DOI: 10.31038/PSYJ.2022434

Abstract

Introduction: Health is of the most significant affairs we are in challenge based on the crisis such as COVID-19 or any others such so. We aimed to review and follow Gonabad city activities for preventing and finding a way out of COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: In this study, different sources of information such as the news, articles, mass media, and some people’s views were investigated regarding the subject. The local mass media were also followed to know the activities being done in the city, as well.

Results: Based on priorities and potentialities and the culture ruling the city or the country, some have relied on mass-scale testing to segregate the infected ones from the uninfected ones or have had a carefully monitored, micro-managed region-specific quarantine strategy or even adopted a strategy of a national lockdown, home lockdown and quarantine, covering mask, conducting social distancing and washing hands 20 times for 20 seconds every day. Some have referred to disinfectants, using traditional drugs and some vegetables and local grasses, however, they have not shown or it does not seem to be sure of any positive and treatment impact, but a way out of stress and fear of COVID-19 pandemic for most of them.

Conclusion: The people should be aware and try to care about it and learn the protocols and health recommendations that is advised by the men and the organizations responsible in the country as they are waiting for a safe and immune way out of it.

Keywords

COVID-19, Crisis, Immunity, Social Health, Health Protocols

In December 2019, a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged, sparking an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome (COVID-19) in humans, centered in Wuhan, China. Within three months, the virus had spread to more than 118,000 cases and caused 4,291 deaths in 114 countries (Up to now, COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic Last updated: August 01, 2020, 05:53 GMT: Coronavirus Cases: 17,770,530; Deaths: 683,229 and Recovered: 11,167,447), leading the World Health Organization to declare a global pandemic. The pandemic has led to a massive global public health campaign to slow the spread of the virus by increasing hand washing, reducing face touching, wearing masks in public and physical distancing [1].

The world is in a deep crisis and a dangerous challenge with no parallels to draw experiences and lessons from. In most countries the infection curve hasn’t really flattened at present and they are faced with a big crisis and if the lockdown, that is one of the preventive ways of the pandemic, is withdrawn without any proper alternative, the world must bear a potential health crisis, in spite of the fact that its lockdown continues in its current form, so many other problems such as joblessness, economic crisis, food crisis, stress, depression, suicide, divorce increasing, local and global clashes, being tired and so many problems resulted from its continuation and prolonged economic shutdown will appear to bother the populations through the world from the poor to average and the riches. Then what’s the way out? It is a big question. How the global economy be actively running while keeping the health crisis under reasonable control? A possible way out, till the COVID-19 vaccine arrives, is providing personal protective equipment (PPE) and follow the health protocols being provided and recommended to all the workers in sectors which need to be opened up on priority. We take our city, Gonabad, as a case in point but this can be true for any economy and city. Based on priorities and potentialities and the culture ruling the city or the country, some have relied on mass-scale testing to segregate the infected ones from the uninfected ones or have had a carefully monitored, micro-managed region-specific quarantine strategy or even adopted a strategy of a national lockdown, home lockdown and quarantine, covering mask, conducting social distancing and washing hands 20 times for 20 seconds every day. Some have referred to disinfectants, using traditional drugs and some vegetables and local grasses, however, they have not shown or it does not seem to be sure of any positive and treatment impact, but a way out of stress and fear of COVID-19 pandemic for most of them.

Since Epidemiological records in China suggest that up to 85% of human-to-human transmission has occurred in family clusters and that 2055 health-care workers have become infected, with an absence of major nosocomial outbreaks and some supporting evidence that some health-care workers acquired infection in their families. These findings suggest that close and unprotected exposure is required for transmission by direct contact or by contact with fomites in the immediate environment of those with infection. Continuing reports from outside China suggest the same means of transmission to close contacts and persons who attended the same social events [2]. Then, it should be believed that following the health protocols and recommendations from Ministry of Health and Medical Education or Corona virus control center in the country must be considered as a big and important way out of the pandemic at the first.

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, Gonabad people must take decisive action to stop the spread of the virus at least in local area. In these critical and fearful circumstances, it is essential that everyone be informed about other health risks, hazards and dangers of COVID-19 pandemic and the next problems it can leave and if they are informed and sufficient information is given and presented to have a deep impact on the population, then they can stay safe and live healthy. As one of the health workers in Allameh Bohlool hospital said the in bed patients for corona virus is subsiding in Aug month and this is for more covering mask, following social distancing, avoiding of crowd, ceremonies, traditional funerals in crowd, close contact and following other recommendations and advices, that not Iran but whole the men of responsible call out and insist in the world.

Recommendations and advice for the public during previous outbreaks due to other coronavirus (Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), human-to-human transmission occurred through droplets, contact and fomites, suggesting that the transmission mode of the COVID-19 can be similar. The basic principles to reduce the general risk of transmission of acute respiratory infections include the following: Avoiding close contact with people suffering from acute respiratory infections, Frequent hand-washing, especially after direct contact with ill people or their environment, Avoiding unprotected contact with farm or wild animals, People with symptoms of acute respiratory infection should practice cough etiquette (maintain distance, cover coughs and sneezes with disposable tissues or clothing, and wash hands) and within healthcare facilities, enhance standard infection prevention and control practices in hospitals, especially in emergency departments. WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers? In case of symptoms suggestive of respiratory illness either during or after travel, travelers are encouraged to seek medical attention and share their travel history with their health care provider [3].

COVID-19, our new and may long-time guest has brought about so many different concerns for our planet living creatures and mostly, up to now, people feared and lost hope to live safe and immune, since it is too dangerous, complicated and mysterious to be prevented, controlled or be stopped [4].

Therefore, To be safe, healthy and live in peace, the people of Gonabad and all of the cities in the world also should consider the recommendations and the said advices presented based on science and standards of WHO and Iran Ministry of Health and Medical Education or their health ministries to reach the goal and prevent to overcome COVID-19 pandemic as soon as possible with low cost and time. Through cooperation, knowledge sharing, following health standard messages advised, exhibit a novel cultural effort and have a look on health workers struggling for saving lives with no stop round the clock and considering that they are also human and may be tired and washed out one day, we can defeat corona virus and let it be such as other controlled and prevented diseases and viruses that once upon a time were ruling over the planet. Hope to be such so.

