A Psychiatrist’s View: Why Jesus Attracts Today’s Youth

The mass media have made Americans aware that in recent months large numbers of young people have turned from a grossly secular to a distinctly spiritual style of life. Interest in the spiritual began to emerge several years ago as part of the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs. At that time the young focused on Eastern religions, perhaps because these were clearly separate from the establishment. Recently many have turned to the Christian faith, with primary emphasis on the person of Christ. They express and share their faith in small groups and so-called Christian communes. The institutional church has yet to become a major part of the movement.

That this surge of spiritual interest has come among the young is of particular significance. In our society, youth has been setting the standards. Adults, rather than taking the lead, anxiously try to imitate the young, adopting their dress, their language, their music. In films, on television, in books, plays and advertisements, one observes the indelible influence of youth.

When parents imitate children, when the adult world turns to the adolescent world for its values and standards, problems inevitably arise. The young, struggling to find a clear definition of themselves, have a need to separate from adults. When adults identify with them, adopting their dress and mannerisms, the distance many young people find comfortable and necessary is compromised. Thus adults unwittingly force the young to resort to more extreme patterns of behavior and dress.

What has brought about this recent interest in Christianity among the young? Will this trend also influence the adult world? Will it perhaps be the beginning of a vast spiritual transformation within our society? (This didn’t appear likely to those who read Life magazine’s report on the rather startling reactions of parents to the conversion of their teen-agers.) Is the interest merely a fad that will disappear as quickly as styles in dress and music? This youth culture changes so rapidly that freshmen consider college seniors a different generation. Five years out of college makes one a different species.

Like all human behavior, this spiritual interest among youth has many ingredients. Sociologists might point to the cultural crisis we have been in for the past few decades and say that the turn to the spiritual is a result of that crisis, that it is a desperate attempt to regain the sense of dignity and personal worth man had when Western civilization was less secular. Others say that our devotion to science and technology has destroyed man’s image of himself as the center of God’s creation and that consequently man has become increasingly restless and discontent. For their part, theologians might point to the many genuine conversions taking place and present evidence of spiritual forces at work.

I would like to speak from my professional perspective, that of a psychiatrist, and share a few clinical impressions of my work with young people. These impressions may help us understand not only some of the emotional aspects of this youth culture but also some of the psychological determinants of young people’s recent interest in the Christian faith.

One obvious and unique aspect of our culture is its intense involvement with drugs. I estimate that 70 per cent of our population take drugs regularly—marihuana, LSD, heroin, amphetamines, tranquilizers, barbituates, alcohol. Many adults have long used drugs to relieve their restlessness, anxiety, and discontent, to pick them up or to calm them down, to wake them up or to help them sleep, to stimulate or curb their appetite.

Among the younger generation, drug use is considerably more widespread than most of us realize. About 90 per cent of the under-thirty people I see smoke marihuana regularly, and a sizable number have taken LSD. In a high-school class in the town I live in, a teacher asked how many had smoked marihuana; sixteen out of twenty raised their hands. In some areas children experience drugs before entering high school.

What has brought about this infatuation with drugs? What does it mean? A few years ago when hallucinogenic drugs received extensive coverage in the news media, I set out to interview thirty or forty young people who had taken LSD. Because they were intelligent, well-informed students who placed a high premium on intellectual activity, I couldn’t understand why they would take a drug that posed such danger to their minds.

I found all these LSD users struggling with intense personal conflict. For them, the promises of what the drug could do in resolving these conflicts far outweighed the risk. Let me mention some characteristics of the sample I interviewed:

1. Grossly unsatisfactory relationships with other people. Feelings of loneliness, isolation, and estrangement were common themes. LSD promised to make them feel love and unity with others. Richard Alpert, an early proponent of the drug, has written: “With LSD you share consciousness and from then on the other person has become a part of you forever and you a part of him in a very meaningful sense.”

