Genesis 3, Mental Illness, Disease, and What Christians Really Believe About the Origin of Evil
From The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
There are acts so horrific that our vocabulary collapses underneath them. We call them unthinkable. We call them insane. We say someone must have snapped, and then we start searching for a diagnosis, a medication, a trauma, a neurological abnormality, anything capable of explaining behavior that seems fundamentally incompatible with what we understand human nature to be. The Lindsay Clancy case is one of those stories.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, is charged in the deaths of her three children—Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months—at the family’s home on January 24, 2023. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, and her attorney, Kevin Reddington, has not disputed that she caused their deaths. His argument is that postpartum psychosis, compounded by the medications she had been prescribed, left her incapable of being held responsible for what happened. Prosecutors argue the opposite: that she understood precisely what she was doing and killed her children deliberately. The trial in Plymouth County Superior Court ran roughly five weeks and included testimony from more than eighty witnesses. Jurors began deliberating on August 27, 2026, and by the fourth day reported to Judge William Sullivan that they could not reach a unanimous verdict. He sent them back. As this is written, they are still deliberating, weighing five possible outcomes ranging from first-degree murder to outright acquittal, and a mistrial remains a live possibility.
This commentary is not an attempt to decide Lindsay Clancy’s criminal responsibility, and we are not psychiatrists capable of diagnosing anyone from a distance. We also need to make something absolutely clear at the outset: we are not claiming that Lindsay Clancy was demonically possessed. We don’t know that, and nothing in what follows should be read as suggesting otherwise.
What her case does raise is a much larger question, and it is aimed squarely at those of us who profess Christianity. Do we actually believe what we say we believe? Because if we believe the Bible, then evil is not merely a sociological category, an abnormal configuration of neurons, or a product of trauma, poverty, addiction, environment, and circumstance. Christianity teaches that evil is real. And its explanation for the brokenness surrounding us takes us all the way back to the beginning.
It Started With a Lie
Before there was murder, there was a lie. Before Cain killed Abel, before nations went to war, before disease ravaged human bodies, before mothers buried children, before there were cancer wards and psychiatric hospitals and cemeteries, there was Genesis 3.
Genesis tells us that God looked upon His creation and declared it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Then came the serpent, and his weapon was not a sword, or a disease, or an act of violence. It was deception. He challenged what God had told Adam and Eve with five words that have echoed through every century since: “You will not surely die” (Genesis 3:4). Consider the significance of that. One of the foundational moments in the biblical account of humanity’s fall begins not with an act of violence but with a lie, which is precisely why Jesus would later describe the devil as both a murderer and the father of lies (John 8:44).
The serpent deceives, humanity disobeys, sin enters the human story, and everything changes. Shame, fear, blame, separation, pain, suffering, and ultimately death all follow. Paul summarizes the whole catastrophe in a single line: “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin” (Romans 5:12). In Romans 8 he goes further still, describing creation itself as subjected to futility and held in bondage to corruption. Christianity therefore makes an extraordinary claim about the world we inhabit, one that most of us have heard so often we have stopped hearing it at all: this is not the way it was supposed to be.
Yes, in That Sense, Cancer Is “Demonic”
That sentence will make some Christians uncomfortable, so before anyone dismisses it, understand what we are and are not saying. When we describe cancer as demonic, we are not suggesting that an oncologist performing a biopsy will find a demon underneath a microscope. Cancer has biological mechanisms. Viruses have biological mechanisms. Schizophrenia involves an enormously complicated interaction of biological, psychological, and environmental factors. Postpartum psychosis is a recognized and potentially catastrophic psychiatric condition. Medicine should investigate all of it, doctors should treat it, scientists should keep searching for cures, and psychiatrists should treat mental illness. None of that conflicts with Christianity in the slightest.
We are asking a different question, and it is one science does not attempt to answer. Why does a world containing cancer exist at all? Why schizophrenia, why Alzheimer’s, why viruses, why congenital disease, why mental illness, why suffering? Why can the human brain become so profoundly disordered that a person’s perception of reality becomes unrecognizable? Why do healthy cells turn malignant, why do bodies deteriorate, why can innocent children suffer, and why, in the end, do we all die? Science can tell us a great deal about how these things happen. Christianity attempts to answer why the human condition includes them in the first place, and its answer takes us directly back to Genesis 3 and the Fall.