References

1. Bavel JJV, Baicker K, Boggio PS et al. (2020) Using social and behavioral science to support COVID-19 pandemic response. Nat Hum Behav 4: 460-471.[crossref]
2. Bedford J, Enria D, Giesecke J, Heymann DL, Ihekweazu C, et al. (2020) COVID-19: towards controlling of a pandemic. The Lancet 395: 1015-1018.[crossref]
3. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report – 33. Data as reported by 10AM CET 22 February 2020.
4. Atarodi A, Atarodi A (2020) The world concerns of covid-19 pandemic in people’s daily life. EC Psychology and Psychiatry 9:10-12.[crossref]

DOI: 10.31038/PSYJ.2022433

Abstract

From a clinical viewpoint, dereism can be an evil warning sign, which may hint at disruption of thought organization, damaged reality testing, impaired insight, compromised judgement and serious mental condition. So, in the realm of descriptive psychopathology and phenomenological diagnosis, dereistic thinking or animism, demands, first of all, exclusion of organic problems, like space occupying lesions of brain, and, then, ruling out psychosis, like schizophrenia. On the other hand, dereism can be found in neuroses or personality syndromes, a finding that may indicate its multidimensional connotation. In the present article, while dereism has been appraised from psychoanalytic and cognitive viewpoints, it has been tried to delineate some of its valuable aspects, as well, which may be ignored clinically during routine psychiatric evaluation, counseling or psychotherapeutic approaches.

Keywords

Dereism; Dereistic thinking; Autistic thinking; Magical thinking; Fantasy thinking; Animistic thinking; Animism; Animatism; Animalism; Preoperational thought; Obsessive-compulsive disorder; Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder

Introduction

The process of thinking, which cannot be separated from other mental functions, has been divided into the following three types: 1) undirected fantasy thinking = dereistic thinking = autistic thinking; 2) imaginative thinking; and 3) rational or conceptual thinking. In practice, of course, these three types of thinking are not discrete but constantly intermixed [1]. Animism is the doctrine of souls and spiritual beings. It may be said that the principle governing magic, the technique of the animistic mode of thinking, is the principle of the omnipotence of thoughts. In the course of treatment, most obsessive patients are able to tell how the deceptive appearance arose in most of these cases, and by what contrivances they themselves have helped to strengthen their own superstitious beliefs. All obsessional neurotics are superstitious in this way, usually against their better judgment, which seems to have abandoned such beliefs. Thus, the omnipotence of thoughts, the overvaluation of mental processes as compared with reality, is seen to have unrestricted play in the emotional life of neurotic patients and in everything that derives from it, which resembles the barbarians who believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking [2]. In the present article, dereism and the associated items, as important psychopathologic issues, which are many times, and in line with descriptive phenomenology, ascribed to serious psychiatric disorders, have been looked over, based on the available resources and some innovative inferences, which may indicate advantageous clinical suggestions.

Background

A) Operational Definition of Dereism and Associated Issues

Dereism is defined as a mental activity that follows a totally subjective and idiosyncratic system of logic and fails to take the facts of reality or experience into consideration. So, dereistic thinking, which is known as one of the characteristics of schizophrenia, includes mental activity not concordant with logic or experience. Similarly, autistic thinking, in which the thoughts are largely narcissistic and egocentric, with emphasis on subjectivity rather than objectivity, and without regard for reality, is used interchangeably with autism and dereism and is seen in schizophrenia and autistic disorder [3]. Likewise, magical thinking is known as a form of dereistic thought and is defined as an irrational (but not delusional) belief that certain outcomes are connected to certain thoughts, words, or actions, e.g. if I hold my nose, someone will die [4]. Moreover, it is similar to that of the preoperational phase in children, in which thoughts, words, or actions assume power (e.g., to cause or to prevent events) , and a tendency to endow physical events and objects with lifelike psychological attributes, such as feelings and intentions, which is termed animistic thinking [5].

B) Cognitive Epistemology

Epistemologically, during the stage of preoperational thought (2 to 7 years of age), thinking and reasoning are intuitive and children learn without the use of reasoning. So, events are not linked by logic. Preoperational thought is midway between socialized adult thought and the completely autistic Freudian unconscious. Children in the preoperational stage cannot deal with moral dilemmas, although they have a sense of what is good and bad, and have a sense of immanent justice, the belief that punishment for bad deeds is inevitable. Also, children in this developmental stage are egocentric: they see themselves as the center of the universe; accordingly, they are unable to modify their behavior for someone else [6]. During this stage, children also use a type of magical thinking, called phenomenalistic causality, in which events that occur together are thought to cause one another (e.g., thunder causes lightning, and bad thoughts cause accidents). In addition, children use animistic thinking, and they can use a symbol or sign to stand for something else, a process that is termed semiotic function.

C) Psychiatric and Clinical Issues

Psychiatrically, persons with Hoarding Disorder (HD), which is a syndrome in the spectrum of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, have persistent and profound difficulty discarding or parting with their possessions. As a rule, people with the disorder acquire things of little or no value and cannot throw them away. What drives the behavior appears to be the fear of losing items that the patient believes will be needed later and a distorted belief about or an emotional attachment to possessions. Moreover, though most hoarders accumulate possessions passively rather than intentionally, they perceive their behavior to be reasonable and part of their identity. Patients with HD also overemphasize the importance of recalling information and possessions, and may believe that forgetting the information will lead to severe consequences and prefer to keep their possessions within sight so as not to forget them [7]. The same pattern is observable, as well, in some demented patients, though with less reasoning or understandable impetus in comparison with HD. On the other hand, in Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), which is characterized by orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency, and is frequently coexist with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Inability to discard worn off or worthless objects with no sentimental value is, also, observable. Sigmund Freud suggested that those with an anal character are stubborn, parsimonious, and highly conscientious because of struggles over toilet training during the anal period. In addition to acknowledged Psychodynamic Factors and secondary gains that are involved in OCD, like keeping the attention of care takers, controlling interpersonal relationships and management of environmental stressors, and recognized defense mechanisms (the unconscious mental processes that the ego uses to resolve conflicts among wish, reality, important persons, and conscience), like Isolation ( separation of an idea or memory from its attached emotion), Splitting (dividing persons toward whom the patient is ambivalent, into good and bad) and FANTASY ( seeking solace and satisfaction by creating imaginary lives), Freud formulated OCD as a regression from the oedipal phase to the anal psychosexual phase of development.

As stated by him, when patients with OCD feel threatened by anxiety about retaliation for unconscious impulses or by the loss of a significant object’s love, they retreat from the oedipal position and regress to an intensely ambivalent emotional stage associated with the anal phase (1 to 3 years of age, somewhat comparable to the stage of preoperational thought). The ambivalence is connected to the unraveling of the smooth fusion between sexual and aggressive drives characteristic of the oedipal phase. The coexistence of hatred and love towards the same person leaves patients paralyzed with doubt and indecision. Accordingly, ambivalence is an important feature of normal children during the anal-sadistic developmental phase; children feel both love and murderous hate toward the same object, sometimes simultaneously. Patients with OCD often consciously experience both love and hate towards an object. This conflict of opposing emotions is evident in a patient’s doing and undoing patterns of behavior and in paralyzing doubt in the face of choices. The above-mentioned magical thinking can be found in OCD, too. In magical thinking, regression uncovers early modes of thought rather than impulses; that is, ego functions as well as id functions are affected by regression. Since inherent in magical thinking is the omnipotence of thought, people believe that merely by thinking about an event in the external world they can cause the event to occur without intermediate physical actions. Thus, the said feeling causes them to fear having an aggressive thought [8].

