Photo Credit: https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Will_Byers

Every viewer had questions when Stranger Things began releasing its fifth and final season. I was no different; my questions were just odd. I had already reflected on the "theology" behind the show in the first four seasons. And I was anticipating what sorts of deeper value systems would come forward in this one. Having watched the first four episodes, here's one thing that most people might miss. (Spoiler alert: don't keep reading if you'd prefer to do your own analysis and haven't seen the show yet.)

Stranger Things went with Carl Rogers in the end.

Carl Rogers isn't a cast member. He was a twentieth-century humanistic psychologist. And the writers, whether consciously or not, went to Rogers to develop the character of Will Byers. Noticing this can help us ask and answer two critical questions as Christian media consumers: Where do ideas come from? And why do they matter? 

Let's start with Carl Rogers and then move to Will Byers. I'll end by pointing out the ongoing relevance of what theologians call hamartiology, the doctrine of sin.

Who Was Carl Rogers?

Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was a humanistic psychologist who was famous for several tenets of modern psychology. Humanistic psychology (largely represented by Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May) is a branch of psychology that emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a response to psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud) and behaviorism (B. F. Skinner). Freud focused on unconscious drives (often sexual), and behaviorists focused on external conditioning (positive and negative reinforcement). But humanistic psychologists drove attention back to the whole person and their capacity for growth. In that sense, it was more positive about human nature. Humanistic psychology highlighted subjective experience, our potential for growth and improvement, free will and authentic choice, and a holistic portrait of the person (accounting for emotions, values, relationships, and search for meaning, not merely symptoms or behaviors). 

One of Rogers's tenets was that clients should receive "unconditional positive regard" from their therapist. In other words, no matter what someone has been through, you affirm them; you validate them; you build them up. The problems they encounter are not inside themselves but outside themselves. As Morton Hunt writes, Rogers was a champion of the idea . . .

that everyone possesses inner resources for growth and self-healing and that the goal of therapy is not to change the client but to remove obstacles, such as poor self-image or the denial of feelings, to the client's use of these inner resources. The therapist does not guide clients toward a scientific ideal of mental health but helps them grow toward their own best selves. (Hunt, The Story of Psychology, 690).

Notice that buried beneath Rogers's call for unconditional positive regard was an understanding of who people are, an anthropology. He believed, as most humanists do, that people are basically good. The biblical counselor David Powlison both described and critiqued this view of humanity: 

“Rogers stood for man’s basic goodness, a rosy view of human nature that located the resources for change in the counselee; hence the characteristic therapy mode was the ‘mirror’ that revealed and drew out the good from within. . . . The Rogerian heresy, by numbing its believers to human sinfulness and the consequent need for the Christian salvation, took the counsel out of counseling.” (The Biblical Counseling Movement, 157)

"The Rogerian Heresy" is sharp language, but it was, from a Christian perspective, the only appropriate terminology. For Rogers, humans are basically good, and all the resources they need to grow in goodness are already hidden inside themselves. Thus, "look in the mirror" became a psychological mantra. And to the broader world, it doesn't sound all that bad. The single "Man in the Mirror," recorded by Michael Jackson in 1988, was a hit for a reason. People truly believed that looking in the mirror was what they needed to do to solve their problems. (Click here for more on a Christian approach to change.)

The Character of Will Byers

Now, what does this have to do with Stranger Things? In the fifth season (and also at the end of the fourth), the writers began exploring the depth of Will's character by looking at his sexuality (a very common route in a culture dominated by Freudianism). Will begins interacting more with Robin Buckley, who recently came out as a lesbian. I was ready for season five to lean heavily into the LGBTQ+ value system. But instead I was surprised.

When Robin gives Will advice on how to deal with his difficulties and his sense of isolation, she refers him back to childhood. She describes how all of her problems came from depending on other people to affirm who she was. But when she was a child, she didn't do that. She lived a pure, happy, care-free life. She didn't live under the weight of what other people thought of her. She just accepted who she was. In other words, she found that all the resources for goodness and change were already inside her. She simply needed to look in the mirror and forget about everyone else. That's Carl Rogers. It's also got a touch of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau argued for the idea of the "noble savage" (a person uncultured and thus unstained by Western civilization) and the purity and innocence of childhood. For Rousseau, pain and problems were introduced to people from society, from the outside. Inside, people were good and wholesome.

