The Culture of Spiritual Abuse
When confronting spiritual abuse, it can feel more straightforward to focus on a specific person or leader who may have caused harm.
But it’s also important to address the systems and cultural contexts that, in their most obvious forms, promote abuse—and in their more subtle forms, allow it to happen or refuse to confront it.
In this episode, Dan and Rachael dive into the painful realities of spiritual abuse and the systems that uphold it. They explore how cultural powers—such as patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and purity culture—often intertwine with Christian theology, creating harmful environments that distort our understanding of God and faith. And yet, even in the face of this, there is a call to confront our complicity in these systems with grace and humility.
We hope this conversation is an invitation to wrestle with and address how we’ve been shaped by harmful cultures and systems and how we may have participated in them – and ultimately, to consider how we can step into a more loving, just, and merciful understanding of God and community.
New: Spiritual Abuse & Healing Online Course
We know that Spiritual Abuse can be hard to name, understand, and confront. If you’re looking for more resources to explore and heal from your own experiences of religious trauma or spiritual abuse, we invite you to explore the brand-new Spiritual Abuse & Healing Online Course from the Allender Center.
This 6-lesson course, complete with reflective practices and deep dive panel discussions, helps you engage your body, mind, and spirit as you unpack the harm caused by spiritual abuse.
Whether you’re just beginning to wake up to this reality or have been on a healing journey for years, this course provides a safe and welcoming space to deepen your understanding and work toward healing.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: Alright, Rachael, I want to start with a premise and have you react to it.
Rachael: Oh gosh.
Dan: Here’s the premise. I hope our audience knows that a lot of this isn’t really planned. It’s actually intended but not worked out beforehand, so thank you for being willing to work on this. Here we go. Individuals abuse obviously, but individuals abuse. And one of the prime reasons they’re able to abuse and to sustain the abuse and often without consequence is because there are systems that are operating to enable them to be able to do so. Even though we have spoken last time, particularly about developmental wounds, how that plays out in reenactment. I’m not going to go back through all of what we attempted to cover, but to say if we don’t deal with the larger system, that often is in and of itself abusive, but even more so that system sustains, authorizes and often covers over the abuse that has been done. So react.
Rachael: Well. I mean, I’m not sure what reaction you’re looking for here other than for me to be like, yeah.
Dan: Well, as you think about the systems that you have been up against and the people that you work with, again, the dilemma is because often it’s a person who has done something deeply violating, whether it be in the form of grooming onto sexual violation or whether it be the smothering and the stealing of one’s own capacity to engage and choose. But if consequences are provided at the level of if you don’t do this, you’ll not be one of us. If you don’t do this and don’t think this and don’t speak and believe this, then you are no longer going to bear something of the fruits and the goodness of what this person or organization provides. We’ve attempted to do that, but your experience with abuse and spiritual abuse in particular has needed a larger community sustaining it in order for it to occur. So just to begin to put words to how that happens.
Rachael: Yeah, I mean, gosh, again, part of what makes it hard, and we talk a lot about how spiritually abusive cultures and spiritual abuse in of itself because it, again, it’s a misuse and abuse of power often done in God’s name, acts as an umbrella that covers, as you said, and sustains many other forms of abuse and keeps abusers safe because it will prioritize the powerful, it will prioritize maintaining the status quo, so the vulnerable, the victims, the survivors will often be sacrificed in order to maintain the power of the status quo. Now, this is not a new reality. We’ll talk more about that. This is part of living in a very broken world that continues to, in its scarcity and terror and wicked ways of surviving will hoard power for a few and not care how that impacts the people. Now we see that in the larger culture. So yeah, I think what you’re asking me to put words to is what was some of the cultural waters I was swimming in as a young woman that would have made some of these kind of spiritually abusive and I would say sexually, emotionally, abusive realities keep playing out even though in theory, and I think this happens for a lot of abuse survivors, I should know better. How does this keep happening? And in part it’s because I was being raised in a culture, again, I would say denominationally, Southern Baptist. Now caveat, I have incredible friends who are still a part of Southern Baptist Church who are doing really stunning work. So I’m not trying to disparage a place that actually was a huge part of my spiritual upbringing. It is, however, have very patriarchal structures and I think what’s kind of come out in the past couple of years is very white supremacist origins like the Southern Baptist Church became Southern Baptist because they stood in opposition to the abolitionists and wanted to maintain enslavement. And so again, those are DNA origins that doesn’t have to be where you remain, but there’s actually a reparative, deconstructing work that has to happen. For me, I would say a lot of the cultural waters I was swimming in as a young, very able bodied, cisgender, heterosexual white woman was still