The Comforter, they said, comforted.
While congregations watched, the Holy Ghost would grip the pews: The formerly enslaved in the twilight of Reconstruction, European factory hands on their only day off. Perhaps they’d shout and stomp or even collapse to a hallowed unconsciousness in the aisles. Or the Spirit just soothed them.
She was the Comforter. It wasn’t always a compliment.
Karl Marx called Europe’s kaleidoscopic Christian traditions “the opiate of the masses”: Soothing, but useless. W.E.B. Du Bois described “the Frenzy” as the third leg of an expressive “slave religion” — a note of curious ambivalence or an ink-stained headshake, depending on the reader.
One interpretation of “The Frenzy” is that Du Bois feared religion’s influence could lead to a world where “people aren’t rising up, they aren’t making revolution, they aren’t fighting,” said Wake Forest historian Guy Emerson Mount, currently the Carter G. Woodson Fellow at the University of Virginia.
There’s another view, according to Vassar College historian Jonathan S. Kahn: “Slave religion’s” power to unite people in a common cause piqued Du Bois’s curiosity, even if he couldn’t fully inhabit its tenets.
Churches with histories of civil rights activism — including Church of the Advocate and Bright Hope Baptist — stand just steps from Temple’s Main Campus. Du Bois lived long enough for their work to inform his views. But there’s something to be said for the comfort faith communities offer.
Decades of research have established clear links between religion and mental health, for better or worse: Adherents consistently say they abuse substances, contemplate suicide and face anxiety less than their peers. But religious groups’ policing of behavior can also lead to adverse mental health outcomes like higher rates of anxiety.
A 2008 study by Dr. Joanna Maselko — then a Temple researcher — even showed a link between leaving faith and mental health: Women experienced higher risks of depression and anxiety once they’d quit religion, Maselko found. Men didn’t.
“Women are simply more integrated into the social networks of their religious communities,” Maselko told Temple’s health sciences newsletter at the time. “When they stop attending religious services, they lose access to that network and all its potential benefits.”
Among those benefits are the stabilizing power of routine and community, said Temple Interfaith Council director Ariella Werden-Greenfield.
“That a community can be a resource for anyone is absolutely true,” Werden-Greenfield said. “When faith is a piece of community, I think the capacity for that community experience to amplify well-being is so very heightened.”
Temple’s Catholic Newman Center sits on Main Campus’s northern edge, less than a half-block north of the intersection of Broad and Diamond streets. Catholics at Temple have long visited the Newman Center to worship, study and feast on Spag — campus-speak for a Thursday evening pasta dinner served to hungry students, staffers and community members from the hands of Newman Center volunteers.
Not every diner at Spag is a devout Catholic, but the food is free. And it’s helped make Newman a community all its own.
A chorus of healthcare administrators and experts, including former United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, point to social isolation as a root of physical and psychological maladies. Murthy even feared the COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated a “loneliness epidemic.” The Newman Center, in serving, could potentially be part of the solution.
“As humans, we like to give back to each other,” said Center coordinator Cameron Mann, a senior biology major. “We like to help each other out.”
Yet faith might not be the perfect solution for everyone. For those whose deepest selves run afoul of their church’s interpretation of Scripture, full participation in the community might simply be impossible.
Victims of sexual abuse and other religious trauma likely wouldn’t find a return to the fold particularly useful. And while members of Catholic and Protestant clergy alike often point to spiritual forces at work in mental health challenges, there are issues best solved by clinical solutions like therapy and medication, Mann said.
“For things like mental health, where you seriously need medication, treatment — I would say it’s in our best interest to acknowledge that,” Mann said. In those instances, he added, it’s helpful to note, “We’re not, like, doctors or clinicians or anything of that sort.”
And the comforts of consecration, Werden-Greenfield noted, don’t necessarily lull believers away from taking action.
“Faith can give us the strength to align our life purpose with the greater good,” Werden-Greenfield said.
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