Recently I have seen on social media a certain kind of claim being made. The claim usually goes something like this: Person \u201cX\u201d claims they grew up Christian and now, as an adult, are no longer Christian. Their upbringing, it is usually said, occurred in a \u201cfundamentalist\u201d Christian environment or some type of conservative Protestant, usually Evangelical, church or home.<\/p>\n
The claimant then reveals they are now either an atheist or, at most, agnostic about religion. Now, at this point, Person \u201cX\u2019s\u201d story is pretty uninteresting. After all, many people leave their Christian faith as adults, whether it be a conservative Evangelical, Roman Catholic or even liberal Protestant faith. Some, like myself, come back to faith, albeit in a different tradition, while others do not. But this is not the extent of Person \u201cX\u2019s\u201d claim. There is more to it than just this (which, in itself, would not warrant writing an essay). Let\u2019s look at the rest of the claim, something we might call \u201cthe extended claim of spiritual or religious abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point, our particular Person \u201cX\u201d makes a subsequent claim about why they left their faith. The reason he or she is now a non-Christian is because they suffered some kind of \u201cspiritual trauma\u201d or \u201cspiritual abuse\u201d growing up. This claim of spiritual trauma is sometimes followed up by yet a further claim. The further claim is that Person \u201cX\u201d, as an adult, is now suffering from some kind of PTSD related to that earlier, spiritual trauma. In other words, one claims they have an actual medical condition, here PTSD,\u00a0on account of<\/em>\u00a0growing up in a particular kind of Christian environment\u2013 again, usually a conservative one (actually always)\u2013 and experiencing negative things in that environment.<\/p>\n When I saw the first few claims like this, I naturally thought these are people who probably grew up in some kind of cult\u2013 in some bizarre form of Christianity that has zero nuance for anything and that abandons reason and logic completely. Maybe, I thought, they came out of a Christian-imposter cult like the Westboro \u201cBaptist\u201d \u201cChurch\u201d (notice the double scare quotes please), or they grew up in some Jehova\u2019s Witness hall or branch of Christian Science (the Marry Baker Eddy kind of Christian Science, not science that is done by Christians).<\/p>\n And so, initially, I thought: \u201cwell, yes, it is certainly traumatic to come out of\u00a0legitimate<\/em>\u00a0cults like these. Clearly people who have emerged from cults like the ones mentioned might be suffering from persistent mental health issues due to what they lived through as a younger man or woman.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, one should point out, one reason cults like these are\u00a0cults<\/em> is precisely because they are not<\/em> fundamentalist in their theology. They are anti-fundamentals and about as far removed from the Great Tradition of the Church as the sun actually is from the earth (even if it can look close on some particular days and some particular times of day).<\/p>\n However, if this is not the case, I thought, if Person \u201cX\u201d did not come out of some recognizable cult of Christianity, perhaps they just got abused within the confines of what we might call a mainstream form of Christianity. This would be like those tragic souls who were, perhaps, fondled as altar boys by their local parish priest or sexually assaulted by some Protestant minister at youth camp. Sexual assault is obviously a type of spiritual trauma, probably the most insidious type, since all abuse is spiritual at the core.<\/p>\n However, sexual abuse occurs inside and outside of religious contexts. So while the religious, and particularly the Christian, context certainly exacerbates spiritual abuse, clearly not all spiritual abuse is religious abuse. We need to make a distinction here that is usually not made. For if we think that for something to count as spiritual abuse it has to occur within a religious setting, then sexual abuse at the hands of a parish priest would be spiritual abuse since it occurred in a religious context, but sexual abuse at the hands of an angry ex-husband in one\u2019s own home would not. But that is nonsense, since it is obvious that domestic rape is also spiritual abuse, regardless of whether the husband (or wife) is an ordained clergy person. And so we have to make a distinction between spiritual abuse and religious abuse.<\/p>\n Again, this is a distinction I do not see the claimants of abuse making. Thus, for the sake of clarity, I will call what they are claiming: \u201creligious abuse.