Your emotions are your enemy?

Examining quotes from The Spirit-Controlled Temperament by Tim LaHaye

Last week we looked at Bill Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws tract from the 1950s and the teaching that you can’t trust your feelings as a Christian. This week I’m going to show you quotes from Tim LaHaye in the 1960s, who was influenced by Bright.

LaHaye published his first book, Spirit-Controlled Temperament in 1966, when he was 40 years old. It was Tyndale House’s first non-Bible book. In the revised edition of 1992, he claims the book has sold over a million copies in English and been translated into twenty languages. I quote below from the twenty-second printing in 1976 that I swiped (with permission) from an International Baptist church library in the Netherlands.

Spirit-Controlled Temperament purports to be a book about human temperament, which he defines as “the combination of inborn traits that sub-consciously affect man’s behavior” (10). The middle of the book is more a diatribe against emotion than a treatment of temperament.

He bases the idea of the four temperaments—Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, and Phlegmatic—on Hippocrates, a Greek philosopher. LaHaye says that one of his three contributions to the ancient discussion of temperaments is the idea that fear and anger are our emotional enemies.

LaHaye tells a story about counseling a man who wasn’t a Christian: “When he had finally unburdened himself, I began to present to him the gospel of Jesus Christ in the form of the Four Spiritual Laws which my 16-year-old daughter had introduced to me as the result of her training at a Campus Crusade for Christ conference” (122). You can see the influence of Bright’s “feelings caboose” in LaHaye’s writing about emotion.

LaHaye starts to go down the right track on how emotions are made: “Man is affected emotionally by what is placed in his mind. What he places in his mind is determined by his will; therefore, if man wills to disobey God and records things on the files of his mind that cause emotions contrary to the will of God, these emotions trigger actions that displease God” (74).

This is not far off from what neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes about constructed emotion, though he puts a more negative spin on it. When he is starting from an understanding that is actually somewhat accurate, how does he end up drawing such wrong conclusions?

In the chapter “Grieving the Holy Spirit Through Anger,” LaHaye outright calls the emotion of anger a sin: “For some reason, otherwise consecrated Christians seem reluctant to face as sin these emotions that stem from anger…anger is every bit as much a sin as these overt practices” (69).

Not only is anger “one of two universal sins of mankind,” but also “all emotional tension can be traced to one of two things: anger or fear…these two emotions bring more Christians into bondage to the law of sin than any other emotions or desires” (70).

In the book, there is a diagram of a man’s head labelled “A Man Without Christ” (75). He suffers from lust, idolatry, vanity, jealousy, as well as anger and fear. This diagram could lead Christians to believe that if they construct instances of anger or fear, they are actually without Christ. This contributes to emotional suppression and false emotional performance to both fit in with others and to assuage themselves.

LaHaye concludes the chapter by insisting that anger is “motivated by selfishness” (78) and encourages people to be “willing to recognize inner anger and turmoil as the sin of selfishness” (79) He illustrates this with an anecdote about a woman he counseled who was angry because of the way her husband treated her. She told LaHaye, “You would be angry too if you lived with a man who constantly ran roughshod over you and treated you like dirt!”

He responded by deciding her reaction was caused by “plain old selfishness” and telling her so: “Until you as a Christian recognize your own sin of selfishness and look to God for a proper attitude…you will continue to grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (78). Imagine telling a likely abuse victim, who is rightly angry at being mistreated, that she and her emotions are the real problem in her marriage and sending her right back into it.

The next chapter is called “Quenching the Holy Spirit Through Fear.” It starts with forcing positivity in the Christian life: “Anytime the Christian does not rejoice or give thanks in everything, he is out of the will of God.” (80) He follows this with an assurance that “The more man obeys God…the less he experiences fear.” (81) This serves to tell disciples that if they are constructing instances of fear, or failing to construct happiness, they could very well be displeasing and disobeying God.

He writes that “Anxiety is a form of fear,” equating anxiety with the sin of fear. (70) He goes on a rant about mental hospitals, mental disease, mental derangement, and emotional illness and their destructive effects on families then seems to imply that fear is one of or leads to such emotional illnesses. The way he talks about fear here confers the idea that ending up in a mental hospital because of anxiety is a choice someone can make. He also implies that the emotions themselves are the problem, rather than acknowledging that terrible life circumstances might be leading to the emotions. (83-85) It’s the circumstances that need to be fixed, not the emotions!

He also describes a woman who sounds like she has an untreated anxiety disorder and dismisses her as “the professional worrier” who was making herself sick. (86)

A doctor gave him a clear warning about hurting people emotionally. His family doctor told him, “You ministers…do irreparable damage to the emotional life of men by preaching the gospel…I took my internship in a mental institution, and the overwhelming number of those people had a religious background and were there because of fear induced by guilt complexes.”

This sounds exactly like the spiritual abuse and religious trauma that many of my peers are seeking mental health help for today.

LaHaye was warned that what he and other preachers like him were doing was damaging people, and the next day he blew it off in a conversation with another Christian who said, “People have guilty consciences because they are guilty!” (91)

He concludes the chapter similarly to the last one: “all fear can be traced basically to the sin of selfishness.” (93)

Anger and fear flow into his following discussion on depression. Again he talks about the positivity of the righteous life and contrasts that with depression: “It has always been God’s intent that man enjoy a peaceful, contented, and happy life…the ‘abundant life.’ No Christian filled with the Holy Spirit is going to be depressed. Before a Spirit-filled believer can become depressed, he must first grieve the Spirit through anger or quench the Spirit through fear.” (96) He goes on to explain that depression is caused by indulging negative emotions, self-pity, rebellion, and the devil. If a Christian is afflicted and “depressed by the devil, it is because he is not ‘abiding in Christ’ or is not ‘filled with the Holy Spirit.’” (104)

Beliefs have consequences, and in the case of the ideas that LaHaye espouses, they keep people from seeking the medical and mental health help that’s available to them, leaving them to suffer needlessly.

Have you ever read this book or heard these ideas taught in churches? I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Next week I’ll go through quotes about emotion from another author influenced by Bill Bright: James Dobson.

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