Lee
This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Perhaps it is simply because I am stubborn, or perhaps it is because my grandmother repeatedly read me the children's book The Little Engine that Could. It's the book about the little train making it over the hill because of dogged determinism: I think I can, I think I can. Whatever the reason, I don't like it when people tell me there are things I cannot do or choices that I must make. Perhaps all of that is one reason we're always talking about breaking down false dichotomies like this one.
Mark
You can't be a Christian and you can't be a psychologist at the same time. It's just not even possible.
Lee
That's professor Mark McMinn, Professor of Psychology recently retired from George Fox University and author of The Science of Virtue. In this episode of Tokens, we hear Dr. McMinn narrate being told what he could not do, and then what he sought to do with his life's work, putting Christian practice and psychology in mutual service, one to the other. We talk about the supposed antagonism between the two, we discuss depression and antidepressants, and we get a crash course in the relatively new field of positive psychology. This is not, it turns out, some naive self-help pop psychology. It does not reduce all life's problems into a failure to say, “I think I can, I think I can.” Instead, it's a different sort of psychological approach. It looks at...
Mark
... not just what goes wrong with people, which psychology had always done and had done pretty well, but what goes right with people, what makes people healthy, what makes people flourish...
Lee
Our interview in just a moment.
I'm grateful today to have Dr. Mark McMinn, author most recently of The Science of Virtue, just recently retired as Professor of Psychology at George Fox University, talking to him in his treehouse in Newburg, Oregon. Welcome Dr. McMinn.
Mark
Thank you. Thank you, Lee. It's so good to be with you today.
Lee
Grateful to have you with us. You start out in your book talking about how actually coming to Nashville was a key moment in your life.
Mark
It really was. Yeah. And by the way, what a lovely place to live. Nashville is just a great city. It was sort of a turning point for me. This goes back a lot of decades. I finished my undergraduate work in 1980 and was heading off to Vanderbilt to do a PhD in clinical psychology, which is what I ended up doing, and I grew up in the Oregon area where I live now. And there was a couple in my church that came to me before we moved. Lisa and I were married really young. We were juniors in college. We've been married 41 years now, but this older couple said, “We're really concerned, because if you go get a PhD in psychology, we think you'll lose your faith. You can't really be a psychologist and be a person of faith.” We do and did respect this couple so much. It was a very serious matter for us to ponder this and think about it. We decided to go ahead and make the trek and take the risk, and so we showed up at Vanderbilt. Oh, I still remember getting out of the car when I first drove into Nashville--it must've been early August--and just feeling like I couldn't breathe. I can't believe the humidity and the heat.
Lee
Yeah, the heat and humidity of August is quite intense.
Mark
Oh my goodness. Yes. So then I showed up at Vanderbilt--which was a great experience; I loved Vanderbilt--but I had a class of six. There were six of us starting our PhD that year in clinical psychology, and I was talking with one of my classmates the very first day, and she was listening to my story, and she looked at me and had this sort of horrified look and she said, “What? You're religious and you want to be a psychologist? You can't do that.” And so here we had, from two different perspectives--from a couple in our church that we respected, and then from someone in the scientific world who I was going to be studying with--both of them were saying, “You can't do this thing. You can't be a Christian and be a psychologist at the same time. It's just not even possible.”
Lee
I think there were a number of books throughout that time that, from the Christian angle, were very suspicious. Wasn't there one called Seduction of Christianity that related to psychology, perhaps?
Mark
Exactly, Dave Hunt's book. I think it's sold over a half a million copies. It was a huge seller back then, and so there were a lot of people saying, “You just can't do this.” And I often reflect on that, because things have changed so much in the last 40 years. It's remarkable. So many of the journal articles that I read now, especially in the positive psychology movement, are written by Christians. There's really been a vast change in the field and much more openness, like the sort of thing that you're doing. I just love what you're doing with the show you produce, in terms of bringing together culture and conversation and academics and faith. There's room for that now, and I think there was a time in the past where there was just barely any room for that, especially in the field of psychology.
