Lessons From a Year of Preaching Part 3: Beyond Behavior Modification

So this series has outlived its name[1] and I am going to make this the last post on this topic, for now. My preaching partner and I are teaching a preaching class this year so, if you are interested in my thoughts on this, the MP3’s and resources will be showing up at the class website. But for my final post in the series I wanted to talk about the motivating behavior change in ourselves and others, a topic that has far more nuance, complexity and peril in it than I ever imagined.

Most of us share the experience of trying to motivate behavior change in ourselves. We have a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together (e.g. over eating, carbon usage, prejudging people based on perceived relationships between their easily observable characteristics and behaviors we have formerly correlated with those characteristics[2]). Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (e.g. exercise, spending time with kids, or allocating resources for the poor or the environment) [3]. But one of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us who have undertaken some long term project of behavior change have also failed at it. So, if at least part of the intent of preaching is to help offer cosmic resources for behavior change it would seem like understanding what motivates behavior change in ourselves and others would be fundamental.[4]

But the water is actually murkier than that. Because, from a Christian world view it is not sufficient to do the right things. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons makes them the wrong things. Behavior change with the wrong motivations is not progress. So simple behavior change is not a reliable metric of either personal growth or effective preaching. We are a very clever species. We can often find ways to ‘hotwire our hearts.’[5] That is, we can find ways to modify our behaviors or the behaviors of others[6] by appealing to fears, insecurities or appetites that are themselves unhealthy.[7] This kind of behavior change can leave someone worse off than before.[7.5] So the key to motivating behavior change both in our own spiritual journeys and in the journeys of those in our communities (through preaching or other graces/sacraments) is to reject illicit motivational strategies. But we can’t simply reject manipulation. We have to replace it with something better. So this final post will look at the two sides of the ‘motivating behavior change’ coin: a warning and a proposed way forward.

1. Beware of Moralism

Christianity is not a religion…so you can not treat it like one. The standard religious resources are not available to us. In general, religions hold out the prospect of earning divine favor and avoiding divine punishment as a cosmic ‘carrot and stick’ to motivate the behaviors the religion deems valuable and disincentivize those it considers antisocial. But the Christian story is not one of accumulating merit and avoiding guilt in the cosmic ledger…it is a story of unilateral rescue. If you try to apply the carrot/stick motivational methods to Christianity, it becomes something else.[8]

This means there are tools in the motivational tool box that are simply off limits for Christians. Guilt is very effective for short term behavior change, but it is out of bounds. And this turns out to be pragmatically helpful anyways because, as my brother likes to say, ‘the guilt button is effective but fragile.’ If you push that button too many times, it stops working. Guilt and fear are simply not long term motivators. They require an emotional intensity that we cannot sustain. Trying to earn God’s love and stay off his naughty list is not unlike trying to earn the love of a parent or avoid our daddy’s belt…it can motivate behaviors but it leaves you disappointed and bitter. It can make you do stuff but it can’t change your heart.

2. Offer a Greater Love

But it would be absurd to suggest that Christianity does not have relatively rigorous behavioral prescriptions. So those of us who are ‘all in’ on Jesus are constantly looking for licit ways to bring our behavior in line with many of these counter-cultural practices which, we believe, are fundamentally pragmatic.[9]

The reason that simply telling people to knock it off because God is gonna get em doesn’t work, is because we are fundamentally motivated by what we love. You hear people say all the time that we should all ‘follow our hearts[10].’ This is an empty cliché. But it is not absurd because it is false; it is absurd because it is trivial. We all, always ‘follow our hearts.’ We, without exception, behave in accordance with what we love. If you are going to give yourself or your community a significant chance at spiritual progress, you can’t just try to modify behavior you have to help develop better affections. You have to cultivate and offer a better love that can supplant the parasitic, destructive things that currently fill our hearts. You have to reintroduce us to a God whose beauty and worth dwarfs the paltry half loves that currently motivate us.[11]

Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If someone is stuck in a behavior that diminishes them, strategies will help[12], but fundamentally, they need a bigger God. They need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. And the role of the preacher is to reveal it to them. You need to exalt a beautiful God and call us to his beautiful mission…so that the bleak life of self centeredness looks as pitiful as it actually is.

