I saw this pattern in my fourteen years as a jail chaplain. The inmates would invariably be overly religious, highly moralistic, and excessively legalistic (believe it or not!), and many overly intellectualized everything. They would do anything to try to compensate for their dashed, maybe never developed, but publicly humiliated criminal self. Here I was the Catholic chaplain, and the last thing I sometimes trusted was a lot of “religious” language and Jesus talk. Again, it was a regressive restoration of a failed first half of life. It seldom works long term.
