I did my due diligence to research historical events concerning the terrible reality of scrupulosity inside the faith. During the Renaissance, religious despair and anxiety was high in the present evangelical culture. Such things aren’t talked about anymore. The Puritan as the patriarchs of old call it. “ The dark night of the soul.“ it’s been forgotten so people suffer alone silently.
Claude ai put this together, these fellow believers that took their lives. Did they go to? Hell no I don’t think so. We are saved by grace grace is not getting what we deserve and contrary to my belief and hardness of heart and the sheer rage. I have a God sometimes because of my brutish utterly insufferable outlook on the theology and God.
He is a God of love full of grace and mercy he clearly saw that these people were sick mentally ill, they cared about their faith so much that it led to them killing themselves. Could he have healed them? Yes did he no. I don’t have an answer for this, but God is not evil and we live in a broken fallen world.
So instead of me wrestling with it constantly making me feel even worse. I am posting these events, bringing awareness to this condition, namely scrupulosity, a.k.a. for modern terms, religious OCD the patriarchs of old called it religious melancholy. These things have been forgotten and perceived as utterly madness.
I know that there are people suffering the same way these men and women did, they fit into a category that’s hard to minister to the present. Evangelical culture is centered around testimonies of joy, worship, and praise. Not the dark night of the soul and wrestling with ones eternal destination.
Lately inside worship, I have had to depart sometimes because hearing the praise, talking about the joy of salvation having your sins forgiven, just makes me furious bitter springing up and defiling everything like the book of Hebrews says. Not blaming my church or any church. It’s just the present culture. It’s hard to minister to these things.
I find servants to be the same way there aren’t many focused on doubt of salvation having entire expositional preaching on these things. So I just feel like some cast away not being able to see what I’m really feeling like my church paid for my mental hospital visit years back when I tried. I’m always grateful for that and having a church body that understands.
But there are people right now, experiencing the same thing the doubt of salvation, the torture, and the hell that only can be understood if you go through it yourself even if someone explains it it won’t make sense to you unless you know it yourself
To give even further context, a lot of these suicides were going on during great revival in the world many people getting saved by the gospel for where there was great revival. There was great death people tortured by reformed theology, Calvin did a lot of good but also a lot of bad. The harsh theology of double predestination the thought that God has already chosen if you are going to hell (reprobate) or heaven and there’s nothing you can do about it because God has decreed it which is not biblical I could show you multiple places.
This terrible doctrine destroyed men and women’s minds who were sensitive.
So I talk about these things and hope to bring awareness to it. These accounts are utterly sad and tragic, but this is the truth behind mental health inside the church even outside. I don’t have an answer to these things. I wish I did, but it definitely starts with telling someone you care about what you’re going through and you’re suffering.
Suicide, it’s not the correct thing to do, but I cannot blame those that do it that I refuse to look down upon. Those that have done it, and I also refuse to instantly by default pronounce damnation over them for the act. God is merciful more than we could ever know… he is aware of the sorrow and the illness in this world, the culprit behind all of this chaos and hell is the devil him and his reprobate angels I won’t spare a single one of them.
The psychological toll of Calvinist theology during the Reformation, Puritan, and Great Awakening periods produced a documented trail of despair, madness, and suicide among ordinary believers—cases often minimized in traditional church history. From a London wood-turner who attempted suicide ten times to prominent citizens who cut their throats in religious terror, the doctrine of predestination created what scholar John Stachniewski calls a “persecutory imagination” that tormented those who could not find assurance of their election. These are not merely famous cases like Luther or Bunyan; they represent hundreds of obscure individuals whose suffering appears in diaries, court records, and pastoral literature—voices largely buried until modern scholarship began excavating them.
The suicide that silenced a revival
The most consequential suicide in American colonial religious history occurred on Sunday morning, June 1, 1735, when Joseph Hawley II, a 52-year-old merchant and justice of the peace, cut his throat in his bedchamber in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hawley was Jonathan Edwards’ uncle by marriage—a prominent citizen who had served as county treasurer for nineteen years—and his death effectively ended the first wave of revival in Edwards’ church.
Edwards documented the tragedy in his Faithful Narrative (1737), acknowledging that Hawley “had been exceedingly concerned about the state of his soul” and “durst entertain no hope concerning his own good estate.” As despair overtook him, Hawley became “in a great measure past a capacity of receiving advice, or being reasoned with to any purpose.” Edwards attributed this to Satan taking “the advantage”— Hawley was “kept awake at nights, meditating terror, so that he had scarce any sleep at all.”
What made this case devastating to the community was the contagion that followed. Edwards recorded that “after this, multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, to do as this person had done.” People with no prior melancholy—even pious individuals with no doubts about their salvation—“had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoke to them, ‘Cut your throat, now is a good opportunity. Now! Now!’” At least one other person died by suicide in the aftermath. The revival collapsed within weeks.
