What Constitutes Healthy Exploration of Spirituality?

Part II: Why Some Approaches to Spirituality Are a Bridge Too Far

Hello, fellow bugbears! I’ve been fighting a summer cold or something this past week, but here I am at last to deliver the second part of my essay on healthy and unhealthy spirituality.

As a quick review, here are some of the key points from part I of this essay that underlie the more concrete approach to the question I’m about to dive into here:

• “Spirituality” is such a vague term conversationally that it is almost meaningless. For our purposes here, I’m following the definition and distinction put forth by Hood, Hill, and Spilka. “Spirituality involves a person’s beliefs, values, and behavior, while religiousness denotes the person’s involvement with a religious tradition and institution.”

• There is no scholarly or scientific evidence that it is necessary to be religious or “spiritual” for one’s psychological wellbeing. There is literature demonstrating how religion and spirituality can be helpful, but there is also emerging literature on how religion can be harmful. Further, the key reason religion often helps people seems to be that it provides supportive community, and, although it’s not always easy in American circumstances, it is possible to have that kind of community outside of a religious context.

• When one undergoes indoctrination into rigid beliefs and black and white thinking, it is easy to retain that black and white thinking (along with the need for clear and simple answers to life’s major questions) even when one’s particular beliefs fall apart. History is replete with examples of people running from one “god that failed” to another totalizing system, which sometimes in turn becomes yet another “god that failed.”

• Healthy spirituality, to my mind, must be a type of spirituality that breaks free of rigidity and dogmatism. Dogmatism leads easily to the dehumanization of those who will not accept “the Truth.”

In part I of this essay, I noted that dogmatism leading to dehumanization is the fundamental problem, but I added that there are also some beliefs themselves that are simply harmful and unacceptable. I suppose you could argue that these are the kinds of beliefs that are inherently exclusionary, the kind that one can only hold dogmatically at the expense of reality and, by extension, sometimes at the expense of people’s health or even lives.

On that note, a spirituality that is at odds with the findings of empirical science—most urgently in areas like climate science and medicine—is inherently harmful in a way that, as I discussed last week, reading Tarot cards is not. I used the example because of a recent article on the popularity of Tarot among exvangelicals, which is something I’ve observed myself. Antitheist atheists will likely contend that I am trying to thread too fine of a needle here, so to be clear, I am not arguing that Tarot is scientific.

But I will point out that many people who do readings for themselves or others still accept established scientific findings and support vaccines, etc. In fact, I know people into Tarot who do not believe there is anything mystical or supernatural about the cards whatsoever, but simply find that the act of interpreting them is centering and helps them sort through the challenges they’re facing in life. Some simply find it fun, and I get that, because growing up evangelical, anything “occult” is forbidden. I suppose this is why I am a fan of supernatural horror and fantasy now.

In any case, the point I’m trying to make here is that there are beliefs that may be wrong and/or unprovable/unfalsifiable, but that people can hold comfortably while also accepting the shared reality and scientific findings that our society needs to thrive. And then there are those beliefs and ideologies that are simply incompatible with shared reality and science, and they are a scourge.

If you want to believe in faith healing only, for example, and you are an adult, I mean, I guess it’s your life. But when parents withhold medical treatments from their children and the children end up harmed for life or dying, that is gross neglect that I think should be actionable. It generally isn’t, because this is America where we “believe in believing,” “religious freedom” goes way too far, and parents tend to have tyrannical control over their children’s lives, but it should be actionable, and the awful parents who do this to their children should be harshly punished.

Photo by marcn (2019), via Wikimedia Commons.

Unhealthy Spirituality: Where to Draw Hard Lines

People who embrace New Age thinking, practices, or groups often fail the dogmatism test, sometimes spectacularly. despite often using the language of rejecting dogma and conformity. In part I of this essay, I recommended the Netflix docuseries Wild Wild Country, about the Rajneeshees’ hostile takeover of an Oregon town and its aftermath, for an example of this dynamic.

Here we see many people who grew up Christian but found Christianity lacking embracing “Eastern” teachings uncritically as “freeing,” only to eventually realize they’d ended up in an even more authoritarian situation, if they allow themselves to process that realization. You can see the same dynamic in play in other recent documentaries about groups like the “Mother God” cult (whose beliefs overlapped with QAnon in weird and wild ways), Twin Flames, and others. (It is possible that I’ve watched more of these documentaries than anybody reasonably should.)

But even more mundane, run-of-the-mill New Age and New Age adjacent beliefs not involving elaborate high-control groups can fuel unhealthy dynamics in individuals prone to black and white thinking, and those dynamics can in turn poison our civil society to some degree. The dizzying spread of certain beliefs about living “naturally” and opposing “Big Pharma” in the social media age are a load-bearing factor, after all, in how we end up with anti-vaxxers running amok and quacks like Dr. Oz becoming famous, influential, and now occupying key policy positions on the U.S. government.

Of course, this trend didn’t start on social media. It started with self-help books and television, and Oprah Winfrey has a lot to answer for with respect to the toxic people she has platformed and promoted through the years. The roster includes Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and Marianne Williamson, among many others. For a deep dive, I highly recommend the series of episodes on the Behind the Bastards podcast highlighting the damage that Oprah has done to American civil society over the decades with her uncritical embrace of almost anything “spiritual” or medically non-mainstream, combined with her massive platform.

To be sure, Oprah wouldn’t have had this platform if there weren’t a critical mass of Americans with authoritarian personalities and an utter lack of critical thinking skills who crave authority figures and, well, authoritative “sacred literature” that celebrities like Oprah recommend (and, today, influencers) recommend.