\u201d Religious abuse would be the kind of spiritual abuse (sexual or physical) that occurs within an identifiably religious context. For our purposes here, it would be a Christian context. It is this kind of abuse, abuse within the confines of a religious and Christian religious context, which seems to be what Person \u201cX\u201d on social media is talking about when they speak of being spiritual abused.<\/p>\n And so we can formulate their claim more accurately as such: \u201cI, Person X, experienced\u00a0spiritual abuse<\/em> within the specifically religious context in which I grew up, which has caused me adulthood trauma and manifestations of PTSD.\u201d This seems to be what is being claimed by those who have left their childhood Christian faith.<\/p>\n Now, at this point, what we would want to see from Person \u201cX\u201d is some evidence of the more concrete kinds of abuse that are, in virtue of us being spiritual creatures, spiritual; and, in virtue of occurring in the right context, like a church or church camp, also religious. Person \u201cX\u201d would then supply details of something like an instance of sexual abuse or an instance of some physical abuse which happened within that religious context. Once provided we could affirm the claim that Person \u201cX\u201d was spiritually abused in a religious context or manner. And this really would be a tragedy of massive concern. It is also something we know happens and has been well documented in church history.<\/p>\n And so, in thinking these thoughts, I found myself totally open to the idea of trauma incurred in specifically religious environments as having long-lasting negative effects on a person. In other words, physical and sexual abuses that occurred within some kind of Christian religious context would be exacerbated by that context. The religious context would make the abuse worse, even though they would still be spiritual abuses, and bad ones at that, had they occurred outside of a Christian (or religious) context. And so, at first, I thought nothing more about these kinds of claims. They seemed entirely reasonable\u2013 and utterly lamentable.<\/p>\n But now I have started to see more claims with less specificity about what exactly the spiritual trauma is that Person \u201cX\u201d\u00a0apparently suffered in their youth. It is not clear that the \u201cspiritual abuse\u201d was either physical or sexual. The concreteness of what actually happened is no longer offered by those making the claim. And this strikes me as odd.<\/p>\n Moreover, as a veteran of a foreign war, I take claims of PTSD, a medical diagnosis that many veterans struggle with, rather seriously. I tend to think there should be very objective criteria for what might count as inducing actual PTSD\u2013 like having seen too many bodies blown to smithereens by IED\u2019s and reliving such events over and over so as to make normal functioning seemingly impossible. In other words, I would think that experiencing a whole helluva lot of war is a good criteria for whether or not one has actual PTSD (let\u2019s ask survivors in Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine if this is true, should we get the chance).<\/p>\n But of course PTSD isn\u2019t limited to just the experience of armed conflicts. I can think of many other events that would lead to PTSD: being tortured in a Turkish prison for several weeks, being sex-trafficked from the age of 8, being repeatedly raped, being beaten with a heavy, blunt object on a regular basis by a violent parent, being fondled repeatedly by a relative who was said to be \u201csafe\u201d by other relatives, and so on and so forth. Certainly there are manifold criteria to discern whether an event or series of events would count as PTSD-inducing ones.<\/p>\n However, something now gives me pause as I consider claims of spiritual abuse. First, I see the abuse of the very claim of being an abuse victim as rampant in our culture. This is not to say that \u201cVictimology\u201d cannot be a legitimate discipline of study. Nevertheless, where to draw the line on what counts as a victim has become increasingly blurry in our day. This begins to make one suspicious about abuse claims. After all, if one cannot point to clear-cut instances of physical or sexual abuse, what would something like spiritual abuse actually refer to?<\/p>\n The criteria for what might count as spiritual abuse seems quite vague and the claim of abuse in a culture of victimhood affects one\u2019s approach to such claims. It is an \u201cunfortunate suspicion\u201d indeed, \u00a0because it strains the principle of credulity<\/a>. If we really do live in a culture that one theologian has described as the \u201cvictim olympics<\/a>,\u201d this causes us to potentially doubt those who may be making true claims of real abuse. This is especially the case if Person \u201cX\u201d cannot give concrete examples of what lead to their supposed PTSD. Not only do we doubt them, but we potentially doubt Person \u201cY\u201d who can provide concrete examples.