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THE EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS FANATICISM ON MENTAL HEALTH
Defining Religion & Spirituality
Since you clicked this article, there is a chance you may have had to deal with religious fanaticism in your family. Or, maybe you are coping with a mental health issue that has challenged your faith, or perhaps you are curious about the overlap of religion and mental health.
As someone who was raised as a non-denominational Christian and who is a non-religious, spiritual person, I have asked myself how do I maintain faith and hope in the future without subscribing to world views, beliefs, and practices that I personally disagree with?
My relationship with God is rooted in my body and mind and has often been felt but not seen. When I have seen God, it has been in nature, other people, and coincidences that I refer to as “God’s timing.”
I was raised in a fundamentally Christian Black home. Not only did our family go to church on Sundays, but we also went to bible study on Wednesdays, and I went to Christian school K-12.
Although I am not a religious expert or a theologian, I have seen much through my Christian career, from the good to the bad, the joyful to the traumatic.
To comprehend religious fanaticism, it is crucial to understand the basics of religion and spirituality. The effects of religious fanaticism on mental health are in a symbiotic relationship. There often appears to be a fine line between what is beneficial to a person’s mental state and what is accepted as appropriate to religious beliefs.
Since primitive times, humans have had a sense of religion; that there is some all-powerful being or force that put us on this planet. We have often heard stories of ancient groups of humans worshiping elements. As time passed, so the concepts of religion and worship evolved.
A quote by Joseph Campbell, late-American professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked…
