The Threat of Pharmaceuticals to Faith
A pervasive problem that the church doesn't talk about. We should.
I am aware this is a divisive issue.
There are certain topics that pastors are conditioned to avoid. One of them is around the norm in our culture of solving problems with pills. This is a topic that has cost me church members and friends. By writing this, I risk losing many more. I keep talking about it because it consistently works against the cause of Christ and the functioning of the culture I love. It is rather plain to see for anyone who cares to look. My integrity as a pastor depends on, not only my encouragement and joy, but also my dismay and warning.
I can readily acknowledge that there are situations in which medication is helpful, and many others in which it is harmless. If a surgery has to take place, I’m quite glad for anesthesia.
Why have I written this?
I should go ahead and state outright that I fully anticipate the corrective: ‘Jeffrey, you’re not a professional. You don’t have a medical degree or a pharmacology degree, or any sort of training in this field. You’re out of your league and causing a lot of harm as you teach people to be skeptical of the very things that would otherwise keep them alive.’ My response is twofold: 1) I don’t think the vast majority of “experts” really know what they are doing; I think they regurgitate norms in their fields, and 2) I think that quality of life is more important than length of life; I don’t accept the burden of keeping everyone alive as long as possible. I’m more concerned about helping people to live with dignity and holiness.
I follow in the footsteps of John Wesley, who also was not a medical professional, but rather a religious leader. He went so far as to actually publish a book on physical health called ‘Primitive Physick,’ which essentially cobbled together lots of methods for treating various maladies. He did this because he loved and cared for people. How strange would it be for religious leaders to only care for people’s souls and not their bodies, as though the two are not connected? The bodily resurrection is a foundational doctrine of the Christian faith. Yet pastors are expected not to speak to the health of the flock? That is a somewhat ludicrous idea.
“If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.”
-James 2:15-17
I could also quote Paul in 1 Corinthians reminding us that our bodies are temples to the Holy Spirit. I could quote the same book, in which Paul not only makes the case for a bodily resurrection, but also of disciplining our bodies and bringing them into submission.
These messages are badly needed by our extremely unhealthy society. They fly in the face of the “body positivity” movement and of the vast majority of sedentary hedonistic American lifestyles today. In an age in which people are told that all their problems are someone else’s fault or otherwise uncontrollable, and that the answers to our problems lie in new technologies, medical interventions, medications, and heavy-handed government, the Christian scriptures point individuals towards leaning on the Lord and submitting to him in all things.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.”
-1 Peter 5:8-9
The forces of darkness want us to be impaired so that we cannot properly focus on the problems of sin. The world, collaborating with such forces, works tirelessly to create new anxieties and machinations so as to derail those who might otherwise turn and repent. The distinct role of the Christian church is to wake people up before it is too late. In an age of mass medication, I believe that means pastors need to speak up about the massive threat to faith that many (not all) medications are.
I am not a Christian Science practitioner, nor a neo-luddite in any strict sense. I am a Christian leader who is watching my countrymen quite literally medicating themselves into dementia and death, trusting in those who would have them stay sick all their lives. I have to say something.
The American Dynamic with Medications
In our society, we have a division between acceptable drugs and unacceptable drugs. There are illicit substances that only bad people do (meth, coke, etc.), some that probably aren’t great but we allow them (alcohol & marijuana), and tons of substances that are seen as good and helpful when prescribed by a doctor.
The latest of these that I’m quite concerned about is Ozempic, among other new “diet drugs.” In my small town of Nowata, I’m familiar with three people, so far, who have had radical personality changes when taking these medications. I’m talking leaving spouses, abandoning children, being unrecognizable to people who knew them.
I started on this article and then put it down because I wasn’t ready to upset people as much as I expected this would. Then last night I woke up at 2:00 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. I ended up watching Tucker Carlson interview a gentleman named Calley Means, who once worked within the pharmaceutical industry. His sister, Casey Means, graduated from Princeton Medical School and is a medical doctor. Each of them, having deep familiarity with the medical and pharmaceutical industries, have come to the conclusion that both sectors are run but unscrupulous people who want to make money off the American populace by keeping us sick. They have published a book called Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.
While the book almost certainly focuses more on solutions to the health problems all Americans face, the Carlson interview with Means focuses almost entirely on the problems themselves. I cannot properly do justice to it here. He talks a lot of statistics on American health. We have skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes, and an array of other conditions associated with inflammation. 25% of young women are on SSRIs. More than 50% of men over the age of 50 are on statins. Supposedly the average number of medications that Americans over the age of 50 are taking on a daily basis is seven. Seven daily medications.
When my mother went to a doctor a couple of years ago and told him that she was on no medications, he was amazed. That is how uncommon it is for Americans not to regularly take medication.
