How a Super-Ego Learns to Fly

Grace in the Age of Guilt

Years ago, I talked with someone who told me how hard it was to keep a moral grounding in the sex-fueled drinking atmosphere of his college. That’s not unusual, but then he told me more about his college.

Turns out it wasn’t a party school but a fundamentalist separatist Christian college, where holding the hand of a date would get a student suspended and dancing would get a student a ticket back home. It’s the kind of place where the student conduct manual is longer than the federal code for maintaining nuclear reactors.

I said, “So in spite of all that strictness, the people there were wild?” He said, “The people there were wild because of all the strictness.”

He went on to talk about getting in trouble for listening to a contemporary Christian music artist (the beat is too worldly) or for his hair being too long or for breaking some other regulation.

“After a while, you start to lose the sense of what’s really bad and what’s not,” he said. “Your conscience gets broken when you know you’re going to be a rule breaker no matter what you do. Once that happens, it’s—well, it’s party time.”

I thought of that man as I read Mark Edmundson’s book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. Like in that conversation, my first thought when seeing this book was, What age of guilt? This is an age of shamelessness. His argument, though, was different than what I expected, and it’s one that those of us who are Christians should take seriously.

Politico’s Michael Schaffer sums up the fractured nature of American life right now this way: Conservative elites are scared of their audience, and liberal elites are scared of their employees. Even beyond the political circus, we see some people with resentment and rage breaking through any previous norms, and, with others, skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression. Why?

Like many others, Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, sees a big part of the problem as our online lives. He builds his argument around Sigmund Freud’s concepts of the ego (what most of us think of first when we think of the word I), the id (the wild and “wanting” self of our unruly desires), and the superego (that aspect that judges the other parts with moral evaluation). He doesn’t accept Freud’s theories on their own literal terms, necessarily, but suggests that—whatever their deficiencies—they are a mythology, one with lots of problems but that does tell a story that’s at least partly true.

Edmondson simplifies Freud’s framework by saying the superego’s moral code, left on its own, is “the code a tyrannical father might inflict on a dependent child” getting unrelenting punishment. On the other hand, our ego, he argues, is made “out of love, out of being loved.” When that judging faculty in a person is implacable, “the ego becomes anxious and depressed; it loses confidence.” Such a person is weighed down by guilt, anxiety, and self-hatred, and so is fighting a battle all the time just to survive.

Sometimes a person “projects” that judgment onto some other person or group—just to get some relief. Other people—like the fundamentalist student with whom I talked—try to shut the “judging” faculty off altogether. Giving up, they surrender themselves to the unleashing of their id—often in cruelty or chaos.

Edmundson argues that, like many other things, the superego is a kind of “corrupted ghost” of something that was seen as necessary in a previous—more religious—age. Without some form of cultural or religious authority, we lose stability. “When legitimate forms of authority disappear, the way is open for rogue authority to assert itself,” he writes. “When there is nothing reliable outside you to help you organize your life, internal forces enter the empty space, and those forces may be anything but benevolent. In the outside world, on comes the dictator; on comes the religious huckster.”

And internally, there often comes a kind of authority—a really judgmental inner authority—that tends to “expand and expand and never be cultivated or displaced.” Sometimes this inner self-judgmentalism, which, no matter how many times projected, always boomerangs, leads a person to try to shut it off with alcohol or opioids.

In a culture such as ours, Edmundson concludes, the internet has become our collective superego. We then end up with hate—either of the “hot” kind or the “cold” kind. Both are frequently self-hatred turned outward.

Often, Edmundson notes, the idea between online mobs is to join the collective superego with institutional power in order to fire, discipline, or humiliate whoever is the target. If the boss or the HR department won’t do that, he writes, the fury is directed toward them. This doesn’t assuage the anger; it just moves on elsewhere.