very patriarchal and misogynistic, which is where patriarchy, the kind of more hateful and systematic, oppressive natures of patriarchy play out. It was very, I would not say overtly white supremacist. I think it was again in the water of some of that reenactment trauma that was not being addressed or confronted or named or we’ve talked about being anti-racist is very different than not being racist and woven into those things was this kind of where those things collided patriarchy and white supremacy was like a very high emphasis on purity culture. So in some ways what I was putting language to about how I was desperate to be loved romantically was I wanted to be pure. And even though in some ways I fit the kind of definition of purity, I also have a history of sexual abuse that nobody was talking about in purity culture. And again, I did not fit the caricature of the femininity because my giftings were perceived as very masculine. To preach, to teach, to have leadership skills in that particular context was a huge violation of my femininity. And so again, I was being groomed toward, those were all very narcissistic systems and structures and ones, and I think this is what’s true of spiritual abuse in general systems that I was also benefiting from and complicit in the harm of others, wittingly or unwittingly. And so when I think about even today, there’s just such a merging of power, an empirical powers, especially in American Christianity with theological ideals. And the reality is all these patriarchy, white supremacy, this kind of late stage capitalism we find ourselves in where there’s such an idolatry of money above and beyond caring for the humanity of others, such scarcity being exploited and this kind of emphasis on purity, but the purity standards are deeply shaped by these worldly powers. All of that’s upheld with Christian theology and biblical imagination. Those things, the way they play out in our culture are not like, oh, just kind of some esoteric spirituality. They are sustained and maintained. It’s why we have something, a phrase like Christian nationalism that we have to talk about that there’s a sense of something of your national identity being parallel with your Christian identity, which is probably the most antithetical. I don’t want to go too much into it. All that to say it can feel overwhelming when we start to look at the cultural waters that we’re swimming in and how they can be pervasively abusive in multiple ways, but especially in how they’ve shaped our spiritual imagination, how they’ve shaped who we imagine God to be, how they shape what we imagine it means to be a follower of God and who gets to belong and who doesn’t. And so we could talk more about some of the characteristics of a spiritually abusive culture. It doesn’t really matter what the frame is, they share certain characteristics, but the truth is just in a very human moment, it can actually feel so overwhelming because it’s one thing to be like, I have this story and there were these unique circumstances and a few different people I encountered who perpetrated this harm or a certain community. But if it starts to feel more powerful than that, more pervasive, you have to actually contend with some of your own powerlessness. And that’s to me, what I see happening. I mean, we are in a very apocalyptic time, meaning just this revelatory time. I mean, how many more spiritual leaders of entire movements and communities are going to be exposed as prolific predatory sexual abusers? It’s overwhelming. So you have to go, these are not just like one-off coincidences. It’s similar to wanting to say what’s happening with school shootings? Oh, these are just lone wolfs. It’s like, no, there’s something in the water that has to be confronted and named and attended to, right, because it’s there. And we get to do that with a lot of compassion, with a lot of wisdom, and with enough safety that we can take them on without feeling like it’s too much, it’s too big, it’s too scary.
Dan: Well, when principals of any sort are operating in a way in which they are generated through, a level of certainty that we have to call dogmatism–a refusal to allow something of the gray, the complexity, the reality of, yeah, we have Proverbs that give us a sense of how we are to enter into the world. And then we have a book of Ecclesiastes that in some ways…
Rachael: Dismantles it…
Dan: Dismantles it. And so you’ve got Psalms of praise, but right next to it, Psalms of complaint. So when the complexity of living a heart for God is then constrained to principles that once you do, you are in the favor not only of God but our community. And if you are not in accord to our language-police demands, then you seen to be at least off and dangerous and therefore we banish you that structure a power bound to certainty power bound to a kind of dogmatism. But if we go another category here, a lot of that as you look at how the Southern Baptist came into existence, but also the Southern Presbyterian Church in the same way and many churches that came into being in order to justify slavery, if we go into the realm of what one of the factors of slavery included was almost inevitably the sexual violation of slaves. So underneath the principle is a perversion. A perversion that often shows itself in sexual violation. So when we begin to talk about how dogmatism is a deep form of taking power away from others, demanding that they concede to a particular approach to life, that any variation would then be not merely criticized, but part of then why you are being exiled. No wonder with developmental wounds, no wonder with the threat of exclusion, people with narcissistic dogmatism who have the principles that appear to be biblical constrain and in many ways silence the hearts of others. But I want to come back to one phrase, as you said brilliantly, this is not new. Where does your mind go? As you say, it’s not new.
