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Religious Faith and the Virtues: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Psychology has a strange history of appearing to be more interested in what is wrong with humans than what is right with us. Likely inspired by Freud's early focus on pathology and the many pitfalls of growing through his psychosexual stages, psychology has been eager to define and remedy the "illnesses" of the psyche. Even though it seems inconsistent to spend so much time defining and remedying ills when we do not really understand what mental health looks like, psychologists carried on, producing an abundance of therapies whose goal generally was to alleviate symptoms rather than to promote an idea of health or wholeness. Maslow's (1970, 1999) focus on self-actualization is a rare exception to this trend. Happily, during the latter years of the 20th century, as psychological researchers began to explore the characteristics of healthy mental lives, there was a paradigmatic shift out of which the field of positive psychology developed. Focusing on the positive aspects of human life, or flourishing as is the more common term today, required an entirely new vocabulary. This drove the originators of the scientific study of the virtues back to ancient philosophy and religion (e.g., Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Snyder, Lopez, & Pedrotti, 2011) to find the common virtues to which humans aspire. In their search, researchers consulted a variety of philosophical and religious traditions, including Judeo-Christian, Eastern, and Islamic perspectives (Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Snyder et al., 2011). Across religious sources, the common focus in the study of virtues is human flourishing and altruism. Peterson and Seligman (2004) still drew from the idea of a nosology of disease to develop a "nosology" of character strength and virtues; though, it is better called a classification (or a "manual of the sanities" [p. 3] as they cleverly title one of their chapters). Their mission was to find categories to shape research in the nascent field. To do so, they conceptualized virtues, or character traits, as similar to personality traits, in that they are both stable, yet susceptible to environmental influence and subject to change over time. Peterson and Seligman (2004) developed six major categories of character strengths from their research. These include wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity (including love, kindness, etc.), justice, temperance, and transcendence. Additional virtues may be drawn from philosophy and religion, empirically analyzed to understand their nature and practical usefulness, and categorized under these major headings for study. Yet religion, and specifically Christianity, places a Godward-focus on the virtues. Although we are to be kind, wise, fair, temperate, and spiritually-minded, it is not in the service of other or of our own flourishing; rather, those manifestations of the virtues flow from the One who is truly virtuous. Early philosophers saw eudamimonism as the key to the virtues--that is, they served to yield a life of happiness and, thus, were pursued in service of that goal. In contrast, Saint Augustine (e.g., 1960) refuted this idea in the fifth century. Arguing primarily against the Stoics who found the virtues to yield tranquility, he contended that only that which does not change can produce tranquility. Though altruism and greater happiness tend to characterize the lives of the virtuous (see Sisemore, 2015), virtue needs a more stable source than the individual. From a religious perspective, virtue stems from God who is True Virtue and who is unchangeable; virtue reflects his character. Therefore, it is reasonable to devote an issue of the Journal of Psychology and Theology to considering the religious, and particularly Christian, context of virtues. People of faith have discussed the virtues longer than psychologists, and the Godward-orientation of some virtues may increase the length of a religious list of virtues over those found in secular psychological sources. …