ReligiosiTea
ReligiosiTea is where sacred storytelling meets critical inquiry—an exploration of how religion, spirituality, and health collide, converge, and co-heal.
Hosted by Adren, a doctoral student in Health Equity Sciences with a Master of Public Health and a background in anthropology, this podcast bridges the gap between lived experience and academic insight. With deep roots in qualitative research and a passion for testimony, Adren invites listeners into the spaces where belief systems meet bodies, where healing is both clinical and cosmic, and where the divine shows up in diagnosis, doubt, and deliverance.
The name ReligiosiTea is a portmanteau of religiosity—a measure of religious participation—and tea, a term from queer and AAVE dialects meaning truth, gossip, and revelation. This isn’t just a show about religion or health—it’s about the stories we whisper, the rituals we survive, and the questions we dare to ask when the stakes are spiritual and embodied.
Episodes vary in format—from interviews with people of diverse faiths and spiritual identities, to solo reflections, to commentary on the politics of faith and wellness. Whether you’re devout, deconstructing, or somewhere in between, ReligiosiTea offers a grounded, generous space for complexity, clarity, and connection.
ReligiosiTea
Long Steep: Hellfire and Salt - Reflections on Holy War
Spill your ReligiosiTea directly with the show host! Let us know your reactions, stories, and more!
This episode discusses heavy themes related to war and religion, including:
- Graphic descriptions of mental health impacts such as PTSD, depression, moral injury, and substance use
- Mentions of death, grief, and suicide
- Discussion of bombings, displacement, and healthcare collapse
- References to Christian nationalism, Zionism, and religiously-justified violence
- Exploration of spiritual psychosis and religious delusion
- Some biblical language may be emotionally triggering depending on personal religious background or trauma
Listener discretion is advised—especially for those with lived experience of war, religious trauma, or moral distress.
What happens when faith becomes a weapon?
In this episode of ReligiosiTea, we venture into the paradox of holy war: how religion, often associated with peace, becomes the banner under which violence is sanctified. From the Crusades to current conflicts in Gaza, the language of God has long been used to justify conquest, displacement, and destruction. Politicians invoke divine mandates—like “those who bless Israel will be blessed”—to rationalize interventionism. Meanwhile, the machinery of Christian nationalism fuels both foreign and domestic policy, emboldening militarism with biblical flair.
But this isn’t just a history lesson. It’s a reckoning. I peel back the layers of rhetoric to ask: what are the actual human costs of faith-fueled warfare?
We dive into the psychological aftermath—PTSD, moral injury, collective grief—and the collapse of healthcare systems that follow in war’s wake. We explore how trauma distorts memory, how soldiers and civilians alike carry wounds that don’t bleed, and how war erodes not only bodies, but beliefs. There’s a reason veterans flinch at fireworks. There’s a reason entire generations disappear behind silence and addiction. And there’s a reason some people stop believing altogether.
This episode also touches on the concept of spiritual psychosis: what happens when a person—or a government—uses faith to detach from shared reality. When religious delusion becomes a political driver, policy becomes prophecy, and violence becomes divine command. We’re not just talking about isolated extremists. We’re talking about the shaping of geopolitics through warped moral vision.
And of course, I turn to the Bible itself. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “Turn the other cheek.” “Live at peace with everyone.” These passages exist alongside verses used to justify genocide and conquest. So which scriptures get remembered—and why? What agendas do they serve?
Through it all, I’m asking one thing: how do we cope when the sacred becomes weaponized? And is there a way to return to faith—not as a justification for war, but as a source of healing?
This one’s heavy. Bring tea. Bring salt. We’re going to need both.
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You can use the link at the top of the show notes or email me at religiositea@gmail.com to share your stories, thoughts, insights, reactions, and much more! I'm waiting for you to spill your ReligiosiTea!
This is your host, adrian. Have you ever thought about fighting for your faith? What about joining a war effort because of your faith? Most religions have doctrines that promote peace. Some are even named after words that mean peace in their native languages. Yet religion has historically been gifted to the masses by the blade or, in the case of modern history, by bombs and bullets.
Speaker 1:The role religion plays in war is far from over in 2025, as we have representatives like Ted Cruz telling media host Tucker Carlson that his Bible, his religious upbringing, taught him that we must go to war to defend Israel, a theocratic nation-state, by holy command from God, or we are unholy. The religion goes deep here, folks. His exact quote was as a Christian growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I'd rather be on the blessing side of things. Why are we having this conversation now, and why is it on religiosity now? And why is it on religiosity?
Speaker 1:Well, in response to the Israeli-Palestinian war, the United States has played an increasingly interventionist role, or at least attempting to intervene, on the side of Israel. Israel has now attacked Iran, with Iran retaliating or vice versa. In the game of geopolitical religious whodunit, and in a misguided attempt to put this to bed and secure resources, president Trump ordered an attack on Iran's nuclear facility sites on June 22, 2025. Israel feels that the land that is Palestine is their promised land from biblical mandate. The land itself is actually the holy land for all three major Abrahamic faiths Judaism, christianity and Islam. We are seeing these three branches of the faith of Abraham battling it out in support of varying geopolitical interests in this region, including access to religious and holy sites, resources and strategic positioning in the Middle East. As we've seen from my own homegrown Texas tabernaculosis strain of Christian nationalism in Ted Cruz, christianity is guiding our foreign policy in the region. It is also guiding a variety of conflicts on the home front, including the wartime jargon used to talk about the attacks on religious liberties in the United States used in some of our earlier executive orders from President Trump.