Lee
Yeah, we laugh a lot on the show about... we laugh, but it's also a very serious agenda. We talk about breaking down false dichotomies, and one of the things that we can do culturally is to break down these false choices that people tell us we have to choose. This seems like one of those classic false dichotomies between psychology and Christianity, or maybe, even, you're pointing to a broader presumed false dichotomy between science and Christian faith.
Mark
Yeah. I like what you're saying about breaking down dichotomies. I'm 62. I'm getting to the point where I can be a grumpy old guy, and yet I look at the generations behind me, the younger generations, and I think one of the things that they have right is the willingness to confront “both and”, the willingness to hold mystery, intention, and paradox, and it's something that my generation didn't do as well. So yeah, let's not set up false dichotomies. Let's really look at how we can be in conversation together. And what we're seeing today with polarization is it's just so hard to listen. We so much prefer to say what we believe than to listen to what another person believes, and that's not true conversation. That's not true dialogue. It's not what academic learning's always been about. So again, I love your show. I love what you're doing, just learning to listen to each other, to hear different perspectives, to engage culture and music. I should say the one thing my wife said when I mentioned this show. She said, “They're not going to have you sing are they?” I was really relieved. That would take your ratings way down, I promise. [Laughter]
Lee
Another biographical transition for you that I heard you mention in the same particular speech was your early time at Wheaton as a professor there. Though you were from the same town where Richard Foster, famed author of Celebration of Discipline, was from, you hadn't really read Foster until you got to Wheaton. Is that right?
Mark
Yeah, that's exactly right. The university I started my career at, which is, again, where I am now--I started in the mid eighties--was George Fox University. I went to Newberg Friends Church, which was a Quaker church in town. And this was a small little town at that time, maybe 12,000 people. That's the same church that Richard Foster was pastoring when he wrote Celebration of Discipline. He had gone by the time I was there, so I hadn't met him at that point in my life, but I never read his book. I mean, here's this book that's really sort of changed the world, and I was going to that church for nine years, but never read the book. I moved to Wheaton, and I spent 13 years at Wheaton. A fantastic place; those are precious years to me. And the first thing I did--we were starting a brand new program, a doctorate of psychology--I wanted to know what my students were going to be experiencing in terms of the integration of psychology and Christianity. So I sat in on the class that the first year students were taking on spiritual formation, a class that Jim Wilhoit, who is a Christian educator, taught. And I refer to it as the class that changed my life, because it really did introduce me to a different way of thinking about the spiritual life, largely because of Jim as a teacher, but also Richard Foster's book, Celebration of Discipline. I've gotten to know him since. We have a little farm here in Oregon now that we've moved back, and he and his son Nathan have stayed in our Airbnb a couple of times, and I've gotten to know Richard a little bit. He's just a wonderful human being, and so I'm really grateful for him and his work and his influence in my life.
Lee
Yeah, I think that Celebration of Discipline was significant for me as well. It was probably a similar kind of timeframe in my own life. I was in my early thirties, early in my teaching career. I guess in my childhood, I kind of had a more works-righteousness sort of approach to Christianity. And then in my early twenties, I began to be exposed. I had this Greek professor as an undergrad who taught us you're saved by grace, through faith, and it was a very significant turning point in my life. And yet I think from that point forward for the next number of years, I had what I think was a stereotypical American evangelical view of grace that was very much focused on pardon. And so I started reading some Catholic New Testament literature that said, “Well, you don't understand the Apostle Paul correctly on grace unless you realize that it's not just pardon, but it's also power.” It's the power to be able to live a different kind of life. And so in struggles in my twenties and early thirties, I would be frustrated. I would read Romans 8--this climactic celebration of the grace of God--and then I would get to the end of Romans 8 and I would just feel frustrated, because I would say, “But how?” You know, Romans 7: “I always do the thing I don't want to do,” but Romans 8 says I don't have to live that way anymore. I'd get to the end of Romans 8: “But how? I believe it, I pray for it, but how is this supposed to happen?” And so, I think it was about that time that I was frustrated that I came across Richard Foster's work and other people who talk about the ways in which this grace has to come into our lives through these practices. And so it was a very important moment for me as well in beginning to learn about spiritual formation.