<\/p>\n In his classic commentary on the nature of propaganda, French sociologist Jaques Ellul points out that propaganda is never something that is wholly a lie. Propaganda, according to Ellul, is always grounded in some truth, and this is done for specific reasons:<\/p>\n The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of\u00a0tall stories<\/em>, a tissue of lies, and that lies are necessary for effective propaganda\u2026.This concept leads to two attitudes among the public. The first is: \u2018Of course we shall not be victims of propaganda because we are capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.\u2019 Anyone holding that conviction is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the \u2018truth,\u2019 he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda; moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware\u2026.For a long time propagandists have recognized that lying must be avoided.<\/p>\n Ellul,\u00a0Propaganda: The\u00a0Shaping of Men\u2019s Attitudes\u00a0<\/i>52-53<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Good propaganda is never about falsifying facts or straight out lying about data, it is about contextualize those facts and the data for political effect. Effective propaganda is about advancing a certain interpretation of the facts or giving the facts without much context for them:<\/p>\n It seems that in propaganda we must make a radical distinction between a fact on the one hand and intentions or interpretations on the other; in brief, between the material and the moral elements. The truth that pays off is in the realm of\u00a0facts<\/em>. The necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of\u00a0intentions\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0interpretations<\/em>. This is a fundamental rule of propaganda analysis.<\/p>\n Ellul, 53 [emphasis added]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If Ellul\u2019s analysis is correct, then it is not enough for someone to just claim an instance of abuse and for us to simply believe it. As readers, or hearers, of the claim we must ask follow up questions, questions about the intentions of the claimant and their interpretation of the stated fact. After all, only a fool would make up a claim, cutting it from whole cloth, about sexual abuse or some kind of repeated and egregious physical abuse. The legal ramifications of totally false claims would be too risky to the claimant. They would deter one, we hope, from making entirely false accusations.<\/p>\n So while we perhaps should validate the fact of an instance of abuse, or, better said, of a negative experience within a religious context<\/em>,\u00a0we need not validate the intentions of the person revealing it nor their interpretation of it. After all, clearly somethings can\u00a0feel\u00a0<\/em>abusive without it being abusive\u2013like the feeling a small child might have when their mother violently grabs their hand as they reach for a sharp knife on the countertop. An older child who later reports her mother\u2019s violent movement as an instance of abuse, would be giving a bad interpretation of a legitimate fact. If the child holds a grudge against the mother on other grounds, then the now grown-up child may also have ulterior motives for claiming \u201cabuse\u201d against the unfortunate mother, who, in the end, was only trying to protect her child.<\/p>\n However, my interest here is thinking more about what might be bad, or unsavory, intentions in reporting certain facts than in what might be bad interpretations of a fact. In other words, why might one want to try to associate a certain kind of Christian upbringing as a PTSD-inducing kind of thing?<\/p>\n No one is claiming that concrete instances of sexual or physical abuse in a religious context are somehow excusable. All decent people know that sexual or physical abuse in a religious context is worse than sexual or physical abuse in a non-religious context. After all, it is within the Church that one expects to be safe; or, at least,\u00a0safer<\/em>. The reason for that expectation of safety is the teachings and the person and work of Christ Himself. However, because Christians are not Christ, we also know that hurts and evils occur in the Church in the same way they occur outside it, even if we hope, again, to some lesser degree or with less frequency.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, in a world that not only hates Christians who have done actual wrong, but perhaps also just hates Christianity and its doctrines, the extension of the claim of abuse to include not just what particularly bad actors have done to young and impressionable minds, but to what the teachings of Christ Himself \u00a0has done to them, seems a plausible motivation to claim abuse.