Mark Linker
Opinion Editor
There are a few ways one can analyze through the lens of psychology. The most widely used method is through the individual landscape. Behaviorism and psychoanalysis are two of the most common branches of psychology that aim at treating the individual when in a therapeutic setting.
Nevertheless, humans are social animals, and much of what affects our own psyche often stems from the external world. This is often a balance, we interpret new events in conjunction with our social history and biological makeup to facilitate new behavior.
What’s fascinating about our individual psyches is that our social capacities shape each other’s individual worlds, thus dictating change in our society and common ways of thinking across time.
On a broader scale, this can create an effect where large numbers of people are changed in their psychological outlook over time. Plato was one of the first to talk about the psyche of the individual extending outward and affecting politics and the broader culture. Throughout human history, the process of each person and community affecting one another can lead to a change in what’s valued depending on the culture. Religion, specifically Christianity, was the ethic that led the West for hundreds of years. Not only did this shape many of the guiding principles that lead our institutions, but this ethic also led us on a communal and individual level.
America’s founding documents held the idea of a God as one of its guiding principles that justified the rights given to individuals. This begs the question as to what a society does when one of its key justifiers for legislation and values begins to lose weight amongst the people who govern the democracy, the people.
In a similar fashion to how one individual can mold another’s behavior, we all have some broad conception of what we value in accordance with where we are in life and the community we live in. Whether one is a critic of Christianity and religion as a whole, there’s no doubt that there’s some sort of utility in having a uniform system of values that extends from the individual psyche to the border culture. It creates a sense of unity and aim that each citizen can take part in.
Without the guiding light of an all-encompassing ethic, secular America may have a separate set of problems to contend with. Although making a correlation error is certainly a possibility when linking modern problems to the decline of religious practice, one of the primary components of religion was the framework that laid the foundations for a path through life. An individual who believed in God and lived in a community that had the same ethic within a country whose foundations were rooted in this same ethic inextricably linked the individual soul to the soul of the nation. It is clear that many individuals are experiencing a crisis of meaning and purpose that leads to events like suicide, mass shootings, and a crumbling of our institutions.
Again, the point isn’t to claim that Christianity or any other organized religion has no flaws or is a perfect system but to claim that the broader West on an individual and societal level may be going through a process of reorganizing itself and finding how to deal with a Godless world. This broad secularism seems to be causing greater unhappiness and mental health crises that may not be wanted and we might have to build a substitute for religious practice for the health of our nation. The obvious problem with this is the fact that in an age of science and high levels of skepticism, it may have to be a system of practical principles rather than an all-encompassing belief.