Of Fathers and God
Author, speaker, and former counselor Debbie W. Wilson writes about an experience she had in her counseling course:
“During the course, each of us took an inventory on how we viewed our heavenly Father in a variety of issues. I zipped through the list checking the appropriate columns.
“Later, we filled out the same inventory, this time as it related to our earthly fathers. I whizzed down the columns until my pattern arrested me. I flipped back in my workbook to the first inventory. The pattern of my answers was identical. Unknowingly, I’d projected my image of my earthly dad onto my heavenly Father.”
What Debbie expresses in this anecdote is a longstanding trope in the Christian world: that one’s relationship with one’s father will be projected onto one’s view of God.
Paul C. Vitz, a former Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University, takes this hypothesis to its logical next step: that atheists must have some kind of deficiency in their paternal relationship. Vitz wrote up his research and conclusions in his 1999 book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism.
The subtitle is a bit of an overreach since the book does nothing in the way of providing a comprehensive look at the psychology of the atheist, but it does defend his hypothesis that a poor relationship with one’s father may be a causal condition of atheism.
Vitz’s Case
Vitz makes an interesting first volley in his book. He begins by observing that the most prominent voices in the history of psychology – James, Freud, and Skinner to mention just a few – all found psychological explanations for the origin of religion and its accompanying beliefs. Why not use those same tools to explain atheism?
Vitz then outlines one of the famous explanations for the psychology of religion, given by Sigmund Freud. Freud claims that religion is simply just the invention of men who have a subconscious yearning for a perfect father figure. God fills the role of this father figure, and all of the associated beliefs follow as a matter of course.
Vitz then points out that Freud’s model of psychology also suggests that boys feel an inherent sense of competition with their fathers, and have a subconscious desire to kill them and take their place.
These two theories in cooperation suggest that atheism is simply the slaughter of the ultimate father figure, Vitz argues.
It is unclear how seriously Vitz takes the psychoanalysis of Freud, which was seen as something of an antiquated oddity even in the 90s when this book was published.
Nevertheless, Vitz’s thesis is that one would expect that atheists would have dead, absent, or defective fathers.
The New Atheism
Little did Vitz realize as he was publishing his research in 1999 that a looming cultural phenomenon was about to permanently change the landscape of the Western world. Within about 5 years, atheism would claw its way up from its former place as an ideological retreat for academic elitists to a widespread movement destined to steamroll Western culture.
Bear in mind that Vitz was not writing about people who just had no use for religion, or were religiously unaffiliated, but rather of people who actively believed that God did not exist. At the time, this was a vanishingly small minority of people. As a result, most of the arguments and assumptions Vitz makes in his book would be objectionable to the modern atheist.
Two of these objections are worth mentioning:
The first is the idea that atheists believe there is no God. While a fairly standard definition at the time Vitz wrote, a more modern atheist would describe atheism not so much as a positive belief that God does not exist, but rather an absence of beliefs about God. This technical change in the definition of atheism would probably not make a significant difference in Vitz’s thesis, given that believing that an ultimate father figure does not exist and having no beliefs regarding an ultimate father figure could equally correspond with a problematic relationship or no relationship with one’s biological father.
However, the second more recent dogma of the modern atheist might challenge Vitz’s work. Since Vitz wrote, it has become a common notion in atheist circles that beliefs about God are received rather than inherent. In other words, belief in God might require an explanation such as those given by Freud, Jung, Skinner, et al, but a lack of belief in God is just the natural state into which humans are born, and explaining the genesis of atheism is as foolish as explaining why some people have no concept of fairies, centaurs, or chupacabra: these entities have simply never been introduced to them, or they know too little about the subject to form any sorts of beliefs.
Vitz’s book does not address this objection, however the legitimacy of this objection does face a few challenges from the academic world.
In 2004, Psychologist Deborah Kelemen published her study titled “Are Children Intuitive Theists?” Her study found two important things. Firstly, as early as we are able to measure, children seem to think there is some intelligence behind things that happen, even if they can’t see who it is.
The second thing she finds is that children have an in-built idea that everything exists for a purpose. Children in her study were asked about pointy rocks in the wilderness. The children agreed that those must have been put there for animals to scratch their backs upon.
From childhood, people automatically believe that there is some unseen person directing things, and that the things that exist all have a purpose. These are the basics of God-belief.
But this isn’t exclusive to children. A 2011 Oxford study, titled “Humans Predisposed to belief in God/Afterlife,” shows just what the title suggests: a survey of every culture they could access across the globe found that almost everyone on earth has some kind of idea of God and the afterlife. Certainly, some people don’t believe in these things, but they still have a notion of what “God” and “afterlife” mean.
In fact, even atheist sociologists agree that religion appears to be an inbuilt feature of humans. A 2013 study by atheist researchers Ara Norenzayan and Will M. Gervais attempt to explore a question very similar to that posed by Vitz: where does unbelief come from?
