Post-evangelical healing

Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who has written a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a chronicle of his father’s ministry in Mississippi, and a history of Christian organizing in the Jim Crow South, offers in this memoir a searingly honest account of his mental health struggles and his return to a fuller life through thera­py and psychoanalysis.

The narrative begins with a description of what he calls his first breakdown, which occurred one night while he was a student at Harvard Divinity School. “How much noise the body makes when amped up on fear! I could hear the hiss of molecules colliding. . . . 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.” Deeply shaken, he found himself unable to concentrate for months afterward.

Eventually Marsh connected his anxiety to his upbringing in evangelical Christianity, which demanded constant purity of body, mind, and spirit. His reflections on that type of faith establish “parallel lines of the complete breakdown and my total depravity merging finally into the one either/or: redeemed or damned; pure or impure; all-in or lukewarm; possessed of the mind of Christ or strapped into a white paneled van on the way to Whitfield [the state asylum].” For Marsh, the demands of his childhood faith are simply impossible to fulfill.