What is Religious Abuse?
In my last blog post I mentioned that the question I get asked most frequently is what is religious trauma. People normally couple that question with the assumption that religious trauma comes from things like clergy sexual abuse, cult rituals, or having demons cast out of you.
To be certain, those things can be incredibly scary and can result in religious trauma. But, what these people are asking about is religious abuse, not religious trauma. Whereas religious trauma is the result of anything that is too much, too soon, or too fast that overwhelms our ability to cope and return to a sense of safety, religious abuse (or spiritual abuse) is the thing(s) that prompts the overwhelm.
Simply, clergy sexual abuse is incredibly overwhelming (and scary!) and often results in religious trauma–but the thing that happened (the abuse) is not the trauma itself.
Several years ago on a series of phone calls and Zoom meetings, my colleagues from the Religious Trauma Institute and Reclamation Collective developed some language to help better understand what it was that happened to us and so many people we worked with. We realized that when we understood religious trauma as trauma (just like other trauma) that it shifted our focus from what happened to how our bodies responded to what happened.
However, for many people, understanding, talking about, and processing through what happened to them is almost as important as the process of resolving trauma in our bodies. But even then, the people we talked to struggled to adopt the term ‘religious abuse’ (aka ‘spiritual abuse’). We developed another term which I’ll describe later in this post (Adverse Religious Experiences) but felt it was important to help people understand what religious or spiritual abuse truly is.
The working definition we came up up with is:
Religious or Spiritual Abuse is the conscious or unconscious use of power to direct, control, or manipulate another’s body, thoughts, emotions, actions, or capacity for choice, freedom, or autonomy of self within a spiritual or religious context
Some of the key components of understanding religious abuse is the conscious or unconscious use of power to direct, control, or manipulate someone else. This does not always need to be intentional or conscious. I’ve had many people ask me if they had experienced or perpetuated abuse even if they weren’t aware of it. I can deeply resonate with this; there were many times where I promoted messages or behaviors that in the context of my religion were sold as love, accountability, and living a life of integrity but outside of that system are considered controlling, manipulative, and abusive. T
his certainly does not mean that individuals within high control religions are malicious and overtly seeking to claim power over someone else’s life (I’ll talk more about dynamics of power and control in October!)--most of the time these behaviors, thoughts, and discussions are engaged with because someone really believes that they know the best for another person. However, as we step away from high control religion and examine what is going on underneath, we see that when this happens, a person is not acting of their own free will. Instead, they are acting under the control of someone else, to avoid punishment, or to subscribe to a set of rules that may not be in their best interest.
So we see that foundationally, religious abuse rests upon a dynamic of religious power and control. The other term that the Reclamation Collective and Religious Trauma Institute coined is the term Adverse Religious Experience which is defined as:
Any experience of a religious belief, practice, or structure that undermines an individual’s autonomy and sense of safety and/or negatively impacts their physical, social, emotional, relational, or psychological well being.
This term was created as an expanded alternative to spiritual or religious abuse as Adverse Religious Experiences (AREs) do not have to have the dynamic of conscious or unconscious power and control in order for them to be adverse. Where as spiritual or religious abuse almost always have a perpetrator of the abuse and at least once victim, AREs expand beyond this and could include harmful or overwhelming messaging, systems such as purity culture, doctrine, practices or even structures (think Biblical marriage or patriarchy) that may be promoted from powerful positions but also may just be part of the expected ways of living and thinking within a high control religion.
While research on religious abuse has been limited to some of the most extreme circumstances and research for Adverse Religious Experiences is just beginning, we hypothesize that the more experiences of adversity within a religious context, including religious abuse, that someone has endured, the greater the likelihood it will result in religious trauma (for more on what religious trauma is, see this blog).
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