The Cult of Self-Esteem

First, a short aside. For those of you who are kind enough to read this blog, let me apologize for being absent so long. My wife and I bought the old house belonging to my father-in-law and over these months we have been doing an extensive remodel, and finally have moved in. We've settled in to the point where I have time to once again make my written contributions. Thanks for your patience, and please pray with us that we will sell our old house. The market is very slow right now...

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. (2 Timothy 3:1-4 ESV)

I’m not sure when the “self-esteem” movement began.  I feel somewhat like the proverbial boiled frog when I look around at the ubiquity of the term these days (you know, put a frog in a pan of cold water and ever so slowly bring it to a boil so by the time he realizes he’s in trouble, he’s already cooked).  It seems that every personality, behavioral, and even financial malady these days is attributed to “low self-esteem”; but I confess to being truly astonished upon hearing that Crystal Cathedral pastor Robert Schuller wrote a book entitled: Self-Esteem: the New Reformation.  I have no desire to read the thing since the title alone is enough to make me queasy, but I can pretty much guess the sort of new-agy pseudo-aphorisms within.
 
Apparently there is a pop-Evangelical wrinkle of the self-esteem trend which goes something like this:  God has commanded us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves; therefore it’s necessary for us to cure ourselves from low self-esteem and learn to love ourselves so that we can love others.
 
The problem with this, of course, is that you’re not going to find anything even remotely similar to this in the Bible. Let's look again at this command to love our neighbor as ourselves. In reality it comes tied to another commandment which rightly precedes it:

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”(Matt. 22:35-40 ESV)

Jesus was here quoting two different places in the Torah, Deuteronomy 10:12, and Leviticus 19:18. So these are long-standing principles in which God expresses something irreducible in human nature--God didn't have to tell man to love himself. It was well-understood that man's self-love was so intrinsic, so self-evident, that God could use that fact as an essential clause in the second Great Commandment.

Yet now, thousands of years later, pop psychology (and for all I know, academic psychology) challenges this fact, and tells us that we need to "learn" to love ourselves, that indeed we need to nurture and cultivate our self-love, and only in this way can we be healthy and complete. I would like to dispute this whole notion of "low self-esteem" being the cause of so many of our modern ills with a radical submission: that all of the contemporary behavioral problems attributed to "low self-esteem", are rather due to an obsessive, all-encompassing surfeit of self-love. But what about depression? What about self-destructive behaviors, what about suicide?

Let me illustrate with myself. About four years ago I lost about 60 pounds. I was exercising daily, bought a new wardrobe, and felt great about myself. But little by little, I began to regain weight. Five pound here over a vacation, a couple more during the holidays, and during this remodel and move (eating fast food in the car as I drove to the new house after work to paint, and no time to exercise)...well, I've regained pretty much all I had lost, and I'm not very happy when I look in the mirror. Fair enough. Does this mean I don't love myself anymore? No, it means that when I see myself in the mirror, I am disappointed because what I see doesn't match the ideal picture I have of myself, the self-image of my conceit. If I didn't love myself, it wouldn't matter that the reality didn't match the concept.

Now as far as this goes, it's a fairly benign example, but the principle is the same for truly toxic or even self-destructive behaviors: they are born of disappointment, depression or rage at the short-comings of our reality compared to our narcissistic internal vision. Is it any wonder, then, that Paul warned Timothy of the self-lovers, "reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God," ?

So what is the cure? Jesus' two Great Commandments: more love of God, more love of others--and, if not less love of self, at least less self-absorbtion.