Evangelical Anxiety

A Memoir

Charles Marsh

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780062862730
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062862761
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

In this riveting spiritual memoir, the writer, scholar, and commentator tells the story of his struggles with mental illness, explores the void between the Christian faith and scientific treatment, and forges a path toward reconciling these divergent worlds.

For years, Charles Marsh suffered panic attacks and debilitating anxiety. As an Evangelical Christian, he was taught to trust in the power of God and His will. While his Christian community resisted therapy and personal introspection, Marsh eventually knew he needed help. To alleviate his suffering, he made the bold decision to seek medical treatment and underwent years of psychoanalysis.

In this riveting spiritual memoir, Marsh tells the story of his struggle to find peace and the dramatic, inspiring transformation that redefined his life and his faith. He examines the tensions between faith and science and reflects on how his own experiences offer hope for bridging the gap between the two. Honest and revealing, Marsh traces the roots of shame, examines Christian notions of sex, faith, and mental illness and their genesis, and chronicles how he redefined his beliefs and rebuilt his relationship with his community.

A poignant and vital story of deep soul work, Evangelical Anxiety helps us look beyond the stigma that leaves too many people in pain and offers people of faith a way forward to find the help they need while remaining true to their beliefs.

This honest account explores the painful and profound questions at the intersection of faith and mental health:

• An Evangelical Upbringing: An inside look at the pressures and piety of being a preacher’s kid in the Jim Crow South, where faith was fierce and questions were dangerous.
• A Crisis of the Mind: A raw, unflinching account of the onset of debilitating panic attacks, and the terrifying realization that prayer alone wasn’t enough.
• The Stigma of Therapy: Marsh navigates a Christian community that views psychology with suspicion, making the courageous choice to seek psychoanalysis against the grain of his tradition.
• Reconciling Two Worlds: A thoughtful exploration of the tensions between faith and science, offering a hopeful path for Christians to embrace modern mental healthcare without abandoning their beliefs.

Part I

Life’s Rich Pageant

Martin Luther on Prozac

Sometime after my family moved to Charlottesville, on a mild April evening, I sat in my accustomed pew beneath the Tiffany stained-glass window at a downtown church. The church had recently launched an evening service intended for students and seekers, with tasteful acoustic praise songs and a fellowship supper in the refectory afterward prepared by a local farm-to-table caterer.

That evening, I was treated to a sermon on the sixteenth-century German Reformer Martin Luther that included this pastoral word to the people: “It is my hope and prayer that every person in this congregation suffer a complete nervous breakdown before they reach middle age.” He may have said before their thirtieth birthday. I can’t recall. I had recently rounded forty but didn’t think of myself as middle-aged. I’d only been teaching for a decade, free of doctoral studies and gainfully employed, and I could still run with the kids at North Ground gym in afternoon pick-up games.

The preacher, an amiable fellow a few years younger than me, had briskly approached the pulpit in crisp khaki trousers and a Vineyard Vines button-down and begun the homily by surmising that if Martin Luther had taken antidepressants to quell his violent mood swings and inner torment—“I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole,” Luther might bark out—the world would have never known a Protestant Reformation. Its great insights—justification by faith alone, sola scriptura, and the priesthood of ordinary believers—would have been lost to recalibrated serotonin levels and steadier nerves.

It was a sermon I knew I would not soon forget; the gospel of the shattered self, where the anxiously ill submit graciously to the whip. By the time the priest concluded that “our lives are not a journey, they are a train wreck,” air-quoting “journey” to scattered laughter, I felt the old rumblings of dread begin their slow rise to a symptom.

The whisper-folk benediction be damned, I whisked my wife and children out the side exit and ricky-bobbed the minivan the two miles back to our house and there hurtled upstairs to my medicine bag, shook free a lorazepam, and placed the round white pill under the tongue. “The body of Christ broken for you,” I thought, waiting before the bathroom mirror for a direct hit to the blood and the “Amen” I needed most.

Harvard Divinity School: Fall 1981

I want to talk now of an autumn evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the end of the time when I lived so successfully disguised to myself as unaghast and free. It was an ordinary night during my first semester at Harvard Divinity School. I lay in bed in the low-ceilinged, overheated dorm room to which I had been assigned, when a panic overcame me so complete that from that moment on I could divide my life between all that had come before and everything that followed: twenty-three years, six months, and three days of coming to feel at home in my mind and body, changed in an instant.

I had set my oscillating fan to high and slipped into a shallow sleep. It was not unusual for me after an arousing day of study to spend an hour in bed, letting my mind roam free, resting in the silences.

The first sign that something was wrong came from a crackling sound in the drywall that separated my bed from the one in the next room, occupied by a visiting scholar from a midwestern college. I knew my neighbor already as one who also suffered from allergies and asthma. He’d been having a rough go of it lately; the building’s dust mites and allergens patrolled the hallways like prison guards. It’s something we’d talked about briefly, our shared miseries. My own inhaler remained at arm’s reach.

