Maslow's Pyramid

When I arrived in London, and learned about urban mission, one the chief influences on the scene, taught to me as a key for our task in the inner city, was Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. There are, he taught, a series of needs, which must be met, for a person to progress in their life.

It begins with basic physical survival, and progresses through safety and material security; love, relationships and belonging; self-esteem and recognition; to self-actualisation and creativity. Only when someone feels secure at a lower level, can they turn their attention to the upper levels.

Self-actualisation, the search for transcendence, is therefore a matter only the materially secure can attend to. The approach suggested a strategy for mission, which stressed social action, as preliminary to verbal proclamation of the gospel.

As such, it chimed perfectly with the emphases of Liberation Theology; and expressed our feeling that the Kingdom of God was about political transformation, besides spiritual conversion. It meant that our evangelising (‘good-news-ing’) was conceived in terms of ‘Good News for the Poor’.

This was an important lesson for those of us who came from outside the inner city, encouraging us to identify with, and work alongside those we served. It led me, for instance, as a youth worker, to set up a Tenants’ Association on the local estate, working for tangible benefits for residents.

Maslow’s philosophy rested on a faulty assumption however. Drawing on Existentialism, he saw religion as dealing with ideas, doctrines, and concepts. Clearly this rested at the top of his pyramid, and was necessarily out of reach for those without leisure time to conceptualise.

This, however, owed much to a European mode of religion: Maslow’s own Jewishness, and North American Protestantism, in whose image US Judaism was remade. Here, faith became intellectualised. So that Maslow’s theory was a humanistic secularisation of Hebrew mysticism, which ignored the reality of God, as himself an active agent.

Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism remained immune to these modernist currents, expressing the more affective aspects of communal worship and spirituality. Only where Catholicism itself adopted the same rationalistic impetus did it lose out. Hence, the saying that: while the Catholics chose the poor, the poor chose the Pentecostals”.

Faith is not solely a human invention, but a response. For God operates, intervenes, actively, at all levels of Maslow’s pyramid. Far from predictions of secularisation, the later twentieth Century saw a revival of religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

It was the poor, for example, who learned how to pray, precisely for their immediate needs, at the lower end of Maslow’s pyramid. God is present, and meets our needs, at every level. This is his Kingdom breaking into our reality.

Etymologically, we see this in the concept of ‘precarity’, developed by Franco Berardi and Guy Standing, to describe the precarious situation of the new poor in the West. This word derives from the Latin for ‘prayer’ – precatio. It’s the poor who know how to pray, because they need to.