Deconstructing the Unconscious Faith of a Nation

If you grew up evangelical, you’ve experienced evangelicalitis—that constant need to keep imposing a right, correct, “biblical” worldview. Symptoms include but are not limited to preaching long sermons and venerating mostly the men who preach them, perseverating in Bible studies, discussing, arguing, professing, praying, the desire to prove something, and to assert a unifying “orthodoxy.”

It’s endless. It’s exhausting. It’s performative.

And yet, what does evangelicalism have to show for itself but an American religious landscape with more denominations than any sane person should bother to fathom, more church splits, church “plants,” and independent religious communities that aren’t managed chaos but more like a cacophony of crows?

Imagine if an alien were to come to Earth and land at an apologetics conference—all the posturing, the inauthentic humility, the faux intellectualism. It makes your head spin. My wife, who grew up Roman Catholic in the Northeast, a tradition that most evangelicals say is from outer space anyway, is weary of hearing me talk about evangelicals. Whether it’s the machinations of conservatives or the rebuttals of progressives, she would rather I keep it to myself.

Sacred Words or Self-Obsession?

Why are evangelicals, especially the white ones, so preoccupied with their texts and their ideas (and themselves)? Isn’t there more to what’s spiritual about life than words on a page?

In a world filled with diverse cultures and their sacred stories and insights, alongside extensive physical, social, and psychological science, and perhaps especially with our understanding of historical collaborations between religion, politics, and power, could it be that all our evangelical rhetoric plays right into the agenda? Most educated, post-industrial Western cultures have long since stopped arguing about the Bible, and yet we excel at it here in the United States. Why? Can’t we see past our biases, our deep conditioning that makes us quite unusually the most religious country in the proverbial West?

Seeing What We Don’t See: Gladwell and the IAT

Let’s step out of our concern over theological debating and consider, for a few minutes, what Malcolm Gladwell observes in his book Blink, about how unaware we are of our perceptions. The Implicit Association Test, developed by three Harvard psychologists, helps us understand that humans routinely connect ideas or perceptions without being fully aware of them, even doing so despite consciously wanting to avoid such connections or associations.

Let’s say that for some reason, you haven’t liked red grapes since you were a child, but as an adult, you know they are a sweet, healthy snack. You’re trying to get to like them. What these researchers discovered is a difference in the measurable time it takes to go ahead and eat red grapes, as opposed to the time it takes to choose to eat, let’s say, green grapes. It isn’t that you can’t eventually come to like red grapes, but that it will take time and effort for you to consider red grapes as a good idea when you also have some green grapes around. More precisely, you are unaware that it takes you more time and effort.

This seems an obvious example, but try applying this principle to the issue of race. That is, you can decide in your mind that all people are created equal, regardless of physical attributes, and you can agree to that publicly all day long, but is there a measurable lag when you should enact that decision in different areas of everyday life?

Of course there is a lag. Gladwell walks us through it, encouraging you to go ahead and take the Race IAT test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu, where you can also test yourself about gender, sexuality, and even religion.

In short, when you take the Race IAT, you’ll find that you’re measurably slower to associate a word like “good” with a Black person than you are with a white person, and the reverse is true for the word “bad.” Even Gladwell, who identifies as half-Black, finds that the measurement of time for him to associate good with Black and bad with white is slower than bad with Black and good with white. What’s more, the result of his retaking the IAT over time doesn’t change that much, which was even more surprising (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Little, Brown and Company, 2005, 77-88).

Religion as the Royal Road to the Unconscious

Applying this idea about our implicit associations regarding race was clearly harder than applying it to grapes. What if we now apply it to religion—which Freud called “the royal road to the unconscious”—that veritable gold mine of implicit associations? The plot thickens.

If you’ve done the work of deconstructing the evangelical style of religion that so many of us experience, then you probably know about some of its inherent or implicit biases. Some of these strange ideas and behaviors might include how the Bible is supposed to be the most important book you’ll ever read, and yet we ignore so much of it; how we jump at the chance to convert others, just anyone please, to our religion, but we never really experience much relational intimacy; or the fact that evangelicalism has a huge independent streak, so much so that it’s better at church splits and making new churches than it is at robust corporate democracy.

One of my favorite evangelical tropes is our narrative about Christians being persecuted. Living in West Michigan, I sometimes hear how Dutch colonists in the 1800s say they were fleeing religious persecution (while they also proceeded to displace Indigenous populations). Newsflash: the violence of the Reformation was largely over by the 1800s, and what they were really fleeing was poverty. But maybe we needed a persecution story to sustain us on the thousands of miles journey to possess someone else’s land. Perhaps we needed to establish a multitude of associations to achieve this feat, ones that we still implicitly carry today.