D) Thinking and Psychopathological Cataloging

In fantasy thinking, as is obvious, the psyche, if deprived of any adequate object, prefers to deceive itself or invent some nonsensical object rather than give up all drive or aim. So, fantasy allows the person to escape from, or deny, reality; or alternatively, convert reality into something more tolerable and less requiring corrective action. Accordingly, shy or reserved people, without any mental ailment, may use dereistic thinking to compensate for the disappointments of life. Fantasy may develop from the stage of being deliberate and sporadic into an established mode: the person comes to believe the contents of his fantasy, which becomes subjectively real and accepted as fact. Pathological lying (pseudologia fantastica), hysterical conversion and dissociation (somatic and psychological hysterical symptoms), and the delusion-like ideas occurring in affective psychosis are among the said falsifications. Anyhow, this fantastic rearranging or transformation of reality is shown by neurotic patients habitually, and all people occasionally. In imaginative thinking, there is a joined use of fantasy and memory to generate plans for everyday life, and though it does not go beyond the rational or the possible, it is not necessarily confined to solving immediate problems. On the other hand, rational or conceptual thinking is the use of logic, without intermixing with fantasy, to solve problems [9].

E) Freud’s Annotations Re Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis, In Brief

An important mental need in obsessive patients is the need for uncertainty in their life, or for doubt. The creation of uncertainty is one of the methods employed by neurosis for drawing the patient away from reality and isolating him from the world – which is among the objects of every psychoneurotic disorder, and so may prepare the person’s perspective for dereism. Again, it is only too obvious what efforts are made by the patients themselves in order to be able to avoid certainty and remain in doubt. The predilection felt by obsessional neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn their thoughts by preference to those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgments must necessarily remain open to doubt. The chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory – in the last of which we are all in the habit of believing, without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness. On the other hand, the relationship between love and hatred is among the most frequent, the most marked, and probably, therefore, the most important characteristics of obsessional neurosis. In every neurosis we come upon the same suppressed instincts behind the symptoms. After all, hatred, kept suppressed in the unconscious by love, plays a great part in the pathogenesis of hysteria and paranoia. So, the neurotic phenomena in OCD arise, on the one hand, from conscious feelings of affection which become exaggerated as a reaction, and on the other hand, from sadism persisting in the unconscious in the form of hatred (reaction formation). If intense love is opposed by an almost equally powerful hatred, and is at the same time inseparably bound up with it, the immediate consequence is certain to be a partial paralysis of the will and an incapacity for coming to a decision upon any of those actions for which love ought to provide the motive power. Also, it is an inherent characteristic in the psychology of an obsessional neurotic to make the fullest possible use of the mechanism of displacement. So the paralysis of his powers of decision gradually extends itself over the entire field of the patient’s behavior. The doubt corresponds to the patient’s internal perception of his own indecision, which, in consequence of the inhibition of his love by his hatred, takes possession of him in the face of every intended action. The doubt is in reality a doubt of his own love, and is especially apt to become displaced on to what is most insignificant and small. Accordingly, a man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing and may endeavor to ‘isolate’ all such protective acts from other things. The compulsion, on the other hand, is an attempt at compensation for the doubt and if the patient, by the help of displacement, succeeds at last in bringing one of his inhibited intentions to a decision, then the intention must be carried out.

Furthermore, by a sort of regression, preparatory acts become substituted for the final decision, thinking replaces acting, and, instead of the substitutive act, some thought preliminary to it asserts itself with all the force of compulsion. True obsessional acts such as these, however, are only made possible because they constitute a kind of reconciliation, in the shape of a compromise, between the two antagonistic impulses. The obsessive thought which has forced its way into consciousness with such excessive violence has next to be secured against the efforts made by conscious thought to resolve it. As we already know, this protection is afforded by the distortion which obsessive thought has undergone before becoming conscious [10].

F) Freud’s Comments Re Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts, In Short

The terms ‘animatism’, animalism’ and ‘manism’ denote the theory of the living character of inanimate objects. What led to the introduction of these terms was a realization of the highly remarkable view of nature and the universe adopted by the primitive races, which peopled the world with innumerable spiritual beings both munificent and malicious. As said by them, these spirits and demons were the causes of natural phenomena, and accordingly, not only animals and plants but all the inanimate objects in the world are animated by them. Similarly, they believe that human individuals are inhabited by similar spirits, and the souls, which live in human beings, can leave their residences and transfer into other human beings; so, they are the vehicle of mental activities and are to a certain extent independent of their bodies. How did primitive men arrive at the unusual dualistic views on which the animistic system is based? It is supposed that they did so by noting the phenomena of sleep (including dreams) and of death, which so much look like that, and by attempting to elucidate those phenomena which are of such close concern to everyone. The main starting-point of this hypothesizing must have been the problem of death. While what primitive man regarded as the natural thing was the indefinite prolongation of life (immortality), the idea of death was only accepted late, and with doubtfulness. So, by forming the idea of the soul and its extension to objects in the external world, he kept the earlier dogmas. As stated by Hume, there is a general inclination among mankind to imagine all creatures like themselves, and to transfer to every object those abilities with which they are intimately familiar, and of which they are very well aware. Animism is a system of thought that allows us to grasp the whole universe as a single unity from a single point of view, and myths, as well, are based on animistic premises. On the other hand, it is not to be supposed that men were motivated to create their first system of the world by pure theoretical curiosity, because the practical need for controlling their surroundings must have played its part. So, hand in hand with the animistic scheme, there came a body of guidelines for how to achieve mastery over men, monsters, animals and things – or rather, over their spirits. These instructions go by the names of ‘sorcery’ and ‘magic’ as the ‘strategy of animism’. Sorcery, the art of manipulating spirits by treating them in the same way as one would treat men in similar conditions and by the same techniques that have proved operative with living men. Magic, on the other hand, disregards spirits and has to serve different purposes – it must protect the individual from his enemies and from dangers, it must give him power to injure his enemies, and it must subject natural phenomena to the will of man, like a series of rituals for producing rain and fertility. Furthermore, in magic, the element of distance is ignored; in other words, telepathy is taken for granted. Also, there is a similarity between the act performed and the result expected (‘imitative’ or ‘homoeopathic’ magic). For example, if I wish it to rain, I only have to do something that looks like rain or is reminiscent of rain. At a later stage of civilization, instead of this rain-magic, processions will be made to a temple and prayers for rain will be addressed to the deity living in it. Also, if one knows the name of a man or of a spirit, one has obtained a certain amount of power over the owner of the name. The higher motivations for cannibalism among primitive races have a comparable basis. By incorporating parts of a person’s body through the act of eating, one at the same time gains the abilities possessed by him, which leads in certain situations to restrictions and precautions with respect to diet. While association of ideas permits misidentifying an ideal connection in place of a real one, men mistook the order of their ideas in place of the order of nature, and therefore imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, allowed them to exercise an analogous control over things. It is easy to perceive the motives which lead men to practice magic: they are human wishes, like children that, to begin with, satisfy their wishes in a hallucinatory manner by creating a satisfying situation (kids’ play). As a result, as said by Schopenhauer, the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy; and we have already seen that the origin of the belief in souls and in demons, which is the essence of animism, goes back to the impression which is made upon men by death. While on the animistic stage, men assign omnipotence to themselves, the scientific view of the universe no longer gives any possibility for human omnipotence; men have accepted their littleness and submitted reluctantly to death and to the other necessities of nature. None the less, some of the primitive belief in omnipotence still continues in men’s conviction in the power of the human mind, which struggles with the laws of reality.

