When obsession shakes certainties and challenges beliefs

What happens when questions of belief are subject to obsessive behaviours? The impact of OCD on key life moments.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A close-up of a complex clock mechanism featuring small statues within it.

The Millennium clock tower.

National Museum of Scotland.

I’m eleven years old and I’ve been given a New Testament in our school assembly. This is the first time I’ve owned a copy of the Bible. So far, I’ve only heard it read to me in school or the few times I’ve gone to church with my family. I flick through it that evening, taken by the table at the front that directs you to different verses that speak to how you might be feeling. I find myself reading Revelation. The imagery frightens me. The tone, the threat, the fear, and the condemnation… would this be me if I didn’t believe in the right way? If I didn’t believe enough? I’m terrified of this book, these words, terrified of God, even. Mostly, I’m terrified by my own doubt and uncertainty about all things religious, despite wanting to believe. What if God isn’t real? What if God is and I just don’t believe enough? God will know I’m not sure. I tell myself not to think about it. If I’m to avoid thinking about it, I can never read the Bible again. I accept this as a rule.

I’m twelve years old and I’m standing in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, listening to one of Bach’s minor key concertos playing from the Millennium Clock. To me, it looks like it depicts some sort of hellscape straight from the book of Revelation. Death, suffering, and evil are everywhere in this model with its eerie red glow at the bottom. It brings up all the thoughts I’ve been trying to avoid – “you don’t believe enough” and “this is what hell looks like.” I tell myself to forget about it. If I’m to forget about it, I need to make sure that I never talk about it and don’t tell anyone how afraid of it I am. Talking about it makes it real, I think. I accept this, too, as a rule.

I’m thirteen years old and I’m sitting in a church trying to concentrate on the service. I can’t because I keep having the thought that I don’t believe enough. I’m worrying about what the reading might be – I’m still too scared to read the Bible and I can’t prevent myself from hearing it in this space. I’m afraid of thinking that I don’t believe enough, and that God will know because this is God’s church after all. I tell myself that I do not belong in this place if I cannot control my thoughts. If I can’t do that, I can never go to church again. This too, becomes a rule.

I’m fourteen years old and I’ve started praying every evening. I’m not sure what prompted this, but I also know that I must do it correctly. If I pray and forget to conclude with “amen”, then it seems obvious that God will continue to listen to my thoughts as if I’ve forgotten to hang up the phone. I try to keep my thoughts corralled and pure when I pray. If I don’t end my prayer, God will hear all my worst thoughts – the ones I am ashamed of, the ones that scare me, the ones that fill me with doubt. I tell myself that I can no longer run that risk. If I’m to prevent this, I shouldn’t pray. Another rule.

I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them.

I’m now in my late twenties, and I have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I’m slowly unlearning the rules I’ve created for myself over the years. Each of them, in their own way, was designed to keep me safe from harm, safe from thinking about something that frightened me, or acknowledging difficult emotions like doubt and uncertainty.

It has been a long road to reach that diagnosis. OCD is regularly misunderstood and presented as punchline of jokes – “I’m so OCD!” is one that I’ve heard far too many times when someone simply means that they’re organised. The problem with these jokes is that it disguises the reality and makes it that bit harder for people to recognise what it is they’re really dealing with. OCD-UK, a charity to whom I owe a great deal, describe OCD as follows: “Obsessions are very distressing and result in a person carrying out repetitive behaviours or rituals in order to prevent a perceived harm and/or worry that preceding obsessions have focused their attention on.”

Obsessions could cover virtually any topic, and everyone will experience compulsions in slightly different ways. I didn’t recognise that I was living with OCD because almost all of my compulsions were mental rituals or avoidance behaviour. I would try and avoid thinking about things, check whether thoughts upset me, avoid reading the Bible… Layers and layers of compulsive behaviour in response to frightening intrusive thoughts that became associated with faith. I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them. I now know to call this “magical thinking” but I still find it difficult at times to accept that I cannot cause something to happen simply by saying it.

It can be particularly difficult for people with OCD to cope with uncertainty. I can see why anxiety and doubt about the existence of God has been hard for me to tolerate. I also know that I can never achieve absolute certainty and part of learning to live with OCD is learning to accept that and make choices despite it. Last year I attended the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) Faith and OCD conference and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people there. So many people with the same worries and doubts as me, and many more who had found that OCD impacted them in different ways.

But it was hard for a doctor to diagnose me until I could find the words to articulate what I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I started reading books about other people’s experiences with OCD that I started to recognise my own thought patterns, my own fears and doubts in other people’s words. Author and video creator John Green shares a very powerful video titled “What OCD is like (for me)” where he shares what his experience of having OCD and says:

“I can say what it is like more than what it is.”

