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.

A Letter I Plan to Send

To Gregory Alan Thornbury

President, The King’s College

56 Broadway

New York, NY 10004

Dear President Thornbury,

My name is Stanley Rice. I am a professor of Biological Sciences at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. I am also the president of the Oklahoma Academy of Science. I was a faculty member at The King’s College from 1987-1990, at which time I chose to leave for other employment (I was not asked to leave). I was a sabbatical replacement, then a temporary instructor, then an assistant professor of biological sciences.

I wish to express my disappointment with the way King’s, a supposedly Christian college, prostituted itself to the Republican Party, as well as some relief that, with your appointment as president, a more theological and less political direction seems to have been restored. From what has been in the news, it appears that the only thing that was important, from the viewpoint of the administration and governing board of King’s, was that a faculty or staff member adhere zealously to the Republican Party. This was particularly evident in the case of your former president, Dinesh D’Souza, who apparently considered himself exempt from the laws of both man and God as he broke the civil law regarding campaign contributions and God’s moral law regarding faithfulness. While King’s could not have known about his utter disregard for personal morality when D’Souza was hired, it was clear even long before he became the president of King’s that he believed he could say anything he wanted, regardless of fact or evidence, against Democrats, especially President Obama, and that God would approve of it. While this may not be what you intended, the message that the outside world gets from this is that D’Souza was acceptable as your leader merely because he is a zealous Republican, and that, for King’s, Christianity is merely a disguise for rabid political conservatism. Previous presidents of King’s (I was there during the administration of Friedhelm Radandt) were not famous conservative zealots but were more interested in education as, it appears, you are. At the time I worked at King’s, I felt uncomfortable with this switching of Republicanism with Christianity, and now I am completely ashamed of it. Just be assured that the outside world does not deride The King’s College for being Christian, but for being unchristian.

During my time at King’s, I knew some truly outstandingly good individuals, most notable of whom was Dr. Wayne Frair. But even these fine individuals got caught up in the continual warring factions that eventually led to the 1994 temporary closure of the college.

When King’s should prove ready to heed the call of the prophets, ancient and modern, to care more about the poor than the rich, and to care about the earth, as commanded in Exodus, and to behold the lilies of the field, as Jesus did, then let me know. I would be happy to circulate your response to those who read my writings.

Sincerely,

Dr. Stanley Rice

I’m So Glad to be So Out of There

From 1987 to 1990, I was a faculty member at The King’s College, which at the time was in Briarcliff Manor, New York. I voluntarily left in 1990. I was a moderate Christian at this very conservative religious college. Some of my colleagues had inquisitive minds, but many were simply closed-minded to anything outside of conservatism. Many of them spent their time fighting one another in power struggles and doctrinal disputes. The students got really tired of it and eventually there were so few students that the college closed in 1994. Then it reopened in New York City.

I am so glad to be out of there. You see, I called it a conservative religious college, not a conservative Christian college, because the only things they really affirmed with any enthusiasm were the tenets of the Republican Party.

I had stopped paying attention to The King’s College until I heard a news report about the hyper-conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. It turns out he was president of the college from 2010 to 2012. D’Souza is the perfect example of the belief that all you have to do to be saved is to worship the Republican Party—that is, the extreme right wing of the Party. Moderate Republicans do not count.

D’Souza expresses this opinion most vividly in his absolute hatred of Barack Obama. In a Forbes magazine article in 2010, D’Souza said that Obama was “...trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.” D’Souza stops just short of saying that President Obama is demon-possessed.

Even those aspects of history and current affairs that most conservatives find disturbing seem to be pretty damn acceptable to D’Souza. For example, he thinks that the European conquest of Africa was just fine. According to Wikipedia, “In the second chapter of What's So Great About America, D'Souza defends colonialism, arguing that the problem with Africa is not that it was colonized, but rather that it was not colonized long enough.”

D’Souza also claims that the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib was the fault of liberals, not of certain members of the American military or the Bush Administration. He said the tortures and degradations (which the whole world saw on video) were caused by “the sexual immodesty of liberal America”.

In May, 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in a senatorial race. He and his wife each made contributions to the full legal limit, but then he made further contributions through “straw donors,” one of whom was the woman with whom he was having an affair. On September 23, he was sentenced to eight months in a halfway-house rather than prison; five years of probation; and a fine of $30,000.

As I read the Bible, God considers it wrong to have affairs and to break national laws and to lie about people (as D’Souza has lied about Barack Obama). But D’Souza apparently thinks, or at least thought, that he was exempted from God’s laws because of his worship of the Republican Party. I wonder if his sexual immodesty will cause a new rash of tortures of detainees.

Although The King’s College had the integrity to pressure D’Souza to resign his presidency once the sexual scandals emerged, I very much doubt that the College has opened itself up to reasonable thinking any more now than it ever did in the past. I thank whatever God there may be that I got out of there.