The tragedy cast a long shadow. Hawley’s orphaned eleven-year-old son, Joseph III, later became Edwards’ most bitter opponent, leading the campaign that resulted in Edwards’ dismissal from Northampton in 1750. Years later, Joseph III published a public confession acknowledging he had been driven by “vast pride, self-sufficiency, ambition, and vanity”— and he himself descended into melancholy, spending his final years sitting silently by the fire, his eyes exhibiting “a wild and piercing look.”
Ten suicide attempts: the notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington
Perhaps the most extensively documented case of ordinary Puritan suffering comes from Nehemiah Wallington (1598-1658), a London wood-turner who left over 2,500 pages of notebooks chronicling his spiritual torment. Between 1618 and 1619, Wallington recorded ten suicide attempts—by poison, hanging, drowning, and cutting his throat.
His diary entries reveal the texture of predestinarian despair: “My spirit was wounded and my minde troubled, and my conscience terrifying of mee. For rest comfort and quietness I could find none, neither day not night.” Taking his lustful feelings as a sign of reprobation, Wallington descended into such terror that “he took his shoes for devils and contemplated throwing himself out of the garret window.”
His father stayed with him for hours, reading Scripture and praying. By the 1640s, having finally gained assurance of election, Wallington began counseling other melancholic believers— evidence that the pattern of despair was widespread enough to require an informal network of spiritual support among the godly community.
Chained to prevent self-destruction
George Trosse (1631-1713), later a respected Exeter minister, left a detailed autobiographical account of his descent into religious madness. After a period of sinful living, Trosse experienced “Distraction and Outragious Madness, complete with delusions and despairing visions.” He became convinced “the devil tempted him to sin against the Holy Ghost and commit suicide.”
His friends sent him to a doctor experienced in such cases, where he was “chained by his hands and feet” to prevent violent outbursts and self-harm. The proprietress, Mrs. Gollop, “many times sit and discourse with me” about Scripture. Trosse eventually recovered “thro’ the Goodness of God, and by His Blessing upon Physick, a low Diet, and hard Keeping.” He later published his autobiography as a warning—evidence that he believed others were at risk of the same fate.
Similar accounts appear across Puritan sources. Dionys Fitzherbert, an English gentlewoman, documented her religious melancholy in autobiographical writings, insisting her illness “could not have recovered from by any other means of consolation, except by regaining assurance that she was one of the elect.” Katherine Brettergh, a Lancashire gentlewoman who died around 1601, experienced a “bitter conflict with Satan” on her deathbed, doubting her election with such intensity that Catholic neighbors accused her of dying “despairing, and by her comfortlesse end, shewed that she professed a comfortlesse Religion.”
The paradigmatic case that haunted Reformed Europe
The most influential case of predestinarian despair was Francesco Spiera (1498-1548), an Italian lawyer whose story became a bestseller across Reformed Europe. After converting to Protestantism and then recanting under Inquisition pressure, Spiera immediately heard what he described as “a direfull voice, saying to him; Thou wicked wretch, thou hast denied me, thou hast renounced the covenant of thy obedience.”
Convinced he was irrevocably reprobate, Spiera testified: “I am a reprobate like Cain or Judas who casting away all hope of mercy fell into despair.” Despite the efforts of priests and Protestant ministers, he insisted: “The mercy of God is exceeding large, and extends to all the elect, but not to me, or any like to me, who are sealed up to wrath.” He died on December 27, 1548, possibly by suicide.
Nathaniel Bacon’s 1638 account, The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira, became “an instant best-seller and was reissued ten times in England and eight times in the American colonies.” John Calvin himself wrote a preface to an early Latin account, describing Spiera as “an example of divine justice”— effectively using the case as evidence that reprobation was real. For generations of Reformed believers, Spiera represented their deepest fear: that they might already be among the damned.
The Great Awakening’s documented madness
The Great Awakening of the 1730s-1740s produced both ecstatic conversions and psychological catastrophes—and contemporary critics documented both. Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston’s First Church for sixty years, emerged as the revival’s most formidable opponent, characterizing religious enthusiasm explicitly as mental illness:
“The cause of this enthusiasm is a bad temperament of the blood and spirits; ’tis properly a disease, a sort of madness: And there are few; perhaps, none at all, but are subject to it.”
Chauncy’s 424-page Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743) catalogued revival excesses and warned against “hell-fire and damnation preaching” that drove people to psychological extremes rather than genuine faith.
The most spectacular case of revival madness was James Davenport (1716-1757), whose breakdown was so severe that both the Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial assemblies officially declared him mentally ill. The Connecticut General Assembly pronounced him “disturbed in the rational faculties of his mind” and exhibiting “enthusiastical impressions and impulses.” He preached a continuous 24-hour sermon before collapsing, and the Boston Evening Post commented: “Were you to see him in his most violent agitations, you would be apt to think that he was a madman just broke from his chains.”
During his trial, witnesses reported Davenport “vehemently crying out, That he saw hell-flames slashing in their faces.” After stripping naked at a public bonfire in 1743, he published a confession admitting he had been “under the Influence of an evil Spirit” and that “God had left him.” He never fully recovered, dying at 41 after years of mental and physical breakdowns.
