Stanley Milgram and Psychology Class

It is difficult to resist immoral authority. Christians teach their children to respect and obey authority. We also teach our children to resist immoral authority.  In Daniel 6:10 – 21 we see that it is difficult and costly to resist immoral authority. That’s the same lesson Stanley Milgram demonstrated in his famous obedience study at Harvard University in 1961. It is difficult to resist immoral authority.

This fall, thousands of Christian students will fill classrooms on campuses everywhere for their first taste of Psychology 101. The authority in the room will be the professor, who may share beliefs like those of the late philosopher and professor Richard Rorty, who wrote:

“I, like most Americans who teach in colleges and universities, try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ...”

“... when we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization… So we are going to go right on trying to discredit (your beliefs) in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.”

You’ve probably heard that 70 -75% of Christian students walk away from their faith after the first year in college. If that statistic is accurate, and if it has anything to do with the teaching in college, I believe it has more to do with psychology than any class they’ll take in college.

I wrote Psychology: A Christian Perspective to equip parents and teachers to get in front of this problem. This book helps students to recognize psychology-specific worldview issues, and to introduce them to the study of the wonders of God’s greatest creation; the human mind.

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