Speaker 1:Listen to my episode A Constitutional Crisis of Faith for a breakdown on those. In fact, christian nationalism has been guiding divisive American rhetoric for years. Think back when was the last time you heard about the war on Christmas, even though Christmas trees, santa Clauses and other tidings of the pagan holiday, yule, have taken over American Christmas for decades and are still available in stores, including other seasonal religions that occur at the same time. It is a fight against the faithful. The conflicts in the United States around religion and American interventionism in the United States are both centered around the ongoing religious colonization of the nation. To be clear, I am not saying Christianity is inherently wrong, nor that it is wrong to be Christian. I love many Christian people of many denominations. What I am saying is that Christianity is being used to support ideological and actual wars in the United States and abroad in a fight for religious ideological supremacy.
Speaker 1:Today's episode will cover a brief history of religious war, keying in on Christianity or wars that involved Christianity as a major contender. An overview of spiritual psychosis and how this mental health outcome might be shaping our foreign policy through religious experience. Mental health outcome might be shaping our foreign policy through religious experience. A look at spiritual warfare as a Christian concept. An overview on the health impacts of war in general that we know about, ranging from mental health outcomes like PTSD to the ultimate health outcome, death. Finally, we close off this long steep with a reflection on how to resist the rhetoric of Christian nationalism and a look at where we might be headed as a warring or peaceful nation. Grab your tea and let's get into the cathedral, because it's time for religiosity.
Speaker 1:The Crusades began in 1091 and spanned nearly 200 years. These wars were fought primarily between Christians and Muslims, in attempts on both sides to gain control of holy sites and acquire land throughout the Middle East. Islam had arisen over 400 years prior to the Crusades and had established a foothold as the predominant religion in regions under Turkish rule in Western Asia. Much of what is still considered the Middle East today. The Muslim rule over the region, which included Jerusalem, a city synonymous with holiness for all of the Abrahamic faiths, was seen as a major threat to the power of the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium. Since Christianity was founded out of the stories of Jesus in Jerusalem, the Christians needed to regain control of their most holy sites that birthed, shaped and validated their cultural systems, society and politics. Holding holy sites and artifacts not only increases the austerity of any faith, but also gives the power of belief to the stories that have shaped society. So, after the initial blessing of Pope Urban II in 1091 and two centuries of war between the Christians and Muslims of Eurasia, can we really say that the issue of control of Jerusalem has been settled. As we know now, jerusalem is still a highly contentious city. About a whole millennium later, after Christianity has conquered over a quarter of the whole world's belief systems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts have entered the chat, with Judaism also taking a claim to one of the world's holiest cities, judaism also taking a claim to one of the world's holiest cities. The world is watching, and the religious descendants of Abraham across the three holy lineages of belief, all claim a vested interest in the political control over the region. Before we get into recent events, let's look at a few more examples of holy war. Let's fast forward a bit Around half a millennium after the Crusades.
Speaker 1:Protestantism, or the rejection of Catholic dogma among Christians, began in 1517 with Martin Luther and his writings in Germany. About a hundred years later, in 1618, the Holy Roman Emperor, king Ferdinand II of Bohemia, had had enough. He decided that he needed to centralize power in Europe around a singular Catholic faith, in line with his beliefs and with the Vatican and papal power in Italy. For the next 30 years, for which the war is named, catholics and Protestants fought over which group would control the various local politics in Europe. While this period was a series of conflicts between varying individual nation-states, and often were between Catholics and Protestants, religion was the vehicle by which power was asserted to fight for territorial and material gain. When the period was over, the maps were redrawn Sweden and Denmark gained independence, religious tolerance became a conversation and religious control over the various nation-states become fragmented between Catholics, Calvinists and Lutherans, the latter two making up the Protestants with their own conflicts.
Speaker 1:Around this time, the Spanish were seeking faster trade routes to India and China and accidentally came upon the Americas. Much less by accident, the Catholic powers of Spain and Portugal began actively colonizing and converting the indigenous peoples of the Americas to Catholicism, often by force. This was following the Spanish Inquisition and ousting of Moorish Muslims, who had ruled the region for nearly the past thousand years, and Jews, with mass forced conversions, executions and exodus of non-Catholics from the region. So, it's safe to say, the tentative and relatively recent control of the Catholics over the Spanish Empire was not equipped to merge new belief systems they had never encountered before. Once again, their religious beliefs were the crux of their power over their own empire, and their belief system validated their own authority as a mandate from heaven to spread their faith and their power to whichever lands they took control over. Enter the Protestants to the Americas.
