Mental health expert details 10 thought patterns that trip up former Christians
Perhaps it's been years or even decades since you left biblical Christianity behind. You may have noticed long ago that there are human handprints all over the Good Book. It may have dawned on you that popular Christian versions of heaven would actually be hellish. You may have figured out that prayer works, if at all, at the margins of statistical significance—that Believers don't avoid illness or live longer than people who pray to other gods or none at all. You may have clued in that Christian morality isn't so hot and that other people have moral values too. (Shocking!) You may have decided that the God of the Bible is a jerk—or worse.
But some habits of thought are hard to break. It is a lot easier to shed the contents of Christian fundamentalism than its psychological structure.
Here are ten mental patterns that trip up many ex-Christians even when we think we've done the work of moving on. None of these are unique to former Christians, but they are reinforced by Bible-belief and Christian culture, which can make them particularly challenging for recovering believers.
- All or nothing thinking. In traditional Christian teachings, no sin is too small to send you to hell forever. You're either saved or damned, headed for unthinkable bliss or unthinkable torment, with nothing in between. Jesus saves only because he was perfect. Moderate Christians are "lukewarm."This kind of dichotomous black-and-white thinking seeps into us directly from Bible-believing Christianity and indirectly from cultures that are steeped in Protestantism...
- Good guys and bad guys. One consequence of black-white thinking is that we put people into two mental boxes—good guys and bad guys. You are either with us or against us, a patriot or a socialist, an anti-racist or a racist, one of us or one of them. Disagreement becomes synonymous with schism and heresy. When we discover the personal failings of a public figure like Bill Gates, we may move them from one box to the other, good guy to bad guy. Christianity offers no mental model in which people are complicated and imperfect but basically decent—we are just fallen ("utterly depraved" in the words of Calvin) and either washed in the blood or tools of Satan.
- Never feeling good enough. Since we are acutely aware of our own failings, it can be hard internally to stay out of the bad-guy box. Some of us toggle between "I'm awesome" and "I suck." Others have a nagging internal critic that tells us nothing we do is ever quite good enough. After all, it isn't perfect, and that's the biblical standard.
- Hyperactive guilt detection. Biblical Christianity gives tremendous moral weight to all of this, and the practice of "confessing our sins one to another" turns believers into guilt-muscle body builders. We live in a world of shoulds and should-nots, and in the Protestant ethic, those daily failings are moral failings. A nagging sense of guilt can become baseline normal, with little bursts of extra guilt as we notice one thing or another that we have left undone or goals where we have fallen short.
- Sexual hangups. For many former Christians, particularly for women or queer people but also straight guys who like sex, it's impossible to talk about guilt without talking about sex, because sexual sins are the worst of the worst. When it comes to the Bible, getting and giving sexual pleasure are more matters of temptation than of intimacy and delight. Idolatry and murder share the top 10 list with coveting your neighbor's wife. Then there's virgin-madonna-whore trifecta. And don't forget God hates fags.
- Living for the future. Sexual intimacy isn't the only kind of pleasure that biblical Christianity devalues; the consecrated life focuses broadly on the future rather than the moment. The small every-day wonders that comprise the center of joy in mindful living are mere distractions for a person who has their eye on the prize of heaven. As former believers grow convinced that each person gets one precious life, those individual moments can become treasures. But the habit of focusing on the future can make it really hard to center in the moment, breathe in, and bask in the ordinary beauties and delights around us.
- Bracing for an apocalypse. Even worse than being drawn by the lure of heaven is being braced constantly for some impending apocalypse. We may no longer expect a Rapture or the Mark of the Beast or Jesus riding in on a horse. But the idea of a cataclysmic disruption in history looms large nonetheless. A sense of nuclear doom or pandemic doom or overpopulation doom or underpopulation doom may nudge us to action or be paralyzing. Either way, the experience is very different from being driven by a sense of curiosity and discovery as we face the unknown.
- Idealizing leaders. Living in a cloud of anxiety makes us more susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians, people who exude confidence we lack, who convey that they know what's right and true and how to solve problems. They prey on our fears and on our desire to do good and be good. They prey on our sense of ourselves as sinners and tell us how to atone. (Sound familiar?) They prey on dichotomous thinking, reinforcing our sense that people who don't share our worldview must be evil and so must be silenced or defeated.
- Desperately seeking simplicity. Biblical Christianity tells a story about us as individuals and about human history that is clear and simple. Multi-dimensional causality? Moral ambiguity? Conflicts with no good side and bad side—just sides? Problems with no right answer? Blurry boundaries between human beings and other sentient species? No thanks! Fiction from Western cultures often mirrors and reinforces older Christian templates and tropes and specific types of oversimplification. And it's all to easy to project these in turn onto the hard-to-parse and hard-to-solve challenges of the real world. We know deep down that things aren't so simple, but it's easy to act as if we live in a world of saints and sinners, elves and orcs.
