Is the Christopher West Controversy Primarily a Misunderstanding Between Personalities?

A few years ago Christopher West came under some fire for going on ABC news and comparing Pope John Paul II with Hugh Hefner.  Here is the news story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Sex/story?id=7527380&page=1

Now this version of the interview may be easy to take out of context, but if you watch Christopher West's videos he makes no secret of his comparison between Pope John Paul II and Hugh Hefner.  He had been talking about that for quite awhile before the ABC interview.  Why was there no outrage beforehand?  I have always thought the criticism of the JPII-Hugh Hefner comparison was unfounded.  If you listen to it he is not glorifying Hefner in any way.  He is simply trying to make a deeper point.  I could not understand why people gave him such a hard time.  Are there things you could find to legitimately critize about Christopher West's work?  Yeah, sure he is human and he makes mistakes, but I am pretty confident his heart is in the right place.  At least I have no reason to believe it is not.

Last night I had a flash of insight that I think may shed some light on the matter.  I suspect this controversy is in many ways a personality conflict.  I think it is almost certainly an iNtuitor-Sensor misunderstanding and and for many people it may be a Thinker-Feeler misunderstanding.

For More info on iNtuitors and Sensors see this link
http://www.hillinghypnotherapy.co.uk/personality-test-online/personality-testing-explained/sensor-and-intuitor-what-is-the-difference/ 

For more information on thinkers and feelers I suggest this link
http://www.hillinghypnotherapy.co.uk/personality-test-online/personality-testing-explained/thinkers-and-feelers-what-is-the-difference/ 

First let's look at Christopher West  (I suggest you take what follows with a grain of salt, I am often wrong about this stuff. ).  I am guessing he is an iNtuitor, (N) type.  All of his work deals with finding connections between things.  For instance the connection between Theology and the Body and the Scripture.  He is a fairly abstract thinker and is very comfortable dealing with patterns and relationships between things.  My guess is he is probably also a Thinker.  He seems pretty detached from his work to me.  He takes it seriously but he looks at it from a distance and he is full of new ideas.  He is probably a judger because he is all about finding order, and he is probably an extrovert because he is on a mission to evangelize the world.  I would go so far to hazard that he might be ENTJ like myself.  The reason I think this is the following.  Faith is a very personal thing.  It is not something I liked talking about for most of my life.  I think this is because I am ENTJ.  Introverted Feeling is the ENTJ's weakest cognitive function.  This means we ENTJs almost do not have feeling functions.  If weaker functions get stronger as you age I expect I will naturally understand emotions when I am about 40 or 50.  They say ENTJs have strong deep sentimental streaks that no one knows about and they do not talk about.  I think this is true.  ENTJs in general are reported to be not comfortable talking about emotions and I can say for myself this is true.  If you watch Christopher West he usually seems almost in pain as he talks about the Theology of the Body.  I think this may be really uncomfortable for him.  If he were an NF he would probably be very familiar with dealing with things that have no logical explanation.  In a sense he is really going out on a limb and bearing his soul to the world.  If he were an NF I think he would be smiling and not flinch talking about emotions.  He is not like this.  He seems too analytical to me.  (Now I want to personality test him to see if I know what I am talking about :-) )

Anyways most people in the world are Sensors (S).  Sensors tend to like more concrete straighforward things.  They tend not to pickup on connections and relationships between things as well.  I suspect most people who saw the ABC interview were Sensors and just heard the words Pope JPII and Hugh Hefner in the same sentence and didn't like the sound of it.  They probably did not understand the connections and relationships that West was trying to present.  This may seem odd to some people.  Especially if you are N, but part of the reason I came up with this is that I noticed it in some people I know.  N-S differences are considered the biggest difference between people.  I can now totally see how this could happen.

I would not be suprised if Alice Von Hildbrand, one of West's most outspoken critics is also S.  Here is an interview with Alice. 



In the interview she is always citing other people's authority.  Mostly her husband.  I hazard to guess she is SJ.  Probably a feeler as well just because women tend more often to be feelers.  She uses alot of very flowery language which seems very F-like.  SJ types tend to want to uphold the status quo.  The Theology of the Body in many ways pretty radical so it is not surprising that SJ's might react negatively to it the first time they hear it.  I want to personality test her too to check my hypothesis out.  The gift of the SJ philosophy is that it has a stabilizing effect on society.  As time goes on I suspect SJ types will warm to the ideas.

So why didn't we see much criticism of West before the ABC interview?  My guess is that most people who were exposed to West's thinking were in college.  They probably heard it at a Theology on Tap or something like that.  College culture is very N-like.  It would probably be very open to new ideas like west.  Also, in my experience there are alot of NFs in Catholic circles.  For instance the usually rare INFJ seems to be everywhere in Catholic young adult groups.  It seems pretty common to me for the leaders of these groups to be ENFJ.  My guess is the culture in colleges was such that all the S types figured that was the status quo and they rolled with it.

As far as the thinker-feeler misunderstanding goes I think it is pretty simple.  Feelers tend to put themselves into the situations that are dealing with.  They empathize with things.   Many of them probably associate negative feelings with Hefner and positive feelings with JPII.  They probably do not like their positive feeling being corrupted by negative ones.  Some feelers literally seem to feel pain if something is mentioned that evoked a bad feeling in them.  Thinkers do not do this.  They just look at this detachedly.  Some of the criticisms I hear of the JPII - Hefner comparison seem very feeler-based to me.  People will make very emotionally charged remarks concerning mentioning JPII and Hefner in the same sentence.  Not that being a feeler is bad or anything.  It is just a different way of dealing with the world.

I could be wrong, but this is what I think.  I would be curious to know what others think about this.