Jung and Impressionable

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY

“Protestantism has . . . intensified the authority of the Bible as a substitute for the lost authority of the church. But as history has shown, one can interpret certain biblical texts in many ways. . . . . [U]nder the influence of a so-called scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have either left the church or have become profoundly indifferent to it. . . . But many of them are religious people, only incapable of agreeing with the actually existing forms of the creed. . . . The Catholic who has turned his back on the church usually develops a secret or manifest inclination toward atheism, whereas the Protestant follows, if possible, a sectarian movement. The absolutism of the Catholic church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, while Protestant relativism permits variations.”

Carl Jung. Psychology and Religion. 1938.


A REFLECTION

Of course the sects Jung had in mind were what Americans now characterize as Mainline Protestant, a breed whose numbers continue to decline. Eighty years on in America the authoritarian face is less that of the Pope than that of the non-denominational “Bible Church” minister who leads large, semi-autonomous congregations made up of the theological illiterati. That the manipulative and unbiblical apocalyptic visions expressed in sermons and popular fiction, e.g., the Left Behind series, could be taken seriously might be held to demonstrate the depths of biblical and historical ignorance to which a large majority have sunk. The religious perversion that is the Dominionist movement exploits this ignorance and, furthermore, countenances none of the relativism to which Jung refers. What might he say about today’s atheist/Muslim Europe and secularist/Christianist America?

CS