Speaker 1:The British, which have their own bloody history between Catholic and Protestant rule, came to the Americas seeking religious freedom. Ironically, or maybe predictable, the British settlers were just as unforgiving about religious freedom as the nation they left behind to start a new life more aligned with their own values. The inherent nation-state level tribalism associated with religion and religious control led the British colonists to forcibly convert, make war against and otherwise anglicize the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Similar to the threads of religiously inspired imperialism, these sentiments about divine right to rule through the grace of the Christian God led to the idea of Manifest Destiny in the historical United States. Manifest Destiny staked the claim that God wanted the United States to control the entire continent of North America, which led to a lot of disputes, conflicts and wars with indigenous nations, new Spain or historical Mexico and parts of Canada. Through these conflicts, wars and treaties with imperial powers like France and the Louisiana Purchase, the United States did seize a lot of the North American continent in the boundaries we currently have as the United States.
Speaker 1:More contemporarily, we are seeing continued war and aggression in the Middle East, particularly in the contemporary Israel-Palestinian conflicts, which began around 100 years ago. These conflicts are fueled by the creation of Israel as a nation state in 1948, after the Second World War, which took possession of land historically held by the Palestinian peoples. Though Palestine has scarcely been recognized as its own nation-state by supranational governments like the United Nations, a Jewish nation-state and held territory is similar to Manifest Destiny and similar to the Americans who used Manifest Destiny to justify the encroachment and seizure of native lands, israeli political actors used Zionism to slowly erode Palestinian territory and claim those lands for Israel by any means necessary. The idea of divinely inspired right to land ownership, even if that means taking it by force, is hardly a new idea, as we've seen, and it looks like these realities, spurred on by what I believe are both sincerely held religious beliefs and purely political motivations towards self-determined imperialism, are not going anywhere anytime soon. In the United States, our imperialism looks different now. It is fueled by global interventionism, with treaties and agreements that benefit our access to certain resources, rather than outright claiming lands and territories for ourselves. Unsurprisingly, the remnants of Christian domination guide many of these agreements, with many of our allies being Christian-dominant European nations, with some exceptions if the locations are strategic or resources are rife.
Speaker 1:Religion is also more apparently guiding our politics and global interventionism, with the need to maintain good relationships with Christian nation-states and global proselytization of global Christianity masquerading as democracy. This leads us back to Ted Cruz's comment about biblical truth, even if the Bible never said that guiding our role in supporting Israel in the ongoing Zionist conquest of Palestine, christian Zionism is the support of Zionism, which is an Israeli Jewish nationalist movement to bring about Armageddon, lead to the rapture and claim good Christians for eternity in heaven and to defend the right and claim good Christians for eternity in heaven and to defend the right of Israel to exist, to garner good favor with the Abrahamic God. This is what Ted Cruz was referring to as being from the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. I believe that people genuinely believe this, but does that mean it should shape our global geopolitical actions and involve us in the latest wave of holy wars in Jerusalem?
Speaker 1:On the home front, american wartime rhetoric is being applied to national policy as an attack on Christianity. I talked more about these attacks in an earlier episode titled A Constitutional Crisis of Faith, but it's worth repeating. Here we are in a culture war of Christian and non-Christian, with evangelicals citing biblical law and rhetoric to shape our public policy, law and rhetoric to shape our public policy. The so-called war on American Christianity has been leveraged to suppress the rights of LGBTQIA plus individuals, the right of women to bodily autonomy, with weird abortion laws that have led to strange cases, like a recent case of a dead woman whose body was left on life support to carry her child to term, and has also impacted military readiness through the attempted removal and barring of people who are transgender to serve in our armed forces. We are also seeing the militarization of the United States' southern border, with rhetorical reinforcement from misunderstood Catholic values, like Vice President JD Vance's explication of Ordo Amoris, being used to promote xenophobia and inhumane treatment of fellow Christians because those Christians do not look, speak or act like a certain segment of the American populace.
Speaker 1:So if religious beliefs are guiding physical wars, culture wars and internal military action in the United States, what should we make of these beliefs? They are clearly here to stay and they are powerful, strongly held belief systems that shape and warp our perceptions of reality. Many of us not me grew up religious or have experienced some kind of religious or spiritual feeling in our lives. This is a leverage point for political motivation, especially if someone already agrees with the framework and especially if the belief system is used to reframe someone's worldview. And remember religions make up a large part of someone's worldview. It guides their behavior, their beliefs, their perceptions and how they feel they ought to live to attain their reward or afterlife, or whatever they believe they get out of this system.
Speaker 1:So when does this become dangerous? Now introducing spiritual psychosis? It can sound scary, but anyone who has ever had an extraordinary spiritual experience including speaking in tongues, feelings of enlightenment or rapture that disconnect one from reality, prophetic visions or feelings of impending doom like Armageddon, or any other kind of experience that ties back to religious or spiritual beliefs may have been experiencing a form of spiritual psychosis. Despite that understatement of what spiritual psychosis is, it can be scary, especially when it is experienced en masse and shapes public consciousness and public policy. This is how people enter into cults and why it's hard to get people out of cults. Spiritual psychosis has a variety of symptoms, often diagnosed through DSM-5 measures of psychosis and only delineated as spiritual if the context of the symptoms is framed by religious or spiritual beliefs. There are a few symptoms I want to discuss here, but if you are interested in this topic. It is worth exploring more. It's fascinating in the dreadful deer-caught-in-the-headlights kind of way.
