The Narcotic Functions of Faith: Inside the <i>Defensive Theology Scale</i>

In my blogbook Freud's Ghost, I spend a great deal of time reflecting on Freud's notion that religon is a narcotic, a defense mechanism protecting us from the existential realities of life. I refer you to Freud's Ghost for a fuller discussion.

One of the issues I left on the table in Freud's Ghost was this: If your faith did have narcotic functions (metaphorically speaking), how could you tell? What would a defensive faith configuration look like?

In recent research of mine, I poured over the existential literature on defense mechanisms and looked closely at William James' descriptions comparing the healthy minded believer and the sick soul believer. From these literatures I was able to propose some hypothetical distinctions between narcotic and non-narcotic faith. Those intial ideas were published in 2004. But later, published in 2006, I took those ideas and created the Defensive Theology Scale as a tool to capture some of these defensive themes for research purposes.

Following my theoretical work in 2004, the Defensive Theology Scale was designed to assess five theological tendencies:

1. Special protection
Theme: The belief that the believer will experience less misfortune than non-believers due to God's protection.
Narcotic Function: Creates an aura of "safety," allowing for equanimity and a reduction of basic anxiety.

2. Special Insight
Theme: The belief that the believer can clearly discern the actions of God in life and the will of God in personal choices.
Narcotic Function: Reduces the existential burden of freedom and choice. Further, allows seemingly chaotic circumstances to be "explained" by God's Providence.

3. Divine Solicitousness
Theme: The belief that all the believer's concerns, even the most trivial, are of import to God.
Narcotic Function: Makes the mundane issues of life cosmically significance. Creates a sense of "specialness" to have the Deity acting as, to put it crudely, a butler.

4. Special Destiny
Theme: The belief that God has a very specific plan for one's life.
Narcotic Function: Allows life to be seen as intrinsically meaningful and heroic. Reduces the existential burden of meaning: A pre-existing "destiny" is handed to the person rather than constructed by the person by hard work and risk.

5. Denial of Randomness
Theme: The belief that God's hand is involved in all the events around us, that nothing is inherently "due to chance."
Narcotic Function: Unpredictability is inherently scary. Further, chaos makes us feel that God is not in control. Thus, by banishing randomness/chance/accidents/chaos from the world the believer maintains his/her equanimity.

Let me be quick to say, as I said to concerned reviewers of both the 2004 and 2006 papers, that I'm not denying that God cannot cannot be interested in the minutiae of life or have a plan for someone's life. My interests here are not theological. My interests are, and this is difficult for people to keep clear, psychological. How is the faith system functioning, psychologically, in the mind of the believer? If you look at themes 1-5 above and imagine a person really believing each of these, without nuance, what strikes you about that person? This is my assessment: This person has constructed a happy theological bubble for themselves. All disruptive or distressing material is banished from his/her world. Consider:

There are no accidents, all is a Plan.
I am protected from misfortune.
My choices and life are already laid down for me, I just follow the Path.
All my choices are significant, important, and meaningful.
The universe is well-ordered and under control.

That, by all objective standards, is a VERY comforting world to live in. But is it accurate? Is that the world we really live in? I don't think so. There are accidents and one might befall me today. Choices are hard and God's will isn't very clear at times. There is risk to life and I can make mistakes about the direction of my future. And God might not care if I need a parking space today.

But these realizations are scary and unsettling. Thus, the defensive configuration, it seems to me, is actively engaged in repressing those realizations with their associated anxieties. This is why I conclude that the content assessed by the Defensive Theology Scale gets at the narcotic dynamics of faith.

The actual items from the Defensive Theology Scale are below, group by theme:

Special Protection
I believe God protects me from illness and misfortune.
Despite being a child of God, I will have just as many traumatic things happen to me during my life as anyone else.
I believe that fewer bad things will happen to me in this life because God is protecting me from harm.
My life will be happier because God will keep evil things from happening to me.

Special Insight
When making a choice or tough decision, God gives me clear answers and directions.
God gives me clear and obvious signs to communicate His will to me.
God clearly guides me along the path He wants me to take.
God doesn’t give me clear directions as to what I should do with the big decisions in my life. (reverse-scored)
God gives me special insights about the events taking place around me or involving other people.

Divine Solicitousness
God answers even my smallest requests in prayer (e.g., like helping me get to a meeting when I am late).
I don’t think God intervenes much in the small details of my life, even if I do care about them. (reverse-scored)
If you have deep faith and pure motives God will grant even your smallest requests.
Nothing is too small, liking finding my lost keys, to pray to God about.

Special Destiny
God has a very specific plan for my life that I must search for and find.
God’s Hand is directing all the daily events of my life.
God has a destiny for me to find and fulfill.
Before I was even born God had a detailed plan for the course of my life.

Denial of Randomness
God controls every event around us, down to the smallest details.
A lot of evil in the world is just due to random events with no Divine goal or purpose.
Most of the events around us are random and don’t reveal much about God’s intentions.
Every event around us is a sign of God’s larger plans and purposes.

Again, don't read these items as propositions in systematic theology. Many, even most, of these items may be true, theologically speaking. The goal rather is to observe if a person is uniformly and consistently scoring very high across all these items. Such a person would be displaying a systematic refusal to admit any disruptive material into their spiritual life. This denial is a form a repression, a defense mechanism. The sign of a narcotic faith configuration.