2. Extreme dissatisfaction with themselves. As a group the LSD users had high expectations for themselves and poor performance. Many had intellectual interests but were unable to settle down enough to become absorbed in these interests. Their inner conflict left little energy to invest in their studies. They found extreme frustration in their desire to engage in creative work. Here again LSD promised a quick and easy resolution; proponents of the drug spoke loftily about freeing the mind and expanding consciousness.

3. Hostility and anger toward the adult world. This anger paralleled a deep-seated dependency. Said one girl, “We take LSD as another way of avoiding the adult world we hate. I think adults want me to fit into a mold, and I object. LSD is a way of fighting this mold.” The drug promised to change reality through an activity disapproved of by authority.

4. Feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy. Often the users ingested LSD after an unsuccessful social or sexual encounter. The drug promised to make the user into an effective, perceptive person. Again and again these young people said they were attracted to LSD because they thought it would bring about a change that would straighten out the defects and inadequacies that plagued them.

5. Moral and spiritual void in their lives. When these young people really opened up, they expressed feelings of guilt and of moral worthlessness. They spoke of anger at their parents for not giving them a philosophy of life to fall back on (as their parents’ own parents had given them). The drug appealed to this conflict by promising them a mystical experience, and the users were caught up primarily in Eastern religions.

We can understand how these emotional needs—for self-renewal, for rebirth, for dealing with guilt, for filling a moral and spiritual void, for establishing a positive self-image, for finding a philosophy that gave some meaning to life—might lead young people to drugs that promised to meet the needs. Because the drugs inevitably fail, we are witnessing today a mass disillusionment with the drug scene and a gradual turning from them to more promising pastures.

In addition to dependence on drugs, a second major characteristic of our society is a marked inability to control basic impulses. The liberation of sexual and aggressive instincts may be due to many factors. Developments in my field, especially in psychoanalysis, may be partly responsible. Unfortunately, some people felt that freedom from sexual prohibitions would eliminate neurosis and make for a happier society. This, of course, has proved patently untrue. Although Freud felt that excessive suppression of instincts often leads to neurosis and accounts for much restlessness and discontent, he also realized the danger of their liberation. He said:

When the mental counterforces which ordinarily inhibit aggression are out of action, aggression will manifest itself spontaneously and reveal man as a savage beast to whom consideration toward his own kind is something alien.… Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts.… Hence the restriction upon sexual life.

An article in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly pointed out that among young people, drive liberation, the consequence of less pressure on them by older adults, has not diminished the conflict between generations but has heightened it. Sexual liberation and easier opportunities for sexual gratification have not produced a lessening of aggression. Indeed, for some reason this trend seems to have increased restlessness, discontent, and conflict between the generations.

Aggression in the form of violence appears to be increasing continuously in our society. New crime statistics continually show sizable increases over the former figures.

A couple of years ago I was able to observe at first hand a campus disorder that brought the nation’s oldest university to an abrupt halt. A small group of students seized an administration building and forcibly ejected several deans. The administration quickly summoned outside help. Some of the police who were brought in lost control, and the resulting injuries to both participants and innocent observers radicalized many moderates and catapulted the college into a paralyzing strike.

As I explored the details of the crisis, I was struck by seemingly endless examples of disordered communication—especially at high administrative levels—reflecting disordered human relations. One fact emerged with remarkable clarity: the remoteness and invisibility of some administrators alienated a large segment of the college community and set the emotional backdrop for the disorder.

The behavior of remote, uninvolved professors and administrators parallels the behavior of parents in the childhood homes of many of today’s students. An increasing number of young people come from homes in which the family has virtually disintegrated. At no time in history has the integrity of the family been more severely jeopardized by both internal and external forces. A home in which both parents are available to the child, emotionally as well as physically, has become the exception rather than the rule.

That physically or emotionally “absent” parents often produce resentful or disturbed children is hardly a recent discovery. Only recently, however, have we come to realize the full emotional impact on the child, especially of the inaccessible or absent father. Demands on the father’s time, changes in the role of the wife and mother, and the intrusion of the television set make meaningful relationships difficult to maintain. Parents’ absence and uninvolvement cause the child to feel rejected and resentful.