Mark
Yeah, that's really beautifully expressed, and it mirrors my own experience so much, because I think I had thought of the spiritual disciplines as ways to prove that I was doing the work, that I was doing the things I was supposed to do to be a good Christian. And what Foster sets up in that book and what Jim Wilhoit set up in his class was, “No, the disciplines are really just putting you in a position where you can encounter the grace of God.” I love the word power. It's just putting you in a place where you kind of get into the stream of God's power in your life. So it's not so much about performing or trying to peddle faster or anything like that. It's just finding a place to be present to God. And when we are present to God, we're immersed in grace.
Lee
You say at one point that you began to see the ways in which, in your work in clinical psychology, people desperately need social connection, and the sort of lack of social connection that there is in the world, and that that, in turn, then led you to reinvest in the life of the church, because you saw that church communities did allow people to have this deep place of connection.
Mark
Yeah. Again, I'm really impressed with your homework here that you've done. So yeah, what happened was I was at Wheaton college in the late 1990s, and I was teaching a class on psychological assessment. And just to stay current, I was doing some assessments at the local hospital, where I'd go in and work with... usually it was depression or sometimes psychosis. But I would go in, and I would meet with a patient in the hospital, and the psychiatrist that would refer to me wanted the reports back quickly, usually within 24 hours. So I would go in, I would do my assessment and take two or three hours of testing, and then I'd go home and spend three or four hours writing a report and get done by midnight and send it off to the psychiatrist so that he could move forward with the treatment plan. What I would sometimes do is find a paragraph that I had written in a previous report, and I would cut and paste it and then modify it in the next report. So there was this epiphany I had in a parking lot at Central DuPage Hospital. I was walking out of a session where I had done testing with a patient, and I was walking back to my car thinking about writing the report that evening, and it occurred to me that there was a paragraph that I had been cutting and pasting into almost every report I wrote, modifying it some, but it was basically the same thing. And it was this: this patient is socially disconnected. They're feeling isolated. They're feeling alone. They're feeling lonely. And here I was in a busy, suburban culture where people are everywhere, and realizing how disconnected people feel. And I thought, “Where is it? Where do people find connection in this world?” And the epiphany was, at least from my understanding, one of the best places to find connection is in faith communities. So I made a commitment on that very day to take whatever time I had left in my career and my research to think about how to make psychology useful for the church, and how to really look at the partnership between psychology and the church. So that, then, became the defining work of my life over the next 20 or 25 years, to try to figure out how to make psychology and the church good partners.
Lee
I noted at the beginning, you're in a beautifully built, constructed, appointed treehouse. You're on a small farm. How do you see your work --manual labor, hands in the soil--how do you see that relating to psychology in your life's discipline?
Mark
That's a great question. So, I was at a grant meeting a year ago, and I was hearing from a Catholic seminary--Mount Angel Seminary--talking about the program they have for their seminarians. These are long programs. Roman Catholics take spiritual formation and seminary training very seriously. The first year of their training is manual labor. That's what the seminarians coming into Mount Angel's... as I understand it. This is secondhand, although it was from a leader at the seminary that I heard it. So they're learning to work with their hands. And so as I've come to be near the end of my career, I found deep meaning in manual labor and working with my hands, and there's something deeply spiritual about it. So yes, I build things like this tree house. A year ago, my wife and I had a project to build a goat barn, and on top of it, this little tree house, and she's a spiritual director and she meets with her clients up here. It's just a lovely place to come be in the trees and be reminded of the grace of nature all around us. We're sort of situated in the middle of a bunch of maple trees up in this little place. As it relates to psychology, I guess I'm answering more how it relates to my faith, because I think so much of how I understand God is that God is materially invested in this world. God is present with us in the material realities. One of the things that's really a hallmark of Christianity is that the word became flesh and dwelt among us. There's this sort of material nature of our faith. I've been trying for years to convince my students to do dissertations on food. I'm really interested in the positive psychology of food. Nobody has studied this, but I think there is a physical, material nature to positive psychology that hasn't been explored yet. And I think being in nature, eating the way we eat, the way we celebrate with food, a positive relationship with food, I think there's lots to be explored here. So I don't know that it has a lot to do with psychology, but it has a ton to do with my own mental health and a lot to do with my spiritual health.
