Toxic Spirituality

Ever received one of those anonymous email circulars promising spiritual insight? A friend recently sent me one entitled, ‘Rules for Being Human’. Its 14 points appeared, at first, pretty harmless and I’d have filed it in the bin had she not expected a considered response. By point five, things weren’t looking good: ‘…external problems are a precise reflection of your internal state. When you clear inner obstructions, your outside world changes.’ By ten I was profoundly disturbed: ‘You always get what you want. Your subconscious rightfully determines what energies, experiences, and people you attract – therefore, the only foolproof way to know what you want is to see what you have. There are no victims, only students’.

Try telling that to the people of Iraq, I thought, or to the billions worldwide who live on less than a dollar a day. I expressed my misgivings to my friend, suggesting that the logical outcome of such teachings – which make them, to my mind, patently absurd – is that those who have been oppressed and exploited by others – eg raped and sexually abused – really, deep down, wanted it to happen. To my horror, my friend revealed that this is precisely what some purveyors of ‘alternative spiritualities’ actually teach. Or worse. During a course on ‘spiritual healing’, she said, the course-leader suggested to another participant , a survivor of sexual abuse, that she was abused because she had been an abuser in a former life.

Now that’s what I call spiritual abuse. And let’s not rush to assume that it’s only because such spiritualities are ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ that they go so ethically haywire. The ‘tried and tested’ Christian tradition can be misused too. On October 11 (the day after World Mental Health Day), the Archbishop’s Council launched a resource pack to enable parishes to be more inclusive of those with mental health needs. A moving piece on Radio 4’s Sunday Programme (largely resourced by members of this diocese) told the story of one woman who, experiencing acute depression, found her church to be of little help. On the contrary, she said, she got the distinct impression that her fellow Christians considered her depression to be her own fault. Prayer wasn’t making it go away, so presumably she was to blame.

Such spiritual toxicity stems from an over-individualisation of one’s personal fortunes. But humans are social beings, dependent upon the actions of others for our wellbeing and responsible for the good of others through our own choices and actions. We are never wholly the authors of our own successes (though we prefer to believe that we are) and, while personal responsibility is very important, there is always much that is out of our control. Others have control over us, to a greater or lesser extent. And when we’re vulnerable, we can be exploited through no fault of our own. Spirituality that has no room for such complexities does more harm than good.

Alison Webster is Diocesan Social Responsibility Adviser