For the sake of new readers, I consider my calling to be the masses of people who are disillusioned with the nature of American Christianity and are leaving. I don’t represent all the voices of those who are leaving, but a significant chunk who no longer feel welcomed in the church. I would best describe us as rational, objective individuals who pursue evidence-based truth. We are living in an age, for the past fifty years, of subjective Christianity, where truth is felt, not discovered through God-given reason. That epistemological process, once confined to spiritual matters, has now taken over everyday life. When I speak to many Christians, they now believe things about politics, healthcare, or science that are against all evidence, yet they know it is true because they feel it.

 Nope, human reason isn’t perfect either. Theologically, I am mostly aligned with Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer, among others. But I don’t hold them up as my heroes, infallible and worshipped. There was disagreement among those three, so I certainly can’t agree with all of them.

I have been doing a series on why people leave Christianity for good, and one of the top three reasons is hypocrisy. I am not screaming at the hypocrites, as I am one too. Still, I am examining the philosophical and psychological nature of American Christian culture and why it fosters such widespread hypocrisy to such a severe extent. What I call severe is high-ranking “godly” Christians who have a secret life of pedophilia, lying, embezzlement, or even murder.

In my previous post, I wrote about Bill Gothard. When I was in college, he was considered the most godly man in the world, literally. After all, he was teaching others how to be godly. Then he got caught up in his secret life, with a behavior of grooming pretty girls, as young as fourteen, to be close to him, and with a lot of inappropriate touching. Of course, others have done much worse, but it is the contrast between his public façade of pristine godliness and secret actions that makes this heinous.  But this is not about Bill Gothard; it is about widespread mischief within Christianity, while boasting of self-righteousness. This is driving people away by the droves, especially in this age of self-proclaimed Christian godliness and devotion to Trumpism, where the abuse of women appears to be prevalent.

After spending years contemplating and studying, I believe I have some answers.

A Metaphysical Problem

A term like “metaphysical” could turn off or intimidate some people. However, it is the correct word in this case. The metaphysical involves understanding reality, encompassing both the physical and that which transcends it (meta). Stick with me, and I will make my point.

Plato was the first to write about humans having a divine, immortal soul that surpasses the body. At that time in history, the human brain was considered by Plato and Hippocrates to be where the soul resided. In contrast, Aristotle believed the brain to be the radiator of blood, where the blood is cooled, and the soul resided throughout the body, especially in the heart. It is a Christian tenet that we are spiritual creatures. That our brains house an immaterial consciousness that has a disconnect from our material bodies and lives independently from them. Yes, you will find plenty of scripture that implies we are spiritual beings and our bodies are simply the vehicle that gets our soul, in this material world, from point A to point B. I may discuss that at another time, but not here.

At the time the New Testament was written, we knew nothing about the function of the brain. While there was no neuro-research at the time, surely there were observations of brain injuries causing changes in how we think and move. Over the last two thousand years, particularly in the past two hundred years, a substantial amount of research has been conducted on how the brain functions. No, we don’t know everything, but we know a great deal where reasoning takes place, memory, motor movements, senses, feelings, judgment, and, to some extent, our consciousness.

Here, I will apply the two-book principle of Augustine (fourth and fifth centuries) and Aquinas (thirteenth century), as well as the Catholic Scholastics. That God has given us two books of revelation, the canonical scriptures and nature (reality). And as Aquinas wrote, if there is a disagreement, that disagreement must be rationally reconciled. So, if the Bible says the sky is green (Book 1) and you look out the window and see a blue sky (Book 2), then you must conclude that either you are colorblind or the Bible was speaking metaphorically at that point.

When I was an evangelical, we adhered to Martin Luther’s Sola Scriptura (the written Bible alone). Luther, the founder of the Reformation, disagreed with Aquinas, thinking that Aristotle had too much influence on him and that there was only one book. If it said the world was flat, then the earth was flat, no matter what we observe with our own eyes. This has had a profound affect on the protestant church.

To illustrate our evangelical view of the nature of the soul and human behavior, I was a psychology major with the intention of going into “Christian counseling” for a while. The brand of Christian counseling I was following at the time was called Nouthetic Counseling; the word “Nouthetic” means to admonish. It was the idea that all problems, all mental illness can be accounted for by 1) sin and 2) demonic attacks. This would include depression, anxiety, neurosis, psychosis, personality disorders, and certainly gender identity issues, including homosexuality (in other words, the entire DSM catalog of psycho-social issues, yes and of course homosexuality is no longer included in the manual). This is precisely how you would conduct counseling if it were true that we are only spiritual beings… the brain only filling space inside our skull.

