Bad Experiences With the Church Are Like Bad Experiences With Doctors

What is a Christian–and, specifically, a Catholic–to say or do in response to someone who says they stopped going to church because of bad experiences they’ve had with the Church? (The term “bad experience” is too mild to capture the pain and harm that people sometimes endure in a church context, but it is intentionally vague and broad enough to encompass as many of these negative anecdotes as possible.) How can you answer a person like that without sounding like you’re denying the validity of that person’s experiences or feelings?

This is not an attempt to give a comprehensive answer to that question, which, I suspect, does not have a single answer. The Scriptures repeatedly indicate that wisdom often entails accommodating your answer to the particular person you are speaking to (Proverbs 26:4-5, 1 Corinthians 9:19-22, Jude 1:22-23). The only universal rule I would offer is to pray that the Holy Spirit guides you in what you say, and what you don’t say.

But I would suggest, for the reflection of both believers and burned former believers, that there’s an analogy between having bad experiences with Church and having bad experiences with medical experts, or, to put it a different way, between bad experiences with Christianity and bad experiences with health and medicine. 

What are some of the typical ways people suffer from Church experiences? A few examples I can think of: 

Arrogance and condescension from authority figures. Feeling like people are judging you for not doing enough even though you’re trying your best. Being forced to act certain ways that don’t feel true to yourself. Doing what you’re told to do but not seeing your situation improve. Cult-like thinking and behaviour. Seeing that people outside your community seem to be doing just as well, even though they have an alternative to what you’ve been told is the necessary and indispensable thing to do to be saved. Realizing that the official teaching has changed over time and wondering if it’s all just made up. Seeing that minority groups have been oppressed or marginalized by this community. Realizing that this supposedly objectively true teaching is often tangled up with political or economic power.

What does that paragraph describe: Bad experiences with Church, or bad experiences with health and medicine? Consider:

