’d like to grow in patience, and love, and holiness.’ We talk about prayer and say God wants to answer our prayer, but we don’t pray for the things God calls us to search for. We pray about things God’s Word doesn’t mention: the better job, the higher wage.”
Becoming “Congruent”
For most of us, there is a gap between what we think ourselves to be and what we are. Because we fail to accept ourselves, we build up an unrealistic and dishonest “self-concept.” We think of ourselves as generous despite our stinginess, as loving parents even if we cannot stand the little brats, as caring people though our real philosophy is Look Out for Number One. We picture ourselves as young and dashing when the truth is we are beginning to hang down in flab and sags and wrinkles. This lack of “congruence,” or agreement, between our self-concept and our self stunts our growth, causes emotional anesthesia, poisons our relationships with others, and perpetuates our sense of the world as a threatening place to live.
One of the pastors I talked with mentioned a seminary course in “evangelism” in which the participants analyzed movies in an effort to discern the underlying philosophy of their culture. Evangelism was then supposed to occur when these pastors reflected this basic philosophy back to people whose lives are governed by it, facilitating self-understanding and thus helping them to “grow” into congruence with the philosophy they already adhere to. But this evangelism has nothing to do with delivering any news or attempting to change anybody’s orientation. It is just a matter of “values clarification,” and it is a very Rogerian strategy of “evangelism.” Rogers’s therapy attempts through empathy to close this gap between our values and our declarations, making our selves more acceptable to ourselves. If the truth does not threaten us, it is easier to acknowledge it.
Another kind of acceptance, colored by the forgiveness of God in the cross of Christ, can help us to a more honest self-concept. Christian acceptance, too, can liberate us for clarity about ourselves. I can acknowledge that I am a moral reprobate even though I do not “accept” that fact about myself. I do not accept it in the sense that I respond to this self-clarity with an effort to change.
And that is another difference between the Christian and the Rogerian. With regard to mere Rogerian congruence, there is no difference between Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Meursault, the hero of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger. Mother Teresa is a self-giving person, and she is both clear about that fact and “accepts” it. That is, she does not find this self-awareness distressing. And the same is true of Meursault. He is an uncaring person who finds his mother’s funeral more an annoyance to his routine than anything else. He, too, is both clear about this fact and finds nothing distressing in it.
Neither Mother Teresa nor Meursault would gain anything from Rogerian therapy since they both are perfectly congruent—self-acknowledging and self-accepting. From a Christian point of view, we want to say that for Mother Teresa congruence is appropriate because the self that her self-concept is congruent with is an acceptable self. But for Meursault, congruence is not appropriate; he ought to be distressed about his character. It is part of what makes Meursault monstrous that he should, upon acknowledging what he is like, simply “accept” himself.
Since most of us meet somebody more like Meursault than like Mother Teresa when God’s forgiveness clarifies us to ourselves, we have no business just “accepting” ourselves. Instead, the right emotion is remorse, and the right response is upward striving toward God’s kingdom.
Evangelical Rogerians
Given such differences between Rogers’s theory and orthodox Christianity, why have Christians found Rogers so enormously attractive? Why not those of another psychologist? There are, after all, striking similarities to Christianity in other therapeutic orientations. Freud’s view that civilization and propriety are but a veneer laid in self-deceit over a lustful, murderous, and self-destructive reality below could easily be read as a secularized version of the doctrine of universal sin. And the behaviorist philosophy that a person is what he does is wonderfully congruent with the no-nonsense preaching of the apostle James, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only,” and many similar sayings of the Lord Jesus. But Freud and behaviorism have been far less popular among Christians than Rogers. Why?
Most of us grew up hearing that God is gracious, that Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners, and that there is now no condemnation for those who are in him. But this doctrine was hardly at all reflected in our Christian environment as we experienced it. If you smoked or drank in a community in which that was taboo, the feeling you got was definitely not one of being accepted. If your belief was at variance with some doctrine cherished by the board of deacons, you knew pretty well you had better keep your mouth shut.
From all this the Rogerian spirit comes on as a kind of liberator. What a wonderful new experience of freedom finally to be able to relax and just be oneself! But this is not just an emancipation from the oppressiveness of legalism. It seems to be a return to the authentic tradition, to the heart of the Christianity that we all knew to be in the background of that crabbed, ungracious life we once lived in the church. So this is a liberation unlike others: it is a liberation legitimated, so it seems, by tradition. Carl Rogers is really a preacher of the apostolic gospel, an embodiment of the Christian spirit, though without knowing it.
But as we have seen, this is not true. Rogers himself knows and declares he is not a Christian. Indeed, in many ways he is the very antithesis of Christian. And yet, if we are cautious, there are some things we can perhaps learn from him. And that is the grain of truth in the unreflective urge, which we must all have felt at one time or another, to embrace him as a brother.