Some current practices in child-rearing contribute to the difficulty. For example, failing to set limits intensifies a child’s feeling of parental unconcern and leaves a residue of poor inner discipline and of inability to delay gratification. The tendency to punish by withdrawing attention and affection increases the child’s sense of being unacknowledged and rejected. Being sent to boarding school, as many children of affluent parents now are, seems to some children to be the culmination of a long series of rejections. (It may be more than coincidental that private-school students were over-represented among those who seized Harvard’s administration building.)

The particular orientation of modern society, with material values superseding ethical and spiritual values, tends to produce fragmented families in which parents and children are confused about limits and basic priorities. Perhaps we should not be surprised that many students react to this background by rejecting not only the materialism of our society but the entire free-enterprise system as well.

Out of this background come many of the specific emotional conflicts that trouble young people today. I will mention briefly some of these difficulties that relate to campus turmoil.

1. Depression and excessively low self-esteem. Suspiciousness and hostility toward authority—always present to some degree in this age group—have become considerably more intense and closer to the surface. Repressed anger in the child, resulting from a sense of rejection, may in the adolescent express itself in: (a) depression—by far the most frequent clinical symptom encountered among students; (b) an excessively negative self-image (the disheveled appearance of many young people today not only serves as a gesture of defiance and repudiation of the establishment but also reflects this unconscious low self-esteem; as we have said, this negative image also appears to be exaggerated among those taking drugs); and (c) irrational, stereotyped, destructive behavior.

2. Poor impulse control and inability to tolerate frustration. Although as recently as ten years ago the majority of clinical problems among college students reflected inhibition and excessive impulse control, today emotional difficulties in the young reflect lack of impulse control (both sexual and aggressive) and inability to tolerate frustration. (Perhaps this relates to the expectation by some radicals of immediate response to “non-negotiable” demands.)

3. Intense sensitivity to unresponsive authority. Most important of all, many of today’s young people are highly sensitive to remoteness, invisibility, and unresponsiveness on the part of authority; this can be traced, in part, to experiences with unresponsive parents in the childhood home.

In addition to campus disorder, another form of aggression bears brief mention. It represents aggression turned against the self and contributes to the deaths of thousands of young people each year. I refer to the motorcycle, a pervasive symbol of the “Now” generation. The popularity of the motorcycle is something quite recent. In 1956 there were fewer than half a million registered, in 1971 more than five million. About 5,000 riders are killed annually, and more than a quarter of a million injured. During the past few years I observed a group of patients showing unusual emotional investment in the motorcycle and sharing a number of general characteristics. Correspondence from doctors the world over indicates the syndrome is widespread. Its main features are:

1. Unusual preoccupation with the motorcycle. When the patient was not actually riding the motorcycle, he day-dreamed of doing so.

2. A history of accident proneness extending to early childhood and a recent history of one or more serious motorcycle accidents.

3. Persistent fears of bodily injury.

4. Extreme passivity and inability to compete academically, athletically, or socially.

5. A defective self-image: deep-seated, often unconscious feelings of being unintelligent, fat, weak, feminine, defective.

6. Poor control of sexual and aggressive impulses, with anger—especially anger toward the father—turned inward and resulting in passivity, depression, and tendency to self-injury.

7. Fear of and counter-phobic involvement with aggressive girls.

8. Impotence and intense homosexual concerns.

9. A distant, conflict-ridden relationship with the father. The patient typically sees the father as excessively critical and as one with whom he cannot possibly compete. Each patient within my sample feared his father and as a young boy learned to avoid him. The fathers of these patients were highly successful in their careers. Several had the unusual quality of being outstanding as both athletes and scholars; this made them formidable competitors, of course. These busy fathers were emotionally and physically inaccessible to the boys.

One other aspect of poor impulse control in our society is the permissive and free expression of sexuality. The type of family background I described earlier often leads to profound loneliness and a sense of not belonging, and a great deal of sexual behavior is an attempt to overcome this loneliness. There appears to be an increasing inability to tolerate being alone.