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[1] I am now well into my third year of regular preaching.
[2] i.e. prejudice or the more insidious racism
[3] I recently made one of the strangest resolutions of my life. I resolved to watch more football this season. I love football (for reasons I will cover in an upcoming post) and watched less than 4 hours of it last season. This is symptomatic of self importance and an unhealthy addiction to productivity. So this year I am going to try to prioritize Sabbath and rest by watching more football. So far, so good. I am already up to 6 hours for the season.
[4] I realize that ‘preaching to cause behavior change’ sounds arrogant…almost like a violation. But in the Christian community it is consensual. We all recognize our need for help and look to each other for spiritual resources. Preaching is one of the formal methods we utilize to look together at the scriptures to find that help.
[5] Credit, Keller…I know, shocking.
[6] Way too many marriages work this way.
[7] The most glaring example of this in college ministry, where spiritual zeal is hypercharged by sexual tension, is students whose confuse their desire to impress cute Christian girls with their motivation to live the Christian life. I honestly think this is an underrated reason why so many people find the transition from Christian community in college to the Church (as a married adult) to be underwhelming…because they lose the powerful sexual components of their motivations and it feels a little flat.
[7.5] This is at least one reason why Jesus recomended that so much of Christian practice should be done 'in secret' whether acts of personal devlopment (e.g. prayer and fasting) or acts of social justice (e.g. generosity). By taking the opinions and reactions of other humans out of the equation we are freed of many (though certainly not all) of the illicit motivations for these activities. You simply cannot read the Jesus narratives without coming away with the overwhelming impression that motivation is more important to him than act. He is more interested in who we are becoming than what we are doing.
[8] I started this paragraph by stating categorically that Christianity is not a religion. But, of course, it often is. Many self identifying Christians have no idea that it was never meant to be a merit based worldview. And even those who understand the rescue narrative find themselves lapsing often into moral performance categories. So, Christianity is not a religion but it is full of religious people…like me…which is why we have our share of self righteous prudes. But the goal of spiritual formation (and, therefore, preaching) is to move from a self righteous merit based belief and praxis to a grace based self understanding and lifestyle.
[9] In that, they do not feed our physical or even social appetites, but we believe they are fundamentally for our good. This is what Piper means when he bombastically claims that Christians are just hedonists with perspective. We are looking to maximize our good on a cosmic scale. The idea has rhetorical flourish and some theological issues but is interesting.
[10] This, it seems, has become the only acceptable polemic for contemporary art to assert. Either art has to be non-polemical (as if that was possible) or it has to offer this cliché.
[11] What the Hebrew Scriptures like to call idols.
[12] Preaching has to be practical. It HAS to engage with the daily life and felt needs of a non-religious-professional. But it is an error to think that practical means non-theological. If worship is the engine of behavior…if we do what we truly love…then it is highly practical to paint a picture of God’s worthiness that creates more space for him in our hearts. But we would also error to think that this justifies turning preaching into a regular lecture in academic theology. Worship is fundamentally holistic, so preaching that generates worship has to engage the mind, emotions, volition and soul.

My Problem With Religion: A Quantitative Inquiry

A common objection to the unique value of any particular religion is that all religions essentially teach the same things. This is deeply mistaken. For example, Christians are trying to gain eternal life, while Hindus teach that they have eternal life and are trying to get rid of it. In so many ways, the major religious world views could not be more different. But there is a sense in which I resonate with this objection. There does seem to be a basic ‘religious’ way of looking at the world (that many hold regardless of whether or not they actually believe in a cosmic god figure). It goes something like this: the ultimate outcome in this life or in eternity is the result of your moral achievement in this life. Religions differ wildly on what constitutes a good outcome and what constitutes moral achievement…but this is not my point here.

Computing Goodness

I’d like to look carefully at this basic line of thought: ultimate outcomes are based on our temporal moral achievement. I think the first interesting question is how does a god score morality? Let’s assume that it would be some sort of equation of the form:

A*x+B*Y+C*Z[1]…

Where A, B and C are weighting factors, the sum of which would be 1 and
X, Y and Z are certain moral behaviors or transgressions (in which case the weighting factor would have a – sign).

