M. Scott Peck: Traveling Down the right road. He was a born again Christian!

M. Scott Peck: Traveling Down the Wrong Road

Article ID: DP102 | By: H. Wayne House

Summary
M. Scott Peck; His purported conversion to Christianity occurred in 1980 prior to the publication of his second book, People of the Lie. He had a nondenominational baptism, and was discipled by a Roman Catholic nun. “I entered Christianity,” he said, “through Christian mysticism. I was a mystic before I was a Christian.”7 In People of the Lie he provides an account of his conversion: “After many years of vague identification with Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christian commitment….My commitment to Christianity is the most important thing in my life and is, I hope, pervasive and total.”8



In setting forth his views on spiritual and mental health, Dr. M. Scott Peck has captivated the attention of Christians and non-Christians alike. The best-selling author of The Road Less Traveled and other books on spirituality and psychotherapy claims that true salvation or mental health comes to persons — whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, agnostic, or atheist — as they set aside prejudices of the past and strive toward fulfilling their own potential to save themselves. In his teaching Peck denies practically every major doctrine of Christianity while advocating an unbiblical morality.
Though M. Scott Peck’s name may not be immediately recognizable by everyone, multitudes have heard of his best-selling book The Road Less Traveled. This book has sold more than five million copies and has been on the New York Times “Bestsellers list for a record 600-plus weeks. Peck’s ideas have enjoyed widespread exposure through his books, interviews, and public addresses throughout the country. The high praise that is frequently lavished on Peck was expressed by popular television talk-show host, Oprah Winfrey, when she said, “Few writers have touched more lives than Dr. Peck, and few messages have empowered more people.”1 He has been compared to well-known evangelicals Chuck Swindoll and James Dobson.2
Morgan Scott Peck was born in an affluent family on New York City’s Park Avenue. His parents were “rugged individualists” who neither desired nor trusted intimacy.3 His early education was at an uppercrust private academy, which he left at age 15. Contrary to his parents’ desires, Peck quit the Phillips Exeter Academy due to excessive unhappiness4 and finished at a Quaker prep school in Manhattan.
While studying world religions at the Friends Seminary, Peck encountered and later embraced Zen Buddhism. This was the beginning of his spiritual journey. Peck remembers himself as a “freakishly religious kid,”5 but he was not at all taken with Christianity, which he considered mere “gobbledygook.”6
His purported conversion to Christianity occurred in 1980 prior to the publication of his second book, People of the Lie. He had a nondenominational baptism, and was discipled by a Roman Catholic nun. “I entered Christianity,” he said, “through Christian mysticism. I was a mystic before I was a Christian.”7 In People of the Lie he provides an account of his conversion: “After many years of vague identification with Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christian commitment….My commitment to Christianity is the most important thing in my life and is, I hope, pervasive and total.”8
WHY IS PECK SO POPULAR?
Peck wrote The Road Less Traveled at a propitious time. Whereas psychotherapy stood at a distance from the average person — wrapped in “scientific” jargon and devoid of a spiritual dimension — Peck offered solutions in a nonscientific and easy-reading style. He addressed the spiritual cravings of Americans who apparently were not being satisfied through the church or their culture.
Over the past few decades many Americans have sought after a spiritual meaning to life. In fact, one study revealed that 58 percent of adults in this country “feel the need to experience spiritual growth.”9 In keeping with this, 25 percent of the titles on the December 1994 New York Times Bestseller list were on spiritual matters,10 albeit primarily from a psychological rather than a theological perspective.11
People come to Peck with numerous debilitating emotions like fear, anger, loneliness, guilt, and grief. He offers them relief. As a matter of fact, Peck promises that “we can solve all problems” with total discipline.12
PECK’S INFLUENCE AMONG CHRISTIANS
Surprisingly, Peck and his writings have had a strong influence on many Christians.Contemporary Christian magazine said his book People of the Lie is “enthralling, frustrating, controversial, paradoxical, revolutionary — People of the Lie may well be one of the most significant new works in recent memory” (emphasis in original).13
Not only has Peck been praised in the media, he is also a frequent speaker in Christian churches, as well as in New Age meetings.14 Since cowriting The Less Traveled Road and the Bible15 I have discovered that various Christian schools use Peck’s books in classes and Christian counseling centers give them to counselees.
Christians have not been very discerning regarding Peck’s teachings. Simply because Peck uses Christian terminology, or offers some legitimate solutions, many Christians have embraced him and his books without reservation. Using that same criteria, however, Mormon material should be accepted because it has helpful information on the family. Likewise, Jehovah’s Witness literature should be accepted because it argues against materialistic evolution. Certainly as much discernment and caution should be exercised with Peck’s works as is used for cultic material.
WHAT HELP DOES PECK OFFER?
In Peck’s thinking every individual needs to develop mental health. People are at different stages of this development. Peck has labeled these identifiable stages this way: Stage 1, chaotic/antisocial; Stage 2, formal/institutional; Stage 3, skeptic/individual; and Stage 4, mystic/communal.16 He indicates that he has passed through the first three stages and is now in the final stage.17
Stage 1 comprises most young children and approximately one in five adults.18 Adults in this group are “people of the lie” who appear incapable of loving others and are thus antisocial.19
Stage 2 consists of individuals who conceive of God as “almost entirely that of an external, transcendent Being.”20 These people are barely better off than the criminals represented in Stage 1. They are fundamentalists/ inerrantists to Peck. They believe in a “Cop” in the sky who directs their lives. They need authority and they blindly follow the church.21
Stage 3 is composed of persons who are generally more spiritually developed than those content to remain in Stage 2.22 It is made up of atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and doubters. These men and women are active truth-seekers.23
Like Peck, people who have achieved stage 4 have graduated to the “mystic/communal stage of spiritual development.”24 Peck writes, “Mystics of every shade of religious belief have spoken of unity, of an underlying connectedness between things: between men and women, between us and the other creatures and even inanimate matter as well, a fitting together according to an ordinarily invisible fabric underlying the cosmos.”25 Here Peck reveals himself as a believer in the Eastern religious world view known as pantheistic monism: all is one and one is all; God is all and we are God.
For the Christian, however, salvation includes the forgiveness of sins, the gaining of power over sin in this life through the Holy Spirit, and an eternity with God apart from the presence of sin. Such a vision does not appear in Peck’s view of salvation. For him salvation is merely gaining mental health. In speaking of the need for the world to be saved, Peck says, “Demanding rules must both be learned and followed. But there are rules! Quite clear ones. Saving ones. They are not obscure. The purpose of [The Different Drum] is to teach these rules and encourage you to follow them…For that is how the world will be saved.”26 The rules Peck suggests may certainly be helpful in gaining some level of mental health or living one’s life productively, at least if interpreted in the context of a biblical world view. But they provide virtually no basis for eternal life or freedom from the guilt of sin. Let us now look at some of the ways in which Peck seeks to lead people toward “salvation” or mental health.

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