Now we come to the part where I confess that a new article on the popularity of Tarot among exvangelicals was not the only thing on my mind that had me wanting to address the topic of healthy vs. unhealthy spirituality in The Bugbear Dispatch. In the not too distant past, a friend of mine who owns an indie bookstore invited me to participate in a virtual panel discussion with the author of a book on raising kids who, whatever their own sexuality or gender, are accepting of LGBTQ kids and opposed to bullying. I liked the concept and initially agreed to be part of the discussion, but as I went through the book, I started to have qualms.

I don’t want to name the author or the title of the book here, but if you really want to track it down, it shouldn’t be too hard. In any case, the first thing that gave me serious pause was the thanking of Marianne Williamson in the acknowledgments, who is mentioned along with Louise Hay and Oprah. I didn’t know who Hay was at the time, but she’s an even worse advocate of New Thought than Williamson as it turns out, and one with whom Williamson has worked closely. (New Thought, for those unfamiliar, teaches that physical illnesses result from mental causes, with the strong implication that “positive thinking” and “loving yourself enough” will keep you healthy.)

As I read further and began to see more and more references to Williamson and an uncomfortable thread of this type of spirituality emerging as a subtext to the book—on a topic that, it seems to me, ought to be discussed without prescribing religious or spiritual views not everyone will accept, let alone inherently toxic views like New Thought—it became clear to me that I would feel ethically compromised if I shared a platform with the author. So I pulled out of the panel, but I felt guilty about it, particular because my bookstore owner friend, who like me is an exvangelical and was a fellow admin of the Exvangelical Facebook group when I served in that role, reminded me that our shared principle regarding exvangelicals had always been that we should affirm all healthy paths out of evangelicalism, whether a person ends up in a healthier form of religion and/or spirituality or rejects religion altogether.

I had to stop and ask myself: by refusing to work with one of Marianne Williamson’s fellow travelers, was I being hypocritical, maybe even bigoted? That’s the deeper origin of this essay, the Ur-reason, if you will, that I realized I needed to clarify my thoughts on spirituality. Looking a little deeper into Williamson’s various actions and statements over the decades made the question a bit more complicated, but not too much, because her New Thought is frankly incoherent, and some of the things she believes absolutely are toxic, and would seem to be incompatible with other things she believes.

Williamson, who ran in the Democratic presidential primaries for the 2020 election, has been very defensive when it comes to deflecting criticism. Yes, she can point to a record of actually being physically present to help AIDS patients during the AIDS crisis, and she can even plausibly claim (although it’s a narrow and seemingly at least partly disingenuous claim) that she never told anyone to stop taking their medicine. She’s both/and, she says, in the sense that she believes in combining “spiritual care” with medical care. Even so, she has a disturbing record of statements about AIDS, illness, and vaccines that’s enough for me to condemn her as having done, on the whole, much more harm than good in the American public sphere. She is, therefore, someone whose work I am justified in refusing to associate myself with.

Here are just a smattering of the things she’s said. They would not be unforgivable if she would actually denounce them in clear and certain terms and tell us that she’s changed her mind, but unless and until she actually does that, these statements should be neither forgotten nor forgiven. Williamson’s 1992 book A Return to Love contains the assertions that “Sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist” and “Cancer and AIDS and other serious illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream, and their message is not ‘Hate me,’ but ‘Love me.’”

While there is a divide within the queer community over Williamson, her denial that people who died hating themselves because she taught them that they didn’t love themselves enough to get well is absolutely despicable. Here it is from the horse’s mouth in an excerpt from Christina Cauterucci’s August 7, 2029 Slate article “The Gay Divide Over Marianne Williamson”:

I asked whether it might be true that, even if Williamson never told people they were unworthy of love or caused their own illness, some gay men interpreted her words that way and suffered psychological or emotional harm as a result. Would Williamson consider apologizing to those men? “This is not a question, it’s a hypothetical opinion,” the campaign responded. “You’re asking for an unwarranted apology to a hypothetical situation that never happened.”

As Cauterucci’s article documents, the situation absolutely happened. Williamson has also expressed skepticism regarding the use of antidepressants, made comments that border on (and in our climate certainly fueled) anti-vax sentiments, and even once bizarrely tweeted that perhaps we could all “visualize” a hurricane heading for the eastern United States away with “the power of the mind.” Sure, she officially accepts climate science, but at the same time she believes we can use psychic power to influence the weather? Yeah, this self-help author’s teachings themselves are, taken in the aggregate, harmful and bad for society—a clear example of unhealthy spirituality.

At the end of the day, I think unhealthy spirituality exhibits some combination of the following characteristics: it is dogmatic in a prescriptive way (which makes it coercive); it denies demonstrable realities (or tries to have it both ways relative e.g. to the physical and “spiritual” causes of diseases); it requires conspiratorial thinking; and/or it involves submission to a charismatic leader at the expense of one’s own autonomy.

Healthy spirituality, by contrast, accepts our shared reality, even if it posits something beyond (though as discussed part I spirituality does not require belief in the supernatural—it can refer simply to those ways of thinking and those activities that help us feel centered and make meaning regarding our lives and our place in the universe). Healthy spirituality also respects others’ autonomy and embraces pluralism. It is epistemologically humble, and therefore not prescriptive. It opens discussions rather than giving people instructions. Which is probably one reason it’s unlikely to sell a lot of books…

I think I’ll leave things on that slightly cynical note. I hope you’ve all been well, and I welcome further engagement in the comments and on Bluesky. Did I get something wrong here? Tell me; I welcome good-faith criticism.

The Bugbear Dispatch extends a special thanks to our founding subscribers Jody, Ryan Boren, Katie in Seattle, Kel, Roslyn Reid, Rob B. and anonymous for their generous financial support of this publication.