Prayer, Prozac, and the Healing of America

Notes for a Trinitarian psychology

Christianity Today October 7, 1996

Renewing America’s Soul: A Spiritual Psychology for Home, Work, and Nation, by Howard E. Butt, Jr. (Continuum, 264 pp.; $19.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Don E. Eberly, author of Restoring the Good Society (Hourglass/ Baker Book House) and former aide to President Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp.

Arguably the worst form of pain is not physical, but mental. What makes clinical depression uniquely cruel is the broad confusion and silence that surrounds it. Of all the forbidden subjects in the church, mental illness may be the surest conversation-stopper, even though evidence suggests that it may be as pervasive in the church as it is in the broader society, where as many as one in ten experience it.

When was the last time you read an announcement in the church bulletin that there will be a meeting of the support group for those who have experienced clinical depression? Or heard from the pulpit a prayer like “Lord, help brother Howard with his clinical depression”-especially when the brother in mind is Howard Butt, Jr., a prominent lay evangelist?

Butt has written a book for the millions of Americans who start their day with prayer and Prozac. Renewing America’s Soul is part the story of the author’s struggle with emotional suffering, part commentary on the state of emotional wellness in the church, and part cry for social renewal rooted in relational healing. The author is clearly aware of the current tension between secular psychology and biblical faith but does not shrink from directly confronting the issues at stake in this debate. The emergence of psychological programming in the church, with its emphasis on subjective experience and feelings, has been met in recent years with appropriate resistance. In this book, however, the church gets a reminder of the opposite risk: that of throwing out the “baby” of a proper acknowledgment of the emotional trauma of many in the church with the “bathwater” of unscriptural psychobabble.

Renewing America’s Soul deals as much with the healing of Howard Butt’s soul as it does with that of the nation. Like a growing number of Christian books, it identifies suffering in life as the surest path to spiritual depth. For Butt, the experience of suffering has provided the means of escape from the ever-present snares of idolatry and human pride, resulting in an enriched marriage and strengthened faith.

In openly confronting his depression, Butt reopens a conflict that many would like to close-the intersection of faith and emotional health. Like others who have suffered, he cannot help seeing in the Bible abundant evidence of human struggle, evidence that is often missed by those who mine Scripture only for doctrine.

Butt argues for at least a limited compatibility between classical psychiatry and orthodox Christianity, but he finds fault with both. Psychiatry has been too smug, he says, while the church has reacted too defensively. His harshest criticism is reserved for the church, an institution guilty of pride and effrontery, a place where the lonely gather, avoiding the brokenness of their relationships, remaining no less strangers than those in the world beyond. Indeed, he suggests that evangelicalism is itself the greatest enemy of spiritual awakening, because it is a personality culture of show-business superficiality: blind, shallow, and “relationally unreal.”

Scripture’s inescapable psychology Not content simply to find fault, Butt volunteers an attempt to harmonize theological and psychological truth. The church has not even begun, he says, to discover Scripture’s “unrelenting, inescapable psychology.” According to Butt, though one may sweep the church library clean of psychological texts, one can never succeed in expunging psychological content from the biblical narrative, or from life itself, which is at the same time psychologically and theologically conditioned. Each man and each woman is uniquely created in body, mind, and soul, and uniquely “fouled up” by the Fall. Butt argues that the history of faith is a history of God working with people possessing peculiar psychological makeups-for example, the apostle Peter growing out of an immature temperament into godly maturity. Biblical characters have “spiritual and psychological aspects,” just as we do.

True enough. But biblical history is the story of God the Redeemer rescuing man the incorrigible sinner through atonement and spiritual rebirth, not therapy. One senses that Butt will not gain many sympathizers among psychology’s detractors by embracing terms like “spiritual psychiatry” and “relational theology” with the confidence normally reserved for foundational doctrines like original sin.

Generational realism Biblical psychology is particularly valuable, Butt suggests, in illuminating the dynamics of generational conflict. Scripture is relentlessly honest in revealing the inevitability of such conflict-this is the “generational realism” we need-but also full of hope, pointing the way toward reconciliation.

