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SYMPTOMATIC RELIGIOSITY
cause difficulties, too. They imagine themselves to be the
object of accusations or attacks and will misconstrue remarks
made in services or meetings as deliberate reflections upon
themselves. Querulous, argumentative people are sometimes
mildly insane, but more often temperamental anomalies
account for their unhealthy desire to interfere in the affairs of
others, their persistent negative criticism and their
determination always to have the last word in an argument or dispute.
Pathological jealousy creates grave problems for those
responsible for Church discipline when they lack the psychological
knowledge to recognise it. The pathological liar can divide a
Church into warring factions and cause great injury to its
reputation in a community; so, of course, can a Church
member with perverse tendencies of a more or less criminal
kind. Changes of character that occur at the change of life in
women and during the involutional period in men, and psychic
symptoms that sometimes develop in old age, are other
possible causes of difficulty for ministers and congregations.
Pathological Religiosity
Sometimes it is very difficult to draw the line between
religious health and abnormality because environmental
factors affect our judgment. What is considered normal in one
milieu is unsatisfactory in another. Some religious
denominations encourage forms of behaviour that would certainly be
accounted pathological if they did not occur in a community
where they are customary as manifestations of religious
sincerity or fervour. Again, a religious community may be
corporately subjected to social pressures that encourage
pathological behaviour within it. Certain historical situations release
dangerous spiritual forces; and circumstances arise from time
to time that compel a mentally healthy person to choose
between accepting the forms of spiritual life customary in his
surroundings or of renouncing religion altogether.
Pathological forms of religious behaviour are found
sometimes in people whose lives are otherwise normal and apparently
healthy. Morbid mental traits may first manifest themselves in
the religious life just as, sometimes, they rise to expression only
in a person’s attitude to sex, work, or friendship.
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