The Challenge of the Affective Revolution to the Future of Christianity

Guilherme de Carvalho, a Brazilian Baptist theologian and founder of the Brazilian Christians in Science Association (ABC2), discussed the impact of the “affective revolution,” which focuses on emotional life and has powered identity politics, and its impact on law, general culture, and thus Christian witness at the recent L’Abri Conference in Rochester, Minnesota.

The revolutionary turn to subjectivity has been reviewed at some length by the L’Abri Fellowship. It has had a major impact on the contemporary world, and Latin America is no exception. But it also has deep roots in European civilization. While the West, especially since the Enlightenment, is supposedly is “founded on reason,” it has also long been an “empire of sentiment.” From this aspect of the Enlightenment, we get “sentimental man.”

De Carvalho said that in the recent past, he was “very much focused on fighting rationalism, new atheism.” This was certainly true of Christian apologetics in general. More recently, particularly in the last decade, he “felt something changing.” He “felt that the frontier of Christian apologetics was moving from epistemology to ethics.” A “main theme” has become “happiness.” There is a “disengagement from the moral universe.” This is done “in the interest of self-expression and well being.” This has become “normal currency.”

Behind and before this change, he said, was a much deeper change that happened from about 1950 to about 1970. This was the mixture of “modern hypercapitalism” with a unfettered sense of “how to feel love, and to organize” one’s emotional state. He called it a “second individualistic revolution.” The idea of  “emotional intelligence” emerged in the 1990s, and it has been normalized since then. By 2011, emotional intelligence tests were more important than IQ tests, de Carvalho claimed. Teachers have tests to “assess the emotional realities of students.” Another development is “positive psychology.” This focuses on individual and social well being. He sees some good in this last item. There is also “affective computing,” which was started in 1995, and attempts to take human psychological reality into account.

The emphasis on feeling rather than thought has also led to a “narrowing of the human/animal gap.” Here he referred to the atheist Princeton ethicist Peter Singer. Singer emphasizes the emotions, and therefore the “interests,” of animals. This then gives animals “rights” as a result of their “feelings.” This narrowing the human/animal gap is also found in “pop culture,” he said. He noted that Pope Francis has referred to the preference some people have to pets over children.

De Carvalho referred to The Transformation of Intimacy, by Anthony Giddens. It proposes an egalitarian “pure relation as a description of modern love.” People stay in such relationships only because they get “emotional rewards” from it. The relationship can be terminated at will. This, according to de Carvalho, was proposed as “a new standard for modern love.” Sociologist Mark Regnerius used Giddens’ idea to research sexual activities and relationships in America. Giddens “even recommended” Regnerius’ work. Regnerius “pointed out the problems” the new egalitarian and consensual sex ethic has for women and children.

The affective revolution has affected family law in Brazil. The idea is that “the point of the family is to make each member of the family happy.” It is a “new foundation” for the family, which has changed Brazilian law and jurisprudence. The concept of family is changed “without any reference to kinship.” Any group of people who share living space “and have affections, this is a family.” It might be added that this effectively undermines both marriage and parental authority. A marriage which is unhappy can obviously be ended at will (as is now legally the case, but certainly not in Christian doctrine), and it appears that the state can terminate a parent/child relationship if the child is unhappy with it.

But, he said, there are “things that are worse” in Brazil. There is being advanced the doctrine of “affective rights.” This involves saying that marriage is not about rights and duties, but “affectivity.” This resulted in the Brazilian Supreme Court mandating same sex civil unions in 2011. It has led to a “politics of self-regard.” It can easily be in conflict with the Christian doctrine of sin, which focuses on duty and responsibility, and aims at inducing guilt and repentance. It appears similar or the same as the LGBT claim of “dignity” for deeply felt desires and behavior. As this writer has often noted, this cannot be consistently applied. There can be no right-not-to-be-offended, which is what the “politics of self-regard” would seem to amount to.

The overall effect, de Carvalho said, of “affective rights” is make people turn inward. People are guided by “fear, and gut feelings.” This is happening both on “the left and the right.” He said that “democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling in ways that cannot be ignored or reversed.” He referred to commentary of columnist David Brooks of the New York Times, regarding the business and professional “creative class.” According to Brooks, the creative class has been emerging since around the year 2000. Their ideals are “to be smart, to be original.” The really important thing for this class “is to be creative.” This class is “connected to the tech industry,” and is also “connected to gentrification in … big cities.” De Carvalho said that Brooks was in favor of the creative class when it first appeared around the year 2000, but now he has “changed his mind.” These cities are “more connected among themselves” than they are to their hinterlands. De Carvalho said the creative class holds forth the idea of “affective rights” as the “moral basis to face life.” It is the basis for both “professional decisions, and to organize family life.”

There has also been a tremendous emphasis on mental health as a result of the affective revolution. It was claimed that there is a global problem with “mental health” even before the coronavirus epidemic. One prediction is that there will be “trillions of dollars spent on mental health in the next twenty years.” A new field of “critical psychology” endeavors to analyze how power relationships affect psychology. This viewpoint “criticizes the absence of self-critique” from the Positive Psychology movement. Critical psychology claims that “’siteism’ … helps people feel OK in a system which is making them sick.”       