The author says too little about his struggle with his own father (a hard-driven entrepreneur), although the reader is left with the impression that Howard, Jr., was on the weaker end of a relational struggle with Howard, Sr. What we are told is that the younger Howard acted on his sense of unworthiness and his desire to condemn his dad by substituting his own ambition for ministry for his father’s striving for mammon. Butt Jr.’s “ungodly and hellish strategy” was to become an equally hard-charging lay evangelist, traveling “at breakneck speed” from sermon to sermon, leaving a trail of “breathless service, hurry-up holiness, stripped gears, burned-out motors, and shrieking tires” in pursuit of super-spirituality.

Butt’s moving account of this personal ordeal becomes the jumping-off point for a long treatment of conflicts in families. Generational resentments, marital disunity, continuous transference of our own unacknowledged rage, fear, or bitterness-all are tied, says Butt, to the untreated infections we contract from our family of origin. Imbalances seep by osmosis “through the thin tissues of our family circles,” spreading like an epidemic into ever-wider circles, ultimately throughout society itself.

Here is where the book turns to the broader theme of its title: the renewal of “America’s soul.” The pages reflect the deepening national debate about social capital-the decline in our social institutions and the loss of social trust. Much of the anger, distrust of authority, and declining public order in America reflects a breakdown in primary relationships within the family. For many Americans, life is simply not working out at the relational level, and the resulting anger is often directed toward society and its institutions. A nation made up of wounded, isolated, and cynical individuals is not one that will easily accomplish a renaissance in civic spirit.

The gravest consequence of relational brokenness is in our union with God himself. “We all tend to understand God in terms of our parents,” Butt observes. Whatever their particular faults, we are bound to consume much of life’s conscious energy reacting against our parents, and subconsciously against God who (in our mind) resembles them.

Trinitarian democracy Like many who have encountered deep struggles in life, Butt is eager to rid the world of conflict by restoring harmony and balance-in relationships, in the church, and throughout our divided society. He finds the source of harmony-and the foundation for harmonizing the psychological and the theological-in “the shattering truth” of the Trinity.

In the three perfect persons of the Trinity we discover harmoniously ordered relationships. For Butt, Trinitarian thinking provides the model for psychologically healthy relationships and, if applied properly, can “transform how we think about our personal lives, our families, our organizations, and our governments.”

In what is, by far, the best section of the book, Butt applies Trinitarian principles to the maintenance of democratic order. He argues that for democracy, Trinitarianism synthesizes the virtues of freedom and order, hierarchy and equality, rights and responsibilities. In the Trinity, there is the transcendence of the Father, the immanence of the Son, and the binding together of both by the Holy Spirit. “All freedom-political, psychological, spiritual-has its origin in the Triune heart of God,” Butt writes. All abuses of freedom, whether in the form of fascism or communism, are examples of half-truths and distortions of Trinitarian virtues.

In a world where political differences are sharp and the debate frequently shrill, Trinitarian democracy offers a new set of flexible and respectful arrangements, with leaders serving and servants leading, with “religious liberty its engine, the separation of church and state its chassis, layers of differentiated loyalty its fuel.” The result? A new regard for the common good, more civility, less polarization, more order, more responsible use of freedom. Without these Trinitarian balances between leader and led, democracy-as the ancient Greeks discovered-simply won’t work.

Still, even here, there are strained and muddled concepts. Consider the following phrase: “elite holiness produces flexibly therapeutic citizenship.” There may be something to glean from this, but few readers will take the time to bother. The book is heavy on psychology and even heavier in its use of jargon (“rechildrening” and “reparenting,” for instance). One subtitle reads “Choosing to Choose our Chosenness.”

Indeed, in Butt’s view just about everything turns out to be psychological. Our early experiences and relationships have a powerful (“perhaps unalterable”) influence on our lives. History is psychologically determined: anti-Semitism is father-murder writ large; each of us condemned Christ to the cross because we are primordial father-murderers, and so on. Butt would do well to remember that there are a good many realities that are best left in theological, not psychological, categories, realities for which there are biblical terms like wickedness, evil, and sin.

There is much in Renewing America’s Soul to stimulate positive discussion and, more important, to encourage deeper sympathy for people like its author who know firsthand about emotional suffering. The positive aspects of the book, however, are diminished by Butt’s excessive reliance upon psychological jargon and theorizing. Rather than achieving the reconciliation between psychology and faith that Butt seeks, this book may instead leave the already strained marriage between them in need of further therapy.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 4, 1996

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