This Rogers-Rousseau blend is exactly what Will taps into at the end of the final episode released on Thanksgiving Day (Season 5, Episode 4). When faced with the crushing critique of Vecna, who claimed Will was weak and easy to break like the rest of the children in Hawkins, how does Will respond? He thinks of his childhood. He goes back to the memories of a pure and carefree life when he accepted who he was without question. He ruminates on his childhood innocence, when he knew he had all the resources for growth and goodness inside himself. Leaning fully on this, he rejects the cutting words of Vecna.

The message from Stranger Things (and Will, and Carl Rogers) is clear: Look inside yourself to save yourself.

And then boom: Will takes on Eleven's powers and saves his friends. He becomes a superhero. The message from Stranger Things (and Will, and Carl Rogers) is clear: Look inside yourself to save yourself.

The Heroes We Don't See

I liked that Will's character took a different route for development in this season than what I expected. But don't be tricked into thinking that Will Byers—pure and simple—saved his friends by "remembering who he was." Carl Rogers saved Will, and Robin, and the rest of the characters. It doesn't matter that most of them likely have no clue who Carl Rogers is. His theory seeped into the culture's water hole. And now it's on the big screen. Will Byers is the hero we see, but Rogers is the hero we don't see.

The "heroes" we don't see, hidden behind the characters in popular media, are always assuming an answer to a basic question: What do we need to be saved from? From the humanist standpoint, we need to be saved from external enemies or false ideas pressed into us from a corrupt society. Evil is outside of us. We need to be saved from Venca (external), or from the self-doubt or striving for peer affirmation (ideas imposed on us from the outside).

Harmartiology? 

Let me end by revisiting the question I introduced at the outset: where do ideas come from, and why do they matter? I've explained a bit about where the ideas come from in Will's character development. But why do they matter? Well, not everyone agrees that evil is an external enemy. David Powlison described Rogers's approach to humanity as "The Rogerian Heresy" because he knew it was fundamentally false. Evil is not just "out there." It's "in here." Evil is inside us, marbling the human heart, with its motives and desires and self-striving. This is what Christians have historically called hamartiology, the study of sin.

"Sin" is a dirty word in today's culture, far more offensive, it seems, than curse words. But perhaps the reason it's so offensive is that we have swallowed Rogers and Rousseau without a pause. If we truly believe in Rogers and Rousseau, then "sin" sounds like a heresy. It pushes against the entire Western world's assumption that evil is external.

But what if that assumption, though progressive and attractive, is false? What if evil is first and foremost an internal reality? That, in fact, was what Jesus taught. The ancient writer of Proverbs wrote, "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life" (Prov. 4:23). Yes, the springs of life, but also, it turns out, the muck and mire. Jesus sounds offensive to today's ears when he says,

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. (Mark 7:21–23)

He also says, "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks" (Luke 6:45). For Jesus, the heart is where evil lives. External evils and societal corruption are certainly out there, but where do they originate? The heart, the spiritual organ that Herman Bavinck called the center of our rational and volitional life (The Wonderful Works of God, 3). All that we think and all that we will comes from the heart. And humanity has a heart problem.

Once heart-born "sin" is removed from the vocabulary of what's wrong with us, all we have left are external causes of evil, and the self becomes sacrosanct.

Here's how David Powlison described our heart.

‘Heart’ is the most comprehensive biblical term for what determines our life direction, behavior, thoughts, etc. See Proverbs 4:23, Mark 7:21–23, Hebrews 4:12f, etc. The metaphor of ‘circumcision or uncircumcision of heart’ is similar to ‘idols of the heart,’ in that an external religious activity is employed to portray the inward motivational dynamics which the outward act reflects (“Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair,’” 36).

Inward motivational dynamics: the inner workings of our minds and desires—that's where evil is born, and it always pulls us in self-seeking and self-exalting directions. It's not coincidental that you hear constant repetitions of "self" in humanistic psychology. Once heart-born "sin" is removed from the vocabulary of what's wrong with us, all we have left are external causes of evil, and the self becomes sacrosanct.

Will Byers follows Robin's advice to discover his hero self. But what this whole portrayal leaves out is the most pressing question at the root of the Stranger Things series: Where does something so vehemently evil as Vecna come from? Where does evil originate? The answer is not "external forces." It's something deeper, buried under the humanistic psychologies at play on the surface. The answer is the self-seeking, self-exalting heart that drives the rest of human behavior. Without a Hero for the heart, we remain stuck in the upside-down.