For example, if Muslims are right, if X=eating pork, A = a significant, negative multiplier. However, if Hindus are right, if Y = give grain oblations to Ganesh, then B = a non-trivial positive multiplier. And if yuppie liberal Christians are correct, if Z = driving a Prius then C = close to 0.9

But would every one use the same equation? Would there be a constant added for overcoming poor environment or propensity genetics? A degree of difficulty multiplier if you will?

Setting the Grades: To Curve or Not to Curve

But let’s assume that a god is good at math and can come to a univariate quantitative evaluation of our lifetime moral performance. Let’s assume that global, historic morality is normally distributed.[2] So below, I have plotted an arithmetic scale of human goodness (from 1 to 0, with 1 being the best person ever and 0 being the worst) versus the rate of occurrence of each of these moral states.

So, how does god decide where the cut
off is between the positive religious outcome and the negative religious outcome? Does he/she/it grade on a curve? Does he have a percentile that he is shooting for? If so, does it suite me to sabotage the moral state of others in order to augment my relative position? Or, by helping those close to us (say, those in our church/mosque/synagogue/neighborhood) pursue moral goodness, are we damning others by allowing those we care about to surpass them? It doesn’t make much sense to me that God would grade on a curve.

So maybe God has an absolute standard for a positive cosmic outcome. But where is it? Most people place it above Hitler, Stalin, Sadam and abortion clinic bombers, and conveniently below themselves. Consider any placement of the demarcation[3] that is neither 100% nor 0%. Let’s place it at 50% for argument (i.e. ‘heaven’ is a lot like lake Woebegone). Consider someone who comes in at the 50.000001 percentile and someone who comes in at the 49.9999999 percentile (represented by the small circles in the plot below). These people lived remarkably similar moral lives. The difference between them would be a single lie or a single malicious thought or eating a single doughnut during Ramadan or buying a car with slightly worse gas mileage, yet there is a dramatic non-linearity in consequence for a minor difference in achievement.[4]


Two Attempts to Smooth the Outcomes

Purgatory is a doctrine that was developed that seems to mitigate the non-linear outcome. There is a zone of graded consequence between the good and bad outcomes, such that consequence is more of a smooth function of lived morality. But purgatory doesn’t really work on a number of levels. It only appears in Christian sects and is so foreign to the Christian worldview that even the sitting Pope doesn’t accept a classic version of it.[5]

Reincarnation is another form of mitigating the non-linear outcome. But I find it morally deplorable and politically dangerous to suggest that people deserve their lot in life because of unseen, presumed moral failures from previous existences.[6] Shoot, I don’t even believe that someone’s lot in life is entirely (or even mostly) the result of the moral choices they made in THIS life.

A Stochastic Approach

The Muslim worldview handles this differently. They say that the sovereign will of Allah is not predictive in this way. Righteousness is a factor in who goes to paradise and who does not. In fact they get quite quantitative about it. For example, some teach that prayers during Ramadan are 30X more valuable than prayers offered at other times. In an honest moment one of my Muslim friends admitted to me that he spent a significant amount of time worrying about if his life was sufficient to avoid hell.

But in the final analysis Allah can do whatever he wants so it is more of a stochastic approach. Your goodness can only buy more balls in the proverbial NBA lottery.[7]
Being higher on the moral continuum increases your chances of ‘getting in’ but it is not a deterministic function. It is more like a quantum state than a Newtonian mechanic. So you could, theoretically get a situation like the one below (where the yellow dot indicates a good comic outcome and the red dot indicates a bad one).


Two Types of People

Another approach would be to group the ‘goodness’ data the same way a college professor would group academic achievement. Professors often look for achievement ‘groupings’. There is a cluster of 3 students at the top, they get the A’s. The next cluster gets the B’s. You can’t do this if the data is normally distributed, but, since there are only two consequences, you could do it with a bimodal distribution (below). This is actually a surprisingly common view of the world. One republican friend said to me once ‘the world is full of good people and bad people.’[8] This is the polemical approach taken by ‘The Dark Knight[9].’ Heath Ledger’s brilliantly disturbing turn as the Joker was simply described as a fundamentally different mode of human existence.

