Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Strong Religious Belief: Sick or Healthy?
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
July, 2004The psychological world once listed “strong religious belief” in its official diagnostic manual. It was removed from the list of diseases in the early 1990s.
With contemporary neurological researchers and St. Paul, I wonder about that decision. Some religious attitudes and beliefs may have little to do with health.
Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili, medical doctors, have done neurological research into spiritual experience and brain functioning. They reported their findings in Why God Won’t Go Away (Ballantine Books, 2002).
Not themselves religious people, they were surprised to discover physical evidence that our brains work differently, in some senses better, when we engage in spiritual activity. They ask the question science itself cannot answer, whether we are in some sense made for communion with the divine.
Along the way, the authors review the physical health benefits of spiritual practice. They are not shy about the differences, overall, in everything from marital happiness to longevity in those who walk the road less traveled.
So far, so good. As a professional in the religious world, I find it reassuring to know that there is evidence that what I try to help people find is in every sense good for them.
I have nonetheless always been troubled by extremists, people whose “strong religious belief” puts chips on their shoulders that can make them, sadly, everything from pests to terrorists. It is not easily forgotten that the perpetrators of 9/11 died with religious language on their lips.
Newberg and d’Aquili take this question up in trying to separate genuinely mystical from delusional experience. They provide an interesting secular test to distinguish between healthy spiritual experience and something unhealthy, even psychotic.
They find people whose religious experience is healthy to be characterized by joy, serenity, and wholeness, by “loss of pride and ego, a quieting of the mind, and an emptying of the self.” Those whose religion tends toward the delusional, however, are marked by fearfulness, isolation from others, “grandiosity and egotistical importance.”
The authors were looking for psychological, not theological, criteria, but there was for me an overwhelming shock of recognition when I read their words. When Saint Paul wrote to the embattled community of believers in Galatia two millennia ago he made a similar point.
Paul’s contrast was “flesh,” the baseness that leads to chaos and destruction, versus “spirit,” life in communion with God the redeemer. After observing that morality is summed up in “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Paul came up with a test to let people know which force was governing their lives. His test was practical not doctrinal.
He lists fifteen symptoms of unspiritual living, and includes our doctors’ list as he mentions “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions.” Among his list of indicators of spiritual living: “joy, peace, patience, kindness… gentleness, and self-control.” The choice to live the spiritual life, Paul concludes, is a daily battle and choice to put the base urges to death.
If one’s religion tends to lead to or reinforce one feelings of superiority, arrogance, hostility fighting, and so on, both the apostle and the psychologist (for perhaps different reasons) think something is wrong.
All religions I know about have divisions and disagreements, just as points of view differ in science, law, and in every walk of life. Religious people are caught in a double bind, however: disagreements that include swaggering, demonizing of others, and a inner state of turmoil just are not spiritual, and, if the doctors are right, could indicate something much worse.
When it leads from peace and joy toward discord and kingdom-building, “strong religious belief” may itself be very sick indeed.
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