Of Course Church Will Hurt Us: The Religious Trauma Industry
Examining the Traumatic Church Discourse, Part Two
What if the way forward for true religious abuse isn’t to commodify it, but to work through it? This is the second installment on the religious abuse and trauma discourse, the first of which is here. Read that one before coming along with today’s installment, as I will assume the definitions and framework from there.
Few niches of the religious Internet are newer, and thus more ill-defined and potentially self-defeating, than the religious trauma niche. As I wrote last time, I do not take this to be a matter of malice, but of misunderstanding the distinction between ordinary harm and abuse. Nonetheless, it’s important to name what happens when a church phenomenon takes on cultural traction, particularly when the concern is for how to deal with harm well.
The Ouroboros of the Religious Trauma Industry
In the last ten years, there has developed a real cottage industry of authors, counselors, Substack newsletters, and social media personalities whose work derives from one thing: the blurring of the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary harms, describing ordinary harm within church as potential trauma.1 Small cuts, over time, can become lingering wounds and persistent scars. They are the stuff of slow-burn deformation and long-term alteration of our prayers.
But, like many other movements which seek to address a broad and complex problem, the language of religious trauma gathers up all kinds of harms under one term, treating all variations with a broad spectrum treatment, for reasons discussed last time. By examining all harm under the heading of the most audacious, ordinary harms gather the meaning of extraordinary forms in the intent, scope, and depth. Ordinary harms become described in a more sinister register, and significantly, taken indicative of a broader culture. As much as I have problems with the moral manual traditions of 19th century Catholicism, they had this much right: being able to name the specifics of sin makes all the difference in how we go about repairing the damage.
The gathering of all harms under the language of “abuse” has at least three long-term effects here by what I take to be well-intended folk, genuinely concerned about the health of churches:
The conflation minimizes attention to abuse victims, and banishes ordinary forgiveness.
Is the gaslighting, maligning and firing of a staff member because of their refusal to play ball with power structures in a pathological church the same as not being included in decision-making structures of a church? Both harm people, and may harm them intensely. But these are not the same actions, and cannot be named under the same heading, both because of the gravity of the hurt, the intent of actions, and the elevation of ordinary (albeit sometimes intentional) harms into the language of pathology.
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To do so obscures the language of ordinary sin, and with it, the recourse to ordinary forgiveness. In the first, the gaslit minister, there is a need for ordinary forgiveness to be accompanied by outside mediation, accountability, justice, and recompense. But in the second, what we need is the ability to name sin as such, and to hear the healing of God for the wronged, the pardon of God for the wronger, and a commitment to a renewal of ordinary habits of listening, asking questions, patience, and clarity. Imagine reducing the first example to the remedy of the second example: as much as going to public justice is an outsized response to not being consulted in decision-making, so treating abuse as a matter of misunderstanding is a silencing of the abused.
The Naming of All Pathology as Sin, but Forgetting that Not All Change is Pathology
Describing all sin within the church as a form of social pathology has had an unintended question: it is no longer simply abuse that is in view, but anything which presses on the individual, namely religion itself. As such, “religion” and “harm” become tied together. It’s here that I want to give a half-cheer for religion as such, in that religion simply means something which binds us to a life: it is the ordinary means of grace which God uses to reshape us. We are creatures, and creatures are changed not purely by thought, but by action and life, by habit. And God acts through these ways. What is religion if not the promise that it will change you?
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Some of the concern that gets lodged here, I think, is a complaint not against abuse, but against religion as such. And on that, I have little help for you: religion makes a promise to change you, to alter your life. That promise sometimes takes the form of a threat, of a pressing of people into the mold of the leader. But religion as such does not apologize for making you different—less “yourself”, if by the term we mean that which we wish, and not what God is making us into.
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And these forms can go wrong, in that any organized feature of creation can operate, in the biblical language, as a principality. But religion as such is not abuse, though it is certainly open to abuse. But going into church, and hearing every expectation of change as a form of abuse in waiting is to negate the very possibility of religion. Additionally, it is to invite every manner of protection between persons: it is expecting not just that we will be sinned against, but that we will be intentionally attacked over the long-term, either by others or by religion itself.
There is No More Ordinary Harm, Only Extraordinary Damage We Haven’t Seen Yet
Part of the way, in which this conflation gets traction is through the attention economy. Despite how frequently stories of trauma happen, these are the stories which gain the most attention, the ones which orient our imagination and vision. This is not, I think, because these are the most prurient stories, because they are the most harmful, and the ones which call most for our attention.
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In an ecosystem, like Substack, a newsletter or a writer has to offer some thing which helps them to stand out, something to let them be seen amidst all of the other words being offered. And thus, that which is rightly most deserving of our attention becomes, taken up, duplicated, and quickly becomes the stand down for the ordinary. In the end, there is no more ordinary, at least not with respect to harm. There is only the extraordinary in miniature forms everywhere.
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And so, all harm become potential trauma, with ordinary harm receding from view now noticed as nothing to be forgiven or names but simply the way things are. Religious trauma, once the exceptional, becomes a more ordinary version of reality, and we quit seeing it for the abhorrence that it is. Religious trauma becomes one more piece of background noise, such that we ultimately expect it around every turn rather than being able to grieve it as exceptional.
There are many culprits in this conflation, willing and unwitting. I take it that most of the agents here or not bad actors, but simply those making use of a category ill- fit for all scope of damage. When The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill blended in its storytelling these two types—the malicious and petty, the conspiratorial and the morally vicious—I don’t think this was an intentional decision. But the effect was the same.
And in the end, I can’t really blame the religious trauma industrial complex for doing what Christians have done so often and so ordinarily: how many times have we inflated a conversion story to match the more dramatic versions? How many times have we described all sin as the same? How many times have we flattened any and all distinctions within the church body to measures of sameness? Do this long enough, and the inevitable result is to provide one measure for evaluating all forms of harm, with the worst standing in for all things, particularly when the effect of trauma comes from both ordinary harm and abuse.
In the end, the equation of all harm as a long-term pathology dessicates the very ground which the industry operates on: chew away at the idea of church long enough, and soon, there won’t be anything left to deconstruct from. The snake eats itself, and eventually, the religious trauma industry will have nothing but its own self-performance, grateful that it is not a tax collector like this other fellow.
For the distinctions I have in play, I refer the reader to the previous installment.
My wife, who has a masters degree in social work, and I discussed this post.
She said it was noteworthy that some who would be very careful with delineations in mental health, carefully consulting the DSM-V, lose that precision when speaking of religious trauma.
I thought her point was a salient concurrent one to yours.