Cancer was not part of God’s declaration that creation was very good. Neither was Alzheimer’s, or schizophrenia, or the common cold, and neither were murder, deception, hatred, suffering, and death. They belong to the world after the Fall.
So when we use the word demonic, we mean it. Scripture does not present sickness, decay, and death as neutral features of nature that God built into the world and the devil merely takes advantage of. It presents them as belonging to the enemy. John writes that the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one (1 John 5:19). Hebrews tells us Christ took on flesh precisely in order to destroy the one who holds the power of death, that is, the devil (Hebrews 2:14). When Peter summarizes the entire healing ministry of Jesus in a single sentence, he describes Him going about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil (Acts 10:38). Jesus Himself described a woman bent over for eighteen years as one whom Satan had bound (Luke 13:16). Paul called his own affliction a messenger of Satan (2 Corinthians 12:7). This is not a fringe reading imposed on the text from the outside. It is the text.
What that does not mean is that a sick person is possessed, or that a diagnosis is a verdict on anyone’s spiritual condition.
Which raises the question a lot of readers are already asking, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a careful one. Did the devil give that woman her cancer? Ultimately, yes. Not in the sense that a demon stood at her bedside and picked her out of a crowd, and not in the sense that she did anything to invite it. In the sense that cancer had no place in a creation God called very good, and that it entered this world through the same door everything else came through. The serpent lied, our first parents believed him, and death walked in behind them and has been working its way through human bodies ever since. Every tumor, every failing heart, every mind that comes apart is downstream of that moment. The enemy authored the condition. The condition eventually reaches all of us.
Christians should be willing to say that plainly, and we should be equally willing to say the second half of it, because Scripture never portrays the devil as an equal and opposite power running loose in God’s creation. Job is afflicted, but only within limits God sets and does not permit him to exceed. The devil holds the power of death, as Hebrews puts it, right up until the moment Christ walks out of a tomb and takes it from him. Which means that naming cancer as the enemy’s work is neither a counsel of despair nor an accusation aimed at the sick. It is the opposite of both. It tells a woman lying in a hospital bed that what is happening to her body is not from God, is not her fault, is not the way any of this was supposed to be, and is not going to have the final word.
Which is also why Christians should be careful with the word “gave.” God does not hand out tumors. What He permits, for a season, is a world in which tumors exist, and He retains every bit of the power to end one whenever He chooses to. Sometimes He does exactly that, and believers have been reporting it for two thousand years. Sometimes He doesn’t, and Scripture neither hides that nor apologizes for it. Paul asked three times to have his affliction taken away, the same affliction he had called a messenger of Satan, and what he received was not removal but sufficiency. The complete and permanent healing Christianity promises is not scheduled for this side of the resurrection. That is a hard thing to sit with in an oncology waiting room. It is also what the text actually says.
Christians, We Can’t Have It Both Ways
This is where the argument gets uncomfortable, particularly inside the church. We cannot say we believe Genesis while treating the Fall as irrelevant to the world in front of us. We cannot say Satan is real on Sunday morning and then live Monday through Saturday as though spiritual evil is an embarrassing medieval superstition we have outgrown. We cannot profess that Jesus Christ confronted demons and then declare categorically that demonic influence could not possibly exist today. We cannot call Scripture the Word of God while quietly discarding the portions of it that make sophisticated modern people uncomfortable. Either these biblical accounts describe realities we believe, or they don’t.
The New Testament repeatedly portrays Jesus confronting demonic forces, but something equally important sits alongside those accounts: Jesus also healed disease, and the Gospels consistently distinguish between people suffering from illness and those described as demon-possessed. Scripture does not simply equate sickness with possession, and neither should we. Saying someone has schizophrenia does not mean that person is possessed. A cancer diagnosis is not a verdict on the patient’s faith. A child who contracts influenza is not being punished for some personal sin. That is not the argument.