Discussion

The primitive idea of a soul, which accepts that both persons and things are of a dual nature and that their known qualities and variations are scattered between their two component slices, is identical with the dualism that is declared by our current distinction between soul and body. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unison, linking and unambiguousness from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its comprehension; and if, as a result of special conditions, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not onlyfrom dreams, but also from phobias, obsessive thinking and delusions, as well.

Magical thinking, which, according to recognized manuals, is apparently more observable in OCD and OCPD in comparison with other neuroses or characters, respectively, and, accordingly, has been pronounced in addition to other psychodynamic factors, may have some characteristics which differentiate it from an unconscious defense mechanism, an explicit delusion with manifest content, or an overvalued idea with boundless process. First of all, it may not have any latent meaning that demands intensive interpretation, because it is not an unconscious desire. In addition, it may be a symbolic idea that brings to mind a series of wishes. Thirdly, it may have a provisional quality, not an enduring feature. Last of all, there is some kind of relationship or overlapping between magical thinking and animistic thinking in the said psychiatric complications or traits, which, though has been described en masse by Freud, has not been cited clearly in most known textbooks, except for reporting animistic thinking as a characteristic feature of preoperational thinking during early and middle childhood. Anyway, while magical thinking is around power, surroundings and actions, animistic thinking is around life and existence. On the other hand, though magical thinking may derive from conscious anxiety, unconscious fear, constructive or destructive yearnings, and influential desires, animistic thinking may be driven from inner wishes, internalized objects, and personified losses. Emblematically, like phobia, which involves an exaggerated fear that is apparently regarding an obvious thing, but in reality it is regarding the harm which may result from the said item, animistic thinking, as well, is similar to a firm belief in living of a lifeless entity, while in fact it may be just some symbolic repercussions of a number of ruminations or nostalgias that are attached to some objects. So, the stuff may be assumed as overestimated objects, which are associated with some reminiscence of adored persons, important events, esteemed settings, treasured surroundings, etc. Such an implication with respect to healthy or neurotic individuals, which is in addition to the common psychodynamic, anthropological, or sociological formulations, can be correct as well with respect to psychotic patients, because dereistic thinking is not limited to any specific category of age, personality or morbidity. It is part of normal development of mentality during childhood, which may elongate limitlessly into later phases of development in the shape of trait, ethos or symptom, and can be classified, accordingly, based on the personal, social and occupational functionality of the creature. While spiritualism is basically constructed through dereism or intermixed with it, no illness is mechanically attributable to dereistic or autistic thinking. For example, it has been stated that what drives the behavior of a patient with hoarding disorder appears to be the fear of losing items that the patient believes will be needed later and a distorted belief about or an emotional attachment to possessions, or overemphasizing the importance of recalling information and possessions, and patients may believe that forgetting the information will lead to severe consequences and prefer to keep their possessions within sight so as not to forget them. But, maybe the inability of a person with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder , hoarding disorder or even some cases of Alzheimer’s disorder, who is unable to discard worn-off or worthless objects with no, apparently, sentimental value, may drive essentially from emotional reminiscences, as well, which may not express visibly due to unconscious defense mechanisms like isolation. Therefore, while many times, the resistance of an obsessive person against abandoning of antique objects, old homes, aged cars and similar vintage objects are being ascribed to vicariousness, stinginess or financial conspiracy, no unfriendly or criminal reason can be found except a number of unnoticed memories regarding absent persons, vanished happiness, or missing chances; a system of valuing that is specific to such kind of apparently emotionless persons. So, discarding such memorial stuff may act as a stressor for every individual who values his or her objects of interest mystically, not fiscally. So, it is not surprising that the end result of such a process, if it comes across with constant negligence of families, can be desperateness, vulnerability, anxiety or depression. On the other hand, while subjective characterization of objects may not be robotically equal to acceptance of living of lifeless objects, personification of stuff is not limited to children, obsessive persons, schizotypal individuals or psychotic patients. Having faith in the creation of human beings from soil and the rising from the dead on resurrection day makes magical or animistic thinking allowable for countless believers and turns it into a cultural principle. So, what obsessives or schizotypal persons display more than others or psychotics believe more absolutely is nothing more than a deeply-rooted old-fashioned idea, which, though is unscientific, has no clinical significance per se without other defined criteria for diagnosis of primary or secondary psychiatric complications. In addition to internal wishes or fears in primitive people that may have facilitated the primary creation of dereistic thinking, along with its secondary gains, psychiatric symptoms, like hallucination, pseudo-hallucination or illusion, as well, along with imagination, over-valued ideation, delusions and emotional dynamics, may have assisted elaboration of dereism through olden times. It is interesting that all the aforementioned processes are still operative. Therefore, it is the task of every psychotherapist or counselor to ask patients with apparently animistic thinking regarding the significance that they may attribute to apparently insignificant objects, if it is part of the problem, and probe the related ins and outs or associations. Hence, similar to misidentification, misinterpretation and misbehavior, which may result from internal aspirations, worries and dogmas, dereism, as well, may have discoverable and accustomed roots, whether conscious or unconscious, which demand patience and enquiry by therapists, before clinical diagnosis and psychopathological labeling. Furthermore, as is obvious, some sort of parallelism is evident between preoperational stage of cognitive progress, anal stage of psychosexual development and dereism, which is facilitated by regression in adult cases of OCD, or individuals who are characterized as OCPD. So, overrepresentation of magical or animistic thinking in the said group of patients or individuals is not an accidental finding. Therefore, at this juncture, disregard for classical psychoanalytic interpretations about unconscious motivations for resorting to dereism in neuroses like OCD, or conscious exaggeration of the importance of recalling information in HD, or semiconscious trait in OCPD, another idea has been stated, which involves a conscious motivation, namely commemorative dynamics, for animistic thinking. On the other hand, while, as said by Freud, primitive men and neurotics attach a high valuation or over-valuation to psychical acts, this attitude may probably be brought into relation with narcissism and regarded as an indispensable component of it. The psychological outcomes must be the same in both cases, whether the libidinal hyper-cathexis of thinking is an original one or has been produced by regression: intellectual narcissism and the omnipotence of thoughts. Then again, in only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been reserved, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still come about that a man who is inspired by desires performs something like the execution of those wishes and that what he does in the play produces emotive effects – due to an arty impression – just as though it were something real. So, folks speak with justice of the ‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians. Consequently, although spirits and demons are only projections of men own emotional instincts, such an inclination will be intensified when projection promises to bring with it the advantage of mental relief. In addition, as said by Freud, the omnipotence of thoughts, which is ascribed by obsessives to thoughts, feelings and wishes, and has been recognized as an essential element in the mental life of primitive people, may be accounted as a frank acknowledgement of a remnant of the old megalomania of infancy.

