Mike Guglielmucci + porn addiction = Cognitive Dissonance in excelsis

This is huge everywhere. For a reliable source of this news check out the links in ChristianityToday’s news page.

Okay, I neither want to beat a dead horse nor do I want to repeat all the accusations against Mike, ad nauseam. I’m not like OMG! Mike is teh sux0r!1!0!1!

I first came across the news of Mike’s deception a while back, though I never really realised how big it was. Mike apparently wrote one of the popular song, Healer and performed it to a huge Hillsong Australia crowd. Now, I’m not a huge fan of Hillsong by any means, though I do have one album of their youth team United. So, it is no surprise that I did not know of this whole shebang before. And, it is a good thing. I’m not into hugely “emotional” ways of worshipping where stuff like this can creep into quickly [though, I do not abhor appropriate emotion entirely in worship settings].

Although I can empathise with the reactions of some of the young Christians, I feel that some of their very negative reactions are hardly reasonable, and hardly “Christian”.

As someone who is interested in the psychology of things, it was interesting to note that some of the physical symptoms Mike was showing originated when his porn addiction began:

“When he was about 12 he did vomit all the time, he’d get really really sick,” [Danny Guglielmucci, Mike's father] said.

“He was in the Adelaide Children’s Hospital for seven weeks at one stage; he didn’t eat and we thought we were going to lose him.”

“They took out his appendix, thinking that it might be that, but they realised that it wasn’t.”

“We signed him out from hospital and then he would go a few months and then he would get sick again.”

“We’d always take him to hospital; we’d always do the proper thing but they couldn’t get to the bottom of it until now.”

“We have watched our son go through what we thought was cancer,” [Mike's father] said. “My wife and I, over the past two years, have watched him vomit in buckets, having nosebleeds, and even his hair fell out in clumps at one stage.”

“Every time we saw him, we saw symptoms. He stayed with us for a while where we had to put a special air-conditioner in one of the rooms because he would heat up so much in the middle of winter.”

“He had this cold air-conditioner blowing on him to try to keep the heat down. As a professional minister I’ve stood in front of my congregation and cried and said to pray for my son.”

From here

That’s quite extreme, you know, the symptoms. Its like tons and tons of guilt blowing up inside. The fact that Mike is a youth pastor would have contributed much to his depression, I reckon. All that cognitive dissonance is on a completely different level on Mike’s case. It must have been mind blowing. If what is related by Mike’s father is accurate, I truly feel sorry for this man.

A Cognitively Dissonant Faith

Over at Parchment and Pen, Michael Patton had an interesting post about a person Virginia who apparently was “de-converted” from Christianity after 23 years of cognitively dissonant faith. Here are some thoughts:

Apparently, Virginia made a commitment to Christianity during a time of crisis in her family:

Virginia: “Christianity thrives on human suffering and yearn for community. It was precisely under these circumstances that I committed myself to Christ at 19 years old, when my family got into serious trouble — father filed for bankruptcy, my parents separated.”

Many people turn to religion in times of trouble in their lives. Such people tend to make a decision to follow a religion during emotional situations on a whim. After they are “in” they begin investigate the truth claims of the religion to find reasons for their belief. This latter phase usually happens after the crisis situation has finished. If during this period they do not find reasonable answers for their questions, they lead cognitively dissonant lives. For some, they find the answers they were looking for and some don’t. The latter group tend to be frustrated and lose their way. This is a very cumulative process as they investigate more and more issues, they become skeptical increasingly and as such come to identify with a skeptical viewpoint eventually.

Virginia: “I began fervently witnessing Christ, became a cell group leader on Bible study, witnessed to friends and relatives about Jesus and the salvation, using the tracts supplied from my church. I was active in church and in my college years, also leaded evangelizing activities witnessing Jesus. However, I sensed in the entire ethos of this set of belief, some incompleteness.”

Mike Patton comments on the “incompleteness” she mentions:

I would imagine that the “incompleteness” comes from a rising realization of “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance describes a physiological condition[sic] where a person’s beliefs are in contradiction to other beliefs or the way they live. Often people’s habitual patterns do not harmonize with their intellectual convictions. In Christianity, it is often the case where people live according to a Christian worldview due to traditional bents without ever experiencing a true cognitive or intellectual conversion to such. This produces a dichotomous life of dissonance—inconsistency in their beliefs and practices. I would imagine that this is the case with Virginia.

Cognitive Dissonance is a psychological condition btw and the stress it brings is magnified in a situation like this where a person is inconsistent in their actions rather than in their thoughts. Mike then reveals some reasons for her leaving the faith. Some of them I found rather unreasonable.