Lee
I was reminded as you were talking, personally myself, I hit a very rough kind of midlife patch. I went into a really rough depression into 2013 for two and a half years or so. And I'd had streaks of melancholy, but I'd never had depression, and it really took me by surprise, and it was a very difficult time. And there were a number of mitigating or contributing circumstances to that, but I remember at one point I called a friend of mine, who's a very well-trained psychiatrist. He's done not only a lot of great stuff in the world of psychiatry, but he's also read a lot of theology and a lot of moral philosophy from people that I like and respect a lot. And so I was trying to figure out how to think about taking an antidepressant, and whether I wanted to take an antidepressant, and I called him one night and I said, “I'm sure that you've got a long track tape you could give me about this.” But I said, “I just want a couple of paragraphs about how you, as a Christian who's theologically informed and a psychiatrist, think about antidepressants.” He said, “I think that the reticence among some Christians toward antidepressants is a holdover from our Gnosticism that doesn't take the body seriously.” And I just started laughing, and I said, “That's all I needed to hear. That's like the perfect answer.” And I've held onto that, because I think we forget that the brain is a bodily organ, and that we are embodied people, and we're okay taking penicillin for an infection, but the notion of doing an antidepressant because the chemicals are out of whack seems to be problematic. But anyway, that's one of the things that occurs to me in thinking about, you know, our hands being in the dirt, and building things, and so forth.
Mark
Yeah. Thanks for the vulnerability in sharing that story. And as you were telling it, I was anticipating where you were going, because I kept thinking Gnosticism, Gnosticism. That's been the Christian tendency sometimes, to think, “Oh, I can't take a medication to help with depression, because that would somehow be undermining the work of the spirit or something.” But we are embodied people. We have physical bodies that don't always function the way we want them to. And like you say, we're not hesitant to get help in other ways. Why is it that we're so hesitant with that?
Lee
Yeah. I will say--and I think I've even mentioned this on another recent episode on the podcast--that after I took that for a while, it seemed like the side effects were not helping, or were more troubling than the condition itself, so I stopped. And then for the next year or so, I would try to figure out, and even my wife and I would have some arguments about whether or not I should go back on one. And I did realize that one of the reasons I was reticent to go back on one was because I was afraid that the pain I was in was potentially a precipitating factor to make me learn some things I needed to learn. And I was afraid that if I soothed it, I might not learn the things I needed to learn. And I don't trot that out there as advice to anybody else, but it did turn out that I think that second time of deciding not to for awhile was good for me, because it allowed me to have the experience of learning other sorts of skills and virtues that I needed to learn, I think, at that point in my life. So it seems like it's always a matter of discernment.
Mark
Well, I can tell in that statement that you are an ethicist and a philosopher. I have sat with, you know, hundreds of depressed patients over many, many years. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that. And I agree with you. I think there is a place that pain can bring us to greater awareness, but I would never want to say that to someone who's depressed, because depression is like this dark cloud that just hangs over people. It's an awful experience. But once you've experienced it yourself and you come to that conclusion yourself, I think it's a beautiful thing. It's just not something we can say to someone else in the midst of their depression.
Lee
You are listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Remember, you can find out links, photos, books, and related videos from our extensive YouTube channel, all by visiting tokensshow.com/podcast. This is our interview with Dr. Mark McMinn, author of The Science of Virtue. Coming up, Dr. McMinn and I discuss positive psychology and the practice of virtue. Part two in just a moment.
You are listening to Tokens and our interview with Dr. Mark McMinn, author of The Science of Virtue.
You've raised the matter of positive psychology. For those who were unaware of the sub-discipline that positive psychology is, could you give us a working definition or description of the rise of positive psychology?
