'I'm not interested in the theory - just show me how it works!' The dictionary defines pragmatism as 'a philosophic method that makes practical consequences the test of truth'.
At the end of the 1990s, pragmatism is the prevailing spirit among people. We have had enough of tradition and dogmatism. We are just interested in being practical and getting things fixed. So away with 'ideological baggage' in politics and education and everything. 'Just make life work.'
Being purely practical about life is not a bad platform from which Christians can lead people to consider the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God is a bore
Pragmatic people want life to be good, but the Christian faith is derided in our secular society. We can think of some of the cutting comments earlier in the century of someone like the US essayist H.L. Mencken, 'the sage of Baltimore'. 'A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to people who will never get there.' Or again: 'The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.' Christianity is looked on by our friends as some kind of life in a straitjacket, totally lacking 'whoopee'.
Mental health
One of the major influences was Sigmund Freud and his ideas about mental health and psychoanalysis. His thrust was explicitly atheistic, attacking religious belief relentlessly. In his 1927 book The future of an illusion, he described faith as a form of mental disorder, a 'universal obsessional neurosis' rooted in 'infantile' patterns of thought. It was an aberration which we needed to grow out of. It is not the way to make life good.
We see this popularised on our TV screens almost weekly. More or less every Christian is portrayed as either crazy, hypocritical or a 'silly vicar'.
Not all psychoanalysts were as militantly against God as Freud, but much of 'folk psychology' followed his path. 'Religion' and 'morality' were the enemy, especially as the century reached the freedom ethos of the 1960s. And psychoanalysis did not just oppose faith, but at that time sought to be almost a substitute for it. It captured public imagination with its talk of childhood sexuality and the need to overcome repression. It saw itself as scientific and by the 1970s had almost achieved the status of the fifth estate, alongside things like the media and the judiciary. It was seen to be chic and complexly interesting to be going 'for therapy'. But one of its great messages was 'stay away from religion if you don't want to get screwed up'.
U-turn
But the last 30 years have not been so kind to the psychoanalytic vision. Many of Freud's ideas have been found to be fallacious and a lot of people were coming to the conclusion that they were spending a great deal of money on therapists and not getting any better. 'A psychiatrist is called a shrink because that's what he does to your wallet.'
It would be unfair to tar all psychiatry with the same brush. Some is good and necessary. But the interesting point is that popular psychology has moved on and it has taken an unexpectedly new direction. An important sign of change came in 1978 with the publication of a significant book, M. Scott Peck's The road less travelled: a new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. Whether or not we can go along with everything in that book is not the point. The point is that Peck openly criticised his psychiatric colleagues for rubbishing religion. The book must have struck a chord with ordinary people because it remained on the best-seller list for ten years. Later, Peck wrote another book, People of the lie, which attacked the amoral approach to life so beloved by earlier psychiatrists. It argued powerfully that there is such a thing as evil which has to be taken seriously.
Benefits
Recent years have seen research findings which appear to show that far from 'screwing people up' and being a 'neurosis', faith is one of the most consistent correlates to mental health and happiness.
That is not to say that Christians never suffer from depression, nor that there is no such thing as a religious mania, but it is to say that, on average, mental problems occur less frequently in those with faith, and when problems do occur, there is a much greater chance of full recovery.
'Several studies (from the US) have found that high levels of religious commitment correlate to lower levels of depression, lower levels of stress and a greater ability to cope with stress.' Last September, the newspapers in Britain gave quite a lot of space to the research of Professor Michael Argyle of Oxford, which showed that 'going to church each week induces feelings of calmness, social cohesion, joy and transcendence, while decreasing feelings of bloody-mindedness.' The professor himself was quoted as saying: 'Those who attend church regularly are much happier than non-believers.' This summer Demography magazine published research on 21,000 adults in the UK which showed that people who attend church regularly could live up to 14 years more than those who don't.
At the same time, research evidence has been growing of a powerful relationship between immoral conduct and unhappiness. Here is a quote from The New Harvard Guide to Psychiatry 1988: 'Many who have worked closely with adolescents over the past decade have realised that the new sexual freedom has by no means led to greater pleasures, freedom and openness . . . Clinical experience has shown that the new permissiveness has often led to empty relationships, feelings of self-contempt and worthlessness.'
So when our TV and films so often seem to portray Christians as cranks and fools, just don't be taken in so easily.
Pascal's experiment
All this leads to a new twist in the age-old debate between believers and non-believers at the pragmatic level.
Back in the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was responding to a new generation of secular ideas and atheists. He offered an interesting argument concerning religious belief. He conceived of the issue as a bet or a wager. His reasoning went something like this: the Bible teaches that God gives eternal life, forgiveness and heaven to believers in Christ, while those who reject Christ are choosing to go to hell. Pascal conceded that there it is difficult for reason alone to be sure whether the Bible's claim is true or not. But we may consider our life as a gamble (one that by the very nature of things you can't avoid). If we bet against God, and the Bible proves to be true, we will be lost in hell forever. If we bet for God and follow Christ, and the Bible turns out to be wrong, we lose nothing, for we cease to exist at death like everyone else - we have lost nothing. So, said Pascal, it makes more sense to believe.
The crowning irony
Of course, the touchy issue here concerns what those who opt for faith must sacrifice to follow Christ. The Bible speaks of struggling against sin and pursuing self-control. The atheist and agnostic have always said that this is too big a price to pay. They would say it excludes us from so much fun - 'the pleasures of sin'. But the point is this: the recent research in psychology makes it clear that, in the long run, this is not true. The morally unrestrained life turns out to be a miserable life. Far from making life work, at the pragmatic level, immorality wrecks lives.
The crowning irony seems to be that even if the atheist were right and there was only our existence on earth, then the committed Christian is still better off (apart from religious persecution, which we as yet do not suffer in the West) - the Christian leads a happier, more stable and fulfilled life.
There is obviously much more that needs to be said, but the statistics appear to show that pragmatism can be a good place to start in sharing Christ.
JEB
I am indebted to Patrick Glynn's book God: the evidence (Prima Publishing, USA) in writing this article.
Dr John Benton
