Christianity and Defense Mechanisms

⁸ You do well when you complete the Royal Rule of the Scriptures: "Love others as you love yourself." ⁹ But if you play up to these so-called important people, you go against the Rule and stand convicted by it. ¹⁰ You can't pick and choose in these things, specializing in keeping one or two things in God's law and ignoring others. ¹¹ The same God who said, "Don't commit adultery," also said, "Don't murder." If you don't commit adultery but go ahead and murder, do you think your non-adultery will cancel out your murder? No, you're a murderer, period.

James 2:8-11 MSG

If you live a life comparing and contrasting your holiness against other people, then you are going to start making your own top-ten list of what sin is worse than another. This means that as a way of making ourselves more acceptable to God and other people, we selectively choose what sins we believe are more wicked than others. Christians, just like the Pharisees, can end-up making a subset of the law, something that seems doable, and sticking with that. But the Bible tells us that if a person is to be justified by the law – they need to keep all of the commandments, without ever breaking one. This is impossible.

This approach operates by making taboos out of things. Church leaders then seek to reinforce those taboos by stressing how bad certain practices are. It is very easy to become deluded through taboos to the point whereby you spend a great deal of time demonising certain practices and the people who do them, to the point that you become unaware of just how awful your own sinful practices are.

Ego Defense Mechanisms

Basically, living according to the law causes a person to utilise what is known in Psychology, as defense mechanisms. We will look at some of the more common ones below:

Denial is when a person consciously denies the truth of something, to the point whereby they are hardly aware that they are doing something wrong. Denial is a refusal to accept reality as it is.

Displacement is when a person struggles to deal with their own issues effectively. As a result, they then direct their wrong desires and wrong emotions towards something or someone else. This is what causes vandalism: people become angry at feeling helpless in a society that they cannot cope with, a society that does not seem to understand them, is hostile to them and seeks to control them; so they seek to hit back against society by smashing-up a bus shelter or something. In this case, the poor old bus shelter or the council that own it, has nothing to do with the person being unable to find contentment and get their needs met.

Projection is a combination of denial and displacement. Projection is when a person blames another person for something that they themselves are guilty of. This means that the wrong desires and motives of a person become projected towards another. A selfish person will blame another person for being selfish. In reality, the other person might not be selfish at all, it just means that the accuser is instinctively seeking to cover-up his own faults by laying the blame on someone else for what they do or don’t do. The projectionist will often seek to demonise certain faults in other people, because they themselves are seeking to divert the attention from the same kind of desires that they are struggling with.

Denial, displacement and projection are all born out of repression. Repression is when a thought or feeling is deemed to be unacceptable, and therefore, an attempt is made to push it out of consciousness. This does nothing to deal with the issue and the unacceptable thoughts and feelings become repressed into the subconscious mind.