Psychopaths in the Pulpit

 

Really? Psychopaths in the pulpit?

Yes, indeed, so long as there is a television camera.

I recently read The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton. Like most other people, I associate the word psychopath with cold-hearted, cold-minded, violent criminals who enjoy torturing their victims. And certainly there are plenty of these—about one out of every hundred people. But, it turns out, only about half of psychopaths (defending on how you define them) are criminals. The other half live among us in society—about one out of every two hundred people.

A quick definition of a psychopath is someone who has no sense of empathy. They know right from wrong, and they know that doing bad things (from insults all the way to murder) hurts other people. But they do not feel it. Or if they do feel it, they enjoy it. They have no instinct that allows altruism, about which I have blogged extensively both in this blog and in my science blog.

Altruism may be the most important factor in the evolution of our behavior. In nearly every prehistoric society, altruists reap the benefits of fitness. Altruism is our best adaptation. But like all adaptations, there is some genetic and cultural variation. In the case of the opposite of altruism, that is, psychopathy, about one out of every hundred people has the rare variant. What this proves is that psychopathy confers benefits in some situations, and therefore natural selection (or cultural evolution) never completely gets rid of it. Psychopathy is a variant that will never become extinct.

Psychopathy was very rare for most of human prehistory. While humans can be totally brutal to those outside of their social group, they are generally altruistic to those within the group. A known psychopath in a village—and it is difficult to be an unknown psychopath in a village—will be shunned. But today, we no longer live in villages. Even our small cities are so large that nobody can know everyone else; a psychopath can hide in a large population. Under these conditions, psychopaths can rake in the benefits.

Psychopaths know how to be good, and how to show empathy, and to get people to like them. They are often even better at it than good people. They are famous for their charisma. They get you to trust them. And then they go in for the literal or metaphorical kill. This only works if people are willing to trust them.

One of the best places for psychopaths to rise to the top is religion. A charismatic preacher can use the tools of love and generosity to get a large congregation of people to trust him. The people in the congregation are already eager to follow such a leader. They will ignore any evidence that their religious leader is doing anything wrong, and once the evidence becomes clear, the congregants feel more sadness than anger. As a matter of fact, they can keep right on following the disgraced preacher.

But this is mainly the case for charismatic preachers who have a television following. Pastors of small churches, whose job is to minister to the congregants, are rarely psychopaths. It is the big-time preachers who are more likely to be psychopaths.

There are lots of examples of preachers who, after their fall from grace, go right on preaching, though in a different setting. When the 1970s preacher Garner Ted Armstrong lost his position of power in his church due to sexual predation, he promptly formed his own new church, the Intercontinental Church of God.  When Jim Bakker fell into national disgrace for sexual misconduct, he soon had his own church again, at least until the feds caught him for trying to sell a special medicine that he claimed cured covid. When sexual misconduct made Dinesh D’Souza resign from the presidency of a extreme right-wing Christian college, he was soon right back on the conservative-evangelical speaking circuit. Ted Haggard, after his sex scandal, went right back to preaching. His specialty is denouncing the sinfulness of “progressives.” To these preachers, getting caught was simply an inconvenience, leaving them with no sense of guilt.

Big-time preachers know how to fake it. They know how to play the keys of congregants’ minds better than the organist knows how to press the keys of his or her instrument. They invoke a period of quiet prayer, in which they ask congregants to abandon their sense of careful thought and to just believe whatever they say next. They know the right words and have scriptural references for everything that is convenient to them.

The megachurch is the perfect arena for the spread of psychopathy. The preachers are parasitizing the altruism of the congregation. The same is also true for psychopath politicians, who parasitize the patriotism of voters. At least the psychopaths in the business world are merely parasitizing the desire of their victims to get rich.

It has been this way for a long time. Dutton claimed that the early Christian apostle Paul had epilepsy (the evidence for this is clear) and was a psychopath (something that is much less clear). But most of church history has been dominated by psychopaths. One example is Mormonism. By chance, I was reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days at the same time as I was reading Dutton’s book. One of the travelers, Passepartout, listened to a Mormon preacher in the nineteenth century. Verne pointed out that Joseph Smith, the cult founder, had so much charisma that he could talk his creditors out of the money of which he had defrauded them, and was able to sweet-talk numerous women into being his “spiritual wives,” that is, sex partners, even while they were married to other men. Smith was probably amazed that so many people believed, as they continue to believe, his fake trance in which he dictated the Book of Mormon.

If one to two percent of people are psychopaths, that’s a lot of people. I think back on many people I have known, and now recognize them as psychopaths. My eyes have been opened to recognize them now, all around me, little foci of chill amidst a population of warm, though often misguided, people.