Mental Healthand Christianity
We have been hearing much in recent months about the dangers and hazards of a strict so-called "legalistic" approach to the sacred scriptures. It is being argued by some that the authoritarian concept of a "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" is inimical to mental health, that this fills a man with fear, frustration, and anxiety. Particularly singled out for excoriation in these attacks have been those who might generally be described by the word "conservative" in their religious attitudes and convictions. Even among the churches of Christ (regarded by the general world of Christendom as hopelessly obscurantist and enslaved to an impossible sort of liberalism) there have appeared certain ones parroting the phrases of this new army of "anti-religionists." It is an anomaly indeed!
One of the most able of modern psychologists is Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, of Harvard, founder and chief defender of a new school of psychotherapy a school dedicated to the conviction that the most basic need of the human soul is not oriented around the sex drive (as Freud vainly imagined), nor yet in the "will to power" motivation so insistently set forth by the German philosopher, Nietzsche, and exemplified by Hitler's grandiose idea of a "super race of Nordics," but in the deep-seated and powerful need for man to find "meaning" in existence. What is man? Why is he here? What is the meaning or purpose of life? Is there any ultimate goal either for the race or for the individual.... these are the basic drives, the most desperate needs of the human heart. The man who has found meaning in life will be rich and full and contented; the man who has not found it will be haunted, driven, and desperate. No amount of money in the bank, power, fame, or earthly success can assuage that "hunger for meaning." It is all vanity and vexation, a "striving after wind" unless life has meaning and direction.
At the Bradley Research Center in Columbus, Georgia, a group of doctors have been doing intensive study in seeking to determine what factors in life best fortify twentieth-century man against the terrible pressures and fears which characterize modern society. Chief among these men are Dr. James S. Crumbaugh (who studied under Frankl at Harvard) and Dr. Leonard Maholick, who studied under Frankl in Vienna before the great Austrian psychologist transferred to Harvard. Dr. Crumbaugh recently stated that results from their tests "would suggest that the religion of regular church-goers generally fortifies them against mental breakdowns. They seem to have better ordered and more integrated lives." He went on to declare that the majority of emotional disturbances today, leading to mental abnormalities, "emanate from existential frustration....a lack of spiritual values in people's lives." It is significant to note, too, that the more deeply one feels about his religion, the more completely committed to it he is, the stronger is his fortification against the pressures that disintegrate.
What happens now to the contention that a "fundamentalist religion" is a major cause of mental illness? The tests of these psychologists would seem to suggest the exact opposite. The less committed a man is to his religion, the more likely he is to become a victim of mental illness. The "broad-minded" religious person, who can not be too deeply concerned one way or the other about any particular Biblical teaching, is far more likely to wind up in a psychiatric ward than is his "ranting, wild-eyed, fanatical" brother! For when the chips are down and the cruel and bitter facts of life and death bear down with inexorable and inescapable force, the "fanatic" can call upon his God for help with an overwhelming certainty that he will be given strength to bear up under it. And (whether objectively or subjectively) far more often than his more sophisticated brother, he does have the strength. The "liberal" Christian, who has watered down his basic convictions to the point that they have little meaning finds himself literally unable to pray with any inner assurance at all that his prayers are of any interest to, or even are heard by, any being other than himself. Thrown back on his own puny resources, he is overwhelmed. He has not found "meaning" in his life; and has no strength to meet the demands that are made upon him.
The believer in the Scripture is fortified emotionally and intellectually with defenses that are completely unattainable to the non-believer. When we open the pages of God's word, and let its simple massage of life and death, of salvation or destruction, take hold of our thinking, how beautifully the restless spirit is quieted, how perfectly the anxious heart is eased, how completely the burdened mind is put at rest. For here we learn that God is in his heaven; and all's well in the world. We are not mere creatures of blind chance, born for a day, to be swept into eternal oblivion tomorrow. We are a creation of God, destined for eternal glory with Him. There is no more powerful deterrent to mental illness than this conviction, held firmly and unswervingly as the sum and substance of life's meaning. The believer has it; the unbeliever has not and never can have.
— F. Y. T.