The Shadow Side of Religion

By now, everybody knows that religious involvement correlates with better health and longer life. But a group of researchers has discovered a dark side to religion. For two years, Ken Pargament, Ph.D., of Bowling Green University and his colleague Harold Koenig of Duke Medical School ran extensive tests on 595 sick and elderly patients, controlling for age, race, and physical and mental health.

They found that when old women and men get sick, they die sooner if they fall into certain religious traps. The most dangerous are reflected in remarks like:

"God is punishing me for my lack of devotion."

Of the four negative factors quoted above, all were deadly, but feeling punished by God for lack of devotion turned out to be the least destructive, with the most deadly being despair, the feeling of being abandoned by God--"Why hast Thou forsaken me?"

There's a high risk from the original sin of putting self before God's will

When Pargament first told me about these bitter good-byes, I felt an abiding sadness because I've personally suffered with devout people who had expected their prayers to make their bodies whole again. It was one of the ironic lessons from my mother's last agony. All her life, she'd had the kind of Methodist strength that let her stand up for black friends in a small town down South, but in her 70s she slid into a terminal depression when her faith struck back at her like an avenging angel.

Since her prayers did not heal her body, she decided the fault had to be hers. Her faith must be too weak, her prayers worded wrong, or she must have sinned. In despair, her imagination hunted back over her life for some monumental evil, anything bad enough to match her pain, wrong enough to explain why Jesus had abandoned her in her hour of need. In one depressive episode, she imagined that she'd had an affair with the local doctor. No amount of family argument, or humor, could quite wash away this improbable invention.

You don't have to be an old-fashioned true believer to build this trap for yourself, though it has long been one of religion's secret punishments that ministers hear about over and over. And its frequency may be on the rise. When faith healing was reborn in the 1960s, New Age gurus urged the sick to "take responsibility" for having diseases such as cancer. To them it was a logical step toward psychological self-cures, but it confounded cure with cause and was akin to blaming the victim for crimes such as rape. Worst of all, the burden of guilt, a shaming self-blame, often hits the patient just when she needs to focus all her inner resources on healthy action.

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