The argument is considerably larger than that. Disease, mental disorder, deception, hatred, violence, suffering, and death all exist within the same fallen creation Christianity describes, and Scripture simultaneously tells Christians that spiritual evil exists within that creation as well. So why have so many of us become afraid even to discuss the possibility that evil has a spiritual dimension?
Which Brings Us Back to Lindsay Clancy
Three children died. Whatever conclusion a jury eventually reaches about their mother’s criminal responsibility, what happened to Cora, Dawson, and Callan was horrifying, and it was evil. That statement does not require us to determine the spiritual condition of Lindsay Clancy herself. Perhaps the evidence establishes that she understood precisely what she was doing. Perhaps severe psychiatric illness distorted her perception of reality to an extraordinary degree. Those are questions for evidence, medical experts, attorneys, and the twelve people currently sitting in a deliberation room in Plymouth.
But Christians should be capable of asking a second question at the same time. What does our own worldview tell us about a human mind becoming so profoundly disordered that a mother can kill the children she loves? We do not know whether anything supernatural happened in that house, and we are not claiming that it did. Neither, though, should Christians pretend that Christianity teaches the material world is the entirety of reality, because it does not.
Suppose postpartum psychosis fully explains what happened inside her mind. That does not disprove the Christian worldview. If anything, it illustrates something Christianity has been saying for thousands of years: that even the human mind is vulnerable to the brokenness of this world. Christianity has a word for the condition of a creation in which bodies become diseased, minds become disordered, human beings deceive one another, people murder one another, and everyone eventually dies. The word is fallen.
Explanation Is Not Exoneration
None of this means abandoning accountability, and that distinction is essential. Recognizing mental illness, or believing that spiritual evil exists, does not automatically eliminate human responsibility, and Genesis itself establishes the point. The serpent tempted Eve, and Eve remained accountable. Adam participated, and he remained accountable. Immediately after the Fall, Scripture gives us Cain and Abel, and before Cain murders his brother God warns him directly: “Sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). Cain kills Abel anyway.
Notice what Scripture refuses to do there. It does not present Cain as a helpless puppet. There is temptation, there is sin, there is evil, and there is human agency, all in the same account. That distinction matters enormously when we start talking about criminal justice, because mental illness is real, human responsibility is real, criminal culpability is real, dangerousness is real, spiritual evil is real within the Christian worldview, and society has a genuine obligation to protect innocent people. None of those propositions has to contradict the others.
Six Dead Children Should Make Us Ask Hard Questions
Consider another case, one that most Americans have never heard of. On March 8, 1954, in Waterville, Maine, a young mother named Constance Fisher drowned her three children—Richard, six; Daniel, four; and Deborah, an infant—in the family bathtub. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Augusta State Hospital. Five years later, in 1959, amid a national movement to deinstitutionalize psychiatric patients, she was released to her husband’s custody. The couple went on to have more children. On June 30, 1966, her husband came home to find that she had drowned three of them in the bathtub as well.
Six children, twelve years apart, in nearly identical circumstances. That history should haunt us, and not because mental illness isn’t real. It should haunt us precisely because it is. Compassion for someone whose mind is profoundly disturbed cannot require a society to gamble with the lives of innocent people who have no say in the matter.
There is an enormous difference between concluding that a person was not legally capable of appreciating the criminality of what she was doing and concluding that this same person can never again represent a danger to anyone. Those are entirely different propositions, and collapsing them together is how a case like Fisher’s happens twice.
In fairness, the system that released Constance Fisher in 1959 is not the system operating today. In Massachusetts, a defendant found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility does not simply walk out of the courthouse; the court may begin the process of committing her to a mental health facility, and continued commitment is subject to periodic judicial review of whether the person remains dangerous. Modern practice is considerably more cautious than the deinstitutionalization era that produced the Fisher tragedy. Mercy and protection are not opposites, and neither are compassion and accountability. But cases like hers are still worth remembering, because the balance between the rights of profoundly mentally ill offenders and the rights of people who might otherwise become future victims is not a question any society gets to declare permanently settled.
But What About the Children?
This is where an unbearably dark discussion gives way, for Christians, to something else entirely. Hope.
Six children died at the hands of Constance Fisher. Three children died in the Clancy home in Duxbury. None of them chose any of this, and none of them created the broken world into which they were born. Christians believe that their earthly deaths are not the end of their stories, because Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).
