Disease, Victimization, and
Personal Responsibility
by Dr. Phil Stringer (Florida)
"Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my
sin." (Psalm 51:2)
* * *
Since the beginning of time man has devoted his full intellectual capacity to
finding ways to keep from taking responsibility for his actions. We see this
illustrated by the very first man in Genesis 3:9-13:
9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because
I was naked; and I hid myself.
11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the
tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me
of the tree, and I did eat.
13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?
And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
Any explanation that does not involve sin, personal responsibility, or
correction of bad behavior seems acceptable in today’s culture. In America, it
is fashionable to declare self-destructive behavior as a "disease" or
"genetic." It is considered "enlightened" to blame
antisocial and violent behavior on victimization by some segments of society
against others. Do you remember the controversy when former Vice President Dan
Quayle suggested that single motherhood was not as good a choice as the
"traditional family"? The "media-elite" viciously attacked
Quayle for "blaming the victims." Do you remember the aftermath of the
Los Angeles riots in 1992? Republicans blamed the philosophy of the Democratic
party for the riots. Democrats blamed former presidents Reagan and Bush. Few
public leaders blamed the rioters for their own actions.
Ignoring your responsibilities in a drunken stupor is no longer
"sin" or even an unwise choice; it is the "disease" of
alcoholism. An advertisement for KOALA reads, "Alcoholism is not a moral
issue, nor is it a matter of will power. It is a disease . . . ." People
are told that the first step to recovery is realizing that their behavior is not
their fault. They simply have a disease! But, how many people who never decide
to drink ever "catch" the "disease" of alcoholism?
A November 23, 1992, USA Today headline reads, "Half of All Divorces May
be Due to Genes." That is right; divorce does not necessarily result from
one or both partners making selfish choices. It may simply be your genetic
heritage.
"IT’S NOT MY FAULT"
When New York Judge Sol Wachtler was arrested for extortion and threatening
to kidnap the teenage daughter of his ex-lover, he was immediately diagnosed by
sexologist John Money as having "Cleambault-Kandinsky syndrome" (CKS).
In other words, he was a "sex addict" and was not responsible for his
behavior.
When an FBI agent embezzled $2,000 and lost it all in an afternoon of
gambling in Atlantic City, he appealed for "reinstatement" as an FBI
officer on the grounds that he was a "gambling addict" and not
responsible for this behavior. He asked that his "gambling addiction"
be declared a "handicap" and thus protected under federal law. A
federal judge gave him his job back.
The Major League Baseball player’s union appealed for reinstatement for
banned drug user Steve Howe by claiming he had "attention deficit
hyper-activity disorder" (ADHS) and thus could not be held accountable for
his drug use. The appeal worked, and he returned to professional baseball.
According to a 1989 ad obesity is "a complex and multi-faced
disease." According to Susie Orbach, "Fat is not about food. To
attribute compulsive eating to simple inability to control one’s appetite is
to engage in the ineffective blame-the-victim approach." That is right,
people are no longer overweight from overeating or under-exercising; they just
cannot help it!
The Indianapolis Star, October 19, 1989 carried the following headline:
"Experts now view wife-battering as a disease that can be predicted and
prevented." So now wife-beating is a disease, and you cannot help it!
Perhaps a physically abused wife will invent "husband shooting
disease."
In 1992, in Milwaukee, a teenage girl shot and killed another teenage girl
for her leather coat. Her defense attorney claimed that she was the victim of
"cultural psychosis." Society was responsible for her act of violence.
ALCOHOL, TWINKIES, JELLYBEANS?
Robert Alto Harris argued that he killed two teenage boys because he was the
victim of "fetal alcohol syndrome." Dan White claimed he killed the
San Francisco mayor and another supervisor because of his "junk-food"
addiction in the now famous "Twinkie defense!" It is a wonder that no
one from the Reagan administration blamed the Iran Contra affair on President
Reagan’s well known "jellybean addiction."
In 1991, the Wisconsin Department of Industry, Labor, and Human Relations
ruled that "offensive body odor" was "a physical handicap."
No longer could the personal discipline to use soap, water, and deodorant be
required of state employees.
Aaron Wildavasky claims that if you add up all the individuals and groups
that have been claimed as "victims," it totals 374% of the American
population. Therapy and related fields are now a $185 billion industry in
America. America now has more therapists than librarians, fire fighters, or mail
carriers, and twice as many therapists as dentists or pharmacists.
Writing about serial killers, author Ron Holmes says, "Serial killing is
an addiction." Psychologist Robert Howe (University of British Columbia)
disagrees, claiming that serial killing has a biological origin.
Senator William Cohen (R-Maine) released a r report showing that $1.4 billion
was paid in 1993 under the Social Security Disability Income program to drug
addicts. They are eligible for these funds because their drug addiction was
viewed as a disease.
According to the January, 1994, issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry,
almost 50% of America’s population suffers from mental illness. About nine
percent of the population of Holland receives disability income as a result of
suffering from "mental disease." Concepts of disease and victimization
have found their way into the judicial realm. Lorena Bobbit was found innocent
of mutilating her husband because of claims that he had victimized her. The jury
in the first Menendez brothers’ trial ended up deadlocked in spite of the fact
that the brothers admitted killing their parents. The jury was moved because
they claimed to be "victims" of childhood sexual abuse. Those who beat
Reginald Denny (in the Los Angeles riots) within an inch of his life were found
innocent of most charges because they had been caught up into a "mob
mentality."
Virginia I. Postrel wrote in Reason magazine:
A government of laws cannot stand against a people who can see only
victims, against jurors who believe neither in criminal’s responsibility nor
in their own. Once, runaway juries driven by rage gave us legal lynching, a
complement to the illegal kind. They would not reason, so they could find no
reasonable doubt.