Conclusion

Though dereism, is scientifically an archaic mode of thinking, and in psychiatry, may be accounted as an important symptom, disregard to its developmental or pathologic basis of genesis, it may harbor additional implications, which have not been outlined serviceably before, except than revealing its soothing effect re inherent subjective weaknesses and endless mental conflicts of human being by expert psychoanalysts, psychologists, mythologists and anthropologists. commemorative role of what seems to be animism, though in the presence of intact reality testing, in obsessive persons, neurotic patients or any other individual, can be considered as an advantageous implication, which demands thorough exploration of beliefs and remembrances by psychotherapist, counselor or psychiatrist, before ascribing dereism to serious mental problems, which demands aggressive interventions. It is somewhat similar to post-grief mummification of recollections of a lost darling by a surviving kin or companion, whether depressed or not, though at this juncture it may involve further subjects or moods.

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8. Sadock BJ, Sadock VA, Ruiz P. (2015) Obsessive – Compulsive and Related Disorders. Kaplan & Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry. Lippincott Wolters Kluwer.420 – 421.
9. Sims A. (1988) Symptoms in the mind: an introduction to descriptive psychopathology. Bailiere Tindall, London, 105 – 107.[crossref]
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DOI: 10.31038/PSYJ.2022431

In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul remarks memorably that perception of divine truth is comparable to seeing “as through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12 New International Version). For a number of contemporary Christians, the glass through which humans might perceive dimly the truths of the Christian faith is thought to have grown darker over the past two centuries due, in part, to the manner in which the culture of advanced political democracy has undermined revealed religion—has rendered more opaque the light of Christian faith. One villain in this view is the environment of meaning supported by political liberalism, an ecology formed by widely disseminated decrees of courts and legislative bodies as well as by a set of cultural expectations concerning the scope of justice realizable through state power, an expectation growing from, and reinforced by, the juridical and legislative pronouncements of the liberal state itself. Such an ecology of meaning is held by some Christians to have created an environment in which traditional Christian faith is perceived as marginal, or, worse, as harmful [1]. Hence, it is claimed that humanity’s capacity to know God, if only imperfectly, is made even more difficult by the rise of political liberalism and the symbolic universe it delimits: a world of governments always unmoored to churches or other religious institutions, a world, as a result, where the decisions of states can defensibly and intelligibly be grounded not on revelation but only on natural science, and where, partly in consequence of the state’s firm pursuit of justice, the morally serious pursue not transcendence, but the rectification of injustice in this life, unconcerned with a justice beyond the here and now—the justice dispensed to an immortal soul. These features of the culture of contemporary liberalism—separation of church and state and the resultant elevation of science as the basis of state decision making, and the overarching concern with overturning on earth injustice and the associated loss of the persuasive appeal of divine justice in a future life—have made much darker the knowledge of God’s truth, creating, it is claimed, a “culture of disbelief” [2].

In this work I develop, on the contrary, the hypothesis that the ideas created through the mediation of liberal courts and legislatures, and the cultural expectations that ensue, have forged a set of meanings that, although they may well have some of the consequences certain Christians decry, also, if seen in a proper light, have the power to incline the mind to conceive as plausible basic propositions of the Christian faith. Specifically, I hypothesize that the world in which church and state are separated and science brought to the forefront of culture, and the world in which the men and women whom all can agree to call heroes are those who seek to press as far as possible the redress of injustices in this life—in other words, the world of contemporary political liberalism—is an environment that might incline the mind to think in terms that are deeply consistent with, and thus open to, traditional Christian claims. The world of liberalism communicated through the instrumentalities of the state and through political culture, when viewed in a particular light, can help to prepare the mind for the acceptance of Christian faith: as a result of the cultural environment it creates, political liberalism can represent a kind of proto-evangelium, or presaging of the Christian message. The purpose of this work is not apologetic, however, but psychological: it is to deploy the insights of the cultural psychology of religion to suggest the internal complexity of the universe of meaning associated with liberalism and its potential to push thinking in directions not previously appreciated.

In the first section, I outline recent work in the cultural psychology of religion that demonstrates cogently the importance of this area of psychological research. Second, I provide an outline of basic tenets of traditional Christian thought and the cultural fora through which these understandings emerged. Third, I describe two concepts central to contemporary liberal political thought and the communicative technologies and cultural media that have facilitated their development. Fourth, I review briefly the claim made by certain Christians that political liberalism creates a system of reference and cultural ideals that militates against Christian truth-claims. In section five, I argue that the two principles of liberalism on which I focus can be hypothesized to support a system of cultural signs that point toward the plausibility of traditional Christian claims. In the sixth and final section, I lay forth a research agenda of qualitative inquiry designed to test the hypothesis that political liberalism can bear a fruitful connection to traditional Christian belief.

i) The Cultural Psychology of Religion

The cultural psychology of religion is a subfield in psychological research that, as J.H. Pak [3] notes, “focuses on understanding human behavior in the social context by taking into account environment, history and culture.” Using these insights, it studies the “generation of categories for understanding” the world individuals’ find themselves in, and their religious responses to it (p. 171). Cultural psychology is especially useful as one tool in the psychological study of religion since, as J.A. Belzen recounts [4], religiosity “is a culturally constituted phenomenon in which psychic life expresses itself.” (p. 25). Concretely, Pak, echoing D. Polkinghorne’s famous inventory of psychological research methodologies [5], notes that the cultural psychology of religion is an approach based on qualitative inquiry guided by a well-defined and plausibly-grounded hypothesis (Pak, p. 171). It is thus unmoored to large quantitative data collection research. However, it is not meant to replace quantitative analysis; it is meant, rather, as one tool to augment the study of the psychology of religion with theories derived from assessments of cultural-ecological effects on religious belief and practice. Lastly, the cultural psychology of religion is especially receptive to interdisciplinary analysis (Pak, 180), a point that will become important in the development in our last section of a future interdisciplinary research agenda.