Emotional, individualistic thinking fits in well with the “sentimental man” thesis from European history. In this connection, de Carvalho referred to Charles Taylor’s idea of the “subjective century.” From the “centrality of man,” the contemporary world has moved to “the centrality of self.” But the overall effect of the subjective century is the centrality of feeling. He said that “if the good life is defined at least partly by feelings, then it can be separated from traditional ethical norms.” He quoted Taylor’s famous saying that “religious man was born to be saved, psychological man was born to be pleased.” This was written in 1966, two years before the 1968 revolution and the beginning of “the second individualistic revolution.” This “individualistic revolution” has “come to take a central place in our life, in some respects replacing religion.”

The ethics that emerges from the individualistic revolution is “not just of self-expression, but of creation.” Quoting Francis Schaeffer, de Carvalho said that in the turn to the self, man has made himself “the last integration point” of the universe. This is “the essence of his rebellion against God.” The tragedy is that when man turns inward “there is no one there for him.” But de Carvalho said that in fact, people do hear their own feelings inside themselves.

De Carvalho said that over the course of the last 30 years, expressive individualism has infected the human rights system. Human rights “has become the lingua franca of global moral thought, as English has become the lingua franca of the global economy.” Human rights can now “run the world. It becomes hegemonical.” It is now “changing legislation everywhere” to conform to expressive individualism. The barriers that far different traditional cultures would have posed to the entry socially radical ideas is being overcome by the incorporation of these ideas into human rights doctrine.

A principle instrument to implement expressive individualism worldwide is the Yogyakarta Principles, which were first advanced in 2007, by self-appointed experts in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. These 29 principles are used worldwide to frame sexual orientation and gender identity legislation that require acceptance and even celebration of deviant sexual proclivities and behaviors on the part of governments, private associations, and individuals. The principles effectively make orthodox Christianity illegal, by declaring sin to be righteous, and impugning Christian morality as oppressive. There was an attempt to get the United Nations to declare these principles international law. This was not successful, but pressure to do this continues. In each country, the LGBT movement “is very much related to the creative class.”

De Carvalho noted that in the United States, the creative class took control of the Democratic Party, which had been the party of labor, and harnessed it to its agenda, losing the working class. Much the same thing has happened in England, France, and in Brazil. There is now “a new class war, between this elite” and the working class.

The creative class and the affective revolution now “do the work of soul healing and education.” This complex, along with global capitalism, forms the “hypermodern cultural system.” If it can succeed in taking full control of the human rights doctrine “we will have a morality legislated globally.” This possible future for Christianity in the world, he said, is “dark.”

In this context, in which Biblical morality is judged to violate “affective rights,” “what is the future of Christian witness?” He frankly said that “I don’t know. Of course I believe in Jesus.” But as practical suggestions, he said we should be “doxological, missional, and dialogic.” We must ask how does worshipping God reinforce our identity? We must “explain the place of worship.” We must also be missional, we must insist that people challenge their feelings “to fit the moral reality that God has created.” Thirdly, we must also have dialog with the creative class. This involves witnessing professionally.

But we “also need embodiments of the culture we want to teach.” This includes “traditional things” like “families, churches, schools, Christian organizations, but especially, of course, churches.” Networks of Christian specialists are needed to connect our emotional life to the moral order, which secular therapeutics believes does not exist. He cited C.S. Lewis to say that “real education teaches your feelings” to conform to the moral order.

To state what should be obvious, de Carvalho’s proposals, like the Benedict Option, require a degree of religious freedom if they are to happen legally. Otherwise, traditional Christianity must be entirely underground.

Like the creative class, Christians must learn to “do things together, go in the same direction … This alignment of agency is what makes a culture, embodied in a structure, to become a social force … We need shared groups.” These groups “are brought together by common agreement as to the objects of their love.” 

De Carvalho also suggested that the Evangelical emphasis on testimonies and personal relationship with Jesus has diminished the importance of liturgies, and the unity and strength they bring to individual and corporate life. “Salvation is found outside ourselves, not in my biography, but only in the story of Jesus Christ.” The Biblical story remains “the main weapon against the therapeutic culture.”

De Carvalho believes that “we cannot change this modern culture, but we must just give it witness.” Simply taking power electorally is not an adequate answer, as social conservatives in America in some measure expected, but we must show an alternative. We must also challenge “expressivity” with “responsivity.” This means we “look outside” of ourselves for meaning in life, not inside.

A questioner asked if we might find God’s moral law in our hearts, since it is written in our hearts. But de Carvalho said that modern people are not searching for a moral code in their hearts, but only for something that will make them happy. There is no reason to think they will find God’s moral law looking for happiness  as they judge their happiness to be.

In response to another question about psychology being unbiblical, he said that to stop Christians from studying psychology, as society moves toward a culture obsessed with happiness, would be suicidal.

Based as it is on a rubber-meets-the-road reality of personal feelings, the affective revolution has great appeal to people. It tries to address personal reality beyond religious and political systems, or rising and falling social and economic theories. It has power by focusing on suffering and finding the things that make for happiness. But many diverse and changing personal realities make it hard to find a center of concern. The ever changing LGBT initialism shows this, nor does sex in general seem large enough to find a center for life in general. “Intersectionality” proposes overlapping oppressions to gain clarity, but it hardly works when so much of society is practically outside these concerns in much of their life. A subsequent lecture dealt with the failure secular culture to find a center for life.