Orval Hobart Mowrer - Religious Views

Religious Views

During most of Mowrer's adult life he had no involvement with religion. He recognized that his theories about the importance of guilt were similar to traditional religious ideas, but he had arrived at his convictions through a secular process and the religious concepts of guilt and sin did not at first interest him. Freud, in Mowrer's view, had made a fatal error in attributing emotional distress to inappropriate guilt. Mowrer had concluded that mental disorders, including even schizophrenia, were the result of real, not imagined, guilt. Mowrer did not see this as a religious issue. He had been raised to associate religion with "otherworldly" values, with the relationship of individuals to God, and his own focus was on the relationship of individuals to one another.

In 1955 Mowrer read a religious novel which changed his thinking. His daughter was reading Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C. Douglas and told her father that it might interest him. Mowrer was impressed by Douglas' thesis, expressed through a fictional character, that the Bible was a superb handbook of human relations. A central theme of the novel is a secret shared by a small group of people who have found great spiritual and material success. It is derived from Jesus' suggestion to "do alms in secret", not letting anyone know. In the book, however, good deeds done in secret invest the characters with almost magical power. Mowrer turned the concept around to place the emphasis on the pathological potential of misdeeds when they are kept secret. He summed it up the phrase, "You are your secrets," sometimes reworded as "You are as sick as your secrets."

After reading other fictional and non-fictional works by Lloyd Douglas, who had left the Congregationalist ministry to devote himself to writing, Mowrer became a member of the Presbyterian Church. He was soon disappointed. He had condemned psychoanalysis for being soft on sin, and now he found that the church was dominated by similar permissive assumptions. It was not only the modernist influences in churches to which Mowrer objected, however, but some traditional beliefs such as the doctrine of justification by faith. He set out to restore to churches the consciousness of personal sin and guilt he felt they had lost. He was able to acquire funding from the Lilly Endowment for a fellowship in morality and mental health. The program brought students from seminaries and divinity schools (among others, Jay E. Adams) to Champaign-Urbana, where they learned Mowrer's counseling and group techniques.