Speaker 1:First, I want to talk about altered perceptions of reality. Altered perceptions of reality happen when someone's mental state is predisposed to find certain patterns in the world around them, even if those patterns are created or induced inside their own minds. Think about people who seem to be living in a completely different world than you, even if you're next-door neighbors. The way they interpret the world is framed entirely differently and often is framed through extraordinary experiences or perceptions about the world. People may feel like they have a different position in the world or are experiencing time in a different way. A major example for our discussion today is the belief that the end of times is near and it is up to them and people like them to come together and stop it, for example, believing we must protect and intervene in Israel's Zionist war to garner favor with God and secure our special positions in heaven when the rapture comes. Mind you, I fully believe that people actually deeply believe this. It is also surprisingly easy to induce these altered perceptions of reality in others. If someone grew up believing this line of rhetoric, it shapes their entire frame of reference for this situation and when politicians say we need to defend Israel as our duty, as good Christians, those who have been primed to believe the same narrative will immediately respond to the call to arms. They believe it is their duty and they will reap the rewards for doing so because of their special position in the world as a savior and soldier of God. The belief that Armageddon is imminent is also a temporal incidence of altered perception of reality, or people think that we are living in a specific time, even without any evidence aside from their own beliefs in what is happening.
Speaker 1:The next symptoms I want to discuss I will group together because, at a large scale, they are entwined in our political-religious consciousness. They are the withdrawal from social life and paranoia and suspiciousness. At a large scale, we are seeing policy come out that withdraws us from the global stage, except in cases of specific religious interventionism. The United States is pulling out of international agreements and attempting to close borders, especially to those who are different from the majority population, especially religiously. Many of the countries who our nation is attempting to bar from entry and life here are not Christian. They are Muslim, a religion that arose as a responsive addition to Christianity that we fought nearly a 500 years worth of war against and that we view as being an antagonist to Christian values. I'm saying we here because, as much as we might disagree with what is happening, we can't separate ourselves from our national identity at a global stage, as much as we might want to Pair this isolationism with paranoia around internal and external attacks on Christianity, with the paranoia that immigrants are the downfall of our nation and the suspiciousness of any rhetoric that does not align with Christian values in science, public affairs and other aspects of our social life. And we find ourselves on the pipeline to Christian theocracy, fighting an internal theocratic war and external wars in support of religiously induced beliefs on our duties in the Middle East.
Speaker 1:Our nation is going through a period where, for evangelicals specifically, inclusion of anyone who is different, engagement with different perspectives and tolerance for non-Christianity are all seen as direct threats against their worldview, because they no longer trust that other people can live differently from them and be good, decent people. This is the result of years of religious rhetoric and framing. Explications of religious threats and attempts to map the book of Revelation onto current events have culminated in the need to protect their way of life, their faith and their beliefs. This is terror management theory at its finest. I don't have time to talk about terror management theory in depth, but it basically states that we create beliefs and act according to those beliefs because we are all inherently terrified by our own mortality. I will go deeper into spiritual psychosis and terror management theory in another episode on the psychological health of religion.
Speaker 1:Finally, I want to talk about the symptom of excessive religious rituals. I'm talking about the masses again here. We are seeing a recent rise in baptism and conversion to Christian denominative faiths in the United States. The reasoning behind the increase in baptisms and faith participation is varied. It could be COVID, it could be a lot of specific individual experiences we'll never know about, or it could be the rise in Christian rhetoric and Christian nationalism in the United States. Interestingly, I've heard that a lot of those who are converting are straight white men who are seemingly aligning themselves with the hyper-masculine aura of Novo-Christian Americana. And, to be clear, the Christian nationalist rhetoric has been denounced by papal authority as being countered to what Christianity teaches.
Speaker 1:I want to take a pause here and clarify I am not against Christianity by any means, even if I'm not Christian. I am against the utilization of any religious or spiritual belief system to galvanize xenophobic and hateful rhetoric that contributes to the internal and external violence we are witnessing coming out of the current administration. So what does all of this mean? Is MAGA a cult? Maybe? I don't have the answers to that. I believe some people have a cult-like view of President Trump, of the United States and our role on the global stage and on how Christianity ought to shape our internal and global stage, and on how Christianity ought to shape our internal and global politics, which is textbook spiritual psychosis. I also believe other people are searching for meaning. The religious frameworks used to fuel our politics is appealing because it matches up with things people have heard all their lives, or it maps onto figures they believe in, like God and Jesus Christ, or that it confirms beliefs about the state of the world they already held. What I can say is that spiritual psychosis is rising in the United States among evangelicals and Christian nationalists and that it is actively shaping our laws and the decisions we are making for our own nation and our role in the world.