Mark
Yeah, absolutely. It's been kind of an exciting development. The American psychological association elects a president every year. In 1998, the president was a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman. Every year the president has an initiative, and Seligman's initiative for the year was to try to look at not just what goes wrong with people, which psychology had always done and had done pretty well, but what goes right with people, what makes people healthy, what makes people flourish. There had been people writing and talking about positive psychology since the 1960s, but it wasn't a very prominent movement until Seligman made it sort of a big thing in the late 90s. So if you look at the graph on some research, for example, on forgiveness, if you graph out forgiveness over the last 40 or 50 years, you see that after 1998, the research really takes off. Same with gratitude. Same with things like hope and humility. Now, clearly psychologists can continue looking at things like how do we treat depression and anxiety and deal with the hard things in life, but it was a turn toward saying, “Let's also look at what goes right with people and not just what goes wrong with people.” Since that time there's been a lot of research, and increasingly we're starting to see even how it might influence clinical practice in some ways to think about the positive dimensions of human experience. Really, it's about human flourishing. How is it that humans flourish, and how do we understand that? How do we make sense of it and then promote it so that we can flourish even more?
Lee
That's an area for me that is very compelling, and it's compelling with my own discipline in ethics, because I think that since the Enlightenment, a lot of emphasis upon ethical theory has been upon basically a legalistic approach. And that leads, in time, to what not to do. But prior to the Enlightenment, going back to Aristotle, or going into to the mosaic tradition, or in the Christian tradition to certainly by the time you get to Aquinas in the 12th and 13th centuries, it's all very prominent that the whole point of all of this is not to tell us what not to do. The point is to tell us what leads to a flourishing life. And you know, I tell my students all the time, my favorite quote from the early church fathers is Irenaeus in the second century, right? “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” It's not about telling people what not to do. It's telling people, “This is how to live life well.” And I think it's remarkable that Aquinas will say that the point of life is to be happy. You know, a good protestant can't hardly stand to hear that. For us it's like, “No, tell us what not to do!” You've got to feel guilty all the time. But Aquinas will say, “No, the whole point of this is to live a happy life, and to live a consummately happy life in the beatific vision of God, and that we can know this now through the practice of the virtues, and through the practice of friendship, and that life can be very beautiful.” So I think that's one reason I just resonate so deeply with positive psychology. It fits this sort of beautiful, compelling vision of the moral life that I think is so fascinating.
Mark
Yeah. That's so well said. When I was an assistant professor and a brand new psychologist. Even though my degree... you know, a PhD means doctor of philosophy, but I had never had a philosophy class. And I remember going to a lecture by an ethicist who talked about these two systems of ethics. It was a really great lecture, and I always took those with me as the two systems. One was based--and I'm sure this is nuanced in all kinds of ways in your mind, but for me, it was really helpful--one was duty based ethics, deontological ethics, and the other was consequence-based ethics, consequentialist ethics: what the consequence of an action might be. It wasn't until decades later when I was sitting down to write this book, The Science of Virtue, that I realized there's another system of ethics, the virtue ethics system, that somehow had just gotten lost on him. It was a really brilliant lecture, but he just chose not to even mention it. But when you talk about human flourishing, and happiness being a reasonable goal, that calls us back to this virtue ethics notion.
Lee
Right. It's exasperating, really, to think about how you can have people who are really good in their fields teaching ethics, and that's why I'm often distrustful of ethics classes. It's because they don't teach virtue traditions and all the riches of virtue traditions. And even in some of the textbooks, it's exasperating to me when they do teach virtue traditions, they clearly don't understand it, and they teach them in ways that are misrepresenting. I've seen cases where they take the virtue traditions, and they reduce them to another version of principle or duty based ethics. It's just something so much different that's so beautiful.
