Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction, by Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton (Oliver-Nelson, 316 pp.; $17.95, hardcover);A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth, by J. Keith Miller (HarperSan-Francisco, 262 pp.; $15.95, hardcover);Growing Up Holy Versus Growing Up Wholly: Understanding and Hope for Adult Children of Evangelicals, by Donald Sloat (Wolgemuth and Hyatt, 261 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Jim Alsdurf, a forensic psychologist, and coauthor, with his wife, Phyllis, of Battered into Submission (InterVarsity).
Three recent releases within the “addiction” genre conclude that religious faith—evangelical style—can be pathological. This is a serious charge, which each book develops in its own way.
Expanding on our culture’s seeming addiction to addictions, authors Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton attempt to show in their book Toxic Faith how religious beliefs can lead to a “defective faith” in which religion and not the relationship with God controls a person’s life.
This “religious addiction” emanates from certain “toxic beliefs,” the authors suggest, as a way to avoid responsibility and distort the true life and health of faith. This avoidance manifests itself in everything from codependency to churchaholism to sexual perversion. In short, religious addiction is a faith system that has lost “its true object … the true presence of God.”
Arterburn and Felton contend that religious addiction leads to emotional imbalance, interpersonal isolation, and a stagelike progression that ends in despair, erratic behavior, deep depression, searching for another fix, family deterioration, and other experiences before the addict hits bottom.
The authors identify 21 “toxic beliefs” that may lead to religious addiction; among them are the following: as representatives of God, all ministers can be trusted; problems in life result from some particular sin; one must always submit to authority; one must not stop meeting others’ needs. These toxic beliefs poison our faith and lead to distortions in our beliefs about God.
In identifying the “dysfunctional system that breeds toxic faith,” the various roles of toxic faith—the persecutor, the coconspirator, the enabler, the victim, and the outcast—are explicated and the “ten rules of a toxic faith system” outlined. A treatment and recovery chapter describes how addicts can break through their denial and ultimately come to a new faith, “pure and free of the poison of addiction.” In the appendixes the authors also provide both a self-scoring questionnaire to assess whether the reader has toxic faith and 12 Steps for overcoming religious addiction.
God’S Codependents
In A Hunger for Healing, author Keith Miller attempts to show how the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous can lead “sufferers to a close living relationship with God.” If directly linking the 12 Steps to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ may seem like a large claim, Miller substantiates his view by systematically examining each step, relating his own story to the “spiritual discipline” of the 12 Steps, illustrating their “biblical roots,” and exposing the “deep self-centered disease—selfishness,” which manifests itself in alcoholism and other addictions.
Miller asserts that the 12 Steps are a vital means of “getting well spiritually,” as well as doing God’s will. Because there is only “one Sin … putting ourselves in the center of our lives,” he says the task of spiritual growth is to remove the “character defects that stand between God and us.”
Accepting one’s powerlessness is the entry point for spiritual growth, and Miller relates a “biblical experience” (i.e., Bible verse) to each step and challenges the reader to apply that step to his or her relationship with others as well as with God. Miller writes with conviction and provides examples of his own struggles, which many will find engaging and hopeful.
A third book in this category is Growing Up Holy Versus Growing Up Wholly, by psychologist Donald Sloat. Extrapolating from the adult children of alcoholics model, Sloat asserts that many of these concepts fit dysfunctional Christian families, whose most consistent trait is the “lack of emotional safety” for their members. Adult children of evangelicals (ACEs) tend to exhibit a unique “syndrome or collection of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings,” Sloat says. These vary from oversensitivity and frequent sadness to depression and a fear of God, rather than a sense of being loved by him. Sloat lists 20 characteristics of ACEs, describes their “personality style,” and exposes the “evangelical rules” (don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel, and don’t want) that lead to an “internal split.” This split causes a false sense of holiness and thereby precludes “wholeness as an integrated person.”
Toxic Waste Dump
While each of these books will no doubt help open the eyes of the church to legitimate pathology and imbalance in its midst, the question inevitably arises as to how one distinguishes pathological from authentic faith. Are there guidelines for separating the “committed” from the “addicted”?
While the authors try to come up with standards, they all fall short of what would be of help to clinicians and other professionals. Their guidelines are so amorphous that all will be able to see themselves described. Just as everyone reads him- or herself into the many best-selling codependency books (whose authors even sometimes admit that they are targeting 95 percent of all adults), so too churches, Sunday-school classes, conferences, and more books will help people to see themselves as religious addicts or ACEs.
Furthermore, there is a risk in evaluating religious behavior according to current pop psychological models. The criterion for what is healthy behavior is subject to change and tends to over-pathologize normal human struggles. What used to be considered a product of immaturity, sin, or even an inherent part of the human condition is now redefined as an illness, something that needs specialized care in a therapeutic setting. One wonders if the apostle Paul, for instance, who for the sake of the gospel was stoned, shipwrecked, beaten, and at one point abandoned by a close friend, might not be labeled a religious addict by these models.
The task of distinguishing earnest faith from “toxic faith” is much more complicated than Arterburn and Felton in particular imply. While admitting there may be true pathology behind what they are calling “religious addiction,” for it to be a clearly definable disorder, useful in clinical and pastoral settings, a much more stringent definition is needed than when “your focus has gotten off God.” By failing to provide any reliable data that demonstrate the breadth of this problem, these authors are forced to rely on anecdotal information. That seems a shaky foundation for a charge that would lead one to conclude that the evangelical church is at times nothing more than a toxic waste dump.