The young seek emotional security through sex, but because it is so often disappointing and empty and so often results in emotional pain they become more and more disillusioned. Less preoccupied with sex than the older generation, they have little interest in X-rated movies. On the other hand, the intensity and pleasure of sexuality has markedly diminished. Freud made an interesting comment in 1912:

At the same time if sexual freedom is unrestricted from the outset the result is no better. It can be easily shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as it becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten the libido.… In times in which there were no difficulties standing in the way of sexual satisfaction, such as perhaps during the decline of ancient civilizations [and I suppose if Freud were writing today he would include our present civilization as well], love became worthless and life empty.

Paradoxically, people today feel a great deal of guilt about their sexual behavior, though they don’t readily admit this. Here we may find another reason for the appeal of Christian faith. When the young speak of the moral and spiritual void in their lives, they refer to a gap they feel between their social concerns on the one hand and their personal morality on the other. The Christian faith, with its forgiveness and strong moral precepts, helps bridge the gap.

One final comment about sexuality. I have noticed what appears to be an increasing incidence of homosexuality among young people, though it is difficult to know whether there is actually an increase or whether today’s freedom of expression makes us more aware of its prevalence. The wide coverage homosexuality now receives as the news media report activities of “gay” organizations and the participation of female homosexuals in the women’s liberation movement has made this a topic of open discussion.

As homosexuality continues to become more acceptable for discussion, churches will undoubtedly become more aware of this problem among their members. As a matter of fact, they may find a surprisingly large number of churchgoers struggling with homosexual impulses. This ought not to be surprising, for at least two reasons: (1) The loneliness, the intense need for human contact, the image the homosexual has of himself as a misfit, may cause him to see the Christian community as a refuge and a possible source of comfort. (2) Recent research showed a statistically significantly higher incidence of cold, rejecting fathers within the family background of homosexuals; this produces yearning for a warm, loving, accepting father. The appeal of Christianity to one suffering from this particular emotional need is obvious.

We have been looking at some broad sketches of the youth culture from a clinical perspective. How representative are these sketches? Current understanding of the human mind reveals that we are much more alike than different. The differences between conflicts of the person who visits a psychiatrist and conflicts of the one who does not are differences of degree and not of kind. The attitudes and feelings we have been discussing represent a wide spectrum of youth.

As we focus on these sketches I think we gain some understanding of the emotional and psychological setting in which interest in Christianity is taking place. I have spoken several times in this article of poor impulse control. People in my field attribute this to a weakening of the agency they refer to as the super-ego. And a number of psychoanalysts attribute weakening of the super-ego in young people today to the tenuous role of the father in the modern home. It is interesting to see how often conflicts with the father and intense ambivalence toward authority occur among the youth we have been discussing. This fact may help to make Christianity—with its nuclear Father-Son relationship and its provision of a strong, forgiving, accepting Father—emotionally appealing. I have also spoken of the strong need to find a means of coping with guilt, to find a moral framework that will give meaning to life, to find some means of loving others and of establishing a positive image of oneself as a human being. All this may play a part in the recent spiritual quest of the young.

I have seen the lives of many students changed from a completely secular life style to a full commitment to Christ. Some were leaders of the SDS movement that caused the disorder at Harvard; they were forced to leave college, and during their time away they embraced the Christian faith. It is interesting to see how they have changed. Their intense social concerns have by no means diminished, but their methods of expressing these concerns have changed radically.

One final point: I would like to see the conversion experiences of these outstanding young people written up and published, not only because the young are more receptive to the Christian faith than ever before in our lifetime, but also because young people are most influenced by what other young people do and think. Peer-group pressure has always been the most influential force among youth, and today this appears stronger than ever.

The most effective witness to them will be the knowledge of what Christ has done and is doing in the lives of other young people.

Armand M. Nicholi II is a member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School and Harvard College. He has the B.A. (Cornell) and M.D. (New York Medical College).

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