Mark
The first book I read when I was writing The Science of Virtue--and I'm embarrassed I hadn't read it earlier in my life--was MacIntyre. It was a fascinating book for me to read. He essentially makes the argument in that book that, in our current cultural context, it's really hard for us to understand virtue. It's like almost a foreign language that we can't get, because we don't understand the notion of teleology, the idea of what it means to grow fully into who we are as humans. We just don't get that. You ask a 10-year-old today, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Can you imagine how surprising it would be to hear, “Oh, I want to be incredibly kind and patient and loving when I grow up.” You're not gonna hear that. “I want to be a firefighter, I want to be a medical doctor, a scientist.” We base it on things other than telos. Yeah, we've just lost the ability to think this way. And it's fun to see it being resurrected, but it's probably not going to be done in a generation or two. It's probably gonna take a long time to reclaim this way of understanding ourselves.
Lee
Right. You know, MacIntyre talks about it, and you talk about this in your book: that there's three elements in pre-Enlightenment moral tradition. Any student who takes my ethics classes always has to learn this. The three elements are untutored human nature, human kindness that could be realized as telos, and then the virtues, which are these practices and skills and dispositions that move us from being untutored human beings to being the essence of what it might mean to be a human being. And going back to Aristotle, he uses this example: if you take an untutored musician, and then you take the essence of what it means to be a musician, there are these skills and habits and dispositions that have to be formed in that person to become this essence of a musician. And so that becomes a model for the moral life. And so the virtues are not things to constrain us. They are things to actually free us, and they make it possible for us to be a kind of human being we could not be otherwise. But does that fit? I think that fits with what I hear you saying is happening in positive psychology. They're studying these traits and saying, “We can actually do double-blind scientific inquiry and say, ‘Yeah, actually if people practice gratitude for example, they appear to live a more flourishing life.'”
Mark
Yes, I probably need to qualify that a little bit. I think that would be optimal, but I think the psychology tends to focus more on the benefits or the personal health markers that are associated with these virtuous behaviors. But I think it's pretty easy for psychologists to lose what you were just talking about, the notion of telos. So I love MacIntyre's three points you make here. I grow food; let me give an illustration. If we put a bean seed in the ground in May, what we're going to see at this time of year is this beautiful bean plant that grows, and it produces lots of beans, and it's a flourishing organism that became just exactly what it was intended to be. And it happens because of the soil and because of the water and so forth. And so in this metaphor, of course, it's the virtue that takes us from being an infant to being a fully flourishing human being, and those are the virtues that allow us to move in that pathway. It's the sunlight into our life. I think the psychology of positive psychology--while I'm a big fan of it--I think it tends to look at the adult bean plant: what it looks like, what are the benefits of being grateful, or of having humility, or whatever. And it doesn't tend to look very deeply at the philosophical notions that you're talking about, about moving into our fullness. So again, I'm not trying to be a critic. I'm really a fan of the movement in psychology. But even in the seminal book, what they do is they go into the religious traditions, and they find the kind of qualities that have been studied in religion and philosophy that are considered virtuous--things like fortitude, things like courage, things like awe, gratitude, although gratitude's a tricky one with regard to virtue--but they look at these things, and then in the seminal book, they try to remove the religious and philosophical moorings from it, and make it a topic of social science, in terms of how we study this empirically and do the double-blind studies and so forth. I'm not completely convinced we can do that. I think that's where we need to have more conversation with the theologians and the philosophers and the people doing the double-blind studies, to bring MacIntyre's notion of telos more fully into the conversation.
Lee
It comes up, especially with McIntyre, certainly the whole field of narrative theology presumes that one can not define a telos for a human being. Maybe for those who are listening and are frustrated because we have not defined telos yet, we should just say that this is a working term that just means the end, or the goal, or the purpose of a thing, or a human, or a community. But then one can't define that unless there is a clearly defined sense of identity, and identity arises out of narrative and story, right? So for example, particularities of virtues differ between communities. The notion of bravery in Greco-Roman hero culture is most fully exhibited in warfare, and one knows one is a man if one is not a coward in the heat of battle. Whereas for the early Christians, they didn't have the hero story; they had the martyr story, because their identity is grounded in a crucified Messiah. And so rather than thinking about the hero of Greco-Roman culture, they think about the martyr, and the martyr shows their courage most consummately if they're tested with denying their faith in Christ, and they refuse to deny their faith in Christ, and then they die nonviolently at the hands of the powers. And so both of them have a notion of courage, but the particularities of the courage differ according to the narrative about which they live, which I think is just a fascinating way to narrate all that stuff. And so without a sense of identity, and without a clear engagement with narrative, we can't get as far as I think we need to get in talking about these things. So I hear what you're saying. That may pose some serious problems with the scientific method, because the scientific method presumes a universality of identity that maybe the philosophers and theologians don't necessarily presume.