- Intrusive what-ifs. And so we struggle, with new and old interpretations of reality and thought habits competing in our brains. We tell ourselves it's ok; that we're ok. But often nagging doubts persist. What if I'm wrong? Many years ago I told a therapist that I didn't believe in the Christian god anymore, but I didn't talk to anyone about it because I didn't want to take them to hell with me. He laughed and I laughed at myself, but it also felt very real.The journey out is . . . a journey. Along the way people second guess themselves, especially if Bible-belief got inside when they were young. Years after quitting a former smoker may crave a cigarette. That doesn't mean they were wrong to quit. It just means those synaptic connections got hardwired, soldered in place, and some of them are still there.
The Star Trek Next Generation TV series had it right about the Borg. They represented members of abusive cults. The characters Seven-of-nine and captain Picard who were both once assimilated by the Borg, could never completely shake off their programming. There were both permanently mentally damaged by their experience.
ReplyDeleteThere were episodes dedicated to the Borg drones. The writers did their homework or were former cult members themselves.
There are plenty of Christians who've noticed that human fingerprints are all over the Bible, that some notions about heaven/the kingdom are illogical and would represent an awful existence, that prayers often aren't answered in the affirmative and that some of the Biblical characterizations of God are inconsistent with a loving/compassionate being. Some of us also appreciate the fact that two-dimensional or black and white thinking is flawed/illogical/too simplistic and have acknowledged the importance of nuance. Many Christians have also learned to live in the moment, appreciate this life and avoid being preoccupied with the future. Many of us do not think of nonbelievers as bad people and have learned the lessons of patience, tolerance and good will. Indeed, these characteristics are not unique to nonbelievers.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, like Christians, nonbelievers are also subject to illogical thinking, biases, prejudices and intolerance. Some nonbelievers find it impossible to imagine the presence of Divine fingerprints on the Scriptures. Unfortunately, too many nonbelievers are also subject to that all or nothing thinking which is so prevalent among some segments of the Christian community! They believe the presence of errors, inconsistencies and contradictions dictates that we chuck the whole thing - that the presence of those things discredits and renders useless the whole. Faith does not equal ignorance, and its absence does not equal brilliance. Indeed, we all have many questionable notions which appear to be hardwired into our reasoning process and which many of us are completely oblivious to; but both believers and nonbelievers must strive to overcome this faulty wiring.
Lonnie
ReplyDelete"He who is convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." (author unknown)
Former christian? An oxymoron? I'll bet a plugged nickel that chances are 99.999999999 out of 100 that what the "former christian" left was not christian.
ReplyDeleteThe Bible warned us about this mindset in hundreds of verses. For example:
ReplyDelete“The deaths of my mother, brother and daughter should make all too clear the need for Christ to others that proclaim atheism. But those who would follow my mother continue to fight against God and His authority. “Fools make a mock at sin… ” Prov. 14:8
My mother was not just Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist leader. She was an evil person who led many to hell. That is hard for me to say about my own mother but it is true.
When I was a young boy of ten or eleven years old she would come home and brag about spending the day in X-rated movie theaters in downtown Baltimore. She was proud of the fact she was the only woman in the movie house watching this filth. My mother’s whole life circulated around such things. She even wrote articles for Larry Flynt’s pornographic magazine, Hustler. My mother lived in spiritual death as Paul writes: “But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” I Timothy 5:6:”— quoted from religious freedom coalition.
It would be enlightening if one would read the whole article on their site. And, if you haven’t read his book My Life Without God, you should. The inside works of an atheist evidently isn’t pretty.
Lastly, I wonder if these 10 apply to you Dennis since you are a former Christian? To me those 10 are just false opinion by those looking for excuses.
And, do you really want to lead people into that kind of a mindset?
Lonnie, as an unbeliever myself, I thank you for your balanced view about belief and unbelief.
ReplyDeleteMiller,
ReplyDeleteThese principles do apply equally to Christians and Former Believers. The practicing Christians that it seems they apply to as well are the more fundamentalist and literalist types such as we all encountered in WCG and now in the splinters that drop in here. None of these carry overs would have applied to my own growing up Presbyterian as most mainstream Christian Churches that actually base their beliefs on the NT don't think like this anyway. They are more live and let live, come let us reason together to begin with. They don't claim to be the "one true Church" and prophecy is a long ago shelved topic. So, to me , these hangovers can apply to not just those that have left the faith based approach completely but also to those who have started out in the more WCG type , "soon", "shortly" and "behold I come quickly" mistakes in prophecy as well as trying to figure out what both Church Government is, with conflicts galore over that and which laws are God's current laws?
In short, these tendencies are the fruits of over zealous , piously convicted types who base it all on emotions and marginal information they they simply don't want to consider might not be all there is to know and would threaten their one true faith.
Ignorance is not just what you don't know. It's also what you won't know.
And let us not forget about being in the "gun lap"
DeleteJoe Tkach took WCG down ten notches from the overly zealous pretty much to the Presbyterian mode of who cares about all that stuff. I don't think GCI can be considered a splinter because it destroyed any vestige of prophecy, law and guru based WCG. These principles and cautions would be well remembered by any in any of the splinters that calm down, give up on prophecy and always living ahead of themselves and fall into a still Christian, yet, "we learned those lessons a thousand years ago" denomination. Southern Baptist, however, in my experience are WCG on steroids.
