Page 131 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 5

A Portrait of a Christian Psychologist: Paul C. Vitz

Your paternal line of descent, with the exception of your own father, consisted of several generations of
pastors. Do you see there a connection with your conversion and with your many years of service as a
Christian psychologist?

Yes. Rather often during my first years of becoming a Christian I felt a mysterious but very real kinship
with my grandfather, Martin Vitz, and even more with my great grandfather, Peter Vitz, both of whom
had been German evangelical/reform ministers to the German immigrants to this country in the mid-
west (Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota).

Peter Vitz came over in about 1853 and was something of a pioneer minister. Martin Vitz was a pastor
primarily in New Bremen, Ohio and later in Cleveland & then in Cincinnati, Ohio.

One reason I felt a kinship was that the first academic Christians to respond favourably to my book
“Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self Worship” were Dutch evangelical and reform Christians
who were professors at Calvin College in Michigan. Some of them seemed almost like relatives. Their
support was very important for me and I have retained a love and respect for serious Protestants, es-
pecially of an evangelical character. We are true brothers in Christ.

Fatherlessness is a constantly recurring theme in your publications. On a number of occasions, you have
pointed to the significance of this for atheism – in the revised new edition of “Faith of the Fatherless: The
Psychology of Atheism”, for example, which first appeared in 1999. There you shed light on over 50 well-
known persons regarding their relationship with their fathers. What are your theses on this, and is a proof
of such theses possible at all?

The major thesis is that a bad/dysfunctional/disappointing relationship with one’s father or significant
father figure is a major barrier to belief in God as understood in Christianity and to some extent in Ju-
daism. Of course, there is still free will but bad or disappointing fathers make belief in God the Father
much more difficult. I include a dead father in the theory as an example of a non-functioning/disap-
pointing father if the death occurred when the person was young. I provide a good deal of evidence
to support this from the lives of famous atheists, e.g. Hobbes, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Freud, Bertrand Russell and others including some of the new atheists such as Dawkins. I also com-
pare the atheist fathers with the fathers of famous theists, e. g. Pascal, Berkeley, Reid, Mendelssohn,
Wilberforce, Newman, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Buber and others who all seemed to have good fa-
ther relationships. I put all this interpretation in the framework of Attachment Theory as pioneered
by Bowlby and Ainsworth. I also note some differences between male and female atheists.

A secondary thesis is that a bad father relationship can in some cases be the result of the child’s in-
ability to have relationships with almost anyone, as is the case of those suffering from some kind of
autistic spectrum disorder, e.g. Asperger’s syndrome. For such people the Christian God, a God of
relationship with the believer cannot be understood because of their relationship handicap.

I think I provide enough evidence to substantiate my hypothesis for a significant proportion of intense
atheists. I also propose that the average not especially intense atheist has other psychological reasons
for his or her position.

I cite evidence that such motives include the inconvience of a seriously religious life, embarrassment
about believing parents from a simple, unsophisticated background, etc.

Let me end by quoting two famous psychologists with something like the same hypothesis as mine.
Soren Kierkegaard, not just a philosopher but a brilliant very early psychologist as well, wrote much
about his emotional, often difficult relationship with his father as a young man “I have, quite literally,

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