Mark
Boy, I love that. I love what you're saying about particularity and culture. If anyone who's listening wants to get a sense of how this might look in 21st century culture, there's a fascinating book--even if you don't read the whole book--but it's a David Brooks book called The Road to Character, which is a book about humility. You could just go into a bookstore and browse the first two or three pages, and he sets this up so beautifully. He talks about resume virtues and eulogy virtues in the very beginning of this book. That's kind of the narrative, right, that in our contemporary culture, we think more in terms of resumes. So when you think of a virtuous thing, you're hardworking, you're disciplined, you're smart, and we tend not to think about the virtues that you might use in a eulogy. So we tend not to think as much about being loving and patient and kind-hearted because of the narratives that we have in our culture.
Lee
Yeah. And I'm glad you raised him, because we have David Brooks giving a speech about his book The Road to Character--if anybody wants to go check that out: season one, episode six, which you can get on the Tokens Show podcast--where he lays that out in very beautiful way.
Mark
Wow. That's great to hear.
Lee
So let's do talk about what we're learning from positive psychology, and talk a little bit about the discoveries that are being made from social scientific methods about the benefits that come from things like the practice of forgiveness, or gratitude, or several of the others that you speak about.
Mark
Absolutely. There's so many benefits. And again, when you put things in the hands of psychologists, what we tend to do is we tend to look at the health benefits of a thing. So we now know so much about forgiveness in terms of how it benefits a person. People who are more forgiving tend to have lower blood pressure, better cholesterol or heart rates, they sleep better, better immunity, less depression, less anxiety. There is even a study recently that showed that people who had recently forgiven someone can jump a little bit higher than people who hadn't. I mean, it's just remarkable to see the emotional and physical benefits of these virtuous behaviors like forgiveness.
Lee
Talk a little bit about the ways in which forgiveness is described or defined or narrated. What's forgiveness as a most healthy practice look like according to this literature?
Mark
Yeah. So there's a big literature on this. I would really recommend the books of Everett Worthington on this, who actually outlines a beautiful five-step model for going through forgiveness, where it involves... sometimes Christians, especially, might be vulnerable to thinking about forgiveness too quickly without moving into the depths of the pain that a person experiences. So the first step in this model is recalling the hurt: just really deeply going into an understanding of how I've been hurt. And without that, it's not really forgiveness. It might be condoning, or excusing, or something, but it's not forgiveness.
Lee
That does seem to be like one of the great potential drawbacks of so-called Christian forgiveness, which I would say is probably not very Christian. If we rush too quickly, there becomes this justification of wrongs, or not taking seriously the brokenness of relationship.
Mark
Exactly. And that's not forgiveness; it's something else. It may still have value, but it's not forgiveness. Forgiveness is really encountering the depth of the pain, and Worthington's model then involves--and this this sounds like a stretch, but with people who forgive, they can get there--where they start to empathize with the person that hurt them, not saying, “Oh, I could see myself doing the same thing,” but more like saying, “I'm kind of messed up too sometimes, and I've done some things to hurt people too, and I can understand how, in this situation, someone hurt me, maybe not in ways that I've hurt other people, but I have hurt people, too.” And then there's a deliberate step of offering a gift of forgiveness. Worthington's model has the acrostic REACH. R-E-A-C-H. Recall the hurt. Empathize with the offender. Offer the altruistic gift of forgiveness. And then commit to it, because it takes a lot of work. You have to commit to this, and it comes up over and over, and you have to remember I'm choosing to forgive, I'm choosing to forgive... I actually am confusing a little bit; commitment is where you actually say you make the commitment, I'm going to do it. And then H is holding onto that sort of ongoing commitment to keep doing this thing. So, that's what I mean by forgiveness. It's this full-bodied, difficult, lifelong process of wishing the other person well, rather than wishing the other person harm. Now, that's sort of the mark of how you know if you've forgiven someone. I want my offender to do well in life and not to suffer. And with that--it's a hard thing to do--there's an interesting ethics question there. Do you ever ask someone to forgive you, or do you just hope it happens? I don't know, but when people are able to enter into that hard, difficult work, there are all sorts of benefits that they encounter.