Rachael: I mean probably for me, the biblical witness of the prophets who in some ways are confronting all of these spiritually abusive realities, they weren’t calling it spiritual abuse, but they were naming you are abusing power in God’s name that you have actually been directly told you are not to do. So let me remind you again and we can talk about that. But one thing I want to just name before we go any further is for those of you like myself who are thinking about some of the cultural context you’ve been in and where your mind is going, oh my God, I perpetrated spiritually abusive of harm against other people as a part of this ideology or a part of this community and attempting to maintain purity and not wanting to be scapegoated like I’m seeing other people being scapegoated, maintaining systems of power, that whatever I think I want to name that. Yeah, part of the healing process from spiritual abuse is where we have to confront some of the places that we work complicit in the harm of others because the nature of the system necessitated it. Does that mean then I’m off the hook for the ways in which I persuade? No, there’s reparative work, there’s honest undergoing of grace work, there’s seeking accountability where it’s available or possible work. I’m still very much in the mess… There’s transformative work. There is also mercy because there were places you were also vulnerable and Dr. Lauren Sawyer, who is one of the instructors in the course, so much of a core part of her research as an ethicist studying purity culture and the impact on young people is holding that sense of vulnerability and complicity, which I want to give as a frame so that those of you who are maybe feeling some dissociation as we’re talking about these realities of like you’re not a one-off pariah here, it’s part of the nature. But yes, I think about the prophets and you and I have talked explicitly about the prophet Micah and how Micah was directly contending with where spiritual authority and worldly powers had kind of collided in a way that was incredibly spiritually abusive and bringing profound harm.
Dan: Well, and again, we have used and wisely, so Micah 6:8 as in so many ways a framing passage for who we wish to become individually and corporately as the Allender Center and that “act justly, love mercy, walk humbly.” No one does it well, no one, but Jesus. But in that we’re called into what does it mean to be thinking about justice in systems and individual, but also mercy for systems and also for individuals. So as we do so attempting to walk with humility, it’s so important as you put it, to go back to the prophets and we’re simply starting with Micah, but if I start with Micah 2, woe to those who plan iniquity to those who plot evil on their beds. At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them and houses and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them of their inheritance. So let’s start with this, and that is every system is committed to its own existence as a power structure. It has to do so through financial means. So the reality is that we’re not just straying into politics here. We’re straying into commerce, to economics, into how money gets used to sustain power. I remember, and again, not the particularity, but one church that I was involved in, almost all the leaders, all men and all rich men, all rich white men who had a certain deep conviction as to how a church should be run. But also there were many decisions regarding people who were in marriage issues or addiction issues or whatever. It was very clear there was an old boys club. And in that, what I have to say is I don’t think they were evil, but I think there was a sense in which they are coveting fields, keeping friendships, sustaining their own financial wherewithal in part because the people whom they protected were a lot like them. The people they didn’t protect in the way that they did the others were people who were in some sense of the word different. So we know clubs, we know economic worlds. There is a kind of homogeneity in that I think we can just look at even political processes where plans are made to vilify certain group, a certain community, and in that there is a gain of power. We create the us and them and we’re the good, they’re the bad, they’re the bad blood, we’re the good blood. And in that it is for an economic power because they have power. They’re using it to defraud, to steal back to the word steal and be it psychological or be it relational or be it spiritual or be it financial. There’s theft in all forms of spiritual abuse.
