Excerpt from a Sojourners’ article about the stigma of mental health by Robyn Henderson-Espinoza—
Christianity has a bad habit of diminishing the body in favor of elevating the mind. For Plato and Descartes, two philosophers who have heavily influenced the Western church’s thinking on spirit and flesh, the body was imagined as an inferior attachment to an idealized, spiritual mind.
What this has created is a divide between body and soul — a focus on the care of the soul in our churches, with little attention given to how the health of mind, body, and soul are integrated. This has not only created bad religion, but has meant that Christians overlook the prevalence of mental illness in their churches. And this is affecting church communities in significant ways.
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