Period medical literature on religious despair
Calvinist theology’s psychological dangers were recognized by physicians and ministers of the period. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) specifically blamed preachers who “in their ordinary sermons speak so much of election, predestination, reprobation… they so rent, tear and wound men’s consciences, that they are almost mad, and at their wits end.” Burton documented people who became convinced they were damned “though they had been religious and faithful all the while,” experiencing suicidal thoughts, demonic visions, physical wasting, and sleeplessness. Burton himself probably died by suicide.
Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie (1586) attempted to distinguish between spiritual despair from a guilty conscience and melancholy from physical causes— an effort to protect Calvinist theology while acknowledging that fears of reprobation could be caused by “melancholic humors.” Felix Platter (1536-1614), a Basel physician, described religious despair as “the most common form of melancholy” that he had “frequently been very much impeded” in curing.
Timothy Rogers, a nonconformist minister who himself suffered prolonged religious melancholy, wrote in his 1691 Discourse Concerning Trouble of Mind: “I thought that I should never have any more ease in my pained Body, nor ever any more hope or quiet in my troubled Soul.” He advocated combined physical and spiritual treatment, cautioning ministers: “Do not attribute the effects of mere Disease, to the Devil.”
Continental Reformed suffering
Religious despair crossed linguistic and national boundaries wherever Calvinist theology took root. In Amsterdam in 1658, Michiel Straatsburg, a 72-year-old sailor, hanged himself; his body was buried in the gallows field “in a pit without a coffin.” Dutch legal records show ongoing debates about whether suicides “from desperation and despair” should face the same penalties as criminal suicides, with some authorities arguing that “those who wrong themselves merely from despair or dejection” deserved more compassionate treatment.
German Pietism institutionalized conversion crisis through the concept of Bußkampf (repentance struggle). August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), the leading Pietist at Halle, experienced severe spiritual crisis in 1687 before his dramatic conversion. Johann Blume, librarian at Hamburg’s Johanneum school, hanged himself in the library in 1672—described as “a reclusive scholar with a reputation for melancholy,” he left a note “commending his soul to Jesus” and requesting that his physician attest the suicide resulted from melancholy rather than despair.
Most disturbing was the phenomenon of “suicide by proxy” documented by scholar Kathy Stuart—people who committed murders (often of children) in order to be executed, viewing execution as preferable to direct suicide because it allowed time for repentance and a proper religious death. The theological framework made self-destruction seem worse than murder.
Academic scholarship on suppressed history
Modern scholarship has begun excavating what traditional church history often minimized. John Stachniewski’s The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (1991) argues that “innumerable men and women in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were gripped by the anxiety, often conviction, that they were doomed to go to hell.” Stachniewski directly challenges “the emollience toward protestant culture that have informed most literary studies of the period.”
Julius H. Rubin’s Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (1994) documents “religious suicides” among evangelicals, “evangelical anorexia nervosa”—sinners who “would fast unto death”—and those “obsessed with unpardonable sin.” Drawing on unpublished diaries, asylum records, and spiritual narratives, Rubin traces how “fervent believers who devoted themselves completely to the challenges of making a Christian life… all too often languished in despair, feeling forsaken by God.”
Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy’s Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (1990) documents how religious melancholy and Calvinist anxiety contributed substantially to suicide rates between 1500 and 1800. Roy Porter called it “magisterial in research, forceful in analysis.”
William Perkins’ famous chart in The Golden Chaine (1591) visually represented the paths of the elect and reprobate—but as scholars have noted, “it was unfortunate that the famous table… was constructed so that the thick black line down the right side of the page showing the path of the reprobate drew more attention to itself than the thin line… showing the path of the elect.”
Conclusion: voices no longer buried
The evidence accumulated by modern scholarship reveals that Calvinist predestinarian theology, while providing profound comfort to those who felt assured of election, created devastating psychological crises for those who could not achieve certainty. The cases documented here—Nehemiah Wallington’s ten suicide attempts, George Trosse chained to prevent self-destruction, Joseph Hawley’s throat-cutting that triggered a wave of suicidal ideation, James Davenport’s official declaration of insanity—represent not anomalies but a documented pattern.
These were not merely theological abstractions. As Robert Burton observed, ministers who preached “so much of election, predestination, reprobation” left their listeners “almost mad, and at their wits end.” The pastoral literature developed to address this crisis—the careful distinctions between religious despair and melancholy, the combined spiritual-medical treatments, the doctrine of “temporary desertion” to explain periods of darkness—testifies to how common such suffering was.
The voices have been partially buried for centuries, but they survive in diaries, autobiographies, court records, and medical literature. They speak a shared language that emerged directly from a theological system that, whatever its spiritual benefits, provided what Stachniewski calls “a rational basis… for their view of themselves” as damned. Modern scholarship has begun the work of recovery, demonstrating that the “great darkness” of the Reformation period was not merely superstition but a documented psychological reality with lasting consequences.