Rachael: And often done with a weaponizing of biblical text and theological assumptions. And yeah, I mean what you’re putting words to the economic realities behind it, exploitation of vulnerable people, but fused with this sense of toxic extremes and rigid binaries that are effective for keeping the resources in the hands of the few chosen ones. So that obsession with purity little to no room as you put words too for complexity or tension, very clear, even if they’re lunacy realities of who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s inside and who’s out, who’s safe and who’s dangerous, and a lot of violence and abuse projected at those who are perceived as unpure. I mean, again, we’re back in the realm of scapegoating and scapegoating always exploits our fear and our shame. It always is weaponizing places where we are saying, I don’t want to be shamed like that. So I will join forces. Again, I can say this played out in my own family history, my own ancestral history. I have Italian-American ancestors who came to United States and initially were not perceived as welcome. They were the vermin that would’ve been talked about like other immigrants are being talked about in our current political atmosphere. And when the systems of the United States opened the door for them to get to claim whiteness as a racial identity, they took it. They took it to not be scapegoated. And again, I think it’s a grievous, spiritually abusive dangling of you can belong and have access to more economic prosperity. You can have access to jobs, you can have a voice in the political system, and you can be less vermin like if you say yes to actually opting into a system that will then scapegoat other people. You have to actually scapegoat those people now or you’ll lose your place again. That’s a very particular example of a cultural reality that I actually think is profoundly spiritually abusive and not dissimilar to what will continue to play out if you have to have a certain identity, be a certain kind of immigrant to belong.
Dan: Well, and again, if we just follow the path of Micah taking us a little further in chapter 3:5, this is what the Lord says, “As for the prophets who lead my people astray, they proclaim peace if they have something to eat, but prepare to wage war against anyone who refuses to feed them.” So if you follow the language of Micah, he’s looking at economic structures and injustice, and then he goes into the realm of, in one sense, prophets. He then deals with seers and he deals with priests. He deals with the, if you will, the broad spiritual religious community. And this is a profound indictment like you demand being fed and anyone who will not feed you, you’ll destroy. So how we deal with conflict in the church, different views about an understanding of how the gospel is lived out or a different way in which you choose to vote or not vote. The components that often occur in structures that again, we’re labeling dogmatic, narcissistic, and power drenched in terms of the ability to bless or to curse. When you are in a community where you have the power to bless or curse in indirect way by excluding, versus honoring the diversions and the complexity, the grays of the gospel, well, it’s inevitable that there will be some form of abuse, but we’re right back to the economic motive. I do not want to lose my job. I don’t want to cause trouble in my church. We won’t have as many people listening to our podcast if we…
Rachael: Well, let’s go back also, let’s just say the nonprofit industrial complex that we’re a part of. We’ll lose donors if we don’t stay within the boundary lines of what’s appropriate. And we love our donors and we want our staff to have jobs, and these economic realities are real.
Dan: Because money is power and how we in one sense engage the issues of power and money, resources, how we utilize, hide, cover, justify in order to make sure the institution, the ministry is able to continue to operate without any impugning of our motives or any in one sense, fallacies found in the structure itself. These are the hard elements of having been part of an organization that I was privileged to help create. We’ve screwed up a lot and in it we’ve had to name publicly and privately things that we wish we had had the wisdom not to do or the wisdom to do. So when an institution has to cover itself in order to sustain its existence, it’s almost inevitable it will steal fields and it will demand for their profits that only when you feed me will I be with you. It is the rare organization that has the ability to be both broken and beautiful with a simultaneity in which people are not shocked by the brokenness, but also don’t allow the brokenness to hide the glory and beauty of what’s there or vice versa. So as you ponder all this, and particularly with what you’ve addressed in the online course, how now? How did the course help you obviously way longer than a podcast? How did it help you begin to address some of the core things that we’re putting words to at this juncture?
