Salvation through Psychology

By Chuck Colson

Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries

Whether it’s the Columbine shootings, September 11, or Hurricane Katrina, in the wake of the initial crisis, an army of grief counselors descends on the survivors. Is that a good thing? Probably not.

In their excellent book One Nation under Therapy, ethicist Christina Hoff Sommers and psychiatrist Sally Satel show how junk science has promoted the notion “that seemingly content and well-adjusted Americans—adults as well as children—are emotionally damaged.” They trace the history of what they call “therapism,” which “valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings.”

This trend was popularized by twentieth-century psychologists like Abraham Maslow. He believed—though he had no scientific proof for it—that restraint was unhealthy and that “self-actualization” and high self-esteem were crucial to human development. It was Maslow who said, “I sometimes think that the world will either be saved by psychologists . . . or it will not be saved at all.”

We see the fruits of that philosophy everywhere. From schools to talk shows, people are coached to focus on themselves and obsess about their own feelings—in short, to “save themselves” through psychology. No wonder that Jim Windolf, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said, “If you believe the statistics, 77 percent of America’s adult population is a mess. And we haven’t even thrown in alien abductees, road ragers or Internet addicts.”

As if it weren’t enough to teach healthy people that they’re emotionally crippled, therapism is most prevalent at disaster sites: Busloads of grief counselors shuttle in—who, the authors point out, are often under qualified. And they offer the wrong medicine.

Valid scientific studies show that self-absorption, or self-pity, is actually the worst possible way to respond to tragedy. Study participants who were told to focus on their emotions and express them aloud actually ended up more depressed than those who tried to distract themselves and find constructive ways to cope.

We have bought into the myth of “therapism” so completely that after every one of these disasters, these armies of “grief counselors” descend upon us. Well, the good news is that some folks are catching on. After Columbine and September 11, even members of the media saw the failure of the therapeutic model. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley wrote, “Surely there are few sights in the contemporary landscape more repellent than that of these leeches attaching themselves to the stunned, bewildered survivors of affliction, demanding that they give vent to their ‘feelings.’”

As I reported in a “BreakPoint” at the time, kids at Columbine were ignoring grief counselors, but flooding the churches. Those kids understood. But the grief counselors, after all, are after clients. That’s what keeps them paid. So after September 11, Sommers and Satel report, grief counselors literally walked the streets trying to recruit patients. One mental health center tried to hire someone to sit in a general practitioner’s waiting room and ask every patient who came in if he or she was having problems dealing with September 11.

No wonder people are getting disgusted with in-your-face tactics and pop psychology. What these people do not need is more high pressure. What they really need is counseling from the Great Counselor.

For a Decade, London Thrived as a Busy Crossroads of Terror [Excerpts]

LONDON, July 9 - Long before bombings ripped through London on Thursday, Britain had become a breeding ground for hate, fed by a militant version of Islam.

For two years, extremists like Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a 47-year-old Syrian-born cleric, have played to ever-larger crowds, calling for holy war against Britain and exhorting young Muslim men to join the insurgency in Iraq. In a newspaper interview in April 2004, he warned that "a very well-organized" London-based group, Al Qaeda Europe, was "on the verge of launching a big operation" here.

In a sermon attended by more than 500 people in a central London meeting hall last December, Sheik Omar vowed that if Western governments did not change their policies, Muslims would give them "a 9/11, day after day after day."

If London became a magnet for fiery preachers, it also became a destination for men willing to carry out their threats. For a decade, the city has been a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base, where they could raise money, recruit members and draw inspiration from the militant messages.

Among them were terrorists involved in attacks in Madrid, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, Israel and in the Sept. 11 plot. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man charged in the United States in the 9/11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, both prayed at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. The mosque's former leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri openly preached violence for years before the authorities arrested him in April 2004.

For years, there was a widely held belief that Britain's tolerance helped stave off any Islamic attacks at home. But the anger of London's militant clerics turned on Britain after it offered unwavering support for the American-led invasion of Iraq. On Thursday morning, an attack long foreseen by worried counterterrorism officials became a reality.

"The terrorists have come home," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe, who works often with British officials. "It is payback time for a policy that was, in my opinion, an irresponsible policy of the British government to allow these networks to flourish inside Britain" (Sciolino and Van Natta, "The New York Times," July 10, 2005).

So called anti-war protest in Washington

"The media have pushed the idea that the demonstration this weekend at the White House was an 'anti-war' gathering. What they didn't say was who was behind it... For the record, the lead organizer [was] ANSWER, which the media routinely refer to as an 'antiwar group.' It is nothing of the sort. In fact, ANSWER is a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party. And any group that qualifies for that epithet in front of its name deserves special scrutiny, since Josef Stalin was responsible for the murder of as many as 25 million human beings... So why do communists—particularly those who march under Stalin's flag—get different treatment? And why do thousands of average people feel comfortable marching arm in arm with them? It's a puzzle. After all, according to the 'Black Book of Communism' —a widely cited and respected compendium of communism's crimes in the 20th century—communist regimes murdered as many as 100 million people over the last century. That's quite a record. Indeed, all the century's great mass murders—Mao Zedong (65 million), Stalin (25 million), Hitler (21 million), Pol Pot (2 million)—were communists or socialists. Yet many well-meaning people who marched this weekend perhaps didn't know all this. Or perhaps they don't mind having their cause besmirched by people who aren't really anti-war at all, but anti-America, anti-West, anti-freedom and anti-capitalist... Maybe it proves the old adage: Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas." —Investor's Business Daily