Speaker 1:So, since evangelicals are pushing us into physical and cultural wars, what does the Bible say about warfare? The Christian Bible discusses the existence of physical, real war in the here and now. Sometimes, this war is justified in the eyes of God or even commanded by his authority in some cases. The Christian Bible also talks about spiritual warfare, the eternal struggle between good and evil and the necessity of good Christians to be on guard against the evil influences of the devil. Let's talk about this first.
Speaker 1:Ephesians 6.10-18 says Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and, having done all to stand firm. Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness. So imagine for a moment I know some of you won't have to imagine that you are a good Christian in your heart that this rhetoric about the fight between good and evil and your place in it to turn away from temptation and from the powers that be and from the spiritual attack on Christianity. And then all your political leaders say exactly that, that we are facing an attack of spiritual warfare upon us and it is our duty to hold strong in the face of this evil.
Speaker 1:If you're like me, you'll critically wonder about where the evil is, who the metaphorical serpent is in this scenario. Is it the people living their lives peacefully, christian or otherwise, who choose to love their neighbors, or is it the people in power, using biblical rhetoric to incite a moral panic and call upon the values that have been instilled through biblical discourses to empower their own political moves? If you've grown up with these verses and if you feel the moral panic being presented to you, you might be more primed to align with those who you feel are righteous with you, those who have been anointed by God to fight the good fight trademark. I'm not saying everyone who aligns with these narratives is experiencing spiritual psychosis, because that just isn't true, but what I am saying loud and clear here is that spiritual psychosis lends itself to believing in this rhetoric and also fosters the development of spiritual psychosis through using someone's existing worldview to reframe their perceptions of reality and create a suspected threat where there is none. This language is at the crux of our culture.
Speaker 1:War in the United States. It is shaping public policy, public discourse and public sentiment. One thing is for sure when we hear it, we all, believers or not, have a reaction to it. And the powers of belief is compelling. So what about real war? Compelling. So what about real war? And what about the religious or pseudo-religious conflicts we are seeing in the Middle East being perpetuated by loose interpretations of the Book of Revelation and Bible school lessons on godly duty?
Speaker 1:The Bible has verses supporting war. Let's not sugarcoat it. But we will sip this bitter tea and contextualize it. In Deuteronomy 20, 1-4, god provides instructions for the Israelites before going to war. It says when going to war against enemies and seeing horses and chariots and any army greater than yours, do not be afraid. God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you. The priest shall speak to the people saying Hear, o Israel, today you are drawing near for battle against your enemies. Let not your heart faint, do not fear or panic or be in dread of them, for the Lord, your God, is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to save you For the Lord, your God, is he that goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, he that goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to save you. I won't say if this is true or not. That's for you to decide. But even if it were, god is not commanding us all to go to war. This is highly contextualized to the historical wars that were being fought between the Israelites and the Romans A war for territory, a war to exist. No such revelation has been made by God to us now. Similarly, samuel 15.3 and Joshua 4.13 describe going to war by the aid of God.
Speaker 1:The wars described in the Bible, like in Deuteronomy or Joshua, were not permanent and global calls to arms. These biblical passages describe the religious and emotional needs of men going to war in survival conflicts between the Israelites and their neighboring tribes to secure territorial and political power for their superiors. These stories were framed through divine mandate because that's how people at the time made sense of violence, land and their own identity. What was written as a historical explication of divine providence to understand the motivations of men to go to war has been misappropriated by modern politicians as an ongoing call to arms to facilitate political interests in the Middle East. The idea of a perpetual call to arms for Israel is steering our ship of state into uncharted waters, because hyper-globalized nuclear superpowers are not the same as tribal warfare 2,000 years ago. We do not have instructions on how such a war would proceed or what its ramifications might be. Although I do live in a desert, we're not living in the deserts of Canaan. We're not facing chariots at the gates. We're facing robots, nuclear power and geopolitical interests that are more about oil now than they ever were about God. The Bible also doesn't shy away from the impacts of war, which I will highlight here and then discuss these implications from a public health perspective.
Speaker 1:Lamentations 2.11-12 depicts a scene after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. My eyes fail from weeping. I am in torment within. My heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers where is bread and wine? As they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their lives ebb away in their mothers' arms.
Speaker 1:Jeremiah 4.20 says disaster follows disaster. A whole land lies in ruins. In an instant, my tents are destroyed, my shelter. In a moment. This passage was from Jeremiah's prophetic messages to Judah about judgment for their actions. What is more of a disaster come about by action than war? The above passages highlight that war or any destructive force has material, bodily and mental harms. So if disaster follows disaster, what do these disasters look like? What are the public health implications of war? To reiterate why I'm bringing this topic to religiosity, we are apparently veering toward a period of conflict and current religious rhetoric is nudging us toward entering the arena. So let's steep the tea on what we should expect to see, should faith guide us back to the metaphorical sword.