This gives me a little more courage to tell people what living with OCD can be like and represent some of the diverse experiences of the condition. For someone who was too frightened to open a Bible, I think it’s a little ironic that I am now a theologian. My doctoral research project is focusing on faith and OCD, and in particular, how it might affect someone’s relationship with God. I hope to make use of some of my own experience along the way – examining my fear of not being sure enough, my worries that my intrusive thoughts would somehow offend God… I hope that by sharing this, I can raise a little more awareness of an experience that so many of us try to keep secret or just aren’t ready to speak about.

Through advocacy and research, I’d like to share a little of, as John Green says, what OCD looks like (for me). I’d like to add my voice – now that I’ve found it – to the discussion in the hopes that someone might read this and recognise what they’re going through. And if that’s you? You’re not alone. There is help and there is hope.

Column

Culture

Digital

Film & TV

Justice

10 April 2025

4 min read

Data scientists should stop watching Minority Report and start watching The Shawshank Redemption

A justice ministry’s prejudicial database leaves no room for redemption.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tom Cruise gestures with his fingers in an e-glove in front of his face

Tom Cruise takes the measure.

20th Century Fox.

The go-to for any news item about using AI to predict crimes before they happen is Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report from 2002, starring Tom Cruise as a futuristic cop, who employs human “precogs” as clairvoyants to get ahead of the villains.

So, I’m far from the first to name-check it as showing the dystopian future that the UK’s Ministry of Justice heralds with its test project to “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide.”

That use of “homicide”, rather than the more British “murder”, is telling, almost like the Ministry wonks have just watched the movie. The pressure group Statewatch has no doubt where they’re heading, with data being used on people who may never have been convicted of an offence and “will code in bias towards racialised and low-income communities.”

Spielberg was always ahead of the curve. But my fear is less the chilling dystopia that Statewatch sees in its precog. Actually, I’m more worried about the past in this context, or rather in how we treat the past.

If I haven’t to date done anything wrong, then I have committed no offence. I am literally innocent. And that’s an absolute. An interpretation of data that indicates that I’m more likely to commit a crime than others is neither here (in my conscience) nor there (in the judicial system).

Furthermore, there’s a theological point. If it is so, as we’re told, that no one is without sin, then we’re all culpable in the pasts that we have lived so far, but the future contains all we have to play for.

To suggest that some of us are more likely to screw up in that future than others is very dangerously deterministic. It’s redolent of Calvinism’s doctrine of the “elect”, those who have already been marked for salvation and eternal bliss, regardless of what they do or don’t do in this life, while the rest of us, however virtuous our mortal deeds might be, will rot in hell.

Neither Calvin’s determinism nor the Ministry of Justice’s prejudicial database leave any room for redemption. They’re just trying to identify events that will definitely (the former) or are likely to (the latter) happen. Conversely, we live in hope (for some of us a sure and certain hope) of a future in which we can be redeemed, whatever we have done in the past.

And that’s why I find Minority Report an unsatisfactory analogy for the development of real-life precrime technology. It is a film that is only about determinism, which leaves no room for either free-will or redemption. And that’s applying a form of intelligence that is truly, er, artificial.

The vital thing is that hope is fulfilled, the prisoners make it to their paradise after worthless lives spent in jail. Justice is seen to be done.

A more helpful movie, richer in its development of these themes – and not just because it’s got the word that I favour in its title - is 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, based on a novel by Stephen King. Here we have the idea explored that the past isn’t only irrelevant to our futures, but doesn’t even really exist in time in relation to the future.

It’s bursting with more religious themes even than Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, which are really only the righteous saviour turning up to defend flawed goodies from evil baddies, again and again. For a start, The Shawshank Redemption is set in a prison, where whole lives are spent atoning for crimes that have or haven’t been committed. See?

Lifers who are released after decades struggle to cope or kill themselves. The central character, a messianic figure, lives in hope with his convict friend of reaching a beach in the Virgin Islands, while the prison warden describes himself as “the light of the world”, but is assisted by his prisoners in money-laundering – washing clean – his ill-gotten gains.

I could go on. But the vital thing is that hope is fulfilled, the prisoners make it to their paradise after worthless lives spent in jail. Justice is seen to be done. But the important thing here is that there is no pre-crime determinism. The future, which often looks hopeless, is rolling out towards the possibility of redemption, which ultimately becomes the only certain reality.

One can dwell on movie plots too long. They are only, if you’ll excuse the pun, projections of life. But it is nonetheless irritating both that a government department with Justice in its title can believe it worthwhile to explore how it might deploy AI to predict who tomorrow’s criminals are likely to be and its critics condemn it by using the wrong dramatic analogies.

Minority Report was a dystopian thriller that suggests that the future can only be changed by human intervention. The Shawshank Redemption showed us that inextinguishable human hope is in a future we can’t control, but can depend on.

Anyone who is interested in justice, especially those who work in a ministry for it, might benefit from downloading it.

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