Healthy and Toxic Spirituality

Recently it has become fashionable to paint religion and spirituality with quite different brushes – religion often being represented as dark and oppressive while spirituality is viewed as either benign or potentially life-enhancing.  As usual, reality is more complex.  

Sadly, it is not hard to find religion’s dark shadow.  It can foster dogmatic rigidity, prejudice, intolerance, and chronic – even if religiously disguised – levels of anger and hatred. However, religion also has unique potential to reconnect us to the roots of our existence and our shared humanity, bring us in touch with the mystery of our being in relation to the transcendent, and offer a uniquely valuable resource for healing our brokenness and aligning us with the transcendent.

But what about spirituality? After four decades of studying the impact of spirituality on human development and unfolding, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that spirituality does not always make people more deeply human and whole. It too has both a potentially toxic side as well as a life-enhancing one. Let’s look more closely at each of these.

Can Spirituality Really Be Toxic?

It might seem strange to speak of spirituality as toxic.  Perhaps you wonder how spiritual paths and practices that you think of as unquestionably good – for example, your own spiritual path – could ever become so dangerous as to justify such language.  There are many routes away from life, but only one that points us dependably toward it.

Spirituality moves us away from life whenever it distances us from our bodies.  The body anchors the spiritual and the mental dimensions of our life. It grounds perceptions in sensations, feelings in emotions, thoughts in action, defenses in muscular armor, and beliefs in behavior.  Whenever our ties to our body are tenuous, our ties to reality are equally fragile.  

Our bodies connect us to the truths of ourselves, our world, and others.  Even our connection to spiritual realities occur in and through our bodies.  All knowing is at one level body-knowing, and all awareness is at one level body-awareness.  To be human is to be embodied. So any spirituality that fails to take the body seriously necessarily diminishes our humanity.

Removed from a firm embrace of our bodies, our spirituality will always involve an alienation from our emotions, our deepest passions and longings, and our sexuality.  Any attempt to gain distance from our bodies will be at the expense of our humanness.  The price for this form of avoidance is always high.

One of the ways in which we distance ourselves from our bodies is by a retreat to the world of beliefs and thoughts.  Religious spiritualities encourage this when they reduce the spiritual journey to holding correct beliefs.  In Christianity, the shift from faith as trust to faith as belief was primarily a product of the Enlightenment. The result was a profound shift from the personal/interpersonal to the impersonal. 

Faith as trust is both personal and interpersonal.  Trust is always placed in someone or something, and our act of trust is an act of leaning into the object of trust with openness and expectant hopefulness.  For many Christians, trust in God has degraded into trust in beliefs about God.  If these beliefs are judged to be true, one is judged to have faith.  But the object of the faith in this debased expression of it is, in actuality, beliefs, not God.

Equating faith with beliefs truncates and trivializes spirituality by reducing it to a mental process. Thoughts are, quite simply, a poor substitute for a relationship. Some Christians speak much of a personal relationship with God but assume that this is based on holding right beliefs about God. Is it any wonder that this attempt to reduce Ultimate Mystery to theological propositions so often results in the principal personal relationship being with their own thoughts? Cherishing thoughts about God replaces cherishing God; knowing about the Divine replaces knowing the Divine. Whenever the Wholly Other is thought to be contained in one’s beliefs and opinions, Divine transcendence is seriously compromised and personal relationship with Spirit minimized.

Too easily, spiritual practices lead to increasing identification with those of one’s own religious tribe and an ever-weakening sense of solidarity with all humankind.  Too easily, spirituality involves a narcissistic me-and-God relationship that insulates us from, rather than sensitizes us to, the problems of our world.  Too easily, it directs us away from life rather than toward a genuinely deeper, fuller and more vital life. And although these problems are not restricted to religious spiritualities, it seems to me that it is the religious forms of spirituality that are often most vulnerable to these dangers – Christian spirituality being no exception. 

Any spirituality that seeks to make us less than, more than, or other than human is dangerous. Humanity is not a disease that needs to be cured or a state of deficiency from which we need to escape. The spiritual journey is not intended to make us into angels, cherubim, seraphim, gods, or some other form of spiritual beings. It is intended to help us become all that we, as humans, can be.  And our spirituality can and should help us become more deeply human and more fully alive.

St. Irenaeus, the second century Bishop of Lyons, understood this well.  His famous declaration – Gloria Dei vivens homo – proclaimed that the glory of God is men and women who are fully alive, fully human.  This was a high point in the Christian understanding of the importance of being human, a point so removed from the center of contemporary Christianity that it might almost sound heretical.  

Could it possibly be true that being human is a good thing, neither a sign of failure or weakness nor a lack of spirituality? Is it possible that wholeness, not simply holiness, honours God?  Is it possible that there could be an alternative to living carefully so as to avoid sin while pursuing the elusive goal of perfection? And could that alternative really be as simple as being and becoming deeply human and fully alive?  It does sound too good to be true!  It might even make one wonder how Irenaeus was ever declared a saint after making these assertions so central to his teaching.

Healthy Spirituality

Healthy spiritual paths and practices support human development and unfolding. Healthy spirituality is not limited to any particular spiritual path. It is a way of walking the human path. 

Healthy spirituality orients you toward life as it is encountered in your body and in the flow of your lived experience. It’s a way of living out of your depths that orients you to the potential height and breadth of your being and becoming. It channels your vitality in a way that integrates and orients you toward the transcendent. It guides your response to your deepest longings and provides the framework within which your life becomes meaningful. While it can never be reduced to practices, it shapes your lives and in that sense, must be lived, not simply believed. It is a way of living that is essential if you are to become fully human.

Christian spirituality can be either healthy or toxic. The same is true of Buddhist spirituality, New Age spirituality, eco-spirituality, 12 Step or any other spirituality. Healthy spirituality is living out your human journey in a way that helps you become deeply and authentically human. It’s the spirituality that St. Irenaeus had in mind when he spoke of the priority of humans becoming fully alive. It is the spirituality that Jesus had in mind when he said that he had come so that we might have abundant life.

Spirituality has unique potential to facilitate our becoming fully human and deeply alive. It is a tragedy that many who follow Jesus have forgotten that he said that he came to earth to bring us abundant life. Don’t settle with simply being a good Christian, Muslim, Hindu or any other relilgionist. Your calling is much more than this. It is to become fully alive and deeply human!

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2022 © Dr. David G. Benner

• How does my spiritual life support my becoming more fully and deeply human?

• In what ways have I settled for less than this?

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For more on healthy spirituality, see Dr. Benner’s book, Soulful Spirituality: Becoming Fully Alive and Deeply Human (Brazos Press, 2011).

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