When Religion Is an Addiction

Table of Contents

Introduction (pp. 1-10)

You’d have to be living on another planet in a galaxy far, far away to miss the influence of the religious, specifically Christian, right-wing in the US today. They’ve made themselves difficult to ignore.

In fact, like the most dysfunctional person in a typical, traditional family, the religious right-wing has become the center of the country’s attention politically, religiously, and socially. Like the family drunk, they are on a bender and their current drink is political. Election days for them have begun to look like New Years’ Eve for an alcoholic.

They’re setting the agenda to which other political, religious, and activist groups are having to respond. And the responses have more often been like those of an addict’s enablers.

The religious right-wing now provides a target constituency for votes and funds for the Republican Party, and even some Democrats. It successfully seated a president whom its members continue to insist is “a fine Christian man” no matter what he does. It’s become an intimate partner with US consumerism and “free market” big-business economic interests no matter how poor the first-century followers of its Jesus were.

What media analyst David Brock calls The Republican Noise Machine with its right-wing Christian radio and TV stations, and a right-wing corporate media symbolized by the FOX News cable network, support this right-wing Christianity. On top of all that, the mainstream media feel they must continue to provide the religious right-wing with attention and a legitimacy far beyond the numbers it represents. They’ve become a crucial part of the right-wing’s family of enablers.

The mainstream media often seek out right-wing religion to provide the balance to other viewpoints that aren’t even about religion at all. A 2007 study by the watchdog group Media Matters of America finds that on the three major television networks, the three major cable news channels, and PBS, right-wing religious leaders were interviewed, quoted, or mentioned almost 3.8 times as often as other religious leaders on all issues.

The media thereby define the debate in almost all national discussions as the religious right-wing on one side and the other side occupied by science, social science, academics, or anything and anyone else. It’s as if, for example, debates over stem-cell research pit science against morality with only a right-wing Christian religio-political version of morality posed as the “other side.” It’s as if the only alternatives in discussions of evolution are right-wing Christian creationism or atheism.

Right-wing religion fomented “Culture Wars” in the US that enable it to continue to set a warrior-style political strategy regarding what we’ve come to call “social issues,” while it acts as if making war on other people and nations isn’t a social or “values” issue at all. It’s so driving the national agenda that most of the country is caught up in its religiously motivated political and social initiatives.

Outsiders express amazement when they hear right-wing religious leaders, ministers, televangelists, and their political bedfellows speak, or when they learn about their latest political initiative to force US citizens to act more like its version of what a Christian is. They’re astonished by the right-wing’s rewriting of history, callousness toward the beliefs, feelings, hurts, and deaths of others, the right-wing's moral inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and inability to listen seriously to the multitude of other viewpoints that US citizens hold.

Outsiders aren’t surprised at all that right-wing people disagree with them. By now they expect that.

What really amazes them is the psychology of members of the religious right-wing, their attitudes and manner. Those outside the right-wing are struck by the fervency, obsessive busyness, closed-mindedness, and divisive energy that drive the religious right-wing. They’re shocked by the right-wing’s dogmatic assertion of its cause as uniquely just and righteous while painting those who disagree as mortal enemies out to destroy the family, God, humanity, the nation, faith, and civilization itself.

On the one hand, it was at first often difficult for outsiders to take the religious right-wing seriously. It’s been hard for outsiders to believe that anyone could really believe all of this. It was easy to write the religious right-wing off as a group of nutcases.

So liberals turned to the usual inoffensive liberal responses to try to understand these right-wing people and to help the right-wing “see” and “understand” what they’re doing and who they’re hurting. Listen to what liberals find themselves saying:

On the other hand, though, outsiders have been forced to take the religio-political right-wing seriously because it has changed the face of the country. Its juggernaut has so overwhelmed the political process that a few have even come to realize painfully that the old tactics of nice liberals don’t work.

It’s true that there are many people who reside in a moveable religious and political middle in the U.S. The 2006 Pew Research Center's report on religion and public life found that 49 percent believe Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country."

For this middle, information and facts provide a basis for rethinking their faith and politics. For them, the usual nice, open-minded attempt to promote understanding is effective.

These are the people who can be reached if they’re convinced: (1) that there really are viable alternatives to the religious right-wing and, most importantly, (2) that the people who hold these alternatives seriously, sincerely, and passionately bet their lives on these alternatives. They’re not just doing political maneuvering to win elections.

I work regularly with members of this moveable middle right in the center of the country. They know something is wacky about what they’re hearing from the religious-political right-wing. Many of them are still waiting for someone to speak with them who appears to sincerely and fervently hold a convincing alternative to what they hear constantly from mainstream and conservative media and even their own ministers.

