...as explained in Eric
Fromm's Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950).
Those having reached the
fourth level on the 10-Level Pyramid Model of Cult Organization (a.k.a.: the
"Committed"), the cult member observably tend to fit the description
of Hoffer's True Believer. And as such, appear to have been pre-conditioned,
indoctrinated, instructed (as per Berger & Luckman, Asch, Burrow, Cooley, Gergen, Hoffer,
Horkheimer, Johnston, Klaehn, Krishnamurti, LeBon, Lerner, Lippman, McDougall,
Parsons, Riezler, Tart, and Woodward & Denton), socialized and normalized
to ideas and concepts that predispose them to accepting without question an
authoritarian (see Adorno et al, Altemeyer, Arendt, Fromm, Greenwald, Grunberger,
Halslam et al, Henry, Hetherington & Weiler, Koonz, Kramer & Alstad,
Milgram, Miller, and Popper), hierarchical concept of powerful and
mysterious forces beyond their comprehension. The more "seriously" or
"deeply" they subscribe to such notions as explanations of the
challenges and frustrations they face in the course of normal life, the more
likely it is that they will turn to those who seem (to them) to understand and
be able to help them cope with such challenges and frustrations.
Fromm (1900-1980) was a
social psychologist of the Frankfurt School and the psychoanalytic model,
though he rejected a number of Freud's earlier explanations of human behavior.
His many books include Escape from Freedom, widely considered to be one of
the best explanations of authoritarianism in general and the rise of Mussolini,
Stalin and Hitler in particular, as well as Psychoanalysis and Religion. I
quote here from the latter book with the objective of attempting to further
clarify the culture-wide, mental "set-up" in the West that makes it
difficult for so many to see what they're getting into in the evangelical
fundamentalist "churches" (and "mega-churches") that seem
(at least a first) to be "perfectly normal" to them.... given their imersion in the common cultural, "consensus trance."
Fromm's original text is in black below; my comments are bracketed and in dark red.
"...at the root of
the Judeo-Christian religion both principles, the authoritarian and the
humanistic, are present."
"The beginning of the
Old Testament [to this day, a fundament of both orthodox Jewish and Islamic
religious belief] is written in the spirit of authoritarian religion. The
picture of God is that of the absolute ruler of a patriarchal clan, who has
created man at his pleasure and can destroy him at will. [God, according to
whoever wrote the scriptures,] has forbidden [man] to eat from the tree of
knowledge... and has threatened him with death if he transgresses this order.
[Freud's position on this in The Future of an Illusion -- as well as Assman's (see bellow) -- is that severe
measures may have been required to discipline the members of clans, and later
tribes, and later residents of trading villages and then city states -- which
is sturdily supported by the Code of Hammurabi laid down in what is now central
Iraq in the early second millennium BCE -- for the sake of
"self"-protection against raiders from other clans, tribes, trading
villages, etc. One may consider, however, that the utility of such discipline
also served the interests of those who began to amass wealth in such groups.]
...
"The text makes it
very clear what man's sin is: it is rebellion against God's command; it is
disobedience and not any inherent sinfulness in the act of eating from the tree
of knowledge. ... The text also makes it plain what God's motive is: it is
concern with his own superior role, the jealous fear of man's claim to be his
equal. ...
"A decisive turning
point in the relationship between God and man is to be seen in the story of the
Flood. ...
"There is no question
[in the text] that God has the right to destroy his own creatures; he has
created them and they are his property [because, by this time, man is so many
generations distant from his creation of "God," that -- save for
the priests and gurus -- he no longer knows that "God" is man's invention (for the purpose of patriarchal social organization), and not the
other way around; as the old saying goes, "too much of a good thing may
not be, especially of one forgets why it was 'good' in the first place"].
... Thus far the destruction of man and the salvation of Noah are the arbitrary acts of God. He could do as he pleased, as can any powerful tribal
chief [, priest or guru].
"That early
Christianity [roughly 1500 to 1800 years subsequent to the advent of Abrahamic
Judiasm] is humanistic and not authoritarian is evident from the spirit and
text of all Jesus's teachings. ... But on a few hundred years later, after
Christianity had ceased to be the religion of the poor and humble peasants,
artisans, and slaves and had become the religion of those ruling the Roman
Empire, the authoritarian trend in Christianity became dominant. ...
"While in humanistic
religion God is the image of man's higher self, a symbol of what man
potentially is or ought to become, in authoritarian religion God becomes the
sole possessor of what was originally man's: of his reason and his love. The
more perfect God becomes, the more imperfect becomes man. [See the
Augustinian-Pelagian Controversy.]