Today, their successors feel not rage but pity, not hatred but empathy.
They, too, do not reason, but neither do they doubt. They can look at proof of
guilt and still find innocence -- innocence in the victimhood of the
victimizer.
Many of the ordinary people who make up juries desire neither justice nor
revenge. They desire absolution, the obliteration of all responsibility. We
have created a culture of excuse, and it has conquered our courtrooms -- not
by judicial fiat but by the most democratic of means. Our jurors have gone
soft on crime.
An editorial in the March, 1994 Christian American (the paper or the
Christian Coalition) says:
What is lacking here is sense of sin. The criminal justice system in
America has historically been based on the Judeo-Christian concept of personal
responsibility for individual actions. Man, created in the image of God, is a
moral being with the free will to choose between good and evil, endowed with a
God-given conscience that allows him to distinguish between right and wrong.
This concept of justice is now being lost in a New Age psychobabble of
self-justification for the most heinous and unspeakable of crimes. We seem to
have lost the concept of personal accountability and absolute standards of
right and wrong. The result is the moral chaos these verdicts reflect.
But, the legal defense of victimization continues. In the fall of 1993, a
19-year-old girl claimed that she should not be held responsible for stabbing a
young man to death because she had grown up surrounded by violence in her south
Florida neighborhood. Her lawyer called this an "urban psychosis
defense."
John Leo (writing in US. News and World Report) said, "Bonnie and Clyde
came along too soon. Now days they could settle for a year at the Betty Ford
Center as victims of compulsive bank-robbing addiction." This whole area of
conflict is at the center of the modern Cultural War and at the center of our
political campaigns.
The "victim," "genetic predisposition," and
"disease" excuses continue to pop up in the most amazing places.
Rather than being the key to helping people, the
"disease-genetic-victim" approach just reinforces destructive
behavior.
Stanton Peele wrote in The Diseasing of America:
Describing behavior in terms of disease/addiction can legitimize,
reinforce, and excuse the behaviors in question -- concerning people, contrary
to all evidence, that their behavior is not their own. Meanwhile, the number
of addicts and those who believe they cannot control themselves grows
steadily.
A blind faith in the myths of "personal therapy" just compounds
problems. Therapists have totally destroyed the meaning of the word disease.
Charles Sykes puts it this way in A Nation of Victims, "Almost by
definition, disease is caused by agents or forces largely beyond the control of
an individual -- by viruses, microbes, genetic deficiencies or environmental
factors." No one can identify the "disease factors" related to
"behavior." People believe that "behavior" is caused by
disease simply because the idea makes them feel good. No one can identify the
"genetic causes" for homosexual perversion or child molesting; they
simply "feel" that it is true.
In the Scriptures, God never refers to choices as being "value
free." He did not excuse Adam and Eve as "culturally deprived,"
overlook Sodom and Gomorrah as "genetically different," or suggest
that the Pharaoh who withstood Moses was simply the "victim" of
Egyptian culture. God graciously forgives sin, but He never pretends that evil
is good. God gives believers the grace to grow out of sinful behavior and the
Scriptures to teach them right from wrong. If we are going to spare ourselves
from the results of self-destructive behavior, we must identify that behavior as
wrong and take the necessary steps to change.
Politicians race to make new promises to groups in rebellion against God.
They promise to make them "feel" good and legislate away their
problems. But, as Louis Sullivan, the former Secretary of Health and Human
Services, said, "The very idea of a crime gene is misleading. Genes do not
code for those kinds of things."
More and more people are beginning to protest this sort of thinking. In the
February 18, 1993 Indianapolis Star, Abe Aamider says,
Some people seem to think that Education (with a capital "E") is
a magic vitamin. Sometimes, it is Counseling with a capital "C."
Either way, Education is seen not only as the cure for all sorts of ills,
but Lack of Education is actually being diagnosed as the cause in just the
same way that a Vitamin C deficiency is seen as a cause of scurvy.
Now, Education may be a good prescription at times such as when it works.
But that is an empirical proposition.
It is the assumption that Education is always the solution, and that Lack
of Education is in and of itself pathological, that is troubling.
Politically, of course, it is a great thing to support Education. Who,
after all, could be against Education? It is like being for peace, or for
national parks, or something.
And it is politically opportune to support education in another way. It
says to all the overeaters, and the people who do not want to work, and people
consumed by the desire to have sex, that their are victims, and only victims,
and that help is on its way.
In the April 30, 1994 issue of World Magazine Frederica Mathews-Green writes:
Nevertheless, power victimhood has a terrible price: Because all your
problems are someone else’s fault, your only power is to go on being
powerless. There is no place for hope, initiative, and self-control.
Christians do not need to join the victim parade. We have a Leader who won
eternal victory in the very act of submitting to an unjust victimization. We
walk in a similar mastery, instructed to rejoice and leap for joy when we are
persecuted -- not instructed to go on "Oprah" and sniffle. It is a
calling with a lot more dignity, and more potential for effective action.
Absurd charges of victimization will continue to trudge by, but we do not have
to fall in line.
We are following a different Way.
When God sent Nathan the prophet to confront David, Nathan did not tell David
he had a sexual addiction that he could not help. He did not tell him that his
culture was responsible for his act of violence against Uriah. And David knew
hot to respond. We read in Psalms 51:1-17:
1 To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came
unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto
the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me throughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
4 Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight:
that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou
judgest.
5 Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
6 Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part
thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be
whiter than snow.
8 Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken
may rejoice.
9 Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
11 Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirt from me.
12 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free
spirit.
13 Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted
unto thee.
14 Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my
tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
15 O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.
16 For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest
not in burnt offering.
17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite
heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Dr. Phil Stringer is Executive Vice President at Landmark
Baptist College, Haines City, Florida.