Speaker 1:Not everyone who goes to war dies. They are often lumped into two groups the victors and the survivors, but really they're all survivors and have witnessed, experienced and done things that will probably haunt them for the rest of their lives. One of the most commonly known psychological impacts of war, or at least most commonly known impacts in present time, is post-traumatic stress disorder. Ptsd occurs after experiencing a particularly traumatic event, including participation in war. Ptsd becomes complex PTSD when multiple traumas have occurred and their effects intermingle in a person's psyche. Ptsd symptomology is often similar or tied to symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders. Symptoms are often grouped into four types of symptomatic expression Intrusive memories, avoidance, negative changes in thinking and mood, and changes in physical and emotional reactions.
Speaker 1:Intrusive memories include flashbacks or the reliving of traumatic events as if they were happening again. Recurrent distressing memories, when you can't stop thinking about something over and over again and that something happens to be some of the worst experiences imaginable to humankind. The infiltration of these memories or themes into your dreams or nightmares. And severe emotional distress or even physical reactions to things that trigger these memories. I have quite a few relatives who have served in the military and I know my uncle rest in peace who served in Desert Storm, had extreme reactions to fireworks on the 4th of July. It's hard to witness and I can't imagine how hard it is to experience.
Speaker 1:Avoidance occurs when someone goes to sometimes extreme lengths to avoid things that trigger these memories. This can include anything from certain thoughts to familiar faces, neighborhoods or even the scent of something once benign. Negative affect or negative changes in thinking and mood includes negative thoughts about yourself or others to the world. Negative affect can impact memory how someone remembers their own actions or events, blocking especially traumatic memories altogether or not remembering new events that have occurred. Many symptoms of negative affect, mirror clinical depression, including a lack of interest in things you used to enjoy, feelings of hopelessness or despair or feeling emotionally numb and, let's be real, if your mind was telling you that you were the villain or you deserved the fate you got, it might be especially challenging to keep a positive worldview or hold yourself up to the light and be able to love what you see in the mirror. And all of this happens whether the negative thoughts hold any grain of truth or not.
Speaker 1:Physiological reactions can also occur. Someone can be in a state of heightened stress nearly all the time, being easily startled or frightened, feeling guarded or prepared in case anything happens. Trouble sleeping, trouble, focusing. Some people with PTSD may also experience a lot of anger, irritability or aggression that may be out of their control. It's part of the stress response to being recurringly haunted by your own brain. People who are experiencing PTSD may also be prone to self-medication or coping through substance use, which has its own health impacts and consequences.
Speaker 1:And, to be clear, it is not only soldiers in war who get wartime PTSD. Someone who has lost a loved one, someone who has lost a home, someone who has lost any singular thing tethering them to this world through the impacts of war, can experience wartime PTSD. War is not pretty, neither are the health impacts. War creates loss. Most obviously is the loss of life, but there are also other losses that can impact people during war. The loss of homes, belongings, the tangible items that give us identity, memory and continuity impact many who live in war zones.
Speaker 1:The loss of identity for those who have quote-unquote lost the war and are subject to the demands of the victors, those who have quote-unquote lost the war and are subject to the demands of the victors. Sometimes war renames countries. Are you who you always thought you were if your home has a new name? Loss of faith is also prominent. Where does one turn when the one who was supposed to keep them safe in eternity didn't show up? How does one cope when their entire worldview is shattered? Show up. How does one cope when their entire worldview is shattered? All of these losses, the loss of ego, the loss of dignity at the hands of others lead to periods of immense mass grief or collective grief. These are periods where it feels like everyone has lost someone or something they held dear and they have to mourn it. I remember learning about war in school and the phrase who did you lose sticks with me from post-war descriptions of life, because it was assumed and often true that whoever you were talking to lost someone.
Speaker 1:Grief has its own symptomology. Grief can be marked by intense sadness, emotional numbness, fatigue or the inability to sleep. Some people feel anxiety and fear, others feel guilty for not having been the one to go, among other things. Some people live in denial, others long for the futures they didn't get to get, a longing that will never be fulfilled entirely. Some quit eating, some get anxiety and some people experience physical pain from grief. Grief looks different for everyone, but everyone grieves at some point or another, and in war, everyone grieves at once. Grief is also tied to weakened immune systems. How can a body fight disease when a person is fighting reality? Fight disease when a person is fighting reality?
Speaker 1:Morally, people also suffer, and morality is tied to mental health. Morality guides our actions, and when we have to act inconsistently with our morals or when our morals hurt us, there are consequences. These consequences are manifested in the concept of moral injury. Moral injury can conjure up a variety of effects, including emotional distress from guilt, fear, anger, betrayal and loss of trust when you have gone against your own morals or when society demands you to. It hurts, it hurts a lot and it erodes the emotional capacity you have for kindness, especially towards yourself and those who forced your hand.
Speaker 1:Moral injury also has psychological symptomology. It can contribute to depression and anxiety disorders. It can lead to withdrawal from society, relational difficulties and full-on isolation. Moral injury also has a spiritual impact. The difference between moral injury and PTSD or grief really lies in the sense of personal accountability in traumatic circumstances, where PTSD or grief stem from experiences or loss that might have happened as a result of the actions of others or of external forces outside of your control. Moral injury occurs when you had some hand through decisions, actions or non-actions in what happened. Sometimes you're just following orders, sometimes you're scared and can't move, and the results of those scenarios live with you in a hauntological dismantling of a brain's ability to think about what's next. All of the above mental health outcomes associated with war can result in death by suicide.