I clicked off the fan and sat up in bed. It was then that a high pandemonium ripped away everything protecting me from the world outside. I was no longer a person alone in his room. In an instant, I could hear all things inside my body in their deepest repercussions. My heart and its soft aortic murmur, my breath’s every exhalation and inhalation, the downward silences, the laborious intake—would this one be the last? How much noise the body makes when amped up on fear! I could hear the hiss of molecules colliding. And outside in the yellow night, the compressors harrumphing atop the nearby physics building, the sound of car engines and slamming doors. All these things I heard as tormenting assault, a soundscape I could not mute. I’d become a thought thinking about thinking itself and nothing else, metaphysics’ ancient curse. A cogitation cycling through every autonomous body function, placing on each a question mark like flowers for the dead.

I wrapped my arms around my chest. Something terrible was happening. A hyperawareness of all my body was doing to keep itself alive, each system clicking to attention like some deranged mental jukebox in which I had been taken hostage. I came to understand that the sound I heard was not the strange resonance of buildings at night or the result of my nerves addled by caffeine. I heard the sound of collapse. Imagine, if you can, the skid and shatter of the barrier that protects your body from your own imagination. Imagine knowing that your body is now a park that grows predatory at sundown, like the park where the dismembered bodies of three boys were found scattered around a fire pit; I’d seen that on the television news one night when my parents were away.

I became overtaken by the harrowing notion that my body was short-circuiting, that I would soon stop breathing, and from now on every systole and diastole required voluntary operation. And I was certain that something further, deeper had changed, that some mystical unmaking had begun. What did I want in that moment? Only to quell the specter of needing consciously to operate my lungs and my heart. What did I feel? Only a totality of terror that I had never known before. I couldn’t imagine a way out of the night.

* * *

On the first morning after the breakdown, I arose to a gray dawn metaling against the modular window. My late arrival to the seminar on “The Problem of God” was my symptom’s debut in real time—it was my habit always to be present and alert when the bell rang. An angry Mennonite atheist taught the class. He spoke the way he wrote, in a wooden prose that bushhogged Christian orthodoxy to dust and ashes. And he expected his students to do the same. So in the weekly reflection papers you would see a lot of “god” and “godself,” because writing “God” and its attendant pronouns “he” or “himself” puts you on the side of the divine patriarch who castrates women.^* The only real referent for the word “God” is the idea we hold in our minds. The professor talked a lot about constructing the concept of God, but as far as I could see, he did not believe in the reality of God: God as being, transcendent, wholly other; God as triune; God as anything to which the Bible or creeds testified. He believed only in imaginative constructs.

That morning, in the seminar room we had been divided into groups of three and four, each assigned a doctrine—incarnation, Trinity, atonement—and tasked with recasting the Christian faith according to our tastes and preferences. Too late to join one, I labored in a solo effort over the practice of prayer. The professor, I intuited, would approve a form of speech that enabled you, when praying, to make present what is promised, the new creation, or something like that. I’d taken the idea from a Christian anarchist and tried on this day, as on all others, to strike a generous tone. Maybe I came across as self-righteous—I can assure you I felt the opposite. I’d already pitched myself as a plucky believer willing to defend Christian truth claims, and I guess I hadn’t been careful to follow the professor’s script.

When I read my ode to prayer aloud (had I tipped my hand and indicated that prayer has an addressee, specifically the One who made, redeemed, and sustains the cosmos?), a seminarian from St. Louis—whom I’d known as a pleasant enough chap from meals in the refectory—slammed a fist on the table and bellowed, “That is total bullshit!” The professor’s face narrowed into a thin smile while the rest of class coalesced in a giggle.

* * *

After class, I tried to recover my equilibrium passing an hour with my favorite companions—books, in the form of a visit to the Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Plympton Street. As I thumbed through a volume of Marge Piercy (the book felt reassuring in the hand), a woman in a plaid miniskirt approached me. She was holding a volume of Conrad Aiken, the largely forgotten poet from Savannah. I recognized her as one of the Widener Library regulars—we’d exchanged greetings a few times but never met. Now she stood beside me in this lovely little room, bending to whisper, “I miss seeing you in the stacks.”

For a glorious moment she appeared to me in sunlight, enshrouded in flowers, as in a garden drawn by Turgenev. I dawdled beside her, beaming, expansive, and nervously thumbing my Piercy. I felt radiant. She felt radiant. Together, the two of us were radiant.

When she stepped toward me for a closer look at the book, I caught sight of her bare thigh just beyond her knee socks and realized I had once again overlooked, or rather tried to sidestep, the erotic element that particled through every work of art, and through my every desire.

