Bruce McKeown

Myth and its Denial in a Secular Age: The Case of Behaviorist Psychology

Behaviorist psychology, especially as expressed in the philosophical and social psychological writings of B. F. Skinner, has consistently rejected traditional social values, such as freedom and autonomy, because they interfere with the development, acceptance, and application of a technology of human behavior. This article critiques the metapsychology of behaviorism from the perspective of myth and fiction. In spite of its contributions to social analysis and behavioral therapy, behaviorist psychology substitutes another set of myths and fictions for those it rejects. By denying traditional myths and symbols behaviorism becomes totalitarian and thus symbolic of a secular age. Its secularism is enhanced because it disregards its own historical nature, reifies its immanent status, and commits the fundamental error of idolatry by taking its own mythology as absolute. Efforts at integrating “methodological behaviorism” (as separate from behaviorism as a philosophy of science) before addressing the fundamental issues of the metapsychology are seen as encroachments of post-Christian thought upon the liberating message of historic Christianity.

An experimental study of the influence of religious elites on public opinion

Abstract This paper presents experimental findings concerning the influence of source attributions upon subjects’ reactions to a set of domestic and foreign policy initiatives. An attempt was made to determine whether or not the positions of the American Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter, when attributed to the Bishops themselves or to The Reverend Billy Graham, would influence public opinion in two populations of Catholic and Evangelical Protestant college students. In both conditions, even when controlling for a number of intermediating variables, results were null. Based on these data the hypothesized influence of religious leadership on opinion is non‐existent when the experimental conditions are compared with the control (no source) condition. The results are compared with similar experimental studies examining the impact of other political institutions and symbols.