Speaker 1:It is crucially important for anyone experiencing these types of symptoms to seek medical psychiatric care. Let me use that call to action as a gateway to our next point healthcare access. I hope that anyone who needs it has access to the care they need for any health outcome they are experiencing, but let's bring it back to war. Need for any health outcome they are experiencing, but let's bring it back to war. In war, people are maimed, harmed, dismembered. People get sick. People in the field need care. People come home with these maladies. People who live in the bomb-laden zones of wars they aren't fighting also face illness, injury and the need for healthcare.
Speaker 1:Historically in population-level warfare, it has been a strategy to dismantle, disrupt, destroy or otherwise cut off access to healthcare, especially trauma centers and life-saving medical centers. Why would a soldier harm an enemy and then let that enemy seek medical care? It kind of defeats the purpose of war in the first place, which is about domination, make no mistake. But what happens to the people who are not fighting, the civilians who are battling cancer, the families who absolutely did not sign up for this? Unfortunately, they are often the victims of war tactics and lose access to their critical, life-saving care too. Civilians can no longer get the chemo their mother needs to keep working to feed the family, even though she's exhausted and doing her best. Families can no longer get checkups or see their family doctor to heal a broken arm. Communities who have relied on antibiotics to treat malaria and prevent its spread, can no longer access medicines through supply chain disruptions and are now at the mercy of the virus itself, hoping it mutates into something benign along the way, because care called in sick.
Speaker 1:When we think of war, we think of soldiers as units, we think of tanks, we think of guns. We don't often think of people. But the highest cost of war is always human and I promise you, when war is on the table, nobody is safe from these disruptions. With critical healthcare destabilized in times of war, that also means there is a period after every war where the infrastructure has to be rebuilt. That means that for soldiers returning with mental and physical trauma, loss of self and loss of limb, they have to wait for the healthcare system to catch back up to them. For the families who had their chronic illness care disrupted, it might be too late to reverse the damage. When pandemics rage and we still haven't picked up the pieces we broke, the medical system will be unavailable to mitigate the impacts. Remember that calamity after calamity bit from the Bible. This is where we are and before we forget, sometimes war wipes out entire cities off the map. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima after the Second World War literally left shadows where people once stood. Do not ever forget. The ultimate health outcome is death, and no healthcare infrastructure can ever cure death, as much as we might want it to. So now that we have seen some of the many consequences of war, especially as they relate to help, where do we go now? For many, they return to where it all began Faith.
Speaker 1:Religious coping is the use of religious frameworks to help make sense of trauma, whether that trauma is psychological, like PTSD or suffering from the loss of someone, to more physical outcomes, like losing limbs or acquiring a permanent disability. Faith works as a vehicle for coping in two major ways adaptive, positive frameworks that utilize faith to bolster mental health. Or maladaptive, negative frameworks that create justification narratives for why someone did what they did or experienced what they experienced. Let's start with the positive. Engagement with church communities has been shown to be beneficial in maintaining mental and social health outcomes, prevent loneliness and bolster someone's overall sense of well-being. Engagement with faith itself can be healing for mental health if the framework used discusses ideas like forgiveness, moving forward, spreading peace and love and regaining a sense of control over one's life. Further, many people who belong to a faith community look to their religious leaders for counseling and guidance on the issues that plague them, including the remnants of war, if that should be the case. These positive social experiences are crucial in ameliorating the deleterious impacts of trauma and can help facilitate access to other social services and modes of care that can help equip someone with the tools they need to cope with their trauma.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, maladaptive coping can come from the use of religion to justify the harm. Someone is going through a sort of sense of judgment or karmic debt for some cause or another that brought them to the place of suffering they find themselves in, and so they may choose to stay in that suffering. Some may also choose to believe the end is near, or near enough for them to quit attending services or to use their belief system again to justify the harms. Is near or near enough for them to quit attending services or to use their belief system again to justify the harms that have befallen a civilization during times of war? Think oh, they had it coming, or I had it coming, or this is inevitable and it's all pointless, and only God knows why these mental frameworks deter someone from facing their trauma and developing positive coping strategies For people who use a negative religious affect in their approach to coping with trauma. It can be even harder to link these people with the care that they might desperately need from mental health care providers, social service access they may be entitled to, etc.
Speaker 1:If you thought that you deserved your fate or that what had come to pass was an inevitability divinely inspired and therefore all the ramifications were planned, would you go seek mental health services even if you were suffering? Just like any other aspect of religion, interpretations and experiences are entirely subjective. The frameworks that lead to war also lead each individual experience of what that war might mean, what someone's part in it was or should have been, and how we manage the emotional and physical fallout in its aftermath. I bring up negative coping and only frame it as negative, because that is how a lot of coping is framed in the literature, but I think it is important to have a sense of empathy for those who cope in ways that prevent them from seeking care. It must be an incredible burden to bear when you think the universe was divinely aligned to manufacture your own suffering, and it must be incredibly hard to break through to someone who truly sincerely believes that from the bottom of their hearts and there are many sincerely believes that from the bottom of their hearts and there are many more than we might think Entire generations have turned to faith or drink or drugs to cope with things they were never given the tools to cope with.