Lee
Yeah. Fascinating. Talk a little bit about gratitude.
Mark
Yeah, gratitude's interesting. Gratitude hit the map--I mean, it was around before this--but gratitude really hit the map in 2003 when some scholars, one of them--both of them Christian by the way, which is interesting--but one of them at UC Davis, one of them in Florida; they collaborated on this project where they had undergraduates, randomly assigned, either keep track of daily hassles of their life or just daily events in their life, or keep a gratitude journal. This was before gratitude journaling was a thing, so this was a new invention for this study. And what they found is that the students that were keeping the gratitude journal actually had improved all the things you'd expect. They were less depressed. They felt more optimistic. They felt more hopeful about life and so forth. But the thing that they weren't necessarily expecting was they went to the doctor less, and they didn't go to the health clinic on campus as often. They slept better. They exercised more. They repeated this study with another population. They found the same sort of benefits. So it wasn't just the emotional benefits, but physical health benefits to gratitude. Now, here's what happens, though: the media gets hold of this. So, you know, gratitude shows up on Oprah now. And it's great--I'm glad for it, because gratitude's a hugely important thing--but pretty soon it becomes an app, and everyone starts their gratitude practices, and we're not necessarily seeing the same benefits to it, because now it's not so much about a discipline, a virtue, moving from point A to point B like you were talking about, but it's a way to get healthier. So it's like I exercise, I practice gratitude. I do this, I do that. And if it's instrumental--if it's designed to make you feel healthier--it won't have the same benefit as if it's more about human flourishing and how do I live fully and well into the life that I've been given.
Lee
And so, you all are finding, or studies are finding, a decreased benefit; you're speculating that that's because of a lack of a full engagement with teleology, or the purpose of being.
Mark
Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. It becomes more of a health behavior. And it still has benefit, but it doesn't have as much benefit as if it wells up within a person out of the joy of being alive.
Lee
I would presume that you don't want to draw a distinction between health and human flourishing, but I hear you saying that when one pursues something with a purely instrumentalist attitude or approach that that somehow corrupts it, or it's not what it could be without a fuller engagement with the whole question of the purpose of being human.
Mark
It is fair. I want to nuance it a little bit, and I'm really glad to have... you know, we started this conversation with people warning me about being a psychologist, and I'm really glad... I've loved being a psychologist. It's been a great career, but I do think that when you put things in the hands of psychologists, they tend to veer towards self-interest. So even a topic like gratitude, which is ultimately about wellbeing and flourishing, then I want to go back to the great commandment, now. Here are these religious scholars that come up and ask Jesus, “What's the greatest commandment?” And he gives this answer that's been reverberating through all the centuries, which is that you love God with your whole being, and you love your neighbor as yourself. If that's the basis for gratitude, if it comes out of a great commandment, out of a capacity to see the other, of a capacity to love God, we're not just grateful for the sake of our own personal health. We're now grateful for the wholeness of what life means. And that's where I feel like... again, I'm a fan of psychology. I'm glad to be a psychologist, but that's where I feel like the positive psychology movement can easily become so self-interested that we fail to see the bigger picture of what it means to be fully human in our world.
Lee
Well, that's a beautiful place for us to end, and we thank you. We've been talking with Dr. Mark McMinn, the author most recently of The Science of Virtue, and just recently retired professor of psychology at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. We've been talking with him there in Newberg in his treehouse out among the woods there. And thank you, Dr. McMinn, for this.
Mark
Thanks for having me Lee. I love your show.
Lee
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Thanks so much for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and do please remember to refer us to a fellow podcast listener and help us spread the word about our project here. If you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
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Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
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