How Ministers Can Identify Scrupulosity

When earnest questions about faith and morality become compulsive and unhealthy

Photo by Victor Crespo on Unsplash

Let me begin by stating that I am not a professional health expert. I am someone with lived experience with moral scrupulosity who has studied the subject and knows quite a bit about OCD and how it affects the minds of sufferers. For further education, please seek a local therapist who is specifically trained in OCD therapy. Not just any ol’ therapist, but one who specializes in OCD.

Now that that throat clearing is out of the way, I want to address something that I think every minister is going to face at one point in their ministries or another: someone coming to them seeking moral or religious clarity in an unhealthy, compulsive manner.

Roughly 2% of the population suffers from OCD, and many people who are religious find that their OCD attaches itself to their faith, because the general rule of OCD is that it always attacks what you value most! So if you have a congregation of 100 people, on average, 2 of them will suffer from OCD at some point in their life. And it may be religious or moral scrupulosity.

What do I mean by moral or religious scrupulosity?

Well, the Latin root for “scruples” means a rough pebble. Something small and insignificant but seemingly impossible to ignore. Think of the last time you got a microscopic pebble in your shoe. It felt impossible to ignore. The more you ignored it, the more you paid attention to it until you broke down, took off your shoe, and emptied it expecting to see a boulder roll out, only to see the tiniest of pebbles. That’s scrupulosity. In your mind, some tiny issue has become so great, so significant, so irritating and overwhelming and damning and important that you have to stop your life to empty the shoe or your life may depend on it.

Only, with OCD, emptying the shoe never works. In this analogy, emptying the shoe would be something like getting reassurance from a pastor that you haven’t committed the unpardonable sin, or that you understand a passage of Scripture correctly, or that you are truly forgiven. In this case, you can never be certain the pebble is out. You can never be sure it WAS a pebble and not a boulder. Maybe it was serious. Maybe your pastor misheard you. Maybe you didn’t explain everything to him correctly. Maybe you left out a detail. Scrupulosity demands absolute 100% certainty. All OCD does.

In fact, the process of getting reassurance from your pastor has the perverse effect on your mind of validating your doubt as legitimate. So that you feel it’s worthwhile to do more research and get more reassurance. Maybe you should ask him one more time, just to clarify? It never ends.

So far I’ve been talking about religious scrupulosity. But there is also moral scrupulosity, the kind that I suffer more from. Here the struggle is less with religious doubts (Does God exist? Is he good? Did I pray enough? etc) than, have I broken the law, have I violated a rule, am I being negligent, am I being irresponsible, do I owe this person an apology, and so on. And as with religious scrupulosity, Christians with moral scrupulosity are also likely to turn to ministers for guidance and reassurance.

What they both have in common is that experience of using ministers for what’s called reassurance-seeking, which is a compulsion in OCD, something that makes the disorder worse by feeding it. The difficulty is that from the minister’s perspective, when a parishioner calls up asking about a theological or moral question, they feel compelled to offer an answer. We want people to ask earnest questions about their faith and about morality. More people should take such things seriously! So how are ministers to know when they are actually feeding into a disorder?

At first, the reality is you don’t know. And even for OCD sufferers, getting an answer once and living with it is good and healthy. It’s not reassurance, it’s assurance when it happens once. Unless someone has told you ahead of time that they struggle with scrupulosity, you won’t know and the best you can do is honestly share your wisdom with them and let God work his will.

But there are warning signs, at least in my own experience. Someone who needs an answer now (urgency), who exhibits high anxiety about the issue (anxiety), and keeps bringing up worst case possibilities (catastrophic thinking) may be struggling with scrupulosity of some kind.

What’s really revealing is when those signs (urgency, anxiety, catastrophic thinking) occur when the person comes back after receiving a perfectly good answer that originally satisfied them to their question the first time. Typically what will happen is they will come back with the same question clarified, or with a new detail, or with new information that they forgot to mention. They may come back and ask, “But what if?” Having been that person myself, I can say that’s a red flag that we may be no longer dealing with a reasonable theological or moral question, we may be dealing with a mental health condition.

I’m not advocating for ministers to diagnose people. That’s not their role. But I do think that when you see warning signs of compulsive behavior, it’s important to recognize the difference between someone earnestly seeking biblical wisdom or moral guidance and someone being driven by a terrible disorder. The failure to know the difference can actually feed into the disorder, making the sufferer worse. And we don’t want that.

I think if you find someone in your ministry who seems to be exhibiting signs of scrupulosity, and you’ve answered their specific question once, then you might try saying something like, “I noticed that when I answered your question you had a hard time being satisfied with the answer. I’m sorry about that. I wonder if you might be struggling with scrupulosity. We think Martin Luther struggled with it, too. It’s a form of OCD where you have obsessive doubts about your faith or morality and you compulsively try to get answers for them. Does that feel right to you?”

If they agree, you can help them find resources to get help for their OCD and begin a path of recovery (see here for more). The goal is not to ignore their theological or moral questions. But to sort out and set aside their disordered, irrational, fear and imagination-based questions that are actually getting in the way.

Along their journey of healing, they may need you as a resource to help in conjunction with the therapist. Some therapists even consult with clergy to make sure that they are respecting the faith of their clients. I found the support of pastors and friends valuable during my recovery process, not for reassurance, but for prayer and encouragement.

It’s not always easy to tell the difference between someone with a simple passion for theology and a disorder driving them with anxiety to find impossible certainty. I believe it’s important for ministers to be aware of the reality of scrupulosity in those they minister to. This is important for their own sakes, because the burden of reassurance giving is heavy for anyone to bear. But more significantly, it’s important for the sake of the sufferer, who thinks they are trying to keep themselves safe or holy or pure, but are only making themselves sicker by getting constant reassurance.

We serve a God who we can have confident assurance in, who we can have faith in, who we can trust in. In a world of uncertainty, there is comfort there. While ministers should not give reassurance to those suffering from scrupulosity, because it will only make them suffer more, they can ground them in Scriptural truths: That God loves them, that he will not forsake them, that he is working all things together for their good, that he has adopted them has his beloved child. It’s those truths that keep us all moving forward.