Speaker 1:So now that we've gone through the history of war, spiritual psychosis, a discussion on spiritual warfare and a brief, but also somehow long, look at the potential health ramifications of war, what do we do with it all? First and foremost, I wouldn't be a very good host to brew you tea this dark and not let you drink it with some sugar. So I want you to know that the potentiality for war is always there, but so is the potentiality for reason, but so is the potentiality for reason, rationality, radical empathy and peace. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was scared. You wouldn't believe me because I literally wrote this whole podcast about it, which took ages, because the content is especially heavy for me. But there are tools we can use as individuals to be discerning about how faith sometimes, and especially our own, can lead us down either path.
Speaker 1:Let's break it down. I'm not even asking you to be an especially critical thinker, but if you are receiving messages, sermons, rituals, speeches or any inklings of religious or spiritual messaging that say we must go to war to defend our faith. I want you to think really hard about whether or not it is actually your faith that is at risk. Who's taking it from you? Who can stop you from being faithful if you choose not to participate in something that is unequivocally harmful at a mass scale? I want you to think about what this person believes about the world, and if you also believe that about the world, then I want you to ask yourself, if you stop any average person on the street, how likely are they to believe this Pretend to be of another faith, and ask yourself is it really that serious?
Speaker 1:I want you to look at what other messages are coming out of the powers that be. Is this the only thing they're talking about? Oftentimes it isn't, and when you start to trace the lines between the dots of their interests, you might uncover an ulterior motive. After all, politicians on all sides say what they need to say to get us on their sides. We're living in a time where religiously charged rhetoric is hitting especially heavy Again terror management theory, religious psychosis, who knows, but for some reason, this is the rhetoric that is sticking. So it's up to you to then be discerning in your own faith. Are these really the messages you've been taught your whole life? If so, ask yourself why, ask others, why you don't have to solve this puzzle on your own.
Speaker 1:But when you start to ask questions and get your own revelations about what someone's especially a politician's motivations might be to get us involved in any kind of fight, I want you to ask if you still agree with it in the first place. If you do so, be it, but I imagine many of us are simply scared and seeking a light that doesn't come from a nuclear flash. If you are in a faith community that feels unsafe, I want you to know there are other faith communities out there. It is hard to leave. I can understand that For numerous reasons, but I believe that your faith should be uplifting, affirming and keep you safe in this very life, not just a potential afterlife. Think about the way your faith community makes you feel, especially in these uncertain times when religious rhetoric is getting a PR spin for hate. Look out for signs of peer pressure, look out for signs of hostility and seek out communities that are full of love, support faith and healing. I think these are the communities that make faith so beautiful in the first place, and I think we all deserve a space that gives us the peace and safety we so desperately seek from religion or spirituality. And maybe, just maybe, if we all committed to participating in spaces that uplifted us without harming others, we can show our government and the world what we really stand for. An American dream that promotes the diversity it says it was founded on, and an American dream that doesn't dream of dominating the world. That's the American nightmare.
Speaker 1:So when we're thinking about calls to war, I urge Christians to look to their own Bible for answers. Matthew 5.9. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Matthew 5.38-39. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also.
Speaker 1:Romans 12.18. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Nobody wants a war. The impacts of war are irrevocable, and even with promises of immortality, shouldn't we make this mortal life a good life too? I can't speak for everyone, but as a non-Christian, I support your right to faith. Everyone. But as a non-Christian, I support your right to faith. I support your right to believe in the things that make you feel whole, that make you feel holy and that give you light when everything around you is dark. Help us keep the darkness at bay.
Speaker 1:Faith has such an immeasurable capacity for healing Believe me, they're trying to measure it, and it's so nuanced and fixed in other structures that it's hard. Let's let faith continue to heal. Let's let faith lead us to peace and mutual understanding. Let's let faith lead us into good mental health and good spiritual health. Let's not use faith as a tool to promote the evisceration of life from entire populations of people. The ultimate health outcome is death, and we don't need to hasten it, along with all its other horsemen, brothers of illness, mental illness, calamity and social collapse. Let it be known that we want peace, that we want love and that we want light.
Speaker 1:Don't forget to vote in the midterm elections. Don't be afraid to reach out to your representatives to tell them that you are not in support of war by any means and under any conditions. When faith becomes the weapon, it is always that serious, as history has shown, and that's the religiosity. Thank you so much for making it through this episode with me. I'm looking forward to bringing you more content like this, like my personal interviews, like my quick spills on the science of faith and health. Please follow me on socials at religiosity everywhere and share this podcast. You can reach out to me with the link in the show notes or on the socials. Be happy, be healthy, be well and bye.
