I was on a vacation in beautiful Chelan, Washington. Snow was on the ground, and the lakeside city was in the midst of its annual Winterfest. Outside among the ice statues, my family and I stood around a fire pit. In this wintery wonderland, I wondered what the flames in front of me would feel like on my skin, since I might be feeling that sensation eternally in hell.
Who thinks like that? Someone with religious OCD. Never heard of it? Neither had I, until several years into my intense suffering. You see, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) doesn’t just involve germs, having things neat and tidy, and worrying you didn’t lock the front door. OCD attacks the core of your being. And for Christians, that core is our faith. Welcome to religious OCD, also known as scrupulosity.
The Tripped Fuse
Around my junior year of high school, I began to worry that one had to be baptised in order to be saved. I vividly remember poring over my Bible and reading articles on both sides of the debate. I cried myself to sleep one night believing I wasn’t saved. That was possibly the lowest moment of my life.
One day, I had an epiphany of sorts. I had been reading John Piper’s daily devotional Solid Joys. I felt like I had exhausted my resources, but what if John Piper had something that could help me? I eagerly searched “John Piper baptism.” To my enormous relief, Piper’s writings on baptism and salvation helped me, and my anxieties were largely laid to rest.
If only that was the end of the story. But I’m a reader, and I am spiritually hungry to learn. So when I looked up Piper’s articles on baptism, I didn’t stop there. I moved on to his articles on saving faith. And that’s where part two of my story begins.
Spreading Scruples
From here, I dove headfirst into Piper’s writings. While some of it was helpful, in the grand scheme of things, I found more and more reasons to doubt my salvation—or so I thought. Did I desire God? If not, not saved. Had I, like Esau, sinned myself past repentance? If so, not saved. Had I ever truly repented and trusted in Jesus? If not, not saved. Had I ever truly believed that I was a sinner? If not, not saved.
I didn’t doubt the soundness of Piper’s interpretations of saving faith so much as I doubted that I had the sort of faith he extolled. I searched myself for feelings or memories that might prove that I had the faith it takes. Where Piper answered one question, five new doubts arose in its place. But why?
This went on for seven years. In the darkness of my doubts and the excruciating mental torment, a dear friend of mine sent me an article by a woman named Mitzi VanCleve who suffers from religious OCD/scrupulosity. In reading her blog, I felt like I was reading my own brain. If she has OCD, then so do I, I told myself.
I was diagnosed with severe OCD less than a year later.
Not a Perfectionist
When I was in elementary school, there was this joke that went around the various classrooms. “I have CDO,” the jokester would say. “That’s OCD, but in alphabetical order.”
It’s the perfect example of the vision people have in their heads of a person with OCD: someone who likes to have everything perfect and orderly, or someone who hates germs. But what people don’t recognise is that OCD is not fun or cutesy. It’s horrifying and debilitating. If you enjoy having things nice and orderly but aren’t experiencing excessive dread coupled with your compulsive cleaning, you probably don’t have OCD.
OCD begins with intrusive thoughts about health, sexuality, safety, relationships, morals, existential questions, or any other topic. For an OCD sufferer, the thoughts are incredibly distressing; the person begins to obsess about the thoughts and attempts to “solve” the problem through some sort of behaviour. That behaviour is called a compulsion. In religious OCD, compulsions can look like ruminating about religious topics, researching, seeking reassurance from others, checking feelings, or praying a certain way.
Religious OCD has many faces. It’s the woman who obsesses over whether or not she committed the unpardonable sin. It’s the man who compulsively gives up an activity he loves because he fears he’s made it into an “idol.” It’s the girl who agonises over whether she felt the “right” things while saying her prayers. It’s the boy who checks his emotional response to gospel truths to discern if he really “believes” them. And it’s me, the girl who was consumed by doubts about her salvation and desperate attempts to find assurance for ten years.
When a sufferer of religious OCD has their breakthrough moment in which they finally recognise that OCD is behind their suffering, it can be difficult to know what steps to take next. Unfortunately, the resources offered to OCD sufferers by many Christian sites and organisations, such as the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation, are a mixed bag in terms of the accuracy of their teachings and the effectiveness of their suggested treatments.
Because of its link to religious topics, it is often taught that religious OCD is a spiritual problem that should be addressed spiritually. Some resources even imply that sin is behind OCD. Claims like this can cause fear and shame for OCD sufferers, as well as hinder their efforts to find healing. In reality, OCD is as biological a problem as diabetes or high blood pressure. There is no shame in treating a biological disorder as such—and scores of faithful Christians have found healing and peace by using standard OCD treatments and medications, by the grace of God.
Look Up
So what is the way forward for the sufferer of religious OCD? Because of the mechanics of OCD, scrupulous brains can never be fully satisfied through compulsions. Compulsive behaviours may give us short-term relief, but the intrusive thoughts and doubts always find their way back to us in one way or another.
Seeking assurance of salvation—or of anything else, really—by way of OCD compulsions is like if the Israelites had attempted to cross the Red Sea by building a sandcastle bridge. The odds are that hopeless; but Moses said to them, “Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD” (Ex 14:13 NKJV). The journey toward healing for OCD sufferers involves “standing still” by refusing to engage in compulsions and waiting for God to provide the assurance they long for.
As I write this article, I am far from cured of my OCD. However, I am learning the art of “standing still” by practicing Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)—considered to be the “gold standard” of OCD therapy. In ERP, I refuse to engage in compulsive behaviour, ultimately robbing obsessions and fears of their power and rewiring my brain to respond to intrusive thoughts (such as “What if I’m not saved?”) in a healthy, normal way. My journey—and maybe yours, too—involves ceasing from my strivings for assurance through compulsive behaviour and looking to God for the answers.
While Christians are called to “examine [ourselves], to see whether [we] are in the faith” (2 Cor 13:5 ESV), my story is evidence that our efforts can only take us so far in the search for assurance of salvation. Our desires, good works, spiritual fruit, and growth in grace can give us an indication of our spiritual standing, but because of our fallen human nature, how we perceive ourselves is imperfect at best. Self-perception steeped in OCD is especially flawed.
It is for this reason that any assurance we feel is ultimately a gift from God brought about by the Spirit (Rom 8:16). Though OCD makes it difficult to receive that gift, I press on with the hope that when I, with help from the Lord, have retrained my brain, I’ll be able to receive the assurance I’ve sought for so long.
If you suffer from debilitating anxiety about your salvation, obedience, or other aspects of your faith coupled with some sort of compulsive behaviour like what I’ve described in this article, I encourage you to look into the possibility of an OCD diagnosis. It may be that, like me, you have been viewing your faith through the cloudy lenses of this agonising but very treatable disorder.
It is my earnest hope that as I tell my story and raise awareness of this little-known OCD subset, more and more sufferers of religious OCD will come to recognise their “thorn in the flesh” for what it is—and find the freedom God intends them to experience.
