Death and Doctrine, Part 1: The Need for Ante-Mortum Salvific Self-Verification

In this blog I've written a great deal about the relationship between death and doctrine. Mainly, I've been critical of what I call thanatocentric ('death centered") belief systems. My concerns have been twofold.

First, I've been very critical of thanatocentric soteriological schemes. In thanatocentric soteriologies one's moral status (saved versus damned) is defined at the death event. But given that we all start off in different moral climates and that death is an arbitrary event, our moral development is randomly truncated in a way that calls thanatocentric soteriologies into question. I've illustrated this in what I call the Cartesian Race. Eric Fromm perhaps said it best: "The tragedy in the life of most of us is that we die before we are fully born."

Second, I've also been concerned with how death pushes around religious belief. This analysis comes from the existential perspectives that infuse my online book Freud's Ghost. Specifically, existential thinkers have asserted that we deploy ideological worldviews to imbue life with significance and meaning. More concretely, these worldviews allow us to proceed with existential equanimity in the face of death. In short, the prospect of death is continually threatening to nullify all our workaday strivings. With death looming we are continually faced with the nihilistic worm at the core of existence: "What's the point?"

But this analysis isn't just a coffeehouse musing, over a decade of replicated empirical research has shown that worldviews (routes to meaning and significance) are explicitly involved in death repression and transcendence. And this story has a dark side. Given that our worldviews are existentially vital, we react hostilely when our worldview gets poked, prodded, or attacked. In short, much of the ideological violence in the world today can be traced back to death concerns. The conflict between fundamentalist Christians in America and fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East is overtly about ideologies and worldviews, but covertly the issue is about death. Both groups have worldviews in place that allow for death transcendence (i.e., being saved/favored by God or Allah at the death event) but the mere existence of the other calls each worldview into question. Who has the correct vision here? It is a question that is an existential bomb. It's a question that suggests that our cherished worldviews might be arbitrary human constructions. And if that's the case then death fears surge into the mind as we contemplate the purpose and meaning of our existence.

If you read me a lot, this is all review. What I want to do in a few post is just make some ancillary comments and observations about things I've been thinking about lately.

So, my first observation: The anxiety and emotion involved in doctrinal debates.

I am a member of the Churches of Christ. If you don't know us we have an ecclesial tradition of a cappella worship. Voices only, no instruments allowed. At its best, this is a rich and amazing worship tradition. See the recent The Ascending Voice conversation hosted at Pepperdine University.

But this tradition also has a dark side. Specifically, the Churches of Christ formally broke with the Disciples of Christ in 1906 over, along with many other issues, the use of instruments in worship.

The issue of a cappella worship continues to be a hot button issue in the Churches of Christ. More progressive Churches of Christ are increasingly seeing the issue as a non-issue while more conservative churches consider this to be an issue of Ultimate importance, that to worship with an instrument will incur God's wrath and send you to hell.

Now, as a psychologist I'm not going to weigh in on this debate. I'll let the preachers of the Church of Christ work this one out. Rather, what I'd like to do, as a case study, is to analyze the psychological dynamics at work in this debate.

My interest in this case was piqued when I saw a blog post blow up on my friend (and preacher) Mike Cope's blog. In the post Mike writes about the progressive/conservative split about our a cappella tradition. And the post (as other posts before it on this topic) proceeds to blow up with over 250+ comments.

For a psychologist the comments to this and related posts are rich in data. Many of you might be interested in reading them out of anthropological curiosity. As I read the comments my overwhelming response was the degree of defensiveness in the conversation. Doctrinal positions were locked in and immovable. Reason is absent and emotions run hot.

When a psychologist sees behavior like this we think of one thing: Defense Mechanism.

For example, let's say we have this exchange:

Scenario A:
Me: "Sam, you need to quit smoking."
Sam (thoughtfully, ruefully): "I know. It's just hard."

Is Sam being defensive? No. Sam is calm and thoughtful. Open to conversation. Compare that with this exchange:

Scenario B:
Me: "Sam, you need to quit smoking."
Sam (angrily): "Who are you to talk! You're not so healthy yourself."

Is Sam being defensive? Yes, yes he is.

The point is that when you look at the blowups on Mike's blog you don't see Scenario A. You see Scenario B. Lots and lots of defensiveness.

So what is going on? Why so much defensiveness? Well, here is my analysis in light of what we know about death anxiety buffers:

Death is a terrifying prospect. This is exacerbated if one also believes there is a hell of never-ending torment. Thus, faith, belief and doctrine begin to cluster around defining the Saved versus the Lost. If the church is our lifeboat then we become very invested in making a clear demarcation between church and non-church. I need very clear lines in the sand so that I can self-verify, over and over, that I'm on the right "side."

That is, I think the need for ante-mortum salvific self-verification is at the root of many doctrinal disputes. Let me unpack this. If my faith is thanatocentric then faith becomes fundamentally about where I stand at the moment of death. Am I with the saved or with the lost? How can I tell? Well, you can tell by drawing ecclesial lines in the sand and then check--self-verify--where you stand. And you keep checking, almost daily, because death can come at any moment. Faith becomes a kind of obsessive-compulsive salvation check: Am I in? Yes, I'm in. Am I in? Yes, I'm in. Am I in? Yes, I'm in. Doctrine becomes about existential self-soothing.

Back to our case study. In my tradition, being saved was defined by being a member of the Churches of Christ. And one of the defining features of that church was non-instrumental music. For better or worse, that issue became a means of ante-mortum salvific self-verification. But what happens, as is currently being done in progressive Churches of Christ, if that line in the sand starts getting rubbed out? Blurred? Well, you start robbing people of a mechanism for existential self-soothing. You've taken away an existential security blanket. If you start rubbing out all those lines of demarcation how can you tell who is or who is not going to hell? More vitally, how can I tell if I'm going to hell? That's the real issue. Where do I currently stand? Saved or Lost?

In short, in my diagnosis, the defensiveness of these debates trace back to death concerns. The issue isn't really about doctrine at all. It's about existential comfort. And if you poke at a defensive mechanism you'll see the anxiety shoot through the roof.