By no means do I agree with all of Edmundson’s diagnoses or recommendations, but his metaphor of the superego is onto something true. If we don’t pay attention to this as Christians, we have no way to bear witness to the gospel. What Edmundson means by the superego metaphor is a moralism without mercy, a law without gospel, a judgment seat without a John 3:16.

This is significant because for so long, so many have assumed that sin and guilt are outdated categories, suited for a medieval era but not for this one. The prophets and apostles, though, told us that sin and guilt—along with the search for a meaning to life, the fear of death, and an answer to shame—might be culturally amplified realities, but they are not culturally created.

Guilt and shame are fallen human conditions, not ancient or premodern or modern or postmodern ones. The question is not whether the world around is grappling with guilty consciences but how.

We could also caricature the Old Testament Scriptures as “superego”—the intimidating judgment-filled God of Sinai over and against the merciful God of Jesus—but we could only maintain that with a willful ignorance of both Testaments.

Even in the giving of the Law itself, with God on the mountain with Moses, there is the communication that the Law itself is not enough. The tablets from Sinai were not all that God delivered to the prophet. Most of the rest of Exodus includes the details of God’s showing Moses the specifications for constructing a tent in which God would meet with his people over the mercy seat (Ex. 25:22).

The people could see the priests as they went behind the veil to the Most Holy Place, to atone for their own sins and for the sins of the people. They could then hear the word of forgiveness; they could start over again. The Book of Hebrews argues that the blueprint of the tabernacle itself and the directions for the sacrifices make clear that this movable tent was temporary—pointing to the sacrificial offering of the one High Priest who need not be replaced because he’s human like us. But unlike the priests of Levi, the resurrected Jesus wasn’t a sinner and he won’t die.

The Israelites listened to the bells of their priests moving into the mysterious place behind the veil, approaching the ark of the covenant before the face of a holy God, hoping that they wouldn’t be struck dead, that their sacrifice would be accepted. They also knew that this could never totally purify the conscience, because they would have to be here, again, doing the same thing all over again.

“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf,” the writer of Hebrews tells us (6:19–20). The mixed metaphors here are mind-bending if we actually pay attention to them.

The imagery is of a pioneer—a “forerunner”—going before us to where we will follow him—and it’s to the place we could never before approach: behind that curtain. The imagery is also, though, of an anchor. This “new and living way” (Heb. 10:20) into mercy and forgiveness and the cleansing of conscience is stable and steadfast, unmoving and immoveable.

That’s why we often—when confronted with our own sin—do the exact opposite of what we should. We get ashamed and withdraw from God. Prayer gets harder. We assume that we should get our failures under control and then come into the presence of God. We want to rely on the superego to fix us until we’re good enough to face the God who loves us.

The presence of God with us in Christ, though, isn’t a reward for good performance; it’s the way that we are transformed.

We don’t give up, then. We don’t wallow in self-loathing or project that loathing onto other people. You might not feel okay. You might not be okay. But behind the veil of what you can see, the anchor holds.

That frees us to pursue righteousness and holiness in the only way that can actually give it, not by achieving it for fear of God rejecting us but by receiving it—because we know that, no matter what our conscience tells us, there’s an offering of blood. There’s a mercy seat. There’s a God who is actively moving toward us, not with condemnation but with mercy.

In a time of diminished expectations—and of an eclipsed gospel witness—what would really make the church countercultural is if the people around us were to have a very different conversation. One might say, “These are people of moral integrity, even though they think that God is merciful to them for their sin.” And another might say, “Yes, but they say their morality isn’t in spite of the mercy; it’s because of it.”

If this is, in fact, “the age of guilt,” if it’s true that the collective superego and the collective id are destroying what it means for us to live as people, then surely there ought to be a people who remember what it is to be amazed by grace.

The After Party Is Here!

After two years of work, The After Party is now ready to launch. It’s a small group curriculum—by David French, Curtis Chang, and me, along with a bunch of amazing guests—helping us to think about how to live as disciples in this crazy political time. We don’t think the fruit of the Spirit will expire in an election year, and we don’t think that we trade in our cross for a crown when the political stakes seem high enough.

