Psychology and Its Influence on Religion

"Do we use our relationship with our earthly father to excuse our poor relationship with God? How do legitimate psychological factors impact our practice of our faith?"

From Crisis

By Stephen Sammut, BPharm, PhD

Do we use our relationship with our earthly father to excuse our poor relationship with God? How do legitimate psychological factors impact our practice of our faith?

The parable of the prodigal son has to be one of the most touching parables of God’s mercy, love, and forgiveness. It is a parable of hope if we are willing to admit our deficiencies and to reconcile with God. However, there is an unsettling aspect to the homilies that one often hears pertaining to this parable, an aspect that, in my humble opinion, reflects an overemphasis on psychological concepts over spiritual reality and personal responsibility.

When this parable comes up in the liturgical calendar, it is not uncommon to hear homilies that explicitly or implicitly focus significantly on our personal relationships with our own fathers and how this colors the relationship with God the Father. It often feels as if the earthly relationship is being used as an “excuse” for any woes that we may be experiencing in our relationship with God the Father. Is there not an underlying, implicit statement here potentially teaching the individual to deflect any personal problems in the relationship with God the Father onto someone else? Let’s assess this in a bit more depth. 

This article is by no means intended to dismiss the importance of our earthly relationship with our father (and mother) and its potential to impact, among other things, our relationship with God. To dismiss such a reality would be insensible, especially given the substantial evidence, even in the scientific literature, indicating the importance of fathers in development and the negative consequences of absent fathers. However, it is also wrong to overemphasize it. Saying our earthly relationship contributes to our relationship with God does not imply that it determines it. 

In lockstep with what we see happening around us in the information deluge we experience, truths or half-truths are being stirred into the same pot as lies, often in a very subtle way. This leads to great confusion, especially when they are then addressed publicly as “definitive truths”—which is everything they’re not. Human behavior is complex and multifaceted in addition to most behaviors displaying a bidirectional relationship. 

My own research, among others, has shown that while more positive parenting styles from both mothers and fathers are indicative of fewer religious/spiritual struggles, the father’s parenting was not so predictive of the religious/spiritual struggles. So, what could this mean? In all likelihood, it simply means that there’s more, significantly more, to our relationship with God than the experience of our relationship with our parents. Such relationships may contribute (like everything else) to the quality of relationship, but they certainly are not the be-all and end-all, and they certainly do not seem to supersede our autonomous capacity to have the right relationship with God the Father. 

We are taught, on the one hand, that we should see Christ in the other person and see others through the eyes of Christ. Thus, our perspective of our fathers should follow a similar pattern—meaning, we should see our fathers, with all their humanity, through the eyes of God the Father (literally, as prodigal sons in the context of this parable) and pray for them, that, by His grace, they rise toward the perfection He desires of them. They, like each one of us, are a work in progress in the lifelong journey toward holiness, and one can only hope and pray that if they have passed on to the next life, they died trying. 

However, in these homilies that focus on how our relationship with God the Father is colored by our earthly fathers, what we are hearing seems to suggest the opposite: that is, we are subtly, or maybe less subtly, encouraging people to consider God the Father through the eyes of the imperfect fathers we all are (for those who are fathers), we all have had since the Fall, and will continue to have until Christ’s return. How can anyone see God for the Father He is with such an approach? We are already limited by the Fall. All that is needed to make it even more difficult is such “suggestions” emphasizing that our perception of God is formed through our experience with our earthly fathers. We all know the power of suggestion: say something enough times and people come to believe it. This leads me to the second point.

Such focus encourages the dispensation of personal responsibility, deflecting my failures, for which I alone am to blame, onto others. Such is the trend across the board in today’s world. It’s much easier to blame others for my woes than to admit my deficiencies! It is much easier to play the victim than to admit responsibility. And, sadly, the root of this teaching is psychology, explicitly or implicitly, at every level—it has penetrated every aspect of our society and even left a mark on Church teaching, or rather how it is taught. 

To conclude, it is not my desire to be dismissive of the importance of parent-child relationships in how we interact and perceive God. However, we also need to realize the significant limitations and potential negative consequences of such teaching approaches. 

When my relationship with God is personal and between me and Him, then what is written in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” becomes very personal. However, this personal relationship becomes more difficult and complicated when we seek to bring in a third person (in this case, our earthly father), as it clouds our vision of God because we come to see Him increasingly through the lens of the imperfections of our earthly father. Moreover, it may potentially compromise our relationship with our earthly father as we start perceiving him increasingly as the reason for our own issues in our relationship with God. 

Let us pray for our fathers and for each one of us who is a father, as prodigal sons, that we may seek to imitate our Father in Heaven—the Father reflected in the parable of the prodigal son.