There has been much criticism of Nouthetic Counseling by the established psychological community. These criticisms focus on 1) reductionism (oversimplifying emotional disorders), 2) being against empirical evidence, so claims of success cannot be substantiated as they are in other, research-oriented psychological and psychiatric treatments, 3) blaming the patient for failures if their approach didn’t work, and 4) totally ignoring the role of the material brain in emotional disorders, including genetics, physical and emotional trauma, and disease such as dementias, strokes, and metabolic disorders.

I can still remember, as a practicing PA in a neurology practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan, hearing for the first time about “endogenous depression” (biological-based depression) and a blood test (dexamethasone suppression test, DST) that was thought at the time could diagnose it. I laughed out loud, knowing with certainty (as a religious person, I was sure about all my beliefs and dogmas), that depression was always caused by sin. As a footnote, a few years later, through careful study, the DST was found to be unreliable and was subsequently abandoned. However, many other biological markers for biological based depression have been found.

I didn’t mean to go down the Nouthetic Counseling Movement rabbit hole, but only to illustrate how your metaphysical ideas matter. Later, I will apply this to morality and the Christian concept of godliness, which makes even the most “godly”  people quite vulnerable to secret lives of mischief.

I will admit that I have some bias, as I spent a thirty-eight-year career in neurology. Daily, I observed the power of the material brain over movement, feelings—both emotional and tactile, perception, as well as thinking and morality. I will close with an illustration of the latter.

A Not-so Secret Life

I had a patient, around sixty-five years old, who was well-known in his community as a very kind and moral man, a faithful Christian. One day, middle schoolers were standing in front of his house waiting for their bus. He went out to get the paper, then walked over and grabbed one of the girls by her crotch. Yeah, I know Donald Trump bragged about doing this, but this was totally out of character for this man, and it was done in broad daylight, in front of other kids. The man was arrested, booked, then released on parole, awaiting a trial date. His wise daughter (who lived out of town) booked an appointment at our clinic, as this didn’t make sense.

His wife was profoundly embarrassed about this whole matter, and I had to go out to the lobby to coax her into the exam room. The man seemed normal and didn’t remember the event but claimed he was being falsely accused. I knew better. When I asked his wife about other unusual behaviors, she was very hesitant to share that at their granddaughter’s tenth birthday party, he commented to the whole group that he noticed she was starting to have breasts, and he would like to feel them.

“What about his driving?” I asked.

“He makes me nervous. The other day, he drove right through a red light, and I yelled at him. He said he thought red meant to go.”

Now, if I were learning that this man had a façade of being a good, Christian man, but a long history in his secret life of molesting children, I would have believed it and considered evil but normal. But even a pervert, a pedophile, knows better than to do their heinous acts in public.

I suspected him of having early signs of frontotemporal dementia, which, unlike other dementias, doesn’t affect memory as much as judgment. I ordered a brain MRI (which showed some mild shrinkage of his brain) and a PET scan of brain activity (which I had to fight with his insurance company to get), which showed the classic signs of reduced metabolic activity in the frontal and temporal lobes of his brain, diagnostic of frontotemporal dementia. I presented this evidence to the wise judge, who did not sentence him to prison or put him on the sexual predator list, but required him to be under the care of our clinic with monthly appointments. The sad thing is that the treatments are limited.

Frontotemporal dementia is a brain disease characterized by genetic markers and abnormal proteins. The Christian Nouthetic Counselor would have rebuked this man as sin or demon-possessed.

To tie this post to my previous posts from the past year or so, there is overwhelming evidence for an ancient Earth and cosmos. There is overwhelming evidence for evolution at some point, as documented in both the fossil and genetic records. There is also overwhelming evidence that our material brains are tied closely to our conscious beings. The problem is that modern-subjective Christianity rejects these ideas because it rejects evidence and reason.

In closing, I have shared the above story to make the point that our beings, our state of consciousness, have a deep connection to our material brains. No, I will not be making the argument that all those nasty acts in the secret lives of Christians are brain disorders and out of their control. Just wait and see where I’m going with this.

Respectfully, Mike