ii) An Outline of Orthodoxy Christianity

Traditional, or orthodox, Christianity is certainly not univocal, but, for present purposes, it can be defined as a set of propositions and ideals derived from oral church tradition and ritual practice, scripture, and conciliar pronouncements, most centrally the creedal declarations of the Nicean and Constantinopolitan church councils. What many today call orthodox Christian thought, therefore, emerged through the communicative technologies of orality, collective practice, written exposition, and collaborative debate in the form of ecumenical councils comprised of leading church officials. These technologies forged the environment in which men and women came to define themselves as orthodox. Orthodoxy can thus be studied as the product of specific communicative strategies: the collection of oral tradition and ritual observances, the writing down and continual passage over time in written form of these traditions, and the collective debate and discussion of the true meaning of the claims found in oral and written material.

One abbreviated outline of the substance of orthodox thought can be adumbrated in the following way. All that exists in any space or any time is the result of an act of a creator god. This being created first a time and a place somehow anterior to the time and space we experience in our ordinary lives. In this place the creator made humanity from the substance of the earth. Here, the humans the creator made lived in harmony with their maker, the entire created world was peacefully and harmoniously directed toward god, and humans were, within their own psychological makeup deeply at peace. However, through a transgression by the first humans, the initial condition was radically altered. By force of this transgression, divine punishment came to be executed. The souls of the first humans became disordered and their orientation was turned away from their god. And the natural world itself also was wounded. Since the initial transgression and the resulting punishment, instead of being harmoniously directed toward god, the natural world became a captive of decay, etched with suffering, locked in ruthless competition, and travailed in pain—groaning for its ultimate redemption (Romans 8: 21-23). As the Book of Isaiah recounts: “the earth languishes…for a curse is on the earth” (Isaiah 24: 4-6). Indeed, “cursed is the ground because of you [Adam and Eve]” (Genesis 3:17). This altered state was a punishment visited not only on the perpetrators themselves but on all the humans who followed the initial pair. The creator gave to the later generations a punishment—a disordered soul, an orientation away from god, a natural world marked by decay, enmity and discord—for a transgression that they themselves did not commit, a penalty that makes it hard, or perhaps even impossible, for any human on his or her own to secure god’s favor. Through the redemptive act of Jesus Christ, however, atonement for the transgression is given. Humans who are in some way followers of the redeemer will then be resurrected in a new heaven and a new earth, in which there will be the restoration of internal balance for individuals; the reorientation of humankind to god; and the healing of the violence that marks the natural world, for, in that new place, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion” will live in harmony, with “the wolf and the lamb feeding together.” Indeed, “they shall not hurt nor destroy” in the abode of the new creation (Isaiah 11:6; 65:25).

iii) Contemporary Liberalism: Two Central Concepts

Contemporary liberalism is a complex and often amorphous set of ideas and aspirations. It has been shaped in the crucible of a distinctive set of institutions: standing courts issuing written decrees accessible through print media, and representative bodies assembled to address matters of public concern, informed in their deliberations frequently by the technology of representative polling, and issuing written laws accessible to the mass of society. The emergence and continued maintenance of liberalism depends on these (or very similar) institutional structures and communicative technologies. At least several constellations of ideas are central to the culture created by political liberalism. First, as Robert Audi and others have maintained, the concept of the separation of church and state is indispensable to contemporary liberal political thought [6]. Moreover, this separation is often viewed as deep and wide. The proper functions of the state should not include any meaningful promotion of religion at all.

Related to this strict separationist viewpoint is the idea of science as the privileged, even exclusive, means of state decision making. Since the state should not promote religion, policy making must not be based on claims derivable from scripture unless they can independently be verified by a non-religious source, most frequently the natural or social sciences (Audi, 2000). Science is privileged because its claims are held to be reproducible in empirical experiments, and are held to be subject to continual revision and testing through on-going debate and discussion in the forum of scientific conferences and publications.

With a strict separation of church and state has come the political and cultural elevation of science. As Oxford theologian Roger Trigg has argued, science has assumed the status of an alternative system of truth that takes the place of religion in the decision processes of government (2007, p.198). An example of this development can be seen in recent debates surrounding public school curricula. In the celebrated case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School [7], the United States District Court held that the decision as to which textbooks to assign in a public school had to be made in a way that was untinctured by the influence of any concepts even remotely religious; the decision as to which textbooks for a public school district to accept is a governmental decision that has to be made solely on that basis deemed the most purely scientific, a basis allowing no influence, however indirect, for religious concepts or ideas.

Another idea integral to contemporary liberalism is at least the aspiration that humans will treat injustice as a summum malum to be combated tirelessly as a highest duty. Liberalism has developed through the instruments of government power, specifically court rulings, legislative enactments, and executive orders. A central preoccupation of the liberal state has been to advance the cause of justice for individual citizens seen as free and equal members of the political community. Courts have perhaps most visibly advanced the cause of ensuring justice, understood as the fair and equal treatment of all citizens. Indeed, as Thomas Woods, Kevin Gutzman, and Thomas Sowell have argued, through the mediation of the court system and its printed decrees accessible to all in society, liberalism has grown into a set of cultural norms defined by an expansive and deeply ambitious claim that men must strive to rectify all human injustice [8,9]. From this overarching concern to redress injustice in this life has emerged dilated concepts of restorative justice. Several of such very ambitious attempts to right human wrongs can be found in the policy of affirmative action, in school desegregation, and calls for reparations for African slavery.

Affirmative action programs are born of a high idealism, the desire to take charge and make right past injustices. Injustice is so vilified, and the call to rectify wrongs in this life, without relying on divine justice in an afterlife, so powerful that affirmative action has emerged as a policy demanded by the political liberalism’s understanding of justice. Due to past wrongs, and the lingering consequences presently of the past injustices, all traces of the initial wrong must in this world be extirpated. To do so, all individuals now should not be treated strictly or fully equally, but rather, some advantage should be given today to the members of the class historically treated unfairly, even if this means that a member of a non-protected class unrelated in any direct way to the perpetration of the initial injustice is denied a strict conception of equal treatment. Perhaps the clearest articulation of this understanding of racial justice was expressed by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in the important affirmative action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke [10] when he notes that “in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.” True justice, Blackman argues, demands that past injustices to African Americans be rectified to the point of treating whites who had no role in the imposition of earlier injustices in a way that can in effect prove to make their admission to college harder.

