Jude 3 Project

The reasoning usually goes like this: real faith brings peace, I have no peace, so my faith must be failing. Each step sounds reasonable, but the first one is wrong. A Christian can be depressed, and depression is not evidence that faith has broken down. Dr. Anita Phillips, a trauma therapist and minister, explains why. Suffering enters human life through a fallen world, and that is different from personal guilt. Once you see that difference, therapy and medication stop looking like rivals to prayer.

That answer only holds if a few ideas are in place first, in the right order. We need to know what depression actually is. We need to know what Christians mean when they say suffering comes from sin. Then we can see why hunting for one single cause leads people to one single remedy, and why that fails.

What is depression, as opposed to a hard season?

Phillips is glad that more people now talk openly about depression, but she warns against using the word loosely. A low mood or a painful stretch of life is not the same as major depressive disorder, the clinical diagnosis. She describes the core of that diagnosis as “at least two weeks of just consistently feeling very sad, very low, and kind of an absence of any previous interest in doing anything you used to like to do.”

Other signs can come with it. Sleep may change in either direction. A person may feel physically restless or unable to get moving. Phillips singles out two signs as pointing to something more serious than sadness: feelings of worthlessness or guilt, and thoughts of suicide.

Grief belongs in this picture too, and Phillips notes it can follow any kind of loss, not only a death. To tell a response to circumstances apart from something deeper, she asks: “was it initiated externally or is it now seem to be initiated internally?” Her example is the person who keeps saying they will feel better once the current crisis passes. Then it passes, they still feel heavy, and they find a new reason. Someone who always needs a fresh explanation for the weight may be carrying something that comes from inside. When a person feels down more days than not, for weeks and months, Phillips says that “life doesn’t have to be normalized in that state.”

She also stresses that depression does not always look like lying in bed. It can look like indifference, or like anxiety. Among Black women, she says, it often shows up as the sense that everything takes enormous effort, and she points to survey figures she reads as reflecting a culture that prizes staying in motion. Her figures and that cultural explanation are her interpretation and would need checking against the studies behind them. Her broader point stands without them: depression can hide inside a person who is still moving.

The purpose of these details is not to make readers into diagnosticians. Phillips resists that directly: “Don’t worry about you figuring out what it is.” The purpose is theological. Mistake an illness for a spiritual condition, and you will reach for the wrong remedy and then blame yourself when it doesn’t work.

If suffering comes from sin, isn’t my depression my fault?

Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, names the problem in her conversation with Phillips: “sometimes people can blame people’s depression on sin, or this is a consequence.” Phillips’s reply begins with what sounds at first like agreement: “Every human experience that is suffering is related to sin.”

This is the step most readers are missing. Phillips is not saying depressed people have done something wrong. She is saying that “the problem is we view sin too narrowly.” When most people hear “sin,” they think only of a wrong act. Phillips names three different ways sin produces suffering, and keeping them apart changes the whole question.

The first is your own sinful acts. Phillips does not wave this away. If you are living against your convictions, guilt is a fitting and even healthy response, and staying in a compromising situation for a long time can wear down your mental health. She adds a second observation. Many Christians keep doing something they know is wrong without being able to stop, which points to brokenness as well as rebellion. She notes that “you can be saved and have an addiction,” and that “therapy can help with brokenness.”

She anchors this in James 5:16: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” About the wording, she remarks: “Didn’t even say, pray that we be forgiven. It says, pray that we be healed.” In context, James is writing about the sick (James 5:14-15), so the healing in view includes the body. Interpreters differ on how widely to apply the verse. Even read cautiously, it links a person’s faults with a need for healing alongside a need for pardon.

The second is sin committed against you. Someone else’s wrong can leave lasting damage. Phillips gives the example of childhood sexual abuse, and says post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety are more often seen in people who suffered abuse and trauma as children. Such a person suffers from sin, though the sin was someone else’s.

The third is the fallen condition of human life itself. This is where most depression belongs, and Phillips states it bluntly: “These bodies are made of dirt and they do stuff.” The same fallen body that produces headaches and high blood pressure, she says, “also produces illnesses that have emotional symptoms as well.”

So she can hold both claims at once: “it’s all related to sin in some way, but that doesn’t mean that I’m guilty.” The weak-faith explanation squeezes all three kinds of sin into the first, assuming that anyone who suffers must have done something. Separate them, and most depression turns out to be fallen-world suffering, of the same kind as any other illness.

What Scripture says about where suffering comes from

Phillips refers to 1 John 3:8: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” The verse needs careful reading. John is contrasting a life marked by habitual sin with a life marked by righteousness, so his immediate subject is moral conduct. When Phillips applies the verse to all human suffering, she is connecting John’s statement to the larger biblical story. That connection is reasonable, but it is an application rather than John’s direct point.