But there are others for whom the facts are so trumped by the right-wing religious frame of reference that they rely upon that they seem incapable of considering alternative views, much less real compromise or actual movement toward the proverbial political center. This group often includes religious personalities who have their careers, fame, finances, self-images, and ability to get attention and followers dependent upon their right-wing beliefs and practices.

This group also includes everyday followers who have become desperately dependent upon right-wing religious beliefs, practices, institutions, and leaders to alter their mood, to give them good feelings in the middle of a world that doesn’t seem to care about them and their fortunes. These everyday folk cling desperately to these mood-altering substances for hope in a world that can scare them.

This book is about this latter group. It has the audacity to argue that for them religion is functioning as an addiction and that unless we understand that function and respond with it in mind, we’ll be unable to affect the larger moveable middle in the long term.

Religion for this influential group is like a mood-altering substance upon which they’ve become increasingly dependent. In the last thirty years the addiction has encouraged them to seek stronger fixes. It has led them to become dependent upon the use of political activities and the elevated mood of political victories to alter their feelings about themselves.

In 1991 Father Leo Booth wrote a ground-breaking book on religious addiction: When God Becomes a Drug: Breaking the Chains of Religious Abuse and Addiction. Addiction expert, author, and counselor John Bradshaw, who in 1985 had recorded a set of cassettes entitled “Religious Addiction,” wrote the book’s foreword.

Booth’s and Bradshaw’s works were courageous. They took on an American icon. They broke with that old advice to never get into discussions about religion and politics. Out of their own experiences and their work with addicts, they spoke about the connection of religion and addiction in the same breath.

Over fifteen years later, their observations are still valuable, and in the meantime the addiction that uses religion has also become a dominant social and political force. We now must disregard that old advice again and speak plainly about both politics and religion.

Addictive religion has not only moved successfully into the political arena, but into the center of attention in the US in the same way that addicts usually become the center of attention in their families. From a marginal force in twentieth-century American society, addictive religion has set the nation’s religious and political agenda.

Those outside the addiction have awakened to their own marginalization by the activities of these addicts. They’ve most often moved into a reactive mode toward the addicted that hasn’t always been helpful.

Frankly, this movement of addictive religion could only have taken place because those of us outside religious addiction have enabled it to happen. Often we’ve done the best we knew how to do given our understanding of religion and our assumptions about how right-wing religion was functioning in people’s lives.

Through minimizing the potential power of the religious right-wing, denial, obsessive positive or negative emotional attachment to it, and even self-blaming, we often became like abused spouses believing that there must be something we could do to control, change, or save the addicts. Our focus became changing them. That, we believed, would solve our problems.

This book is written as a result of my experience that one of the most requested topics in my speaking and workshops in the last few years is how to deal with religious people when you’ve tried everything else and nothing is working. Frustration among people who must respond to right-wing religion continues to build.

There’s much anger, hurt, fretting, and hopelessness. People are getting tired, seeing it take a toll on their health, and realizing that their old responses are not only not changing much of the extreme religious right but encouraging it. They are also realizing that the religious right-wing’s continual dominance of the discussion is hardly being affected by our current techniques.

When Religion is an Addiction first asks us to change our understanding of the radical religious right, to consider it in a new light, so that we can do something that will, first, ensure the health of those outside the addiction, and second, end our own activities that are part of the dynamics that further the religious right-wing. Chapters two through seven set out this new understanding and how it explains what we’ve been seeing happen around us.

Yet my ultimate goal is not only to set forth a way to understand the problem but also to point to solutions. Chapter one sets the tone for that at the beginning by calling us to stop arguing about religion in general.

The recent spate of books that defend atheism — what Time magazine labeled “an atheist literary wave” — provides a welcome alternative voice in America’s diverse religious dialogue. They encourage such arguments while they soothe the atheist choir.

Yet they actually provide more opportunities for the right-wing to further use religion as an addiction. They enable it to feel even more righteous and thereby not deal with the real issues that motivate its behavior.

Chapter eight discusses practical guidelines for dealing with people who use religion as their addiction. People in my workshops have already found these guidelines helpful, reassuring, and empowering.

However, I believe it’s important for people to work out the application of those guidelines themselves. The process that groups go through of deciding how to respond to a specific addict without enabling is an important one for the group itself and is very situationally specific. How one responds to religious addicts and their political bedfellows in specific situations must be worked out on the ground.

Though the benefit of an outside perspective is often helpful, an outside consultant can only be a facilitator for what will become an important group experience. Creative and out-of-the-norm thinking by the group is important here.

In addition, we must recognize that appropriate, non-enabling responses will often not be the easiest to implement. But when we recognize the reality of the addiction, we’ll see why we really have little choice.