In respect to primary and secondary school desegregation, in Swann v. Mecklenberg Board of Education [11] the Supreme Court authorized the busing of white students to schools with a large percentage of African American students to remedy past state-sponsored school segregation on the basis of race. As a result of this ruling—one born of a deep desire that justice be done on earth—“among the losers,” Woods and Gutzman note, “were nonblack students bused to underperforming schools, even though none of the affected children was a wrongdoer,” i.e. the children had no role in the earlier state-sponsored acts of racial discrimination (2008, p. 58). Hence, the courts enshrined a conception of justice based on collective responsibility and accountability: it rejected, Woods and Gutzman remark, an “older idea of justice” which holds that only present malefactors are to be held responsible for criminal or immoral acts and that the state should only “target the guilty party and not inflict their punishments on a broad class of individuals” not themselves responsible for previous injustice (p. 61). Indeed, when justice is pursued with such passion as evidenced by many of the rulings of the United States Supreme Court—rulings that are core features of contemporary political liberalism–it often leads to an expansive definition of justice that includes and even necessitates collective responsibility.

Moreover, in regard to the question of material reparations for African slavery the same logic often holds. Calls by international legal bodies for reparations for slavery follow the logic of expanding justice to the point of implementing liabilities based on a de-personalized and collective sense of responsibility for previous egregious offences. The Legal Committee of the Organization of African Unity, for example, has called for monetary reparations for the past injustice of African slavery, a call echoed by legal scholars such as Mari Matsuda [12,13], who all call for the legal and political systems of the western world to make material amends for the past injustice of transcontinental African slavery. Against arguments that the injustice of past slavery is no longer justiciable since (presumably) no Western individual or state today is directly responsible for any current act of transcontinental African enslavement, these legal scholars and corporate bodies argue that the injustice of African slavery was so monstrously egregious—such an affront to justice itself—that any lingering aspect of the previous injustice, say, in the form of material advantages that the Western world may still enjoy as a result of its previous acts of unjust enrichment through slavery, must be extirpated: justice demands that collective responsibility for past wrongs be born by individuals and states not themselves responsible for the earlier injustice [14]. Through calls widely disseminated in print and electronic media, the demand for reparations for African slavery has begun to have a powerful influence in Western culture. As the noted scholar of global restorative justice Richard Falk argues, the decisions of the African Union and the writings in their defense by Western legal scholars have allowed the demands for reparations to assume a good deal of the same cultural force held by legal holdings of the United States Supreme Court (2008).

iv) The Claims that Political Liberalism Undermines Christian Faith

These influential ideas—the separation of church and state and the resulting political potency of natural science, and the rise of expansive claims on behalf of justice—are thought by some conservative Christians to have undermined the Christian faith. Separation of church and state is thought by such scholars as Roger Trigg (2007) and Stephen Carter (1994) to be religiously corrosive, in part due to the representational power of the state. That is, a functioning state is an entity that will always elicit awe. The technologies of state power will always be, to some degree, awesome: even the most constitutionally restrained government will have the reserve power to field an army and to send its young people to die in combat to defend the state; and even the most minimal state intent on survival will retain the reserve power to shape in some manner the upbringing of youth, through some control over schooling to ensure a minimum of social cohesiveness; and even the most minimal state will also have the power to take away the life of egregious wrongdoers, if not literally through the instrumentalities of the death penalty, then at least in the sense of taking away one’s life as a free person through the technology of perpetual imprisonment. A functioning state of any political stripe will, therefore, always be viewed with awe, having as it does power over life, youth, and death. Since the state concerns itself with these fundamentally important things and so is always to some extent awe-inspiring, for it not to be involved at all in religion is for religion to risk being seen as not awe-inspiring, as not fundamentally important: for if religion were, how could such an awesome force as government ever be indifferent to it? (Trigg, 2007, p. 128).

By this logic, when the state bases its activities on science (and not religion), science takes on the representational gravity of the state. Science, then, tends to become fundamentally important in the mind of the people. Moreover, many Christians have come to see science as increasingly and belligerently opposed to Christian faith. The burgeoning industry of natural scientists authoring god-rejecting books [15] has not assuaged this concern. For these reasons, some Christians see the culture of political liberalism as denigrating the faith, and even as setting up a parallel pseudo-religion using the same rhetorical technologies of the earlier religion: we see sacred books disseminated by writers claiming to have firsthand knowledge of the truth, but now not in the form of Christian oral tradition derived for eye witnesses to Christ but of empirical revelations of scientists in laboratories; ecumenical councils of learned experts convene to define creedal statements, but now not as a Christian creed but as a kind of scientific conciliarism to construe the precise meaning and formulations of disbelief; and the majesty of the state becomes moored to claims of ultimate reality, but now not through a union of church and state but through an establishment of science as the state’s official confession.

Additionally, the expansive concern for justice has also been viewed by some Christians as establishing ideals that erode orthodox faith. Combating injustice is of course not seen by any Christians as wrong. What is questioned is the commitment to a bold idea to make the world fully morally clean by human law and government. The proponents of reparations for slavery, for example, seek to purge the world of lingering vestiges of injustice, a desire they pursue with such passion that they see as fair the imposition of tariffs and impediments on individuals in no way directly implicated in the sin of human bondage. Here Christian thinkers often point to Eric Voegelin as having detected a dangerous siren song. Such a project communicates the idea that the mind must be focused on straightening the crooked timber of injustice on earth, remaking by human will the whole of social relations. Voegelin refers to this kind of a mission as the call to immimentize the eschaton, a call of a secularized heart for a world redeemed by human effort (1987).

v) Liberalism as a Cultural-Psychological Proto-Evangelium? A Hypothesis.

Such Christian thinkers, however, overlook a very real sense in which the culture of political liberalism might serve to underscore the viability of central Christian claims. The culture shaped by political liberalism can be hypothesized as forging a worldview that makes more accessible key Christian concepts—however mysterious these may be in a complete sense. The conjunction of the emergence of strict separation of church and state, and the resulting elevation of the power of science, and the rise of expansive claims on behalf of restorative justice can together create an ecology of meaning that can make plausible orthodox Christian views.

Separation as we have seen leads to the high cultural valuation of science. One of the central concepts of modern science is evolutionary biology. In fact, the Dover school case mentioned above was itself about evolutionary biology. Affirming evolutionary biology as the account of the origins on this earth of life and humanity is to affirm as true an account of the world in which the natural order itself is replete with suffering. As the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, in Darwin’s world nature is “Red in tooth and claw” (1850). Darwin’s natural world is marked by severe competition and frequent genetic mistakes that result in their animal bearers being butchered on, in paraphrase of Hegel’s famous words, natural history’s “blood-soaked slaughter-bench” [16,17]. Random mutations coupled with selection through ruthless competition are the engines of development on earth.