The larger story begins in Genesis 3. After the fall, Genesis 3:16-19 describes pain, painful labor and death entering human life, and ends with “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Phillips’s remark about bodies made of dirt echoes this passage. Genesis explains where the damage started, and 1 John says what Christ came to do about it. Neither text says a suffering believer is personally guilty for the damage they carry.

The Bible even includes a whole book about a sufferer whose friends assumed he was. In Job, the friends tie Job’s pain to his wrongdoing, and at the end God says they have not spoken rightly of him (Job 42:7). Phillips’s verdict on them is simple: each had a different explanation for Job’s suffering, and all of them were wrong.

So is it spiritual or medical?

This is the most common mistake, and Phillips knows it from inside her own family. She grew up in a Pentecostal home. Her sister’s severe mental illness first appeared as terrifying night visions of demons in the bedroom doorway. The family responded the way their tradition taught, and the visions kept coming. Phillips recalls: “Because if it was simply a demonic attack, believe me, it would have been conquered at our house.”

She does not conclude that the spiritual side is imaginary. She says she fully believes in deliverance, that demonic activity is real, and that prayer matters. Her criticism runs both ways. She faults mental health professionals who brush aside the spiritual beliefs of Christians from her tradition, and church people who want to find the one thing that is wrong so they can respond in only one way. In her view the spiritual, biological and emotional are not mutually exclusive.

She offers an analogy. Water a potted plant with tainted water, and the soil becomes tainted, then the stem, the leaves and the fruit. If toxic air enters through the leaves, it eventually reaches the roots. However the harm gets in, it spreads through the whole system. The picture shows why a single-channel response falls short. It also has a limit. A person has a spirit and relationships that no picture of plant biology can capture, and the analogy cannot tell anyone which treatment they need. Its job is narrower: to show that a problem in one part of a person seldom stays in that part.

That is why her practical counsel is so broad. When there is mental distress, she says to use every strategy you have: “plead the blood of Jesus, cast out the devil, go to therapy, take the medication.” She adds exercise and time with friends, and states her conclusion: “There is no one approach to being well.” The idea she wants to remove is that going to therapy or taking medication means you are praying less. On her account, a person in therapy can pray just as hard as before, and should.

Doesn’t “use everything” make faith optional?

This is the strongest objection, and it often comes from painful experience. Some people found real help in therapy after a pastor failed them, and concluded that the therapist had simply replaced the church. Phillips takes the hurt seriously. Feeling unseen by a minister can be painful, and depending on the response, even traumatizing. Still, she draws the line where it belongs: “that person is not God. God didn’t fail you though.”

She also places church leaders in their history. When her sister’s symptoms appeared in the early 1980s, she says, mental illness was not yet a national conversation and pediatric psychiatry was just beginning. Her parents were not rejecting a psychiatric explanation. None was available to them, and today they understand.

Then she gives the reasoning that answers the objection: “Don’t let the enemy trick you into abandoning your God because you got help from something that God provided.” If therapy and medication are among God’s provisions, accepting them keeps a person within his care. Leaving faith because a therapist helped you would mean rejecting the giver because of the gift. That is why she insists on caring for the whole person, spirit, soul and body together.

She adds that older church practices such as testimony services, shut-ins and long weeping at the altar once supported mental health without anyone using that term, which is why today’s quick advice to pray about it, as she puts it, “ain’t quite the same pray.” So the aim is to add care, never to subtract faith. In her words, “We are expanding our wellbeing.”

One limit needs saying. Phillips’s approach explains why many kinds of help belong together. It does not tell any individual which help they need or in what measure. That is the work of a qualified clinician, alongside a person’s pastor and community.

What this means for the people nearby

The same theology applies to friends and family. If depression is no verdict on someone’s faith, then judging, lecturing and comparing have no place. Phillips’s first counsel is simple: “The ministry of presence is a powerful thing.” Sit in the room. Let the television play. Don’t try to fix them or pull them outside. Skip the tough love and the advice, and stop comparing them with someone who recovered faster. If they decline an invitation, send a text anyway. They may read it later and be encouraged, even without the strength to reply.

Job’s friends did one thing right before they did everything wrong: “So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13). The trouble started when they began explaining. Silent company, even over a video call, can do more than a carefully reasoned speech.

Presence also takes courage. Phillips urges people to listen for suicidal thoughts hidden in church language, like a believer saying they could go to sleep tonight, be with Jesus and be fine. Her standard is that “anything other than leaning into life is a concern for me.” She also addresses the fear that asking will plant the idea: “You will not inspire them to be suicidal by asking.” She would rather people call emergency services by mistake than lose someone they love.

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.