A Most Accursed Religion: When a Trauma Becomes God

by Greg Mogenson

The long-awaited, extensively revised and expanded version of Mogenson’s provocative first book, GOD IS A VICARIOUS RELIGION AND SOUL-MAKING. Despite its title, this book is not about theology. When a psychologist writes of God, he must do so within the confines of his own field of the psyche. Mogenson’s aim is to focus attention on the religious dimension of the psychology of those overwhelming events we describe as traumatic. Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine.

Genres: Psychology

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2005

Reviews

[Feamelwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The all devouring trauma-god is not a good enough substitute for the soul-protecting crust baked in uncertainty, symptom and ordinary gnostic unhappiness.

Or something.

[Mats Winther · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jungian analyst Greg Mogenson (A Most Accursed Religion) follows in Nietzsche’s footsteps and castigates “Judeo-Christianity” and monotheism, generally. Thanks to Christianity “an eon of decadence began” because “weakness became valued as strength” and “slaves replaced their masters”. Jung’s view on religion is much more reasonable. An oft repeated false citation of Jung is that “religion is a defense against the experience of God”. Jung never said those words. Rather, thanks to religion, we are “shielded against immediate religious experience” (CW 11, para. 75). Religion has an important function, as people aren’t ready to handle the “immediate experience of the forces waiting for liberation in the unconscious”, powers that could cause unbounded savagery, as demonstrated by the horrors of the 20th century (cf. CW 11, paras. 82-85). On the other hand, religion could become a stumbling-block for the individuating personality, the unique individual capable of negotiating the forces of the unconscious. Mogenson is much more radical than Jung; more of a Nietzschean than a Jungian.

Mogenson says that we ought to “step out of Judeo-Christianity ... as Nietzsche did” to make room for “creative freedom”. To this end we adopt “soul-making”, a term that derives from another inferior theorist, namely James Hillman. It means to give free rein to a creative process of imagination. Mogenson defines God as “trauma”, the sum of our pains, problems and catastrophes. Monotheistic religion and theology stand as a “shield between mankind and trauma”. We ought to remove the shield and instead allow trauma to become absorbed into creative responses; into “soul”:

 
Only when our human tragedy had become slightly larger than the capacity of our religious containers to absorb it were we able to experience our humanity. Ironically, with the death camps and the bomb, man gave himself back to himself. (subch. ‘Nuclear Escalation’)
 

The lifeless protecting crust of Christianity could no longer protect us from the vicissitudes of the “inorganic world”. Our true humanity was unleashed in the two World Wars, the Holocaust and the Holodomor. No longer upholding a false facade, man gave himself back to himself. As Jung explains, this is a necessary consequence of the degradation of Christianity. Mogenson ostensibly sanctions this horrific modern development, as it is a “transitional stage between vicarious religion and soul-making”. It is a necessary step, because we need a new way of negotiating the traumatic forces of the unconscious. Instead of dead monotheistic worship, we shall resort to unbridled soul-making.

Mogenson doesn’t provide any credible scientific sources for his theory. Nor has comparative history of religion such a concept. He relies heavily on fantasizers such as Nietzsche and Hillman and diverse poets. But he could have drawn much from Heinrich Himmler, who fantasized about a heroic Aryan empire, ruled by the elite. Himmler truly let his fantasy fly and reinvented the polytheistic Norse religion. He welcomed the “new heroic man”, the Übermensch, who revels in war and destruction.

Mogenson’s theory is unscientific, clearly anti-Christian and anti-civilizational. It has morbid qualities reminiscent of Nazi-Romanticism. Nothing good can come out of this. I wish that Jungians would come back to the relative sanity of Jung’s views, because this book, like so much of post-Jungian literature, is an exercise in weirdness. It deserves only 1 star out of 5.