As this evolutionary account takes a greater cultural hold, it becomes natural to look for ways that the universe itself could be seen as the result of evolution. The drive is set in place to think about worlds before the big bang, which would allow our current universe to somehow be itself a product of a larger scheme of cosmic evolution. Indeed, a large number of scientists now speak frequently of evolution being applied to the universe as a whole. Many now speak of some earlier universe; and as a part of an evolutionary mindset—which sees incredible change over time in the natural order–an earlier universe is often seen as quite likely being radically different from our current universe, there being, as evolution demands, radical change over time. Hence, a number of physicists speak now of an earlier universe with entirely different physical laws, different “domain functions.” Scientists such as Lee Smolin in his work Life of the Cosmos have popularized this idea [18]. And major scientific conferences and publications have also widely disseminated this understanding. Indeed, as astrophysicist Bernard Carr argues, due to the rise of the “multi-verse” view of the cosmos, “although conservative cosmologists might prefer to maintain the [one universe model]…history is against them” [19,20]. Or as the noted physicist and author of the popular work The First Three Minutes, Stephen Weinberg argues, the many universe model is compelling and represents “a major shift in our understanding of the universe” (2007, p. 17), a view supported by such other luminaries of natural science, and promoters of science in popular culture, as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, [21,22]. As Dinesh D’Souza points out, these ideas are now widely disseminated and well known in the broader culture (2007, pp. 133-137; Trigg, 2007, p. 192). Given the cultural importance of science in a liberal political regime, which we have explored, the multiverse idea can indeed take a powerful hold.

So the culture of liberalism bends in the direction of seeing our world as one in which, hardwired in the natural world, is violence and discord, but at the same time as a world we can increasingly suppose was preceded by an earlier world with different physical laws—laws that might perhaps be other than the savage ones of mutation, competition, and selection repeated over immense periods of time which has fashioned in this universe the beings we are today. Moreover, by the logic of cosmic evolution–that is, of an evolutionary process at work in the cosmos in its broadest sense–it is increasingly plausible to assert that there will exist in the future a world after this, also possibly with entirely different natural laws.

Importantly, we must add to this concept of cosmic multiverses the cogency of claims of collective responsibility, such as inheres in the policies of affirmative action, school busing, and slavery reparations. Liberal political culture, by supporting policies that in effect punish some people today in order to rectify injustices perpetrated by earlier generations, makes increasingly plausible the idea that the savage laws of mutation and selection could actually be visited on this world due to some action in a previous one: that this world is a world suffering its own collective punishment.

From these ideas emerge a viewpoint consistent with orthodox Christianity, a kind of presaging of the Christian drama supplied by modern scientific and political liberal presuppositions. Humans are born into a natural order that is itself deeply disordered due to the operation of savage laws of competition, mutation, selection, and slaughter—the world of Charles Darwin. As beings made of the very stuff of nature, man is therefore also born disordered. Yet an earlier world existed in which different laws controlled, and the created being or beings in that world were not subject to Darwinian laws of mutation and selection. This current world with its Darwinian laws—laws the Christian writer Henry Morris [23] describes as “monstrous, inefficient, and cruel”—could be a punishment visited collectively on later humans for the transgressions of the beings in the earlier universe. Evolutionary biology could merely depict the physiology of the Pauline letters: man’s constitution in this world is inherently marked by inner turmoil, nature is scarred by incessant competition, the natural order is “red in tooth and claw”—and thus is in need of God’s deliverance—all because of an earlier offense. Such would, moreover, be no scandal to liberal justice, since the liberal language of justice inclines the mind to accept the validity of unearned punishment, of individuals—for the sake of justice—being punished for acts they themselves did not commit. The language of liberalism affirms in effect the right to punish sons for the sins of their fathers. For despite perhaps some superficial protests to the contrary, collective punishment is indeed an inexorable consequence of the policies of an expansive understanding of justice which has come to typify political liberalism. The liberal language of justice in the context of an evolutionary worldview, therefore, creates a system of cultural signposts pointing toward the Christian message of the fall. Yet the evolutionary framework points also to the possibility of a yet other world, with different physical laws, laws that could be free from the rule of mutation, selection, competition, and death: a new heaven and a new earth.

Of course, it can be argued that both policies like reparations and the Christian concept of the fall are unjust simpliciter. But this is not the logic of either position. Liberal political thought sees its policies as representing a deeper, fuller sense of justice; and Christianity holds that the fall does not impugn God’s justice, for “the judgments given by the LORD are trustworthy and absolutely just.” (Psalm 19:9 New English Translation).

Moreover, nothing I have sketched about evolutionary science and collective responsibility speaks clearly about the Christian drama of sin and salvation; yet the reference to one who would “crush” the head of the serpent (Genesis 3:15 Berean Study Bible)—what is called by Christians the proto-evangelium, or the pre-figurement of the Christian redeemer—is itself only suggestive of things to come; it only points in a particular direction. In the same way, might we be able to call political liberalism its own form of proto-evangelium?

My argument is not one of apologetics, it is one concerning the ecology of cultural meaning as an exercise in the cultural psychology of religion—a determination of how cultural symbols are available in the context of contemporary political liberalism that can point thought in a particular direction by broadening the imagination to think in terms consistent with fundamental Christian claims. It is about how forms of thought can be made viable by their presentation and elaboration in the culture of a particular time; it is about, in all, how liberalism might cast on what Paul calls the dark mirror a shimmer of new light.

vi) An Agenda for Future Research

Interdisciplinary work among political scientists deeply conversant in liberal political ideology and the leading figures in the liberal political movement, joined by religious studies scholars deeply conversant in Christian theology, and also qualitatively-focused psychologists of religion, can test this hypothesis in the following way. In line with suggestions developed by Pak [24,25], one especially fruitful method in the cultural psychology of religion to do this would be through in-depth examination of autobiographical narratives of leading liberal activists. As Pak argues, autobiographical narratives serve to create a sense of psychological “consistency and coherence across time” (p. 180; Belzen, 2008); and they do so, McAdams notes, by how “they serve to define self, define relationships with others, and regulate emotional experiences through drawing moral and life lessons” (Pak, p. 180; McAdams, 2001). These features of narrative writings, Pak maintains, are precisely the tools that should be seized on in the cultural psychology of religion (2017, pp. 180-82). In-depth analysis by an interdisciplinary team, therefore, should review the autobiographical accounts of leaders in movements that embody political liberal ideals to assay if self-descriptions are discoverable that fit the hypothesis developed above. A study of this nature would provide important advances in the cultural psychology of religion [26,27].

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