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Back to School, America!

Back to School, America!

Last updated on: September 18, 2026 at 2:40 pm by John Gravino

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Back to School, America! 2026-09-18T14:40:23-04:00 John Gravino

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Back to School, America

September marks the beginning of a new school year and a new college football season. These traditional American institutions may seem to share very little in common except for their start date. But there is another commonality. Those who take these enterprises seriously tend to be focused on success. Not enjoyment. Not pleasure. Not leisure. Success.

Nick Saban on Success

Nick Saban is the former head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. He is also one of the most successful college football coaches of all time. Since his retirement from coaching, he has become a visible television fixture on football-themed talk shows and commercials. His unparalleled success as a football coach has also made him a popular motivational speaker. And a recurring theme of his lectures is—you guessed it—“how to be successful.”

Psychological Dispositions

In one of these talks, which I came across on social media, Saban compared football to the medical field. He observed that everyone who gets into medical school is smart. But despite this fact, not everyone graduates successfully. Furthermore, of the ones who graduate and go on to become doctors, not all of them become good doctors.

Saban concludes that the same is true for football and for all of life. Talent, desire, potential. These are not enough to guarantee success in medicine, football, or in life. Something more is needed. And that extra ingredient is interior in nature. Saban called it a “psychological disposition” that keeps a person focused on a goal, and resilient in the face of setbacks, etc.

The Happiness Advantage

Saban’s wisdom is drawn from years of practical experience as a football coach. What Saban learned from the gridiron, researchers have been discovering in the lab. Shawn Achor is a Harvard psychologist and the author of The Happiness Advantage. His book was turned into one of the most popular TED talks of all time. In his book, he stands certain commonsense wisdom on its head: success does not lead to happiness as much as happiness leads to success.

Success does not lead to happiness as much as happiness leads to success.

Achor’s academic research posits the same lesson as Saban’s gridiron wisdom, namely, that success in life depends on positive interior psychological dispositions. In fact, Achor’s book is part of a new and growing branch of psychology known as “positive psychology”—positive psychological attributes like happiness, optimism, and discipline are the key to a fulfilling human life.

Positive Psychology—A Checkered Past

The trick to this new and burgeoning field of psychology is figuring out how to actually cultivate a positive interior life. How can I cultivate happiness and optimism if I don’t know where they come from? If happiness doesn’t come from success, as Achor argues, where does happiness actually come from? Early psychological theories, influenced by Freud, argued for greater personal freedom to satisfy basic instinctual drives for sex and aggression. It was thought that the repression of these drives was responsible for a great deal of misery and unhappiness and also a principal source of mental illness.

The early pioneers of positive psychology like Carl Rogers were influenced by Freud’s views. During the sixties and seventies, Rogers’s “encounter groups” tended to encourage sexual relationships among the group members. As I documented in my book Confronting the Pope of Suspicion, these encounter groups wreaked havoc on the Catholic Church’s religious orders: far from creating meaningful and ordered human lives, this early experiment with “positive psychology” introduced the most abhorrent levels of moral degeneracy into the Church. Yes, I’m talking about the clergy sexual abuse scandal. (See John Zmirak’s excellent discussion of my book in the latest edition of Chronicles Magazine.)

Marcia Angell

Positive psychology got off to a rocky start, to be sure. But, as Marcia Angell observed in the New York Review of Books, the entire history of 20th century psychology shows that the so-called experts of the mental health sciences are at a complete loss as to how to cultivate a positive psychology. Angell is a long-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School and the former Editor-In-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Here is an excerpt of her brief history of psychotherapy. It is a tale of abysmal failure:

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created. . . .

The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.

What is going on here? . . . [W]hat about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?

“Shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?”

Angell’s provocative question should be tattooed on everyone’s forehead. If the mental health “experts” really knew what they were doing, then, indeed, we would expect mental health to be improving. But countless studies reveal that this is not the case. In Angell’s words, “Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness.”

“Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness”

The Science of Spirituality

Fortunately, positive psychology is evolving. And they are getting smarter about how to cultivate a clear mind. If you’ve been a visitor to my Soul Science blog, or if you are familiar with my books and articles, then you know that I have written extensively on the research linking mental health benefits to religious practice. The positive psychology movement is embracing this research and promoting religion as an antidote to the ravages of psychological dysfunction. You can see this trend among a number of positive psychology researchers. And that includes Happiness Advantage author, Shawn Achor.

How to Succeed in School, Football, and Life

Perhaps the best thing you can give your kids, then, is some of that old-fashioned religion. There may be no substitute. Indeed, I argued in The Immoral Landscape… that the skyrocketing rates of mental illness in our culture serve as very strong evidence that secularism has failed to discover a substitute for Christianity. The mind responds positively to religion, but negatively to the abandonment of religion. Does this suggest that the mind possesses a spiritual dimension? Are we discovering evidence for the existence of the human soul? That was the argument I advanced in The Immoral Landscape….

And I predicted in that book that, because of the reality of the human soul, the advancement of secularism would lead ineluctably to a darkening of the human mind—and ultimately, to the sunset of civilization. Next time, I will confront our contemporary dark ages by discussing Lindsay Clancy and the new “assassination culture.”

Sports and Religion

Education and Religion

Confronting the Pope of Suspicion—the book

Mental Health

Soul Science

The Immoral Landscape of the New Atheism—the book

Positive Psychology

About John Gravino

John Gravino is the author of The Immoral Landscape of the New Atheism, which was the topic of a health and spirituality seminar at Duke Medical School. He continues to explore the intersection of health and religion and the other big questions of life right here at Patheos. You can read more about the author here.

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