Just how does brainwashing work? Essentially the idea is to reverse someone's thinking on a particular issue by some kind of careful persuasion and manipulation. You don't really need the techniques of Torquemada to get someone to recant and convert.
You can start off by getting the intended convert under the guise of "playing fair" to list the good things about your position and then, some time later the things that are bad with his position. This can be done with the free will of the subject and the process can be continued with minute increments until he is indeed truly converted.
Now this method has actually been used and to great effect specifically in the Korean War, in which Chinese captors managed to brainwash with this very technique (called hsi nao) their American PoWs. Americans were shocked to see their freed comrades (pardon the pun!) proclaim freely their support for the Communist manifesto.
The power of this technique lies in the fact that the subject has generated the new viewpoint by himself, and, because it comes naturally from within the subject, it is most convincing. That the subject is apparently making up his own mind imprints the desired belief system more deeply than a set of thumbscrews and a quarter turn on the rack.
So now this begs a lot of questions. Is organised religion of any kind a brainwashing outfit? Is brainwashing always undesirable? Can you tell if you're being brainwashed, and if so can you stop it? Can you think of any more?
These are not easy questions. It may seem that brainwashing could be sometimes desirable. Wouldn't it be great if all those terrorists who fight in what they believe to be the name of Islam were brainwashed into a more pacific demeanour? Wouldn't it be good to perform hsi nao in our prisons and gaols, so that the inmates are rehabilitated into society?
Again, we are faced with discerning whether the ends justify the means. To some extent this is the content of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, the brainwashing of a convicted felon in order that they might conform to the Rule of Law. From a Christian viewpoint, the human soul must always be free to say 'yes' and 'no' to any invitation, even if saying 'yes' means saying 'yes' to sin and saying 'no' means saying 'no' to God and Salvation.
So here's the bind. As Christians are we meant to be converting people? Should we be gently persuading our families and friends to forsake whatever beliefs that they might have in order for them to embrace the Christian message and bring them Eternal Salvation? This is certainly a deep part of Christian history, and there is no church, community, denomination or sect that has not tried to convert people. We are certainly called to "make disciples of all nations", "to proclaim good news to the captives" but the history of Christianity shames us with its tales of coercion and crusade.
Yet as Christians, we know that we are right to believe in God as Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity. This is our faith, and to admit to any contradictory doctrine takes us out of the Christian faith and into heterodoxy. Surely then, because our belief is right, we have a duty to show everybody the Truth by any means possible!
Again, the end doesn not justify the means. At every level of Christian belief comes Love. No matter who the human being is and before any debate, any proclamation of the Message, any teaching of the Faith takes place, there must be Love. Crucially, as I Cor xiii tells us, Love does not insist on its own way, even if that way is right! The Beloved must always be free to walk away, to say no, to reject the teaching. This is the crucial difference when it comes to recognising brainwashing. Brainwashing requires a certain level of captivity. The American Soldiers were PoWs; they were not free to go back to their families, to the familiarity of their own lives. In their captivity they were unable to escape the gentle yet constant persuasion that Communism was best. If, by our preaching the Christian message we are in any way restricting the freedom of another, then we are in transgression of the Commandment to love our neighbour as ourself. Indeed, St Francis of Assisi tells us to preach the gospel continuously, using words if we have to!
Religion is being attacked by the likes of Richard Dawkins on the grounds that it brainwashes the people into naive unreasonable thinking, that it betrays the legacy of the Enlightenment. Essentially what he is saying is that Atheistic Rationalism is the truth and that we should all be following this gospel. Fair enough, that is precisely what every religion does. At this level, Dawkins is the prophet of Atheistic Rationalism, an High-Priest of Scientific Realism, and despite any objection he might make, this is what he is, because he is fulfilling precisely the same role in his religion as the Bishop Wright of Durham, Pope Benedict, or Archbishop Haverland are playing in Christianity.
However, Dawkins calls for religious schools to be closed, every religion to be scrapped, or shown up for the intellectual foolishness he claims it to be. He seeks to remove the freedom of people to believe and follow other forms of religion, denies them the idea of worship. This to me smacks of a desire to brainwash. I believe that Moslems are wrong and so does every Christian (take note Dr. Redding), however I cannot demand that they stop practising their religion on the grounds that I disagree with it. Only God can do that, and He will in His own good time.
It is Dawkins (and not necessarily the entirety of the Scientific community) who seeks to brainwash, and he, and Derren Brown do so by playing on the intellectual pride of their audience. They seek to put across the idea that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to believe in God, and that true intellectuals, like Pierre Simon de Laplace, have no need of that hypothesis. The idea is that the audience member thinks "well I am intelligent, so I had better discard my belief in God." This is why perhaps I was rattled by Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind because it played upon my intellectual pride and arrogance.
As a Christian, I trust St Paul. I don't have to trust St Paul, but it is consistent with my belief that I do trust him. He tells me that it is better to be a fool for Christ, than intelligent in the eyes of the World. If I am wrong, then I shall die a fool and be nothing for ever after. If I'm right, then who is truly foolish and eternally so?
We need freedom of thought in order to know that we are loved. This means being aware of our choices and how free we are to make them. Brainwashing can only occur if we give up our freedom to think. There is nothing wrong with asking questions of God. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, and God does not depise a Science which is asking honest questions. What we must be doing is ensuring that our belief is well-founded.
Is your belief well-founded? How can you demonstrate that you've not been brainwashed?
Mr. Dawkins, though professing to be an unbeliever, is in actuality as much a "True Believer" in Eric Hoffer's sense of the term as the Ayotollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, Pat Robertson, or Torquemada, to take a wide-ranging selection. He makes the powerful faith-derived assumption that he, and only he, is capable of judging the truth or falsity of any idea, and that, therefore any other idea should be forbidden. A world organized by such as him might perhaps be less brutal, but would be no more free than the world of Josef Stalin.
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