The term spiritual bypassing was coined by psychologist John Wellwood when his study led him to conclude that people within his religion were using religious beliefs to avoid personal change. I don’t remember when I was first presented with this concept but it was one that described my own experiences with many people in my life especially when my own child was diagnosed with mental illness. 

Having been in her life’s pain with her as a result of my own traumatic pregnancy and birth experience with her, having not been able to hold her at birth and for the month afterwards, I knew where her brain’s dysfunction was rooted but had no idea how to get her the help she needed. At that time in my life everything was unfortunately about God and Satan battling life out using human beings to do it so I believed that we would be exempt from the realities of her trauma. I believed that God was on the side of those who had accepted Jesus into their heart and everyone else on Satan’s. Trusting anyone outside of that bubble was only done in order to influence them toward understanding and making that decision to trust in Christ for personal salvation. Reality, however, became a brutal mentor in teaching me that much of what I believed was not rooted in the real world. At some point I realized that like my community, I was very skilled in the art of spiritually bypassing.

It is so ironic when I think about my life before I was so brutally confronted with the reality that neglect of my child’s mental and emotional needs had brought us to the place where she was dying right in front of me. Ironic because the church I was a part of,  and the Evangelical faith overall, was also about dealing with our personal sin, repenting and conforming ourselves to Christ’s image. I can’t even count the times when someone more spiritually mature confronted me and challenged me to understand my own faults, to repent and commit to Christ’s example. Sadly, that practice also led to the profound capacity to encourage the bypassing of very human realities. One particular incident where my child is concerned really stands out to me. 

One day, as I often did, I listened to an episode of Focus on the Family. On this particular day the guest was discussing grief and loss in the life of a Christian. She encouraged the listener to understand that along with being a spiritual being, Christians are also human beings. She went on to say that it was important to acknowledge one’s loss and grieve over it. I had experienced a lot of loss when my water broke at 13 weeks – when my child was born under anesthesia during an emergency c-section – when I sat alone in the hospital in a private room because the doctors were sure that she was going to be born dead when I returned back to the floor. I had experienced SO much pain and so much loss that I could not feel because in my world at the time it was all God’s will for us. I wasn’t able to hide all of it from my church family but I did do my best to adhere to the “God is good all the time” mantra so commonly spoken in our faith. 

That evening when I was at a Bible study I shared with an older woman how much the episode had meant to me and how it gave me permission to accept that I had genuinely lost a lot and needed to allow myself the space to feel it and grieve over it. This person, without any hesitation whatsoever said, “Oh, there is NO loss in Jesus.” She went on to tell me that were I to believe there was loss, I would suffer and so would my daughter. This “friend” was literally telling me to spiritually bypass my present reality and sadly, I took her reproof into my heart and did just that. It would be 17 years later before I would wake up and begin to break free of that toxic worldview. It would take a decade more before I would have the courage to leave it behind me altogether. As one on the outside of it now but living in the heart of Evangelical Texas, I see and experience continual examples of this spiritual bypass where reality beckons to be heard. 

As I write this our Texas attorney general is in the middle of an impeachment trial. Sadly, Mr. Ken Paxton an Evangelical Christian who believed himself to be anointed by God to force Conservative values onto the state’s people through his office, is daily going down in flames. Mr. Paxton went into the AG’s office with such a radical agenda that he actually neglected the regular duties of that office and the State of Texas is paying a huge cost for it. When his staff or others would confront him in any way, he blew it off because he believed himself to be in subjection only to “God’s law” (I’m not sure he actually even knows the content of anything actually in the Bible but I digress.) This man, actually re-elected here in Texas in spite of the reality that he had committed multiple crimes, had even successfully delayed his own trial through abuses of the AG’s office fully expecting that he would not ever be held accountable. 

When a lawsuit by his former staff resulted in a settlement of several million dollars, Ken Paxton’s delusion of anointing was so complete that he actually had the balls to ask the Texas Legislature to pay the bill for him and expected them to readily do so! That request was just the wake up call many Christians needed to actually face reality. 

The Texas House and Senate were not of such a mind and now his actual character, his actual moral compass, or lack thereof, is finally being exposed for what it has always been. The people of Texas who shared in his delusion will either continue to deflect and claim this is a radical plot by a woke mob to persecute their anointed one OR they will face the reality that he is a cheat, a liar and not anointed by anyone but his own self. It would make sense in a healthy soul for one to feel an enormous sense of betrayal and to question how they were so duped to begin with. Reality should work that way. Unfortunately, strongly held religious beliefs are very hard to change. We build our mental framework around them, our culture and family structures too. Facing reality is brutally hard work. That said, I hope there are those willing to do it for the sake of Texas and this whole country. 

The people founding this country knew that if one religious persuasion were to take over in the government, the result would be catastrophic to our Republic. Even acknowledging God in a public way is very different for the American people than it is to declare that this is a Christian country. When you do that you put blinders on toward any one else of a different persuasion and become something other than a free country. This is what I believe has happened to the Republican Party. It has been taken over by Christian Nationalists like Ken Paxton and those with the goal to take over control of the nation and if they could, the world. Ken Paxton is just one of them. It’s time to wake up.