dogma to doctrine

I don't know that I've ever mentioned this here, but my research is in religion. Specifically, in the relationship between various motivational orientations towards religion, and corresponding outcomes related to mental health, well-being, and behavior.

So I read a lot of journal papers. And here's what I think is interesting: These psychologists, people whose ranks I am attempting to enter, are a monolithic block of bias. Seriously. Brilliant people. People who have these huge, theoretical minds that are always spinning "what if's" and "how about we try's..." and thinking up these crazy awesome experiments, and toying with conclusions, and interpreting pages and pages of numbers. People whose brains work like I wish mine worked.

But...

Their research is thoroughly biased. Ironically, it's biased because they're attempting to keep out the bias. See, it's like this. Each paper begins with the assumption that religion (Christianity is the most-studied in my sub-field) is merely an instrument. And the psychologist is attempting to understand why different people engage in Christianity for different reasons, and how that results in different outcomes. That's completely valid. But none of the studies ever considers, in any real way, that some of their subjects engage in Christianity because it's truth.

We talk about how people engage in Christianity for external, or introjected, or "religion as a means" reasons--in order to stave off fear, or keep others happy, or maintain social status. We talk about how others engage for internal, or identified, or "religion as an end" reasons--because they value its teachings, or truly believe in its dogma. But, implicit in almost any of these papers is the assumption that Christianity is untrue, and that studying religious motivation will lead to the liberal gold standard: the intellectual panacea.

The researchers can't believe in religious truth because that would bias their results, but they are simultaneously biased by their own unbelief. And in fact, they reify that unbelief as its own sort of religion. That's why the accepted and exalted high-road of motivation in any of these papers is a "quest," or an "open" orientation. And because we're a big bunch of quest-ers, and that's most likely why we're studying in this particular field, and adherents to this particular theory, they can get away with the bias because no one questions it.

No one asks, how will the conceptualizations, and uses of the theory change if Truth is assumed? If I design a study assuming doctrines, in place of dogmas, how will I think differently through the interpretative issues of my data? Others would accuse such a researcher of religious bias, but friends, the bias is there already. We might just as well do what science is supposed to do--shed light on the truth we can see, accept the flaws in our perception, and figure out how to minimize them so that we might see truth more clearly.

Perhaps that means assuming truth sometimes--daring to understand others as they actually are, and not as we'd like to imagine them. I think love just got more courageous.