ReplyDelete"It may have dawned on you that popular Christian versions of heaven would actually be hellish."
ReplyDeletewell, considering that popular christianity's version of heaven is manmade, it's no surprise that it would be hellish....
Valerie T describes the false version of christianity, the manmade version....so of course it caused angst amongst its membership.
ReplyDeleteThere is a sample bias here. Tarico is writing about a group of people who were members of a Christian church and left. These are people who did not have a good experience with Christianity for some reason. The list reflects those reasons.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem is that she is too loose with terminology. She talks about "Biblical Christianity," "Bible-believing Christianity," "Christian Culture," "traditional Christian teachings" and other terms. I have no idea what she means by any of this. It could be reasonable and it could be crazy-off-the-wall stuff that many Christian critics deal in. Christianity as interpreted and applied by humans, to be sure, has some pathologies. But that strain of belief is different than what most of us as Christians think Christianity to be.
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According to Ann Coulter, liberalism is a mental disorder.
ReplyDeleteNow liberals are poisoning themselves with graphine oxide. Is this a form of Darwinism?
😂😂😂😂
DeleteJesus was a carpenter in an age when only 3% of people could read. He never read a book in his life.
ReplyDeleteNEO said: "The other problem is that she is too loose with terminology. She talks about "Biblical Christianity," "Bible-believing Christianity," "Christian Culture," "traditional Christian teachings" and other terms. I have no idea what she means by any of this."
ReplyDeleteTo you is that she is speaking too loose but any mainstream Christian would know exactly what she means by the terms she uses. These are very common terms for just about every Christian Sunday observing denomination and how they are very commonly described.
Only those who grow up in rabid fundamentalist Christian churches would either not know the terminology because they are taught that every other Christian church, be it the one down the street or other denominations are simply Satan's and that terminology is good enough. Growing up even as a kid in the Dutch Reformed Church, I would have easily understood the terms as referring to Christianity in acceptable form or another.
Only when I came to WCG did I ever even hear of "The True Church" or Bible prophecy coming alive. And coming to WCG was the first place I ever had to deal with calling everyone else "the false church", "So called Christians", "Satan's church" or "Churchianity". People who grow up or buy into that narrow mindset typically would not understand the terms for Christianity used by just about everyone in a mainstream Christian setting.
Mr. Dennis C Diel sir Churchianity is not based on the Bible rcg is Churchianity only follows their church rather than Christ.
ReplyDeleteDennis,
ReplyDeletePeople impart meaning to language. It is not like a collection of words connected by syntax carry around an absolute meaning. So Tarico says, "Biblical Christianity gives tremendous moral weight to all of this. . ." Am I to assume that she means the same thing by the words "Biblical Christianity" as I do? If so why would she come up with an analysis that is so odd-ball from my viewpoint as a Christian insider?
The problem with your argument is that you are creating a bona fides for her. You are asserting that she really knows what all these terms mean and that she really knows Christianity when she is probably a nothing more than another member of the critic establishment. Unless she accompanies her work with her personal view of what Christianity is, her data and her advice are not so much specious as beyond evaluation. I do believe a little of her belief filters through her comments and I would say she has a deprecatory attitude towards Christianity.
Maybe this will clarify the issue. If she had written this same article and referred to the source of the problem as "toxic Christianity" or "cult pseudo-Christianity" I would not be writing this up. But instead she indicts Christianity proper without telling us what her background with Christianity is. Maybe she is just another run-of-the-mill atheist. If we have the background, we can place her views in context.
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Churchianity it just another term for Pharisaic Christianity. For instance, Abraham Lincoln was an avid bible reader, but he shunned church going because he claimed that he couldn't find what they taught in his bible. It's always been that way. So I would have thought that the term "biblical Christianity" was self evident ie, someone who uses the bible as their reference rather than some church teachings.
ReplyDeleteAnon 4:32 PM, in Luke 4:16-22, Jesus did get up in the Nazareth synagogue on the Sabbath to read from the prophet Isaiah.
ReplyDelete"So I would have thought that the term "biblical Christianity" was self evident ie, someone who uses the bible as their reference rather than some church teachings."
ReplyDeletewhich adds to the confusion since she's applying it to the "sunday christmas, easter version of christianity....which is not biblical christianity at all.
5.32 AM
DeleteYour parroting the ACOGs view. Your "Sunday, Xmas, Easter" etc makes up a very small part of my bible or daily bible study. Most uncalled Christians don't believe the above wrong, and I don't believe that God will hold it against them considering the religious confusion in the world. The core of Christianity is the ten commandments and a relationship with God. In terms of behavior, there are many uncalled Christians with far superior morals and behavior than called and baptized Christians.
Some perspective please!
"gun lap" that was a good one
ReplyDeleteHWA was a skilled marketing man.
We had secret knowledge without realizing it was secret - because the bible was a coded book and only people like us could understand it.
It is OK to brace for a financial apocalypse. Better be ready.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said...
ReplyDeleteJesus was a carpenter in an age when only 3% of people could read. He never read a book in his life
__——————————————
Oh, really?
Luk 4:16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.
Luk 4:17 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
Luk 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
Luk 4:19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
Luk 4:20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.