<\/p>\n In other words, if spiritual abuse that occurs in a religious context<\/em> can be extended to include instances of \u201cabuse\u201d that are in no recognizable way instances of sexual or physical abuse, but are nevertheless said to have caused some kind of negative and persistent emotional reaction, then a subsequent claim can be made that traditional Christian doctrines are themselves potentially traumatic. Finally, the follow up claim to that would be to get a diagnosis of PTSD and connect that medical diagnosis to Christian doctrines one was taught as a child.<\/p>\n Now this, to my eyes, seems like a wonderful piece of propaganda\u2013clever even, as in, like the way a serpent is clever. If this connection is made, that there are people who now have PTSD as adults because they were taught certain theological dogmas as a child or young adult, teachings they say caused them\u00a0spiritual\u00a0<\/em>trauma\u00a0<\/i>or\u00a0spiritual abuse<\/em>, then those same adults might possibly have legal recourse to sue the churches teaching those doctrines.<\/p>\n This, in turn, could act as an opening for the government to get involved. After all, if there are certain traditional doctrines of the church that can be connected to a medical diagnosis like PTSD, then there could be justification to consider those kinds of teachings\u2013and those churches that teach them\u2013 a public health risk. Perhaps we might call it a \u201cspiritual COVID\u201d\u2013 an endemic that demands government intervention. Churches that present such a health risk would either have to be shut down, or, perhaps worse, reeducated to teach more positive, non-PTSD inducing doctrines. Maybe a special branch of government would be needed to oversee such a project, a sort of \u201cDogma-oversight\u201d branch of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n In his history of Rome,\u00a0The Annals<\/em>, the 1st-century historian Tacitus writes about Nero\u2019s false charge against some Christians living in the capital city. This is in the aftermath of a great fire that ravaged the inner quarters near the emperors palace. Tacitus, like many others, believed it was the emperor himself that had given the order to fire the city, in an attempt to clean it out to make room for his new palace. However, Tacitus\u2019 passage about the accused Christians reveals much about the attitude of the Romans, especially the Roman elite, toward Christianity in general:<\/p>\n But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called \u201cChrestians\u201d by the populace.<\/em><\/p>\n Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition<\/em>, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular<\/em>.<\/p>\n Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.<\/em> Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.<\/p>\n Tacitus,\u00a0The Annals<\/em> 15.44 (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regardless of the horrors Nero unjustly subjected these Christians to, Tacitus makes it clear that even though he considers them innocent of this heinous charge, nevertheless there was nothing admirable about them. In fact, Tacitus takes time to speak about Christianity itself, about what these innocent victims of Nero\u2019s persecution believed and what he thinks about it.<\/p>\n According to Tacitus, Christianity was abominable, a most mischievous superstition, an evil, hideous and shameful, and, the most interesting for our purposes here: \u201chateful against mankind.\u201d For Tacitus and those like him, Christianity is the antithesis of all that is good for mankind. It is, one might say, a threat to Rome\u2019s public health.<\/p>\n The claim that Christianity itself is the problem in society is commonplace today. But it was also commonplace in Tacitus\u2019 day too. This was also at a time when we as Christians believe the Church was far more pure, far more innocent than, say, in the days of the medieval papacy or in today\u2019s contemporary environment of Evangelical megachurches and celebrity pastors.<\/p>\n Thus, it seems reasonable to think that the culture\u2019s problem with the Church is not just people in it that act badly or leaders who are genuinely abusive<\/a>. It is reasonable to think that for some, like Tacitus, or those seeking a PTSD diagnosis due to vague claims of spiritual abuse, it is Christianity itself that is the real culprit. For these, Christian belief itself just is \u201chateful of mankind\u201d or, in a more postmodern idiom, \u201chateful of breathingpersonkind.\u201d<\/p>\n But what Christian teachings about breathingpersonkind are so hateful as to warrant the claim of them potentially being PTSD-inducing? I can think of a few, but here is probably the main one. I paraphrase the doctrine of original sin as such: \u201cyou are a sinner from birth and you deserve to be punished for the evil you will inevitably commit.\u201d<\/p>\nNot All Spiritual Abuse is Religious Abuse, But All Religious Abuse is Spiritual<\/h2>\n
An Unfortunate Suspicion<\/h2>\n
A Slight Digression on Propaganda<\/h2>\n
The Devil Is In The Details<\/h2>\n
Nothing New Under the Sun<\/h2>\n
The Hateful Teachings of Jesus Christ<\/h2>\n