He projects the best he has into God and thus impoverishes himself. Now God has
all love, all wisdom, all justice -- and man is deprived of these properties.
[Man] had begun with the feeling of smallness, but he now has become completely
powerless and without strength; all his powers have been projected onto God.
This mechanism of projection is the very same which can be observed in
interpersonal relationships of a masochistic, submissive character, where one
person is awed by another and attributes his own powers and aspirations to the
other person. It is the same mechanism that makes people endow the leaders of
even the most inhuman systems with qualities of superwisdom and kindness [see
Fromm: Escape from Freedom, pp. 158 ff]. ...
"Everything [man] has
is now God's and nothing is left in him. His only access to himself is through
God [, the priest or the guru]. He tries to get in touch with that part of
himself which he has lost through projection. After giving God [, the priest or
the guru] all he has, he begs God [, the priest or the guru] to return to him
some of what originally was his own. But having lost his own he is completely
at God's [, the priest's or the guru's] mercy. ...
"He becomes a man
with faith in his... own power of reason. ...
"In societies [or
cults] ruled by a powerful minority which holds the masses in subjection, the individual
will be so imbued with fear, so incapable of feeling strong or independent,
that his religious experience with be authoritarian. Whether he worships a
punishing, awesome God or a similarly conceived leader [, or priest, or guru]
makes little difference. ... Early Christianity was a religion of the poor and
downtrodden; the history of religious sects fighting against authoritarian
political pressure shows the same principle again and again [in cyclical
fashion, as reactive, anti-authoritarian energy waxes and wanes in relation to
authoritarian control, much as one can easily observe in American culture in
general during the era that began with the Declaration of Independence in 1776
through the evangelical, authoritarian religious revival of the mid 1800s onto
the anti-religiosity of the turn of the 20th century, to yet another revival in
1930s to 1950s, to yet another swing towards humanism in the 1960s and '70s, to
yet another revival in the 1990s and henceforth]. Whenever... religion allied
itself with a secular power, the religion had by necessity become
authoritarian. The real fall of man is his alienation from himself, his
submission to power, his turning against himself even though under the guise of
his worship of God [, the priest, or the guru].
- - - - -
Further recommended to
grasp the authoritarian, hierarchal con-struct of both "God" and
religion in the Abrahamic paradigm:
Karen Armstrong: A History
of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; New York: MJF
Books, 1993.
Steven Arterburn &
Jack Felton: Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction;
Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1991.
Jan Assman: Moses the
Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism; Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.
Press, 1998.
Jan Assman: The Price of
Monotheism; Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2009.
Sharon Beder: Selling the
Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR; London: Zed Books, 2001.
Peter Berger: The Sacred
Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York: Doubleday,
1967.
Boethius of Rome: Consolation
of Philosophy, somewhere in what is now Switzerland or southern Germany: The
Holy Roman Church, c. 524.
Jean Bottero, et al.: Ancestor
of the West : Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece;
Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 2000.
Jean Bottero: The Birth of
God: The Bible and the Historian; orig. pub. 1986; Philadelphia: Penn State
Press, 2010.
Emile Durkhem: The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life; orig. pub. 1912, London: Allen & Unwin,
1915.
Sigmund Freud: The Future
of an Illusion; orig. pub. 1927, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.
Jared Parker Friedman,
Anthony Ian Jack: What Makes You So Sure? Dogmatism, Fundamentalism,
Analytic Thinking, Perspective Taking and Moral Concern in the Religious and
Nonreligious, in Journal of Religion and Health, 2017; DOI: 10.1007/s10943-017-0433-x
Ralph Hood, Jr.; Peter
Hill; W. Paul Williamson: The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism; New York:
Guildford Press, 2005.
Jack Miles: God, A
Biography; New York: Random House 1996.
Jack Miles: Christ: A
Crisis in the Life of God; New York: Random House, 2001.
Pew Research: U.S. Religious
Groups and their Political Leanings, February 2016, at
Milton Rokeach: The Open
and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality
Systems; New York: Basic Books, 1960, 1973.
Jeff Sharlett: The Family:
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; New York: Harper
Perennial, 2008.
Huston Smith: The World's Religions:
The Revised & Updated Edition of The Religions of Man; San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. (First Ed. 1958.)
Charles Strozier, David
Terman, James Jones, Katherine Boyd: The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological
Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History; London: Oxford University
Press (April 19, 2010).
Barbara Tuchman: Bible and
Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour; New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1976.
Max Weber, Talcott Parsons
(translator): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1930.
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