The Christian religion is the largest faith group in this country. In the 2001 census approx 71% of the Uk said they were Christian, in B&H the percentage was about 67%, which at the time earned B&H the title of the most secular city in the UK. What the census didn’t ask was people’s beliefs, the question about religion was included in the ethnicity section. So 71% gives you the percentage of nominal Christians, people who are
Christian by self designation, many of them will be Christian in name only.
More recent surveys like the British social attitudes survey, suggest that Christian beliefs are held by 45% of the population. But even that may be misleading, because surveys amongst people who go to church reveal that not all of them believe in God, let alone that Jesus is divine, or that there is a heaven, or that Jesus is the only means of salvation. So talking about Christians is difficult because there are at least 3 types of Christians:
A) Those who actively believe what the mainstream churches and creeds say are Christian beliefs, and who belong to a church, or go at least once a month. This is perhaps 8-10% of the population.
B) Those who vaguely believe what Christian’s believe and who don’t go to church except for weddings and funerals. This maybe 30-40% c) those who don’t believe at all what the churches teach, and who may or may not go to church, but like to think that they are Christian because they don’t have any other religion. Maybe 30-40%.
To complicate matters further, there are many different denominations of Christians. In the USA there are roughly 4000 different Christian denominations. In UK maybe 400. In Haywards Heath, where I live, there is a population of about 25000, and there are 21 different Christian churches and 11 different denominations.
Mostly they get on OK, but there are a few who don’t speak to the rest of us.
So what can we say about Christians and mental health in general terms? From my experience as a Chaplain working in mental health, I would suggest the following:
1) It makes a big difference whether people actually go to a church or not. The research shows that belonging to a Christian church is much more effective in maintaining good mental health, than what you believe. Churches are generally good places for mental health, because people support each other, and watch out for each other, and on the whole they are fairly inclusive places. You may have problems with inclusion if you are gay, or feminist or even female in some denominations, but on the whole the church is a fairly inclusive place. And this is good for broken and isolated people in our fractured society. Jesus told us that people would know Christians by their love for each other, and this is the aspiration of most churches.
2) Christianity as a religion (NB some Christians don’t like the word religion, they would say something like “I’m not religious, I’m a Christian”, religion has for them negative overtones) has emphasized personal responsibility. For instance most churches will include in their main act of worship some kind of confession of sin. The good side of this is that Christian’s should be less judgemental of others, the bad side of this is that many Christians struggle with a sense of guilt. In mental health this can be very exaggerated: it may be linked to OCD, it may mean that somebody who is depressed adds to their

depression a burden of guilt for being depressed, it may mean that carers burn themselves out because they believe it is their god given duty.
Mental health workers need then to be careful not to feed this guilt. It is tempting to want to use it to achieve short term results like averting suicide or reducing alcohol intake, but this would almost certainly be counter productive in the end.
Authentic Christian faith is about freedom from guilt, but some churches are really bad at loading guilt onto their people. Mental health workers may find themselves having to unpick false guilt.
3) Christians believe in miracles. They believe that Jesus changed water in to wine, healed the sick, and was himself raised from the dead. There is an expectation that God will hear and answer prayer. This is the stuff of all religions, of course. I believe it myself. The question is “how much of prayer is about us hearing and aligning ourselves with God’s will, and how much of prayer is about God hearing us and aligning himself with our will?”
I’m not going to attempt to answer that one here! However, this really tricky issue is a major problem in church life, and especially in mental health: what kind of God allows suffering becomes a very personal question when you were raped by your own father; do you believe in a God who heals, becomes a sharp issue when some churches teach that you shouldn’t need anti-depressants as a
Christian; being lonely and a virgin at 40 is a major problem when you have prayed for God to send you a husband for 20 years.
Where is God when it hurts? How can you talk about a God of love when my life has been rubbish?
These perennial human questions become very sharp if churches have a very triumphalist gospel.
Some people thrive with the encouragement that God hears and answers every prayer, other people feel angry and inadequate because God seems to answer everybody else’s prayer and not theirs.
4) Most Christians talk about evil in personal terms. Jesus spoke about Satan and the devil, and the
Gospels describe him driving out demons or unclean spirits. This is not some medieval relic, but really quite logical and integral to orthodox Christianity. Christians believe in a personal God, the source of all that is lovely and good, so why not believe in a personal devil, the source of all that is not good?
However, just as it is not easy to know when God is at work in a situation, so it is not easy to know when the devil is at work. People who hear voices will often blame them on the devil. People will blame bad luck on the devil. People will believe the devil lives in their house, or maybe in the house next door. Most difficult of all, they may believe the devil is in somebody who they dislike, and it can be a short step from this belief to the belief that they should harm that person to get rid of the devil.
Demons play well in psychosis.
I haven’t got time to talk about how I would handle these kinds of issues, that is why you have chaplains! Suffice it to say that such beliefs will not go away simply by denying that they are true. All mainstream Christian churches have deliverance ministers who are licensed to work with people who believe that they are afflicted by demons.
To end on a positive note: I believe that Christian faith is life affirming and hopeful. It gives broken people a rationale to start again. It gives lonely people a family to belong to. It gives insecure people a basis to believe they are loved. It gives lost people a sense of purpose. It solves more problems than it creates. It heals far more than it hurts. I commend it, or rather Him, Jesus.