With Ozempic, apparently the drug works by essentially paralyzing one’s stomach muscles, so that the body is not able to really digest the food. It just moves through one’s digestive system without adding nutrients. Yet this is not a solution. It is a band aid for a bullet wound. Meanwhile, Americans are eating garbage. Diet and exercise would not just prolong lives, but give them much greater quality. According to Means, pretty much nobody died from Covid who was healthy. Co-morbidities alone were the reason for such a high fatality rate in America.
I’m sure many reading this will take issue with a number of broad strokes already made. Yet I don’t think many can disagree with me that Americans are more unhealthy than we have ever been. Despite what Oprah or any ‘expert’ says, this is not a genetic or unavoidable reality. It is the direct consequence of a faulty treatment of our bodies. The proper response is repentance.
Caveat: Yes, it is natural, and it is helpful sometimes.
One reality I should acknowledge is that humans are a species that has always and will always need to put things into our bodies to survive. These things augment the way we feel, how well we think, how well our bodies function. Food is medicine, in that sense. Moreover, Christians have a sacrament called the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, in which we mystically take Christ into our bodies and spirits through the ingestion of food and drink. Most Christian traditions believe this makes a change in the individual, not chemically, but spiritually. As we continue to study the impact of different kinds of mushrooms on the brain, we likewise see this overlap between physical and spiritual in the realm of the neurochemical.
In the book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, Edward Slingerland effectively makes the case that every human society has intentionally experimented with and synthesized mind altering substances. Virtually every culture has socially sanctioned ways of entering into an altered state of mind. Slingerland actually makes the case that civilization would not have developed were it not for human society allowing for such a phenomenon.
Given that Paul himself urges Timothy to drink wine (not to excess), and that Christ himself mandated wine to be used in the sacrament, I find it difficult to argue seriously that the call of Christians is to completely abstain from all mind-altering ingestion. Fasting, too, has its own psychological impact, which is known by ancients who recommend such practices.
My problem is not with entering into an altered state of consciousness, per se. It is with the unique imbalance of our materially rich and socially isolated society today. When a society is unbalanced, it will act out in any number of ways. We have known in America for some time that we have an unbalanced understanding of ingesting substances. I do not believe the reason for this is neurochemical or genetic. I believe it is spiritual. A short kurzgesagt video is a helpful explainer for how I currently understand addition and substance abuse to work: it is an outgrowth of loneliness and social dysfunction. The movie Requiem for a Dream, which I cannot recommend because of some disturbing and pornographic content, quite poignantly shows how small the difference is between illegal drug use and legal pharmaceutical use.
I told some friends online that I would be publishing an article about this topic. He gently let me know that he was on a medication that had helped him to lose 100 pounds over the last few months. It has turned his life around. I cannot deny than some drugs achieve significant results, nor would I. My main argument here is that things are way out of balance, and that our society is generally taking medications rather than dealing with underlying problems of diet and exercise.
Imagine a continuum with an extreme on each end: One end is the extreme of going to the doctor for every little malady and taking tons of medications, the other end is never going to the doctor for anything, nor ever taking a medication of any sort beyond food and water. In Jeffrey’s perfect world, everyone would rest somewhere between the middle and the naturalist extreme. I think an increasing number of people on the other side of the continuum are going to cause our society to degrade and implode.
How has this impacted my ministry?
In some ways, it is somewhat small. Statins are pervasive among middle-aged to older men. Studies show they only barely extend the lives of these men. Yet they are prescribed to millions of them, with often significant impact on their daily lives. A man in my church recently gave them up, and his wife remarked at how much more pleasant he is to be around.
In other ways, it has been significant. As I said above, I know people personally who have been injured psychologically by Ozempic and other weight loss drugs. I have a dearly beloved sister who chose to get on this medication and somewhat immediately lost her mental stability. Apparently suicidal ideation has been a rather common byproduct of ingesting this drug, which is recommended to be taken for the remainder of people’s lives.
People in the towns I minister to are commonly doing drugs to make it through the day. Usage of opioids and amphetamines is very common. It is not a rare event for a person to walk down my street who is clearly under the influence of something. One of my neighbors regularly howls in an eery way with her dogs when she is high, or else she screams at her husband for all the neighborhood to hear when she is coming down off whatever she was on. Addicts rotate in and out of the local jail while they lose their family, lose their teeth, lose their humanity. All the while they want me to just teach them a new prayer to say, or a little scripture to give them comfort, while they continue to be awash in depravity and destruction. No.
A couple I loved left one of my churches when I preached against the unnecessary use of medications to help folks make it through the day. They hadn’t told me, but this was a big part of their lives. Rather than face the music, they left the church. Their lives have since fallen apart, and my heart yearns to be reconciled, but for too many the chemical and emotional dependance is stronger than the relational need to be reconciled.
