OCD, Scrupulosity, and the Gospel of Certainty

The checkout line at the grocery store was filled with tantalizing treats—right at eye level for a young girl.

Chocolatey, sweet, or sour? She felt the foil wrappers on the candy and tried to make out the words on each package. She was still too young to read, but she recognized the bright colors—the orange was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, her favorite. But today, she was craving something different. 

She selected a roll of SweeTarts and handed them to her mom, who put them on the conveyor belt with the other groceries. 

“You can have them when we get home,” her mother said. The girl nodded. She could be patient.

When they arrived home and put all the groceries away, she asked her mother for the candy. 

“They’re on the counter,” her mother said, pointing to the last bag of groceries waiting to be unpacked. “Don’t eat them all in one sitting.” 

The girl didn’t plan to, but when she popped the first candy into her mouth, the fruity flavor was too good to resist. She had planned to savor the treats, sucking on each one until it turned to chalk on her tongue, but she found herself crunching through them, one after the other, until all that remained was a spiral of paper confetti. 

“Have you seen my Rolaids?” Her mother asked, searching through the grocery bag. 

The girl shook her head. 

“Here are your SweeTarts.” Her mother handed her the blue and pink tube of candy. The girl’s stomach turned sour. She had just eaten her SweeTarts, hadn’t she? 

She attempted to piece the remains of the wrapper back together—pink and blue, but different. The colors weren’t quite as bright or as fun, and the package was a bit smaller than the one containing her SweeTarts.

“Mom,” she cried, tears blurring her eyes. “I know what happened to your Rolaids.”

Scrupulosity and Faith Formation

You’ve probably realized by now that I am the girl.

I accidentally ate a tube of my mom’s Rolaids when I was a small child—probably four or five years old, before I could decode multisyllabic words. 

The level of guilt I felt from this mistake was akin to murder—I thought I’d committed an unforgivable sin. I apologized profusely—over and over again for days. My mom wasn’t even mad. She was just worried about my stomach after eating an entire roll of antacids. 

I tell this true story because I’ve struggled with moral and religious scrupulosity, subtypes of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), since I was a small child. Scrupulosity is a debilitating fear of acting in ways that are inconsistent with one’s religious beliefs or morals.

For those living without OCD, the concept of scrupulosity is hard to explain. Having a moral compass and living in line with your values is a good thing. But scrupulosity takes it a step further—it turns normal human errors into moral failings. It damns without judgment. Executes without trial.

I can’t tell you how many times I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, asking for forgiveness for sins I thought I’d committed. I needed to be certain that I was saved, so I asked Jesus into my heart over and over again. Yet I still struggled. I still feared. I was trapped in a cycle of perceived sin, repentance, and momentary relief. Then the cycle would repeat itself ad infinitum.

Evangelical Christianity's Need for Certainty

My education was overwhelmingly Christian — I attended Evangelical Christian schools from preschool through college. Starting in high school, the curriculum included systematic theology, biblical worldview, and apologetics courses. These courses seemed to have two primary purposes:

1. Provide correct knowledge of God and the Bible

2. Equip us to defend our faith in a secular world

Life after high school graduation was pitched as a battlefield, and our souls were the prize. We were in boot camp, training to shoot down the beliefs of Atheists, New Age spiritualists, Muslims, followers of Eastern religions, and Catholics. To graduate without the ability to defend the Evangelical Christian faith was to be deployed unequipped.

It is no wonder that I had an obsession with systematic theology and apologetics for most of my late teens and early twenties—I was preparing for war. 

Embracing Uncertainty

Looking back, I now see I was far more concerned with dissecting and studying God than I was with actually worshipping and abiding in Him.

Over the past few years, I’ve been on a faith journey. I’ve been learning more about other beliefs within Christianity, including Catholicism, Anglicanism, and other denominations within the Protestant faith. The basics are all the same—God’s love is consistent, but there is a wide array of theologies and doctrines, many of which conflict with what I was taught in Evangelical classrooms and sanctuaries.  

I wanted to know God, and I still want to know God, but I now understand that I will never be able to comprehend Him completely—there will be large gaps in my knowledge and understanding, and I will never be certain, regardless of what I was promised by Evangelical apologists. 

Faith and certainty rarely overlap, and I now understand why the New Testament Gospels focus so heavily on faith. Faith bridges the gap between what we can and cannot know. It makes it possible to tolerate uncertainty. 

OCD demands certainty, just as the Evangelical culture I was raised in demands certainty, and I’m done seeking assurance. Maybe I have right theology and doctrine. Maybe I don’t, and I’m learning to be okay with that — without guilt, fear, or shame. 

Seeking certainty has been a lifelong journey for me, and I know I’ll continue to struggle. But I now see this struggle as an opportunity to strengthen my faith. 

When I’m faced with a scrupulous obsession, rather than spiraling into compulsions to neutralize the fear—like apologizing to my mother over and over for eating her Rolaids—I answer it with “maybe I did something against my religious doctrines, maybe I didn’t. I have faith that the Lord forgives and will help me live a virtuous life.”