1. Priests or other religious authorities can indeed be domineering, tyrannical, and even abusive; this is known as clericalism and Pope Francis has called it “a perversion of the Church.” But, sadly, doctors also fall into this: The tendency to be condescending, cruel, or even abusive towards others, including nurses, is known as “disruptive physician behaviour,” and policies have had to be put into place to protect or correct that kind of medical clericalism; even more grotesquely, doctors have used their positions of power to commit sexual assault, often against sedated patience.  With the unavoidable fact that, in any institution, some people will be “the experts” comes the inherent danger of that power dynamic being wielded against those with less power (although some institutions mitigate this better than others).
2. The Church has suppressed doctrines it declares to be heresy; it has likely been unfair at times in so doing, and heresiarchs sometimes raise excellent points with a lot of truth in them. And, of course, there are people outside the Church who seem honest, intelligent, and virtuous; how can we say authoritatively that they are wrong? But you need to recognize that this is also true of what is either “alternative medicine” or “quackery,” depending on your perspective about it. “Dr. Sebi” was an herbalist (and accused money launderer) who denied, among other things, that HIV caused AIDS; to this day, many people claim that his remedies healed them or their loved ones. There are others who swear by the natural health products of Dr. Mercola, whose very lucrative business is almost entirely premised on claims that the medical consensus reject as being pseudoscience. And maybe Sebi and Mercola are on to something; Ignaz Semmelweis may have ended up in an asylum, rejected by the medical community, but his insistence that surgeons should wash their hands was vindicated by the germ theory that was accepted after his death. But the fact that the scientific community has condemned thinkers who have turned out to be correct, or whose claims seem to correspond to some people’s experience, does not mean that medicine is nothing more than a hoax used to maintain power—even if, as can sadly happen with religion, medicine gets tangled up with money (witness the degree to which “Big Pharma” funds medical research and the implications that this has) and with political power (for example, certain biopolitical responses to the pandemic). 
3. Related to this, the Church has not always been open to certain forms of spirituality that are obviously meaningful and valuable to many people–Canada’s residential schools are an obvious and disheartening example of this. But, in the same vein, non-Western medicine is often marginalized even though many people report having success with methods that are officially regarded as quackery or pseudoscience, like traditional Chinese medicine. (And, to be clear, there are forms of traditional or folk medicine that are dangerous and unhelpful, just like there are forms of local spirituality that may indeed be false or even demonic.) Both the Church and the medical community condemn witch doctors, for different but parallel reasons.
4. Related to this, minority communities may have been disastrously failed by the Church, but haven’t they also been failed by medicine? Indeed, vaccine hesitancy among African-Americans  If some African-Americans are suspicious of Christianity because it was used to justify slavery, or docility on their part, they may also have a justified hesitancy to take vaccines, given what was done to them as part of the Tuskegee experiment. The fact that we can understand and sympathize with members of colourized or marginalized communities who are suspicious of vaccines, given certain historical facts, does not have any bearing whatsoever on whether the vaccines are effective or what their ethical obligations are with regards to whether or not they should receive a vaccine or other medical treatment.
5. Does grace not seem to be operating in your life? Are you praying, reading Scripture, and receiving the sacraments, yet still feel as though you are not experiencing any moral or personal improvement? Besides deep consideration on St. Paul’s testimony in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, it’s worth considering anecdotes from people who have diligently done everything the doctors tell them to do (bearing in mind that physicians can seem to contradict each other at times) and yet their health never seems to improve. This can be especially difficult when the medical advice clashes with something that feels integral to their personality and happiness–for example, a jogger being told they need to stop running or else they’ll soon need a hip replacement–and when those who flagrantly disobey that advice seem to be doing fine. (Some unvaxxed smugly announce that “no one regrets not getting the vaccine”–the unvaxxed dead not being around to comment, of course, but the point stands.) Feel free to draw an analogy here to the Christian teachings on sexuality. 
6. If you belong to any sort of group dedicated to fitness, working out, or dieting, you are running the risk of cult-like behaviour and judgment. There are many reasons for this. One is that people anything that “works” for people (whether by making them feel holier, making them feel healthier, or just being a piece of entertainment that makes them feel good) has the tendency to become cult-like, because it is necessarily something that people will feel defensive of and will want to push on others out of (partly) good intentions (“this worked for me, so you must try it too!”). This can also make people a bit fanatical: You don’t want to see your friend fall into sin, or you don’t want to see your friend fall back into obesity, so you’re assertive, even pushy, with them. Further, they’ll insist on purity, since they don’t want this thing that has worked for them (either by, in their view, making them more saintly or making them more healthy) being diluted. There’s also usually a level of ignorance at work here. The most cult-like fitness or dieting groups are usually the ones where people are most uneducated about biology. Something similar often holds true of the knowledge of theology and church history in the cultier subcultures of Catholicism. Finally, as with clergy or doctors, subcultures can attract narcissistic personalities into leadership positions, because they see how zealous people in that group are and they know that, if I am a leader in that realm, that will make me seem really important. 
7. Yes, theology has developed over time, and, yes, you will find religious leaders, even from within the same tradition, who disagree with each other, even when giving spiritual advice. But it’s worth remembering how science (in the modern definition) actually works: It examines a given subject matter, its data, and rationally makes deductions and inferences from it. This is an ongoing process of self-correction and, within certain parameters, you can expect to see divergence of interpretation and application. For theology, the data is revelation; for biology, the data is the human body. The subject matter remains the same over time, but the process of reasoning from it is always ongoing. (Interestingly, Francis Crick called the fact that information flows into protein but not out of it “the central dogma of molecular biology.” The secular humanist Crick said he chose the word “dogma” because it was “more central and more powerful” than a hypothesis. In so doing, he unwittingly provided a very sound explanation of how dogmas work in theology.) However, the authoritative body within the community doing this research and reasoning is still a hierarchy, and we’ve already seen that, wherever humans have power, sinfulness and stupidity always have a foothold.

