One in Four Pastors Has Struggled With Mental Illness. Why Do We Still Call Anxiety a Lack of Faith?

There’s a sentence many anxious Christians have heard, usually from someone who meant well: “You just need to trust God more.”

It sounds like encouragement, but it works as a diagnosis. Your anxiety is evidence, it says, and the thing it’s evidence of is that you don’t have enough faith.

Set that against some numbers.

In 2022, Lifeway Research published a survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors in the United States. 26% said they had personally struggled with some form of mental illness. For 17% it had been formally diagnosed; the other 9% believed they’d experienced it without a diagnosis. More than half said they had known at least one member of their congregation with a severe mental illness.

So roughly one pastor in four has been there. If anxiety and depression were simply what happens when faith runs low, you’d have to conclude that a quarter of the clergy don’t believe enough. Nobody seriously thinks that.

What follows is something Christians accept everywhere else in the body. Nobody tells a diabetic that their pancreas is a trust issue. Nobody thinks a broken leg shows weak prayer. But the brain and the nervous system are treated as the one part of a person that ought to respond directly to belief.

Here’s the strange part. The “trust more” advice makes things worse by its own logic.

Tell an anxious person that their anxiety shows a lack of faith and you’ve given them something new to be anxious about. Now they’re worried, and worried about what the worry means, and probably hiding both from the people at church who might have helped. The advice turns a health problem into a secret.

It also gets the scriptures oddly wrong. The Psalms are full of people who are frightened and say so. Elijah sat under a tree and asked to die, and the response he got was food and sleep. Even in the garden, Jesus is described as being in anguish. None of that fits the idea that a calm mind is the measure of faith.

A more useful way to think about it is that faith and anxiety aren’t on the same dial, where more of one means less of the other. A person can believe deeply and have a nervous system that fires too easily. And in that case seeing a doctor, taking medication or sitting with a therapist is simply looking after a body, which Christians have always believed was worth looking after.

Diane Cooper makes this case in a chapter of Faith for the Middle of Life called “Faith and the Anxious Mind.” She describes anxiety as shaped by biology, experience and stress, and says faith doesn’t erase those things. It meets them.

Which leaves a hard question for churches. If one of your leaders said from the front that they were on medication for anxiety, would the congregation trust them more, or less?

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