Demon? Disorder? Or none of the above? A survey of the attitudes and experiences of evangelical Christians with mental distress

ABSTRACT

Evangelical Christians consistently endorse spiritual aetiologies for mental distress, which include the belief that mental distress can be treated solely through spiritual intervention (prayer, fasting and deliverance). The present survey examined the beliefs and experiences of 446 self-identified evangelical Christians considering growing public awareness of mental distress. The paper focuses on the extent to which church teaching represents mental distress as caused by “spiritual” factors, and how this affects beliefs about “secular” treatments and resulting interactions within communities of faith. Thirty-one percent of respondents reported experiencing teaching which exclusively spiritualised their mental distress. However, 94% endorsed secular interventions (psychological therapy) as effective. Additionally, 73% of respondents endorsed non-spiritual causal attributions (biological/neurological or traumatic/lived experiences) for mental distress. Overall, 56% indicated positive engagement within their faith communities. That respondents endorsed positive interactions within their churches, despite the presence of spiritualised teaching, highlights the limitations of anti-spiritualisation narratives. We argue for an approach to mental distress that is culturally sensitive and psychologically framed, and yet responds to individual and collective meaning-making regarding the interface between spiritual and psychological dimensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental distress
• Christianity
• evangelical
• aetiology
• beliefs

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to The Mind and Soul Foundation for their support disseminating the survey, as well as, Dr. Jonathan Jong for guiding ethical clearance of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We refer to mental distress as opposed to illness, in order to resist a more pathologising and medicalised understanding of human suffering (Bentall, 2004).

2 Scholars have largely attributed this divergence of theological praxis between British and American evangelicalism to the absence of fundamentalism within the cultural fabric of British evangelicalism (Hutchinson & Wolffe, 2012; Marsden, 1977).

3 This can be traced back to the synoptic gospels, which accounts Jesus regularly healing the sick through the expulsion of demons (Iosif, 2011).

4 We use “disorder” here, as opposed to “distress”, as this reflects formal diagnostic nomenclature, thus aiding readers understanding of the demographics of our respondents.