Complete Acceptance, Self-importance & Mystical Experiences
Reasons for staying in an authoritarian religion
Welcome to the fourth article in the course Reclaim Your Life: Rebuild Your Identity in relation to healing from harmful religion.
This article examines the role of self-acceptance, self-importance and mystical experiences as factors in why someone joins or remains in an authoritarian and controlling type of religion.
You can either choose to listen to me talk on this subject via the video or you can read through a condensed article written below.
Self-acceptance
Self-acceptance can be really hard to obtain for people.
We often have a strong inner critic.
We often can feel guilt and regret.
And so for many people, the thought of getting baptised and having their sins washed away in the eyes of God and having complete acceptance from God if they accept him is very compelling.
Scriptures such as those below talk about this cleansing and removing of sin:
“washed in the blood of the lamb” (Acts 4 v 12)
“Christ died for our sins” (I Corinthians 15 v 3)
“all sins will be forgiven” (Mark 3 v 28)
Think about how powerful is the belief and the relief of feeling completely accepted and forgiven by God (no matter what you have done).
As long as we are sorry, we are taught that it is all washed clean, and we can approach God on the basis of Christ's sacrifice, with a clean slate, so we can feel COMPLETELY accepted.
Not many of us ever get to feel the gift of being completely accepted in our life.
Feeling full self-acceptance or full acceptance from another is probably one of the most powerful things someone can ever feel.
Often if we have done a lot of healing work and personal work we can then learn to fully accept ourself and our shadow side (you may have done things you are unwilling to let too many other people know about though for fear of judgment).
So the teaching of being totally accepted by God and having our sins forgiven is a really powerful incentive for remaining and being in a particular faith or religion.
Conversely, when you go to leave the faith you can actually feel that you have lost Gods acceptance.
Rejected by God
I know for myself, in Jehovah’s Witnesses you are taught that if you leave them you are like “a dog eating its vomit” (2 Peter 2 v 22).
That is what you are told you are.
You are that disgusting that God's spirit will be removed from you and you are perceived by God like a dog licking up its own vomit.
And the powerful teaching, and symbolism are that if you leave god he leaves you.
You are eternally damned.
You might as well have “a millstone put around your neck and be drowned” (Matthew 18 v 6) that is how far removed from God you are.
These are really frightening thoughts.
My experience
I know I can picture myself laying in the backyard on the trampoline one night and crying, looking up at the sky, because those teachings and thoughts of being like a dog returning to its vomit and of being totally rejected by God were going over and over in my head.
And even though I did not want to go back, it was that feeling of complete non-acceptance that devastated me.
I had not yet reached a stage of accepting myself so that feeling of complete and utter isolation and loneliness was devastating to deal with.
Because that feeling of acceptance by God is based on an external acceptance it is not a real internal acceptance of yourself and your shadow side.
So, when you lose or step away from your faith, you can lose that feeling of being accepted by God, especially if you have been taught you will be rejected by God for leaving that faith.
Leave the religion, God leaves you
I know with Jehovah’s Witnesses they equate rejecting Jehovah's Witnesses as rejecting God.
In their eyes, they are one and the same thing.
I believe other authoritarian, fundamentalist type faiths do the same thing.
So I think it is really important that if you leave a faith, to realise that if you wish to continue believing in a God (which many do) that God and your religious faith are not one and the same thing.
That can be a really hard thing to get your head around.
But if you wish to continue believing in God, being able to separate that and knowing that each particular faith is only ONE way of believing (it is not the only way) is important.
And also being able to do the work to learn full self-acceptance from inside of yourself (and to experience that) is hard work but really important.
So having been taught that all your sins are forgiven and you are fully accepted by God is a powerful reason for many to stay in a particular religion.
Especially if they come into the faith/religion as an adult.
People may have shame and guilt over certain things they carry deep inside that they finally feel the relief of being completely absolved in due to their relationship with God and that faith.
That is a really powerful reason for people staying.
Self-importance
This one I had a bit of difficulty in accepting when I first learned about it.
That is acknowledging the feelings of self-importance you can have within a faith.
What I mean by that is the feeling of pleasure in believing that there will be an ultimate vengeance by God on those who do not believe.
You are taught that:
- Christ will come in a fiery flame and exact vengeance on his enemies (2 Thessalonians 1 v 8).
- Those who do not accept the faith will die at Armageddon and be destroyed.
You can have a feeling of specialness, of being unique and accepted by God and an awareness that everyone else is not (based on teachings).
You are taught that scores in this life will be eventually settled by God.
Vengeance
It is like having your own personal saviour that will exact vengeance for you and on other people as well.
I know as a Jehovah’s Witness I can remember as a teenager (going back 30 odd years) when we went door to door witnessing (because we believed Armaggedon was coming really soon) we would be picking out which houses we would want to live in after the inhabitants were destroyed.
Looking back now I think that is really horrifying but at the time if you are taught that everyone is going to be destroyed by God who does not believe in him, then part of you is rejoicing in that as you are going to benefit from it.
So in this way, I could see it was true for me.
And if people ridicule or pick on you for your faith, part of you feels, “Well one day you are going to know and you are going to die”.
That feeling of being a bit more important and special and being part of the special people God approves of (and the only people God approves) can be powerful psychologically and a bit harder when you leave to accept that was a factor too in why you remained.
Mystical experiences
In the faith I was in becoming born-again was not part of it.
However, it is a large part of other Christian religions.
- People speak of feeling a sense of unity and connectedness to all other people and things.
- They speak sometimes of seeing vivid colours and sounds and describe the experience as like being transported to another realm.
I think it is important to acknowledge that these experiences are real for people and not discount them.
But, it is also important to acknowledge that plenty of people have these experiences in a non-religious setting as well. These experiences are not unique to religion.
Intense emotional experiences can bring about these experiences which are sometimes individually hard to find an explanation for in science.
So not to discount these experiences, but to realise that in our minds, we have perhaps connected it to that faith, as a sign that our faith is approved by God.
We may need to unlink that link (put it aside) and realise that mystical experiences are things many people experience in many settings around the world and are not just unique to Christian or religious settings.
So if this is something that held you in your faith or you have had difficulty reconciling since you left your faith then acknowledge that this is still something to be valued if it was important and had meaning for you.
Maybe a bit later you could look into this in more detail as there is plenty of information on the internet about mystical experiences.
So these three reasons for remaining in a faith namely self-acceptance, self-importance and mystical experiences are all valid reasons for people staying and remaining in an authoritarian type of religion.
If you would like to read the article prior to this one in this course, please read below.
If you would like to read the article after this one in the course (still to be published).
