Brit Hume, Tiger Woods and Why the Powerful Behave Badly

Nothing that Brit Hume said in his long and distinguished career as a newsman has come close to stirring up as much response as his recent evaluation of the religious needs of Tiger Woods.

In case you missed it, Hume, in his newer role of Fox News analyst, offered some advice to the multiple philanderer Tiger Woods:

"He's said to be a Buddhist; I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.' "

Turns out that there's some recent research indicating that Brit Hume may be objectively correct with that advice. Not necessarily about Christianity, mind you. But there's new evidence that pretty much any religion might offer powerful people a specific buffer against behaving badly.

Leave aside the silly argument about whether Hume "should" have said what he did. The man is paid for his opinions these days, so he's journalistically justified in weighing in on anything that moves him. He thinks Christianity is good for Tiger? As fair game as whether he thinks health care reform is a polticial minus for President Obama. (Plus, Politics Daily's Carl Cannon has already covered that ground in detail, along with some personal thoughts about Hume. Ditto on the "should-he-have-said-that" theme from Ross Douthat in the NYTimes. And from Michael Gerson in the Washington Post.)

I find it much more interesting to consider the several related positions that his statement implied:

1) Christianity is true in an absolute, eternal sense. (And Buddhism, therefore, is not.)
2) Christianity does a better job of providing transcendent forgiveness and redemption that other religions. (See No. 1.)
3) What Tiger Woods needs to get his life back together is forgiveness and redemption.
4) Christianity offers the best religious framework to help Woods hold his life together once he recovers his equilibrium.

I'll leave the discussion of No. 1 to others, since that's not an issue to be settled this side of the Great Perhaps. (Although I will note that Ann Coulter, of all people, offers an unusually readable linkage of Nos. 1 and 2 on my list.)

Where I want to take issue with Brit Hume is over whether there's evidence that Christianity is, per se, what Tiger Woods needs -- compared with other faiths. And whether there is evidence that the Christian message offers a uniquely effective system for staying out of trouble, compared with other religions.

I've met and interviewed people belonging to dozens of religions, sects and sub-sects. In every single case, I found people who claimed that their particular faith has helped them out of profound trouble and provided them with an understanding of the Meaning of Life that enabled them to better deal with the vicissitudes of the day.

If that were not so, how would any religion survive more than a few years? We are meaning-seeking critters, and religion is one of the most enduring ways that humanity has devised to discover meaning. There are believers in every faith who have fallen like Woods and then recovered -- they say -- because of their religion. The specific methods differ with the distinctives of the faith.

I'll oversimplify to make my point, since every religion has important nuances that can't be easily summarized. But here goes:

Judaism focuses on constant self-improvement. God's will is expressed by the Torah and Talmud. Every person is born with an inclination to do good and an inclination to do evil, and the tension never stops. Forgiveness -- both human and divine -- is linked to repentance and restitution.

Islam is similar to Judaism in this regard. Submission to the will of Allah is the goal of the faithful, and Islamic law is filled with specific ways for a Muslim to align himself or herself with that will. Allah is forgiving in certain specific situations. And so was his prophet, Muhammad, who offered examples for how to do likewise.

Buddhism offers a very different approach, with no personal deity. The world as we experience it is in some sense an illusion. Attachment to that illusion leads us into wrong actions. Karma guarantees that what goes around comes around. And we have many lifetimes to pay for the evils we do. Extending forgiveness is one way to release yourself from improper attachments.

Christianity, particularly the branch that Hume represents, posits that the world and all in it are fallen away, because of sin, from the love of God. Only God's grace -- and nothing else -- offers an alternative to eternal torment in Hell. Accepting Christ as Savior is the ticket to Heaven and to perfect, immediate forgiveness. But that acceptance should also be reflected in behaviors that demonstrate one's authentic alignment with God.

And so on, through Hindism, Jainisn, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Brahma Kumaris, etc., etc., etc.

In every case, the religion offers a definition for moral behavior, a guide for how to act properly, and an explanation for what to do when one fails. Are there saints to be found among putative followers of every major faith? I think so. Are there spectacular moral failures to be found likewise? Of course.

Which one would be best for Tiger Woods? Leaving aside that pesky question of Absolute Truth, there are horses for courses. Maybe Buddhism fits him best. Or maybe Christianity. But then there's that new research I mentioned that offers a hint of an explanation about why a powerful person like Woods might benefit from pretty much any religion.

A new paper in the journal Psychological Science has the title "Power Increases Hypocrisy -- Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior." The researchers are Joris Lammers and Diederik Stapel, social psychology professors at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Adam Galinsky, professor of ethics and decision in management at Northwestern University.

Standard caveat: It's a report on psychology experiments performed on a few hundred Dutch college kids. So I'm hardly justified in drawing definitive conclusions about all of humankind. But the results are interesting enough for speculation. (As an aside, is there a more studied population in the world than undergraduate psych students?)

The researchers primed the students to consider themselves either relatively powerful or not. And then posed moral and ethical questions about taxes, traffic laws and theft. How did they feel about others doing those things? How did they feel about doing those things themselves?

The bottom line:

"Across these experiments, the powerful judged their own transgressions more acceptable but the same transgressions committed by others less acceptable, compared to low-power participants."

So who thinks of themselves as powerful in our society? Politicians. And athletes born and raised for victory. Business leaders. Does this offer some explanation for why so many highly visible men with so much to lose get caught unzipped? Particularly those who have a public identity that would indicate that they ought to know better? Maybe power nudges them to be more likely to judge themselves according to a lesser standard than they apply to the rest of the world.

What's that got to do with religion? Here's another bit of the report, about the role of entitlement:

"Only when power is experienced as legitimate, earned and entitled is moral hypocrisy a likely result. If power is not experienced as such, then the moral hypocrisy effect disappears."

One element common to every major religion I know of is a perspective that individual humans are not so much. Whether the faith compares us to God, Jesus, the Wheel of Karma, or any other transfinite universal, we come out smaller by comparison. Not that a formal faith is necessary to create the effect. Charles Schultz captured the idea in one of his "Peanuts" comic strips. Charlie Brown and his sister, Sally, are outside looking at the stars.

"Let's go inside and watch television," Charlie Brown says. "I'm beginning to feel insignificant."

So maybe that's the kernel of truth inside Brit Hume's advice to Tiger Woods, no matter which theology he chooses. A truly religious man might gain enough perspective about his own status that he'll not consider himself so powerful. Or maybe he'll come to view whatever power he has as undeserved -- granted for reasons unknown from Authority unfathomed.

If so, maybe next time he'll be less likely to give himself a pass when confronted by a moral challenge. But probably not.