The Problem With Calling Everything a ‘Spiritual Battle’

I’d been in the same spiral for three weeks—couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, kept replaying the same conversation in my head. I told her everything. She listened patiently, asked a few questions, and then said something I’ve thought about almost every day since.

“This sounds like a spiritual attack. I think you need to fast and really press in.”

I hung up, stared at the steering wheel and thought: I pressed in. I’ve been pressing in. I don’t think pressing in is working.

So I did the fast, I journaled, I prayed—and the spiral didn’t stop. It got tighter.

Six months later, I was in a therapist’s office for the first time, and within three sessions she had identified thought patterns I’d been dragging around since childhood. Within a year, I had actual tools, and within two, I had my life back—not because I stopped praying, but because I finally stopped treating prayer as a substitute for everything else God had also put on the table.

The Church’s relationship with spiritual warfare is complicated in ways we don’t talk about honestly enough. Most Christians agree that spiritual forces are real—Paul wasn’t writing metaphor when he described powers and principalities. The problem isn’t believing in spiritual battles. The problem is diagnosing everything as one.

Anxiety becomes a demon of fear, depression becomes a lack of faith, grief becomes spiritual oppression. The logic feels holy because it’s taking the unseen world seriously, but the consequences are anything but. When everything gets filed under “spiritual attack,” the treatment plan collapses into a single option: pray harder. And when that doesn’t resolve a chemical imbalance or a trauma response or a relational wound that needs professional care, the person praying harder starts to wonder what’s wrong with them—why their faith isn’t strong enough to fix what everyone else seems to fix just fine, which is a sign of a system failing someone at their most vulnerable, not a spiritual battle being faithfully fought.

I’ve watched it happen to people I love—a friend whose OCD was reframed as demonic intrusion until she was afraid of her own mind, a guy from my college ministry who was told his depression was a sin issue and spent two years in shame before anyone suggested he get his brain chemistry looked at, a woman whose panic attacks were treated like a faith problem until she stopped coming to Church altogether because the building itself had become a trigger.

The cruelty isn’t usually intentional. It comes from a genuine belief that the spiritual is the most real thing—which, theologically, has a lot going for it—but even that belief, misapplied, can become a way of not having to sit with someone in their suffering. Calling something a spiritual battle is clean, it has a clear protocol, and it lets you feel like you’re helping while bypassing the messier, slower work of actually showing up.

Jesus healed people, and he also told them to go show themselves to priests, to wash in the pool, to pick up their mats and walk. He met people in their physical, tangible, embodied reality and addressed it directly, never spiritualizing everything into abstraction. He touched lepers.

I’m not arguing against prayer—I pray constantly and I believe God moves in ways that defy clinical explanation. But I also believe that the same God who “knit me together in my mother’s womb” understands neurology, and that the same Spirit who intercedes for us also works through the therapist who finally helped me see the thought pattern I’d been stuck in since I was 9 years old. Limiting God’s involvement in our healing to a narrow set of spiritual practices takes a small view of a God who is far more present in our recovery than that framing allows.

The shift I needed—and that I’ve watched others need—wasn’t from prayer to therapy, but from prayer instead of to prayer alongside. Medication and meditation, therapy and Scripture, community and professional support. The “and” is where a lot of people are actually getting better, and the Church’s reluctance to say that out loud is costing people years of their lives.

I still go to church, I still believe in the reality of spiritual forces, and I still think there are battles happening around us that we can’t fully perceive. But I also know that the most spiritual thing anyone did for me during the worst years of my life wasn’t binding a demon—it was my therapist handing me a tissue and saying, “That wasn’t your fault. Let’s talk about what happened.”

Sometimes the battle is real, and sometimes what looks like a battle is just a person who needs help, and the most faithful response is to show up and stay.