Having considered all that, I ask you: What do you say to someone who has stopped going to doctors and refuses to visit a hospital because of bad experiences they’ve had with the medical system–someone who can’t even see a hospital cross or the rod of Asclepius without shuddering? What do you tell a person who insists that the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy or the use of essential oils has cured their cancer when oncologists failed to?

As with someone who has a panic attack at the thought of going to Mass or entering a confessional, you need to be sensitive and pastoral, of course. You need to recognize the legitimate pain they’ve undergone and recognize that medical professionals can, indeed, make mistakes that deserve restitution.

Studio shot of handsome Persian man doctor against gray background horizontal shot

But would you ever say to that person, “Well, we’re all on a journey, and we’re all on different points in that journey. You don’t have to go to a medical professional when you’re sick if doing so would make you uncomfortable”? 

I submit you would only answer this way if you did not particularly care for or about the person you were speaking to. 

The only reason we do that with spirituality and religion is because we take our immortal souls less seriously than we do our corruptible bodies. 

(And, while some sicknesses of the body may be nearly imperceptible–until they kill you–most involve some kind of apparent suffering, whereas sicknesses of the soul can be imperceptible to the one experiencing them, much like someone who is becoming more selfish, mean-spirited, or callous may not realize the way their personality is getting worse unless a loved one points it out to them.)

You’d want to be sensitive and not dismissive, but the solution here is to find some alternative way to make medical help available, or to help them deal with their trauma so that they can seek that medical help. Why? Because what’s at issue is, literally, salvation. Salus, the root word for “salvation,” can mean both physical and spiritual wellness (soteria, the Greek word used for “salvation” in the New Testament, seems to also denote physical health; cf. Acts 27:34), and the words “holy” and “healthy” come from the same Germanic root that denotes being “whole.” Physical salvation is essential for life, and thus medical experts cannot be neglected, despite the terrible experiences you may have had with them. The salvation of your soul is essential for the spiritual life; thus, the Church is non-negotiable.

The fact that fitness groups can be judgmental or cultish does not mean fitness is not real; the fact that physicians can be elitist and abusive does not mean all diagnoses are a fraud to sell more medication; and the fact that the Church Militant has often sinned and failed her Lord does not mean the grace offered by the Church is something you can just pass up. 

Caution – danger of stumbling

The Catechism defines scandal (from the Greek skandalon, meaning “stumbling block”) as “an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.” It “is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others.” There’s a reason that those who teach will be judged more harshly (James 3:1). By the way, the word “doctor” originally meant “teacher”–think of how the word “doctrine” means “a teaching”–which implies that they are under the same burden not to scandalize. Shame on those teachers and doctors who cause people to fall away; Jesus warned that a terrible fate awaited them (Matthew 18:6; Luke 17:1-2). 

But letting yourself be scandalized–that is to say, letting the failures of the Church so offend you that you walk away from Christ–is also a sin, which Aquinas calls “passive scandal.” As Fulton Sheen put it, “It is a sin to be scandalized by sin.” If that sounds harsh, think again about medicine: Making it hard for patients to trust medicine is morally wrong because it could result in their illness and death. On the other hand, the choice of former patients to refuse to seek the proper care for themselves based on bad experiences they’ve had with physicians is the direct cause of that illness and death (and sin is nothing more than spiritual illness and death). 

To reiterate: How to communicate this and to help the person who has experienced religious trauma is a separate issue. That takes great pastoral sensitivity, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in some cases, professional help. But perhaps framing it this way in our own minds can help us in how we craft our responses and our prayers, and, just maybe, give those who have suffered a different perspective on what true healing might look like. 

To use the language of St. Ignatius of Antioch put it, we will always long to be united once more with our fallen-away brethren and to again “break one loaf, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote which wards off death but yields continuous life in union with Jesus Christ” (Letter to the Ephesians 20) in what Pope Francis has called the “field hospital” of the Church.