I could have turned to her, smiled sweetly, and said, “I miss seeing you too”—or, perhaps with a little more time, “I like Aiken too, his romantic alienation, etc., and someday I’ll spin a web between two dusty pine trees and hang there like a spider”—but instead I replied, “Well, thank you very much.” Then I laughed out loud and made a crazy face, and dream girl exited the store and vanished forever.

Two days later, I tried again for the consolation of books. It was overcast, and I found myself at a subterranean café, sitting at a glass table with my coffee and paperback copy of Sartre’s Nausea. Clean checkerboard tiles patterned the floor of the poorly heated room.

Sure, I should not have ordered the black coffee. I should not have smoked the dusty Gauloise. I should not have let my eyes linger on the waitress, with her beautiful bottom wrapped tightly in leather. Or her beautiful sinewy fingers. Or her taut body moving in its free operations. I should not have.

Except this, oh Lord. Nausea, coffee, and cigarettes on an ordinary afternoon—is that really too much to ask? People did it all the time and lived to tell. A week earlier I would have pulled it off too, smoked, buzzed, and blissed, indifferent to that creepy satyr boy scowling at me in the shadows.

Not now. Now my neural pathways were singed like Spit Devils on blacktop. I felt sad for the hands that thrashed on the table. I coughed nervously. I couldn’t feel my feet. I dialed up a verse from the Psalms, but got a woman in the streetlamp’s glow, her body halved by my sunken perch, waiting on the sidewalk. Her name was Cassie or Kate or Beate, and she was not a pure thought. She did not shimmer in sunlight. In her fishnet stockings and bow tie, she was the midnight, lonesome answer to my secret prayers. We would not grow old together.

Suffice it to say, I did not make much headway with Nausea. I crammed the novel into my backpack and hurried through the late afternoon streets toward the river.

Before the attack, I could lose myself in a book or warble merrily upon a theme. My attention might drift and stray. I might realize halfway into a book that I’d read it before, maybe more than once—and that the marginal exclamation points, question marks, yeses, and ughs were in my hand. I might ascend from a fifty-page submersion with little recall of what I had read or who had done what. But that never mattered. Reading gave me the thing I needed most, a sense of floating and expanse.

I’ve often recalled the lesson my father taught me when I was five years old and still lived in Mobile, Alabama: how to break in a new book. Folding his hands around the binding as if in a gesture of sacerdotal devotion, he held the book open until the pages fell evenly divided at the middle. He pressed the two sides with his thumbs, stretching the back tenderly to its greatest strength. He continued from the middle to both sides of the book by alternating the movement from one side to the other in languid strokes until the back was relaxed from beginning to end.

In his church office, we laid out books he’d bought on trips to New Orleans, where he was still finishing his seminary degree, and brushed sealants into fraying covers and backs with the care of an archivist. In those early encounters with books, I’d felt a shift in perspective—like when I rode with my parents south on a two-lane highway that cut through miles of parched scrub pine and all of a sudden there they were, in the distance, the Gulf waters, and I felt transported.

Leaving the café for the river, did I think of my father? Did I wonder if I’d never read again? I often remember the child, spread out in the backseat of the car, one hand raised to the window, tracing the arc of the sky.

* * *

I’d spent the weekend before the breakdown with my fiancée on the North Shore, innocent of the foreknowledge that a mental crisis loomed. K had landed a house-sitting gig in Hamilton, sharing a room with her best friend in the sprawling single-floor home of the popular evangelical writer Elisabeth Elliot. Elliot had come to fame in our subculture for her memoir of the missionary labors of her first husband, Jim Elliot, among the Auca Indians in Ecuador. Jim’s work was cut short when he suffered fatal spearing wounds and (some feared) was cannibalized, but his young widow had returned to the jungles and reaped a spiritual harvest.

Widow Elliot lived now with her third husband, Lars (the second, a Presbyterian professor of theology, had died of cancer) in leafy Updike country, but was often away speaking. Lars (about whom little is known, but whom Elizabeth once described as “a muscular Norwegian [who] is in good health”) managed her career and book sales, fetched her dry cleaning, and the like, while she promoted her views on the Christian woman’s obligation to submit to male authority. Elliot’s books occupied a shelf of their own in my mother’s modest but dearworth library.

With the trees in the wooded yard stripped bare, bracing for winter, and beside a fire, K lounged on the couch with an Iris Murdoch novel, and I cozied into Mrs. Elliot’s leather lounge chair (or, more likely, her husband’s, who liked his creature comforts) with Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, followed by Günther Bornkamm’s study of St. Paul, breaking only to jog, shower, and cook pasta—followed by a t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Part I: Life’s Rich Pageant
• Part II: My Rebel Flesh
• Part III: Loyalty to the Event
• Part IV: Testimony
• Part V: After Analysis
• Part VI: Quiet Days in Charlottesville
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher