Created in the image of God, it has become increasingly easy for human beings to forget His image and to reconstruct Him according to their imagination. Our image of God and the way we relate to Him influences every aspect of our lives and affects our psychological well-being.
According to existing research, not only interpersonal relationships, but also interaction with the divine has a strong impact on psychological well-being. The relationship between our religious beliefs and health is nuanced, as recent studies show, and researchers have not reached a consensus on which aspects of religious involvement have the greatest impact, or on the mechanisms by which religious beliefs influence physical and psychological well-being. Some studies focus more on institutional religiosity, while others look at how personal devotion affects individual health.
The relationship between our image of God and our mental health
Both the volume and quality of studies on the relationship between religion and health have increased in recent decades, driven by innovative research programmes in fields such as psychology, sociology, psychiatry, gerontology or social epidemiology.
Religious beliefs protect psychological well-being in the midst of stressful experiences—this was the conclusion of a study by researchers Amy Ai and Crystal Park, who examined how religious resources influence postoperative recovery in heart patients. The study found that positive adaptive strategies include forgiveness, seeking religious support, fellowship with like-minded people, spiritual connection, and an inclination towards generosity, while maladaptive responses to stressful situations (spiritual dissatisfaction, fear of divine punishment, insecurity or doubt) are associated with patients’ inability to protect themselves from stress, depression and anxiety, which predict poor postoperative recovery.
People who pray have better mental health, according to a number of studies of diverse samples, including elderly Canadians, Presbyterian ministers in the United States, Australian adults, and patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery. Other studies have found no positive association between prayer frequency and good mental health, or even reported an association between prayer and the presence of symptoms of depression and anxiety.
In an attempt to explain these conflicting results, some researchers have focused on the style of prayer rather than its frequency, finding, for example, that meditative prayer, in which people focus on experiencing God’s presence, is associated with more positive effects on quality of life than ritual prayer, in which written or memorised prayers are read or recited.
The image that people have of God, and therefore the type of relationship with the divine that this image shapes, also influences individual well-being. Early studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between well-being and the image of a loving, forgiving, caring, and protecting God.
Other studies have shown that people who pray to a God they consider to be their confidant enjoy higher levels of happiness and better quality marital relationships. Other studies have concluded that the image of a loving God is associated with fewer mental disorders, while the image of a distant God is positively correlated with symptoms of psychopathology. The authors note, however, that the results should be interpreted with caution and that further research is needed to replicate these findings.
The researchers did find, however, that beyond the image of God, the type of attachment to the divine interferes with mental health and that, surprisingly, this relationship between attachment to God and an individual’s health is not linear.
Attachment styles and their roots
Attachment theory, developed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in 1969 and refined by Mary Ainsworth and other psychologists in the 1970s, is an important concept in developmental psychology that emphasises the need for close relationships with other people in order to develop feelings of stability and security.
Evidence of the role of emotional attachment in child development was observed and partly understood before Bowlby by researchers or people who came into contact with children deprived of the affection of primary caregivers. For example, in 1760 a Spanish bishop reported to his superiors about children in orphanages who had their basic needs met but were dying of sadness. In the 1930s and 1940s, many orphaned children ended up in American hospitals, deprived of touch and emotional contact, and their mortality rate was high. The psychiatrist David Levi, writing in 1937 about the emotional vacuum in which physically healthy but insensitive and apathetic adolescents and children seemed to live, attributed these reactions to “emotional starvation.”
Bowlby integrated all these observations and the results of his studies into a theory of attachment, suggesting that early emotional deprivation and attachment to very close people play a key role in personality development and in shaping lifelong patterns of relationships. Imagining a simple experiment (to see how children aged 12-18 months reacted to being left alone and then reunited with their mothers), Bowlby and researcher Mary Ainsworth observed four fundamental characteristics of attachment:
- We maintain emotional and physical closeness with people who are close to us;
- We use people we are attached to as a refuge when we feel insecure, upset or threatened;
- Our attachment figure acts as a safe framework for our needs; we count on their support as we go out to explore the world;
- We feel sadness and anxiety in the absence of the person to whom we are attached.
Bowlby’s studies of attachment in childhood laid the groundwork for research into adult attachment. As adults, we develop our own attachment style, which helps us to form relationships, maintain emotional balance and cope with stress, thus influencing our overall happiness.
Older and newer studies have extended attachment theory by finding that the human-God relationship fulfils the criteria for attachment (seeking closeness, finding refuge, and using the relationship as a secure base from which to explore and confront the world). In 1991, researchers Lee Kirkpatrick and Philip Shaver categorised participants in a study according to their religious attachment style (secure, avoidant or anxious), determined by the image they had formed of God—loving and responsive being, or impersonal and distant or inconsistent.
Secure attachment to God is uniquely linked to mental health, concluded a study published in 2018. Three years later, another study confirmed this finding, revealing a more nuanced relationship between attachment to God and mental distress than previous research has shown.
Religious attachment style correlates with mental health
“Most research on attachment to God has suggested a simple linear relationship, where a less avoidant—or secure—relationship is associated with better mental health and a more avoidant relationship with worse,” says Professor Blake Victor Kent, co-author of a study showing that the relationship between religious attachment and mental well-being resembles a U-shaped curve.
The study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, is based on data from 1,600 Americans (mostly Christians) from the Baylor Religion Survey, a survey of Americans’ religious beliefs and behaviours. The study’s authors, researchers Matthew Henderson of Union University and Blake Victor Kent of Westmont College, found that people with secure attachments (who see God as consistent and responsive) and those with avoidant attachments (who see God as distant and unreliable) experienced lower levels of stress than those with anxious attachments (who lack certainty in their relationship with the divine).
This higher level of distress among those in the middle, neither very secure nor very distant in their relationship with God, was the surprising element of the study, with the authors emphasising that insecurity in one’s relationship with God is a real threat to mental well-being.
“The more we understand how we relate to God and others, the healthier we can be,” Henderson concludes.
Concepts of forgiveness and suffering at the heart of the right image of God
According to Herb Montgomery, founder of Renewed Heart Ministries, if one were to rank the factors that significantly shape our conceptions of God’s goodness, the divine role in human suffering would rank first, second only to forgiveness.
Montgomery writes in his book, Finding the Father: See Him for who He Really is, that we have a misconception about God’s forgiveness, and that often what brings us to our knees is our guilt, but also a sense that God has withdrawn His goodness from us and that praying for forgiveness will help us get it back. If what we feel were real, the conclusion would be that it is not God’s goodness that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4), but our repentance that leads us to God’s goodness. This latter perspective does not help us to build a picture of an unchanging God—on the contrary, we believe that He draws near to us when we confess our sins, and moves away from us when we slip back into our old mistakes. The result is that we become followers of a religion that revolves around our behaviour.
In fact, Montgomery argues, biblical forgiveness is not about a change that takes place in the forgiver, but a change that takes place in us. God is the one who takes the first step, it is His goodness that calls us to repentance, and confession and faith are the means by which He changes us, not by which we change Him. “Salvation, contrary to popular Christianity, is not convincing God to forgive our sin, but rather accepting His prevenient forgiveness,” the author concludes.
Suffering, the other factor that shapes our conception of God, has no simple, easy to understand explanations and often comes and goes without the bit of comfort that the explanations we hunger for would bring. The best answer we can receive here is the Word made flesh, who took upon Himself our sins and sufferings, so that “in Him God’s solidarity with us reaches the point of no return.” Taking on the human condition, Jesus remains humble and obedient until He reaches “the most desperate human situation, the furthest extreme from the dominion He enjoyed in heaven,” writes Professor Georges Stéveny, noting that the events of Jesus’s life reveal to us not a God who folds His hands, but one who stretches out His hands on the Cross.
Our only hope of breaking the hold of sin is to be exposed to something far more attractive, points out Pastor Ty Gibson, speaking of the failure of trying to save ourselves from sin by focusing on forbidden behaviour. Only the beauty of divine love can overcome the lure of sin, while stigmatising sinful behaviour leads to a retreat into it under the pressure of guilt and helplessness, the pastor concludes.
In this world of sin, we experience disappointments, traumas or sufferings that cannot be erased, but God can do more than erase the past. He can write a new story over the words carved into our flesh and minds, swallowing up the darkness of the old scripts with its glow. And as the chapters of the new story come to life, our trust in Him grows deeper and deeper, not because we know what the next chapter will hold, but because its author is the One who could not bear to live while we perished.
Carmen Lăiu is an editor of Signs of the Times Romania and ST Network.