Sin and the Stockholm Syndrome
Carol McClain
On Feb. 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. Two months later, authorities caught her robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco with her captors.
How did a young woman with no history of protests or rebellion, one who came from an affluent, conservative family suddenly become a bank robber?
A psychological issue defined as Stockholm syndrome is the answer. With a strange twist, sometimes a captive adopts the philosophy of the captor. According to the dailycal.org, (http://bit.ly/2KuwKyu), “Captives are also more susceptible to the influence of their abductors if they lack a sense of established cultural values.”
History demonstrated this many times.
And we’re seeing evidence of something akin to Stockholm syndrome in our society.
We’re skewing further from Biblical truth. Look at uncensored streaming TV–either Netflix or HBO, listen to the language. It used to be one four-letter word uttered caused us to blush. Now we hear a stream of it, not one S*, but five in a row. Nudity used to consist of decolletage, now it’s full-frontal. Fifty Shades of Grey became a best seller even though it was universally agreed it was poorly written. Mass shootings and bigotry rage. We’ve gone from celebrating drag queens to sex-changing and don’t view it as body dysphoria like anorexia or bulimia, but a true biological issue.
The Bible states in Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Sounds a lot like the fact from the dailcal quoted above.
We have to serve one master. If it’s God, we will adhere to His word. We will try to be good. Try to be moral. Just.
If we serve our flesh, then chaos reigns, and we can’t see the fallacy of our beliefs.
I posit, our world is suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Author Carol McClain
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