Rachael: Yeah, I mean, again, it’s that sense of our culture is beautiful and broken. And Vanessa Sadler, who’s been on the podcast and also joins us in the course teaches a section on the intersection of racial trauma in western Christianity. Dr. Lauren Sawyer talks a little bit deeper about purity culture. We do some round tables that talk about how even though we may all have a similar experience with something because of our particularity, because of our developmental wounds, because of our identities and our socialness, we’re not impacted equitably, and there’s particularity and uniqueness to that. So we get into that more in depth. But one of the things I’m really grateful for Vanessa naming is these are spiritual malformations that we have to address, we have to confront. And anything in our world, does the malformation get to strip and take away the goodness? No, I don’t think so. Unless it is not engaged and confronted and becomes a bigger disease, that leads to a kind of sickness that I would say with regard to spiritual abuse turns us to a kind of religiosity that will actually never align with the kingdom of God. And so yeah, are there consequences for refusing to heal? I do think there are consequences for refusing to heal. And so we have opportunity. There is possibility, and it is not work for the faint of heart because it’s to become more human size and more humble really is to need justice and mercy and to need that coming from a God who is just and merciful in ways that we probably will never quite fully understand on this side of things, if ever. So I think what we were attempting to do was to take a deeper look at, there’s a setup to spiritual abuse, and it’s not just familial or interpersonal, it’s also cultural. And part of the naming what we’re up against is not just to indict or to turn towards shame or contempt towards ourselves or to others, but again, it’s to see more clearly with more compassion and courage. None of these things happen in a vacuum, and the healing therefore is not going to happen in vacuum. It has to take into account the particularity of so much of what we’re naming and we wouldn’t have done this course or be talking about these things if we didn’t think in the depths of our being that healing is possible. And again, is there some completion or quick fix or really clear path that plays out in a short amount of time? No, but there are multiple starting points, and I can say for even myself. My faith is so much more rich, my imagination for healing, the transformation of my heart, mind, and body, and so much of the reclamation that’s played out and my spirituality are so much more rich even in the complexity and tension, and there is so much more repentance and learning and resiliency that I feel like I need to personally develop. And I know many of us need to develop. And I think too, we’re not going to find a faith community or even a people to belong with that aren’t connected to and embedded in these cultural realities. But it’s a much different thing to be walking with people and in relationship with people who at the very minimum are committed to confronting them to being transformed and to trying to find ways to grow in a capacity to do justice. And to love mercy and to grow in humility.
Dan: Well, one client put it this way, as she was dealing with some of the D ache of violation in the context of a ministry she had been part of in so many ways, this ministry devoured her, ate her, and then when she began to create limits as to, no, I won’t, I won’t work out your problem at 11 o’clock at night and therefore stay up till two or three in the morning, she was excoriated, she was shame and eventually threatened with being cut off from the so-called good group of people. So in the process we’re talking about the nature of spiritual abuse, but in her heart of hearts, like many, like you and others who really cannot stand that God but cannot bear or not engaging God. And that process of whether you call it deconstruction or beginning a reentry into, who are you? Who do you say I am and who are you? And being able to, I know it’s no simplistic solution here, but singing the Psalms that have praise, that have lament, that have complaint, But also have thanksgiving. There is something in which as we engage this, it again, it’s not to condemn and excoriate, but also to expose in a way in which we come in so many ways to the end of Micah in chapter 6, this is, oh, mortal, this is what God wants for you, and it isn’t a performance, it’s where life is going to be found. You were meant for justice. You were meant for mercy. Oh, you were meant to walk with enough humility that you are not bound to dogmatism. But as we look at the world as it is today, I don’t think, well, I’m sure there are people who would differ with this, but I think we’re seeing a profound rise in fascism, a profound rise in a misunderstanding of the interplay of what it means to be love your country and yet be first and foremost a member of the kingdom of God. As we begin to see heightened levels of vitriol and dogmatism rising, what we’re essentially saying is, oh, it’s been a reality for a long time, in fact, since Adam and Eve departed. Nonetheless, I think we’re going to see an even more egregious rise of spiritual abuse in the next iteration of our life in America and maybe beyond. So these issues that you’ve addressed and your team has addressed in this online course, all I can say is I think it will be a profound breath of fresh living air for folks who have been at best in stale environments and others who have known some degree of suffocation and so grateful for the work that you and your team, which I actually happen to be one.
Rachael: It has been a labor of love, and it’s not an end all be all, and we do our best to connect to many resources. But I will just say I do believe in the midst of it all, that Jesus is still Jesus and for us and with us and working on our behalf, and I will continue to pray that, and I want people to be equipped with the framework and a lens for spiritual abuse so that they are not at the mercy of it when it’s being wielded against them, whether that’s from a politic or a pulpit.
Dan: Nothing more to be said other than, again, thank you.