Christians sometimes speak of an age of accountability, but Scripture does not hand us a number—not seven, not twelve, not thirteen—at which God suddenly begins holding a child personally responsible, so we shouldn’t invent one. What Christians can do is entrust these children to the perfect justice, mercy, and love of God, and that changes something profound about how this story ends. Evil does not get the final victory over these children. Their killers do not get the last word about who they were, and neither does the illness, the enemy, or the grave. God does.
Genesis Explains the Problem. Christ Is the Answer.
The Bible does not end in Genesis 3, and neither should this discussion. If Genesis 3 were the end of Christianity’s story, Christianity would be a theology of despair, and it plainly isn’t. The biblical account begins with creation, moves through rebellion and the Fall into sin, deception, suffering, disease, and death, and then comes Christ.
Consider what Jesus actually does throughout the Gospels. He confronts demons. He heals disease. He restores broken bodies, gives sight to the blind, touches the people society refuses to touch, and raises the dead. Those actions matter enormously, because Christ is not merely announcing that something better will eventually happen. He is demonstrating God’s authority over the precise brokenness that entered the human story after the Fall. And then Christianity makes its most extraordinary claim of all: Jesus Himself dies, and then He rises. The Resurrection is Christianity’s declaration that Genesis 3 does not get the final word.
Scripture ultimately carries us to Revelation 21, where God’s restoration is described in language that reads almost exactly like a reversal of everything that entered humanity’s story after the Fall: “There shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain” (Revelation 21:4). Think about what disappears in that sentence. Death, sorrow, crying, and pain—the four things human beings have come to regard as permanent and inevitable features of existence—are precisely the things Scripture says will one day be gone.
So, Christians: What Do We Actually Believe?
That is ultimately the question, and it was never whether Lindsay Clancy was demonically possessed. We don’t know, and that is not the claim being made here. The question is far larger than one case in a Massachusetts courtroom. Do Christians actually believe the worldview contained within their own Bible?
If we believe Genesis 3, then we believe something catastrophic happened to creation. If we believe Jesus, then we believe Satan is real. If we believe the Gospels, then we believe demonic forces are real. If we believe Paul, then we believe creation itself exists in bondage to corruption. If we believe the Resurrection, then we believe death has been defeated. And if we believe Revelation, then we believe that disease, suffering, pain, and death will not exist forever. We don’t get to embrace the portions of Christianity that make beautiful wall plaques while quietly discarding the supernatural claims that make modern society uncomfortable. We can’t have it both ways.
Perhaps the reason certain manifestations of evil strike us as completely inexplicable is that we are attempting to understand an explicitly spiritual reality using exclusively material categories. That does not mean abandoning medicine, psychiatry, science, the criminal justice system, or personal accountability. It means recognizing that from the Christian perspective, none of those disciplines encompasses the entirety of reality. There is more than what we can see underneath a microscope. There is good and there is evil, there is disease and there is human agency, there is human brokenness and there is spiritual warfare, there are consequences to the Fall, and there is redemption.
So perhaps evil isn’t entirely unexplainable after all. Perhaps we have simply stopped looking all the way back to where Christianity says the story began. Cancer does not win. Mental illness does not win. Murder does not win. Satan does not win. Death does not win. Because the Christian story does not end with the serpent in the Garden. It ends with Jesus Christ.
Editorial Note
This commentary is written through a Christian biblical worldview. It does not assert that Lindsay Clancy, Constance Fisher, or any other named individual was demonically possessed, and it offers no medical or psychiatric diagnosis of anyone. References to disease and other manifestations of human brokenness as “demonic” express the theological conviction that sickness, suffering, disorder, sin, and death entered creation through the fall and belong to the dominion of the enemy Christ came to destroy. They are not claims that any person named here is possessed, and they are not a judgment on the faith or spiritual condition of anyone who is ill. Medical diagnoses should be made by qualified healthcare professionals, and determinations of criminal responsibility belong to the courts. Details of the Clancy case are drawn from trial coverage current as of September 2, 2026, while jury deliberations were ongoing.
From The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