When Religion is an Addiction isn’t written for those who fit its description of religious addicts. For those for whom the shoe fits, I expect it will make them angry, more defensive, and even more reliant on claims that addicts make about how they are the real victims of everyone else. I expect them also to find relief in that defensiveness, in attacking the messenger, and in even more of their mood-altering addiction.

This is not because I am taking the view that addictions are rooted in moral problems. Right-wing religion itself has a history of viewing alcoholism and drug addiction as sinful. I instead join those addiction specialists who see the core of addictions, including religious addiction, as something more like a complex emotional disorder.

Addictions usually result in destructive and unethical behavior, but even that doesn’t mean that the addict is somehow evil in some inherent way. These resulting behaviors, as addiction specialist Elizabeth Connell Henderson argues in Understanding Addiction, mean that no matter whether one sees addiction as a brain disorder, a disorder of the will, or a disease, it “can’t be separated from morality and personal responsibility.” “You may not have asked for the addiction,” she writes, “but you must ask for help to recover, and you must be willing to accept responsibility for your choices.”

Since completing this manuscript, former Nixon White House counsel and Barry Goldwater conservative, John W. Dean, has published his most important book to date. In Conservatives Without Conscience he brings to public attention the sixty years of solid scientific research by behavioral scholars regarding what has been called “authoritarian personalities.”

This research shows that there is a large group of people in this country (possibly 20 percent or more of the populace) who are most comfortable living in submission to an authoritarian figure or adopting the conscience of an authoritarian figure. With fear their underlying motivating factor, they feel safest when they set aside what would otherwise be their own moral views and shift consideration to how well they are living up to the expectations of an authority or authority figure. They are capable of doing great harm to others if they believe it to be sanctioned by the authority.

Because the results of these studies are so unusually and overwhelmingly conclusive for careful scientific research, it would be easy to make such solid scholarship seem less than the careful, controlled work it is. Dean has fortunately taken pains not to do so. That makes his thoughtful summary in dialogue with the researchers themselves an important addition to the understanding that informs my own work.

The research on authoritarianism shows overwhelmingly that this authoritarian stance is consistently associated with right-wing, but not left-wing, ideology. Dean quotes University of Manitoba Professor Robert Altemeyer, whose works include, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), The Authoritarian Specter (1996), and numerous peer-reviewed articles: “Now it turns out that in North America persons who score highly on my measure of authoritarianism test tend to favor right-wing political parties and have ‘conservative’ economic philosophies and religious sentiments.”

The concept of addiction as the way religion is functioning for many people who include those Dean is describing, provides what Dean’s work doesn’t. It enforces our understanding of why people abandon their own moral values and accept the perspectives of those who deal in the addictive substance.

The addiction model also allows us to see what must be done to change this dynamic, rather than further it. It provides a model for responding effectively to our experiences with right-wing religious people and their abusive activities, especially if they fit these models of authoritarian personalities. As the country continues to be threatened by this addiction, there is hope to change things — if we have the courage to do so.

When Religion is an Addiction is written for those of us who are outside this addiction but can easily, by our very attempts to help, control, argue with, or change the addicts, fall into promoting the addiction instead. It’s written with the primary goal of encouraging those outside the addiction to take a healthy stand for their own lives and for the lives of those around them.

It uses the insights of experts on religion, addiction, and addiction recovery. It’s not, however, meant to defend or authoritatively represent any of the recovery methods, whether they are the programs of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Rational Recovery, or even Al-Anon.

No intervention in addiction has been 100% effective, whether it’s these recovery programs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, motivational enhancement therapy, or relapse prevention therapy. Partly this might be because none of these methods touches upon a core piece of the problem people still must face when they emerge from treatments and group meetings — our society’s current need for addictive behavior.

Yet, these programs offer great insight into addiction, addictive thinking, and dealing with addicts. They often provide a way to cut through the fog of addictive behavior and name it, its deceptive cover-ups, and its denial, for what they are.

I have not personally participated in any of these recovery programs. But in over the last twenty years I have paid attention, listened, researched, and learned from their experience and the words of recovering addicts. I’ve added their insights and experience to my own study of, and decades of experiences with, people all along the religious spectrum.

This book argues that we need a new way to frame and respond to right-wing religion as it functions for the many who dominate the religious-political scene today. It argues that we need a new response that’s neither the old “nice” liberal one that’s been tried again and again but has not worked well, nor the embittered anti-religion one that’s contributing to the addiction.

It’s written for non-religious, anti-religious, and religious people. And its immediate goal is to protect the health, sanity, and lives of the rest of us whose national and personal lives are heavily affected by religious believers when religion is an addiction.