So some precedent does exist for Vitz’s research question from other corners of the social sciences.
Methodology
Keeping in mind that Vitz conducted his research in a time when atheism was not as predominant as it currently is, he was somewhat limited in how to find his atheist samples. What Vitz chose to do was to identify prominent atheists throughout history whose work had left a mark in philosophy, psychology, or politics, and about whom much biographical data was available. He looked through those biographical data in order to discover information about their relationships to their fathers. His sample included such luminaries as Nietzsche, Freud, Hume, and Russell, with Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens being tagged on in the revised edition of the book.
Vitz then contrasted these atheist visionaries with Christian counterparts from similar time periods, and having similar historical impact.
As the title suggests, Vitz found that the atheist sample had dead fathers, absent fathers, or weak and abusive fathers; whereas the Christian sample was filled with strong, present, and affectionate fathers or father figures.
A Few Objections
Vitz’s work is what would be termed “Qualitative Research.” This means that it was research which relied on a very deep investigation into the stories of a relatively small sample of people: 24 atheists and 21 Christians.
Qualitative research is an excellent way to form a theory, but the preferred method of confirming that theory would be quantitative research: in this case finding a very large sample of atheists – hundreds or thousands if possible – and then asking them a few closed questions about their relationships with their fathers.
The method chosen by Vitz grants us an open hypothesis about atheists and their relationship with their fathers, but is open to suspicions of cherry-picking only those individuals who fit his thesis and the use of anecdotal evidence.
I was aware of Vitz’s thesis when I did my own work. As a result, I tried to pay attention to the relationship that my sample of deconverts had with their fathers. The relationships varied as one might expect from any random sample of people, however I did not see a significant pattern of poor paternal relationships. Perhaps of interest, however, was the fact that the majority of my sample had fathers or father figures who were active in the ministry.
An interesting connection can be made, here, with the work of Dr. John Marriott on deconversion. In his book, Marriott notes the difference in response mothers and fathers have when their children deconvert.
Mothers, interestingly, tend to have the most drastic emotional responses, and are more likely than fathers to try winning the son or daughter back to faith.
Whereas deconversion of the son or daughter can certainly strain relationships, fathers are more likely to accept their adult child’s decision, attempt to maintain some kind of relationship, and to be less confrontational than the mother.
In fact, a separate researcher discovered that relationships between males in the family can be salvaged through a mutual enthusiasm for sports, once they no longer shared a mutual faith.
Rescuing Vitz
It may be the case that there are a number of examples of atheists whose relationship with their fathers are not absent, weak, or abusive as Vitz hypothesizes, but does this mean that Vitz’s hypothesis can be dismissed out of hand?
There may be a few ways in which Vitz’s hypothesis could be rescued. Firstly, it is worth noting that, as atheism has skyrocketed and found significant cultural foothold in the West in the last two decades, an equally significant increase has occurred in things like divorce, absent fathers, and the weakening of the male role in society. Could the recent crisis of mental illness in men have some relationship with the drastic rise of atheism? Only further research could say.
However, an even stronger way to rescue Vitz’s research would be to expand it beyond the obvious difficulties of dead fathers, weak fathers, and abusive fathers, and identify instances of weak attachment to fathers.
Attachment Theory is an entirely different area of psychology which investigates the psychological and behavioral relationship a person has with a parental figure in terms of how secure or insecure the person feels with and without that parent. Since feelings of insecurity and the associated behaviors can exist even if the parent is a present and positive force in the person’s life, a simple examination of the person’s biography would not be enough to detect an insecure attachment with that person’s father. More advanced techniques of psychological investigation would be necessary to determine this.
Conclusion
It is possible that one’s relationship with one’s father may be one of many factors which contribute to deconversion. Based on the fact that so many of the deconverts I have researched had fathers in the ministry, combined with the research which suggests that Christian hypocrisy as a causal factor of atheism, it seems very likely that a father acting hypocritically could be contributing to some deconversion.
The gradual diminishing of male leadership and authority in the West could conceptually relate to the decrease in monotheism in the West as well, if one accepts the “God-as-Father” hypothesis.
I do not think that Vitz’s book Faith of the Fatherless does enough to defend his thesis, and I believe the strongest defense of that thesis would be to find evidence that insecure attachment is related to atheism, should such research ever emerge.
In Vitz’s defense, however, several more recent quantitative studies have suggested that strong and enduring relationships with one’s Christian parents and peers may serve as a preventative factor for teenage deconversion – meaning that the teenagers in this study who had weak relationships with parents and peers were more likely to deconvert than those whose parental relationships were strong.
These studies do not serve as a homerun for Vitz’s hypothesis, however. Instead, the studies only extended to teenage behavior and did not follow these people into adulthood, and also the studies relied on strong ties to family and friends as a community, and not to one specific parent.
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