Below are some important considerations for reflecting on whether or not particular religious beliefs, traditions and practices promote healthy physical, spiritual and psychological growth. They are intended to help persons and institutions to reflect humbly on their own religious context, not to criticize others.

Does a particular form of religious thought and practice…..

• Build bridges or barriers between people?

• Foster or deny the human connectedness and mutual compassion that lead to peace and justice?

• Strengthen or weaken our basic sense of trust and relatedness to the Universe?

• Stimulate or hamper the growth of inner freedom and personal responsibility?

• Help or hinder people from moving on from guilt to forgiveness?

• Provide significant and substantive ethical guidelines or emphasize mere ethical trivia?

• Increase or lessen the ability to celebrate and enjoy the gift of life?

• Encourage or depreciate the “feeling” dimension of life?

• Handle the vital energies of sex and aggressiveness in constructive or repressive ways?

• Encourage the acceptance or denial of reality?

• Foster mature or escapist religious beliefs and practices?

• Encourage intellectual honesty with respect to doubts or the pretense that they don’t exist?

• Face into the tangled complexity of the human situation or oversimplify it?

• Emphasize love and growth or fear?

• Offer adherents a “frame of orientation and object of devotion” that is adequate to handle or simply unable to face the existential anxiety which abounds?

(Adapted from Clinebell’s “Mental Health through Christian Community.)