We talk about how to combat quarrelsomeness, cynicism, and exhaustion when it comes to political polarization, and how to cultivate integrity, kindness, mercy, humility, and self-control—even when everyone seems to hate each other.

It’s designed for small groups but can be done individually. As a matter of fact, you can tailor it to whatever your context might be—using as much or as little of the curriculum as you want.

It’s free through the end of this election year.

Details and registration links are included at the site: https://redeemingbabel.org/the-after-party

A Book That Made Me Cry

My sons, at ages ranging from 22 to 12 years old, are (to my great dismay) now too old for children’s picture books read to them by their dad. Gone are the happy days of Goodnight Moon and Good Night, Gorilla and Where the Wild Things Are. They still read Narnia books, but they read them themselves—rather than listening to the words out loud from their father. This is a hard adjustment for me, since each of them had books I had picked out waiting for them literally before they were conceived.

I picked up a children’s book this week, though, because I was intrigued by a review of it I saw somewhere. The book A Walk in the Woods by Nikki Grimes, Jerry Pinkney, and Brian Pinkney is about a child who—a week after his father’s death—finds a map his dad had made for him of all the places they would go in their walks together in the woods. The boy follows that map as a way of connecting with the memory of his father.

The book was especially meaningful because of the story behind the story. The rough first-draft illustrations were done by artist Jerry Pinkney, who died before the book was finished. His son Brian didn’t even know about the project until the author, Grimes, showed him the rough sketches. Brian was stunned to see that the woods drawn in the book were the same ones he and his father had walked through together when he was a child.

“Now I was off on a quest of my own,” he wrote. “I had to find my way through those woods without my dad. As if I was making my way through trees and leaves, I wandered with my watercolor and gouache paints to find the best approach.”

In the end, the son’s and father’s works were merged together. His dad had left him a map.

Maybe it’s because my own father died three years ago, and maybe it’s because I’m kind of wistful these days as I can see the passing of time speeding past in the maturity of my sons. When a big snow came here in Tennessee yesterday, I noticed my son Samuel had snow and ice crystals all in his beard and my first thought was, How do you already have a beard? You were just a little baby in my arms, and now here you are—a young man (an impressive, responsible, mature, disciplined young man who has not just his father’s unearned love but his father’s earned admiration too).

Anyway, I loved the book and the story behind it. It made me think about what maps I am drawing for the woods my sons will walk through.

Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Teresa Tinnerman, who writes from Downey, California.

Of her books, Teresa writes: “Some I would want to reread, others I would just want to hold while on the desert island. The books I love equally are The Scarlet Letter, about who is truly good, and Hannah Coulter, with the perfect voice of reflection for a woman my age, but I do not have hard copies of these books.”

Here’s her list:

Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen: A beautiful book that taught me about the lavish love of God.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok: How our calling affects us and those around us deeply.

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence: In my teens, it taught me to be aware of God’s loving presence in all areas of my life.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck: Every word, every description is perfect, as always with Pearl S. Buck.

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez: Taught me how to choose what I value most.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Earle Stegner: About what matters in love. Stegner’s descriptions are breathtaking.

Living on Less and Liking It More by Maxine Hancock: Taught me simplicity and satisfaction.

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson: The story is beautifully haunting.

Disciplines for the Inner Life by Bob Benson and Michael Benson: Purchased at a thrift store for 95 cents. It is full of beautiful words from “the great ones.”

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: This book taught me about humble, true love and inspired me to love fiction.

Making Color Sing by Jeanne Dobie: About the relationship and beauty of colors.

And, finally, my tattered copy on the side, Streams in the Desert by L. B. Cowman: Also purchased at a thrift store. I’ve worn its cover off. It never fails to comfort.

Thank you, Teresa!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city or town from which you’re writing.

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Onward,
Russell Moore