A man I love and have prayed for hundreds of times will stay away from the church for weeks, then call me drunk and chummy, but when we finally see each other again, he doesn’t remember what we talked about. Another man I ministered to for years fell back into meth addiction and began to sell it from a flophouse motel room. He called me in the midst of a binge, saying he could see the demons around him. A local woman came to worship one day, insisting that her husband had gotten out of jail and was hiding in the walls of her house, coming out and sexually violating her dog and everyone she knew. I confirmed with local law enforcement that her husband was still behind bars. They had come over to her house and looked in the walls when she reported him crawling around in there. She was, of course, hallucinating. She refused treatment. Her husband, another meth head I knew from jail, showed up at my church a year or so later, convinced law enforcement had him surrounded and was listening to his phone. He couldn’t shake it. When I saw him the next day, he had ditched his phone and his truck and was sure the Irish mob was after him. A few weeks later, a neighbor of mine from down the street came by, out of his mind on meth, knocked on my door and talked to my wife until I raced home from the church. He said people/demons were surrounding his house and threatening him. He was hiding out in the attic to avoid them and came over just to let me know.
In the middle of the Covid scare, the vaccine strained many of my relationships and ended a couple. One older lady in the church used a turn of phrase seeming to imply that she hoped I might suffer or die from refusing to get the vaccine. My wife and I chose not to have anyone in our household treated. We believed at the time, and I believe time and study has borne out, that the treatment was more damaging than the disease for healthy people below a certain age. However, there was a ton of fear promoted in every corner at that time, which not only served to sever people from one another, but also to sever individuals from their health. The recommended treatment from authorities was not to go outside, get sunshine and exercise, nor improve their diets. These things would have saved many lives. Rather, the advice from experts was to take an experimental drug and stay away from everyone just in case. It was unhealthy in every way. The extent of the vaccine injuries will not be known for years. I may lose friends just for writing this paragraph.
The brokenness of pills and injections is all around me. I live in a wasteland. Most Americans do, as well. We cannot ignore these people. As society continues to appease them, the church has to figure out the countercultural witness to get them out of this darkness. I believe that begins with renouncing the darkness. Life is not meant to be lived by managing medications…
The Complicated Reality
Our bodies are the amazing byproduct of a God of infinite complexity. From a cellular level, they are dynamic and nuanced machines. Whether one is talking about the gut, one’s skin, or one’s blood, the human body is full of different cells fulfilling different tasks. The body even collects and utilizes foreign bacteria in order to get things done. Billions of nonhuman entities live within each of us. There are microbiomes in many different areas of our bodies, balanced perfectly to keep our bodies alive and functional in the midst of a hostile world.
This corresponds with the realities of marketplaces. I am increasingly a libertarian in my economic ethos because of my increasing awareness of the complexity of markets. In a free society, people are able to respond to the pressures of cause and effect, supply and demand, immediately. When they are allowed to do so, needs are met, people are employed, and wealth is created. Yet when the state gets involved, whether it be through price controls, job creation, or making entire sectors public or underwritten, what we find it economic depression and floundering. An economic system is a complex mechanism, combining millions of different factors. Government intervention can only cause harm in such an environment, with some exceptions.
The same is true in our bodies, with some exceptions. With the gut, in particular, we are seeing the consequences of medical interventions. It is my understanding that autism has recently been linked to the imbalance of flora in the gut. And, as Means says in the Carlson interview, the stomach is where like 90% of our serotonin is produced, among many other hormones. When we interfere with the digestive system, whether it be mechanically through Ozempic or chemically through antibiotics, we potentially throw off a delicate balance. Whether the result be astronomical raises in the rates of autism in children or the rates of people needing to get their gall bladders removed, we are seeing only the beginnings of these consequences. In the economic world, libertarian economists often refer to the “law of unintended consequences.” This surely applies to medical interventions, as well.
The daughter of a popular Canadian thinker, Jordan Peterson, named Mikhaila, struggled for many years of her life with a long list of life threatening medical conditions that led to her almost total disablement. After experimenting extensively with her personal diet, she finally went to the extreme option of something akin to a stool transplant. The restored gut flora from another healthy person completely reversed her life, such that she is now totally healthy.
This is but one anecdote in a sea of thousands of people who have grown suspicious of the popular narrative that health care professionals are going to cure all our ills through innovation. Many are returning to the notion that our bodies are amazing, that they need to be cared for, and that they are naturally resilient.
