Assuming a person violates a religious or sincerely-held belief, can you explain emotional experiences that are common, even though the person may appear to continue to function normally, such as going to work?
Having examined some of the framework associated with the role of conscience, sincerity, and training, we will now consider common internal mental or emotional responses to a failure of one’s convictions through a compromise of faith.
By its nature the religious life includes the conviction that the mind and heart are more than complex bio-electric machines. They are somehow expressions of the ultimate self, living before God or some other conception of ultimate reality. This spiritual self-awareness can be the fountain of the most pleasant human emotions including joy, contentment, peace, and many more. It can also be the seat of unpleasant or painful feelings like guilt, shame, and even anguish.
In the course of pastoral care, ministers, often witness both types in the life of their members. With regard to the harder side of the continuum, I have cared for men and women in complete emotional collapse after coming to terms with their own destructive behavior. I’ve seen that collapse erupt in deep wailing, in apparent catatonic daze, or self-loathing. Of course, these are extreme cases where the failure is of such a magnitude that marriages or careers are in jeopardy, prison is looming, or someone has been injured by the individual’s lack of self-control.
I have also seen less drastic failures impose real distress on individuals. Although it is a difficult task to prescribe exactly what, and how much, a person should feel when they compromise their convictions, using the measures of magnitude and duration are sometimes helpful. For example, if an employee cuts out of work an hour early once but still logs the time, then he or she has committed a sin, to use religious terms. That is not good, but it is perhaps not the worst sin in a person’s life. However, doing so three times a week for two years adds a cumulative effect to the larceny that should, we hope, begin to bear down on the employee’s conscience. In this hypothetical, the duration of the failure multiplies its seriousness. The cumulative weight of that behavior will be experienced as emotional pain or dissonance.
Compromises of graver magnitude can have deep impacts even if they are not repeated. In one of the most famous religious and political failures in history, King David used his position as monarch to have intercourse with a married women in his kingdom and then have her husband killed. That was serious sin by any account, certainly by the Bible’s measure. His moral collapse went undetected for a season by all but him. Once he was confronted, he fell apart in guilt and shame. He later penned words that other sinners have used to confess their own transgressions for almost 3,000 years,
For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Psalm 32:3–4
That sentiment captures the internal cost of moral failure; in this case, deep regret for horrible sins. David was forgiven for those sins, but he still bore significant consequences in his family and kingdom. Other sins are less dramatic, but almost always lead to internal burdens. In these ways, religious failures always have consequences, even if they are forgiven.
Naturally, most pastoral care is done in the context of less dramatic personal struggles. It is common, however, to minister to people whose more pedestrian difficulties are ongoing. After all, most people wake up with the same weaknesses they went to bed with the day before. Consequently, our failures and their related sorrows usually cluster in certain areas and form a pattern.
We also see individuals withdraw altogether, and functionally leave a faith that they actually embrace, because they are not ready to believe it will actually find room for their imperfect soul.
When people come to terms with those issues, they commonly experience internal pain in the form of guilt, shame, anxiety, withdrawal from relationships, loss of sleep, and inability to concentrate. Activities they once enjoyed, especially religious activities, become burdensome and increase internal distress. They naturally feel unfit for the blessings and responsibilities of their community (religious or otherwise) but often do not want to, or cannot extract themselves. The result is that once eager participants become reticent, and central members of the faith community marginalize themselves.
Sometimes they respond with opposite impulses and fretfully attempt to reverse what they have done by hyper-engagement. This is most often counterproductive, because it attempts to mask the failure with other spiritual accomplishments. That can be problematic, but at least they remain involved. We also see individuals withdraw altogether, and functionally leave a faith that they actually embrace, because they are not ready to believe it will actually find room for their imperfect soul. In these cases, the self-imposed loss includes an entire network of friendships and social events, as well as the more formal elements of the faith community, like worship and instruction.
I have witnessed these patterns over and over again. And while I do not wish them on anyone, they are actually part of how God has built us. One tradition in Christianity calls the conscience the soul’s “Sergeant of Arms,” given so that the believer might be regulated from within and drawn back to their better-angels, to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase.
This may seem overdone and psychologically counter-productive to the modern mind, but it has proven inescapable regardless of one’s world view. Remembering what was said earlier about the universality of conscience and the equally pervasive reality of human brokenness, no one would be surprised by the emotional distress an atheist felt if his or her moral failure deeply hurt a child, for example. In fact, regardless of one’s vision of God, or not-god, most people would be disturbed if the offender was unmoved by his or her failure and claimed that regret and guilt are hold-overs from the dark days of religious ignorance.
In her very helpful best-selling book Daring Greatly, Brene Brown recognizes this internal “pain-principle” as part of the innate human experience. Her work is broadly researched and comes from non-religious perspective, but echoes what ministers have seen for millennia. She writes,
Shame is real pain. The importance of social acceptance and connection is reinforced by our brain chemistry, and the pain that results from social rejection and disconnection is real pain. In a 2011 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, researchers found that, as far as the brain is concerned, physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way. So when I define shame as an intensely “painful” experience, I’m not kidding. Neuroscience advances confirm what we’ve known all along: Emotions can hurt and cause pain. And just as we often struggle to define physical pain, describing emotional pain is difficult. Shame is particularly hard because it hates having words wrapped around it. It hates being spoken. (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, p. 71)
Many consider spirituality a deeply personal and private matter. Religious adherents agree. But participants in a faith-tradition have also realized that living in a believing community is just as vital to the soul’s life and health, so religious people would likely resonate with Brown’s explanation of the influence of shame on the longing for connection with others. Brown argues that virtually all people experience these things. My pastoral tenure confirms that. I’ve also noticed that if one believes they live before God and others in the community of faith, the impact of that pain can naturally be magnified. Thankfully, so can the comforts of coming to terms with your own failings in the context of a community that believes in a loving, forgiving God.
