Devin Howard's blog. You can follow me on Twitter: @devvmh
I think the single greatest challenge so far in my life as a Christian has been compartmemtalization. And I imagine others may have the same challenge, so I'm going to blog about it. To really do the topic justice, though, I need to first talk about Fruedian, behavioural, and cognitive psychology.
Originally the field of psychology was dominated by Freudian theories, which were vast and attempted to explain why high society women might become hysterical. Each of his theories had a few important traits:
Behaviorism was the next movement in the field, which sought to apply more intellectual and scientific rigor to psychology to increase its usefulness. For instance, it was discovered that if a button was set up to randomly produce food or not, pigeons would peck the button until they exhausted themselves. The field was characterized by two big changes from earlier Freudian theories:
The third movement happened much more recently, and I'm calling it cognitive psychology. This was a move to extend behaviourism to include human's internal processes and thoughts, while still trying to maintain rigorous falsifiability. Its hard to do! Just as with Freud, we can continue to call these internal thoughts P, for person.
So the model that was drilled into me in my psychology courses in university was P x E. That is, behaviours should be seen as being caused by internal thoughts and factors (the person), external factors (the environment), or both.
So how does this apply to living out my faith? I learned about compartmentalized faith when i was 16, but I've been thinking about it much more deeply recently. I became a Christian at a church camp. My thoughts, words, and deeds were all impressively faithful during my time there. I'm so grateful hat i was influenced by church camp.
But as we know, it's a tired complaint that Christians are faithful on Sundays but are invisible as Christians the rest of the week. That's part of what I'm saying here. But I think it goes deeper. I think the reason I feel closer to God on a soccer field at camp than in a church pew during the year is that during the year I am exposed to so many more contexts. In particular:
I know there are more contexts in my life, but these are the most illustrative of my point. For each of these contexts (note they don't include church camp, where my faith took root), I have to go through a few steps just to begin identifying myself in my head as a Christian!
This is a bare minimum! And its still unlikely I'll be talking about faith with my friends from that context. I still need to "come out" as a Christian in each context, and ideally gauge people's reactions, before even talking openly about it.
I think compartmentalization is easily confused with cowardice - I'm just not courageous enough to share my faith with all my friends outside of a church. But that's not really it. I think framing a faith struggle as one journey, from sinner to saint, ignores a crucial part of my psychology. I've got 7 or more simultaneous journeys, and I'm at a different place in each one.
I really welcome comments on this entry. This is something I've been thinking about a lot as I try to keep growing in my relationship with God.
Comments
Paul N
Sun, 01/08/2017 - 19:50
Permalink
There is so much I could
devin
Fri, 01/13/2017 - 12:26
Permalink
In this post, I'm mostly
Paul N
Sun, 01/15/2017 - 01:08
Permalink
What is the difference
devin
Sat, 01/21/2017 - 17:56
Permalink
Yeah! That hits
Add new comment