Even further complicating this picture is the concept of epigenetics. The notion is that human life dynamically interacts with our genetic programming. Based on the trials and crises we experience, different segments of our genetics can become activated, or perhaps even changed. Sedentary lives without adversity prove to be quite anemic. As a simple example: Lack of exposure to peanuts as young children results in much higher rates of peanut allergies for people later in life. Similarly, humans need to be regularly exposed to trial and adversity, otherwise we become effete and inept.
Resilience vs. Fragility
This is where the real area of conflict is. Are humans to be defined primarily by our fragility, or by our resilience? The rising social phenomenon of safetyism indicates a society increasingly obsessed with its own fragility. Emotionally speaking, the young, in particular, seem unable to reckon with the harsh realities of life. Rather than working to toughen them up, western society seems to generally accept this new softness as a norm, scoffing at previous generations that preached a ‘stiff upper lip.’
I cannot abide this. As a religious leader, as a citizen, as a man who is a part of the same social fabric as all of these people…I cannot let people get soft. I cannot let people get flabby and lazy and medicated. People need to learn to be resilient, tough, vigilant, alert, and faithful. I cannot participate in the lie that overmedicated, overstimulated, underworked, and undisciplined people can be right with God. I will not preach into heaven those who cannot find it in themselves to take up their cross daily and follow Christ.
Pharmaceuticals are leeching into the groundwater because of the massive amount of it in human waste. Fertility rates are falling far below replacement value, which has huge implications for a stable future (it is bad). People in our society are increasingly alienated, miserable, and unholy. I have to ring the alarm. This is a big deal.
What I Want
I want folks to stop poisoning themselves. Stop eating poison. Stop trusting the voices and institutions that have overseen this mass degeneration of our society. Stop being lazy, self-justifying, and self-pitying.
I want people to learn to trust in God and the bodies he has given us. I want them to rejoice in eating real food; not this synthesized crap. I want them to exercise, let their immune systems conquer disease, get plenty of sunlight. STOP DRINKING SODA! Practice fasting regularly.
I don’t want for folks to swear off hospitals or medication altogether. I just want them generally predisposed against such interventions. I want them to insist on seeing themselves as resilient agents with dignity; not as disabled victims. I want people to renounce a mentally-altered state of life, learning instead to love sobriety and vigilance.
Final Anecdote
There is another clergy from my former tribe (United Methodist) who leans left. A couple years ago, he started talking publicly about his sincere effort to quit SSRIs. It was robbing him of precious things, this medication, and he needed to restore balance in himself after a prolonged period of chemical dependence upon these antidepressants.
I wrote him to convey support. He responded, stating his appreciation, but also noting the silence of his many friends within our tribe. As “religious experts,” United Methodist clergy have been conditioned to defer to “experts” in other fields, operating around them. If the medical and psychological experts say medication is needed, then a good pastor takes the drugs, blesses others as they do so, and ignores the fallout. This guy couldn’t do that any more; his friends couldn’t support him.
Wrapping Up
As this age continues to degenerate, more and more are losing their ability to live in denial and avoidance. Something has gone terribly wrong. The center cannot hold, so we are now living in a time of great division.
My continued prayer is that those in authority will similarly sober up, facilitate the corrective, and restore some order and balance. Until then, my family and I have to protest. We have done so silently for a long time; now I have chosen to be more vocal. If I have offended you, I hope you spend some time on why it is that you have been so offended. If I have encouraged you, I hope you spend some time on how it is that you can similarly speak up about the dysfunction of our present moment.
Until Christ comes again in glory, this world is going to be a messed up place. However, Christ’s ambassadors should be agents of peace, spreading order and life wherever they are planted. That is the intent behind this writing. May God bless the reading of these words.
great write up. Yes, some of the comments can be tough. Not if it was me you were mentioning, but I lost 100+ using a weight loss drug /with daily walking 1-2 hours a day. But that was after 30 years of shame, terrible self-image, and daily struggle to be active (often failing), improve my diet (often failing), and stsy positive (often faiing).
With all the weight loss, i feel i’m able to focus on family, career, ministry, activites, etc instead of what we’re eatinf for the next meal.
I do agree with you, and i am VERY skeptical of pharma companies and their priorities (whether to actually help or make money). I thankfully found a doctor i trust and the wroght loss has gotten me off of Blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, and diebeties meds. Thankful, and hopeful i can stay out of that health swirl ever again.
Bless you and your ministry. You’re doing gret content and topics.
Jeffrey, i wonder if these folks you mention of negative turns after taking the drug???
Could it be that they had an underlying heart problem (faith walk) but assumed the medicine and/or weight loss would solve all their problems? And then be dismayed when the drug didnt solve their underlying issues?
Im not familiar with Ozempic (heard of it, not used it) but i had not heard of psychological issues from the drugs.