How American Evangelicalism Was Built on a Puritan Cult of Individualism

So let’s agree for the sake of discussion that Christianity, as we mostly know it, is enmeshed in a multitude of hidden perceptions. How did we get here?

For things to reach this intensity, there must be numerous factors. We absolutely must look at power and privilege, often defined along race, gender, and sexuality. We must consider the size and wealth of the natural resources that Americans have enjoyed, which have likely spoiled us. We need to examine how disconnected we’ve become from our history and heritage.

While all these factors are worth exploring, and while I don’t like to strictly zero in on any one origin story for American hubris, if I had to pick one, it would be that we were founded as a nation of dissident, religious radicals. That is, first we were Puritans, the first fundamentalists, way before we started using the term in the 1920s. They/we weren’t just sexual prudes, they/we were theocratic. Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene is right, as is Sean Feucht, in the assertion that we were founded to be a Christian nation. However, what Marjorie and Sean neglect to acknowledge is that the framers of the Constitution, our early national lawmakers, built in rules against theocracy and Christian nationalism, rules intended instead to foster democracy.

The Contradictions We Inherited

Perhaps it was the Puritans who helped us develop a deeply ingrained, sacred narrative and all its expressions and built-in associations. They formed the American mindset of religious fanaticism and separatism into our very cultural DNA.

Our founding, colonizing mind is the root of our individualism and our ambition for a Promised Land. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it was a certain greed in its utmost form, yet disguised as a religious pilgrimage. Historically speaking, it was a logical extension of the lower and middle classes breaking away from the aristocracies of the feudal and imperial past, a social and cultural thread that connected the Protestant Reformation in religious life to the overthrow of monarchies in political life. Except in the case of the early colonists, such as those of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this power-of-the-people reform was exponentially focused by the prospect of a new land, rich in resources, space, and beauty, regardless of the Indigenous people who were already there and the practical challenges it presented. No wonder it was religious fanatics who took that big step—how could you not manage such a feat without a cult level intensity of belief, narrative, and ritual?

Our American independence, regardless of cost, is a sacred story. Our churches are institutions of individualism, not just places of holding tension, but outright walking contradictions.

One of the most striking illustrations of who we are as Americans is encapsulated in the way the leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony went from being freedom seekers against the state religions of Europe to establishing a state religion in New England, which once threatened, led to the sentencing of Anne Hutchinson, the criminalization of the Quakers, and the bizarre, misogynistic, and violent phenomenon of the Salem Witch trials. In sociologist Kai Erikson’s groundbreaking Wayward Puritans, he puts it this way:

“Whereas the early Puritan theorists had emphasized the private nature of each person’s covenant with God, the New England theorists began to argue that God had entered into a covenant with the people of the colony as a corporate group and was only ready to deal with them through the agency they had built to govern themselves.”

Essentially, it’s as if the leaders of the colony said, “The King of England can’t tell us what to believe and how to worship, but we can tell others.”

Then Erikson puts it plainly:

“. . . it would seem that the people of the Bay were constructing much the same kind of control apparatus they have fought against in England." (Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, Pearson, 2003, 73)

And, “. . . whatever else New England might be in these uncertain times, it was certainly not a place which encouraged freedom of religion. . .”(Erikson, 113)

To those of us raised in evangelicalism today, the contradiction that we have a free, direct relationship to God and the Bible and can self-determine our spiritual path, but also that there’s an approved way to do it, should sound oh so familiar. Beneath the smooth evangelical surface, we are a conflicted people.

Theological Jousting as Seen from Outer Space

Why can’t we see our many implicit, unconscious, and unaware associations in our religious life? Why can’t we see that our religion is far, far more than what we say it is or profess it to be?

Regardless, our evangelicalitis continues. We continue to try and win others over with our religion. We still debate and argue about it with ourselves, four hundred years later. It’s no wonder our theological jousting and all the behavior we justify with it are exhausting to the aliens. We built these implicit associations into our sacred makeup as we left our lands of origin, for whatever reason, and had to find a new identity in what we considered a wilderness. These associations are a path we took, a formative determination we made. In doing so, we exacted a cost from others as well as ourselves, and we have a debt we haven’t yet repaid, to others as well as ourselves.

David R. Morris, PhD, is the author of Lost Faith and Wandering Souls: A Psychology of Disillusionment, Mourning, and the Return of Hope. He’s the publisher at Lake Drive Books and a literary agent at Hyponymous Literary. Follow on Bluesky, Threads, or Instagram.

Above photo by Kraig Darr-Duncan.