It is common to look at crass villains and say, ‘whew, I may do occasional bad stuff, but at least I’m a good person’. Even Imus, after the Rutgers basket ball team debacle claimed ‘I’m a good person who did a bad thing.’ But repentance is the burden of the self aware. My response to my republican friend was ‘I am bad people.’ I reject this idea of a bimodal distribution. We all carry the divine image and the scar of a cosmic corruption. Plus, even with a bimodal distribution, you have the same problem in the shared ‘tail’ (see enlargement in the figure above). You still have the non-linear consequence for the incremental difference.
The Special Cases of 1 and 0

So let’s finally consider the two special cases. You can put the line at 0 saying that all surpass it (universalism) or you can put it at or above 1 saying that none achieve it (the gospel). Both of these approaches get away from the problem of non-linear consequence for incremental differences in morality. I prefer both of them to religion. Many people find the former (see figure below) to be more palatable, more just. They tend to be comfortable suburban westerners who have never had a cause for vengeance.


Consider what Miroslov Volf says about the idea that a just God would finally accept all and judge none: “If God were not angry at injustice and did not make a final end to violence-that God would not be worthy of worship…The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God…My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many in…the west…(But) it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence (results from a belief in) God’s refusal to judge. In a sun scorched land, soaked in the blood of innocents, it will invariably die…(with) other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.”[10]

Volf grew up in Croatia and experience the violence of the Balkan crisis. He will not worship a God who does not judge the horrible atrocities of human villainy. And neither will I. I will not worship a God who embraces evil…including mine. Only a God who judges me and my dark heart and wicked propensities with those of Hitler, Stalin, St Francis and Mother Teresa can be completely other…what the Bible likes to call Holy.

So I am left with the final alternative. I, with Jesus and Paul, put the line light-years to the right. That we each are good and valuable beyond measure but are also vial beasts unworthy of God’s presence. This is why Christianity does not teach moral performance…heaven as a cosmic reward for moral performance …it teaches unilateral, cosmic rescue. It teaches grace and mercy and, in this way, is not, fundamentally, religious.

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[1] I suspect it would be far more complex than a simple multi-variate linear regression (which I am not even quite doing)…but you’d stop reading if I went into some sort of anthropological dimensional analysis or set up a big old matrix.
[2] Scientists are famous for assuming phenomena are normally distributed. I suppose I could use a Gumble or Lévy distribution (I’d love to hear someone make a case for either of these), but the argument would progress in the same way, so let’s just assume a normal distribution for now.
[3] Based either on a curve or an absolute standard.
[4] This, somewhat comically, disintegrates into the BCS/Playoff debate from college football. The debate invariably goes like this: “Let’s just have a 4 team playoff.” “Well what about that year when the best team in the nation was #5.” “Ok, lets have an 8 game playoff.” “Yeah, but this team had one fluky loss and was playing really well. Do you really want them out of the playoff?”
[5] See NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope
[6] This comes up from time to time in a careful watching of ‘My Name is Earl.’ They have trouble navigating this consequence of their Karmic vision that everyone deserves their current state because of past actions. But it is still a hilarious show.
[7] To discourage teams from tanking their season for draft position the NBA decides draft position by a lottery. But they still want to give the worst team the best shot at drafting good players. So all of the teams that did not make the playoffs get balls in the lottery. The worse you are the more balls you get. So badness increases the chance of a good outcome but does not assure it. This strikes me as similar to Islam where goodness increases your chances of a good outcome but does not assure it.
[8] Why are the bad people bad? Is it the result of poor moral choices on their part? Is it a big loss in genetics roulette? Assigning culpability for innate badness is fundamentally problematic.
[9] Incidentally, Leger’s role was the single redeeming quality of this epic train wreck. Let me be the first one on the internet to say ‘This movie sucked.’
[10] From Tim Keller’s Reason For God