Therapeutic Religiosity & True Christianity
A self-study in bouncing back when times are impossible.
When I was a student studying Social Work, two major themes emerged among my subjects (most of which I had a general direction I could choose to study): the first was the effect of religiosity on resilience, and the other is the work of resilience in general.
In undergraduate studies I became enamored with the work of Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and witness and survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. He wrote one of the classics written by Holocaust survivors, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Obviously many of the persons who ended up in Nazi concentration camps in Europe were religious persons: Jews, Christians, and other religious groups. Frankl conducted a qualitative study while in the camps. The question he sought to answer was, “what makes a person more or less likely to survive the horrors of human cruelty?”
The interesting thing he found was that simply having a reason to keep going was enough to help people endure almost anything. Sometimes the reasons they had before them were utterly incoherent: their spouse who had died in another camp would be reunited with them soon, in person. So long as they had a strong sense that these “reasons” were real, these persons didn’t simply survive, they overcame the difficulties of the Nazi cruelties.
I found much the same thing, crawling through scientific studies evaluating whether religious belief had any correlation with mental wellness and recovery from trauma. Some of the religious beliefs of persons queried were religions whose tenets that, as a pastor, I have no problem dismissing as objectively false: Jehovah’s Witnessess, Mormons, Roman Catholics.
Nonetheless having a religious belief which is not merely in the mind, but which is an integral part of one’s life, across the board, positively impacts mental wellness in most all the studies.
Today, while I did some work to set up a camp site, I listened to Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Holocaust survivor, explain her journey toward forgiveness of the person who exposed her work hiding an protecting Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She described the incredible difficulty which the camps had on her, it leading to the death of several family members, but and how this made her unable to remit the offense of a neighbor who conned her out of ƒ600 guilders while sending her and her kin to prison.
Her source of remission, first within herself, was the right to withhold the guilt of this horrible man. She asked the Lord to give her the power to forgive, and felt the release of the inability to forgive within herself. She wrote the man a letter after the war, while he sat on death row, awaiting execution for this crime.
She told the man she forgave him, that there was the possibility that he could be forgiven not just by Corrie Ten Boom, a woman greatly wronged by him, but by God. She reminded him to come to Jesus, to remember the promise, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (rooms). The man wrote back stating that if Corrie could forgive him of that crime, then Christ could forgive him of this great evil.
San Francisco / Haight-Ashbury was eye opening for a couple of reasons. First, the premature victory dance of Secularization and Humanism was already starting to chill out there. Everyone there had a spirituality or a religious-ish belief to address the sort of thing I talked about at the start. They need something for resilience, something for healing, something for wellbeing. But the appeal of the path of Jesus Christ is that is it positively NOT what Marx said about religion: that it’s an “opiate of the masses.”
Like Corrie’s inability to forgive until it was granted from outside of herself by the Lord Jesus Christ, I imagine people are going to get more religious-ish (not necessarily acknowledging that their beliefs or practices are spiritual), but existentially therapeutic, but it will simply be a pill that dulls the pain or merely helps one get through it.
We who are truly Christ’s serve a supernatural God.
We are not a therapy group.
We do not do what we do to feel better, or to get some inner peace.
Any religion, or strongly held belief can accomplish this: I saw it in San Francisco, city of a million individualized “religions.”
We who live for nothing but Jesus do what we do because the historical accomplishments of our Master are so important that they affect the minutiae (smallest details) of those who submit to him in the now, in the near to now, and in the eternal forever. [This is also the case for those who don’t follow or believe in Jesus, but we simply categorize that as blindness.]
Oh, and our Master’s a better therapist than everything on the planet.