Of Course Church Will Hurt Us: In This World, There Will Be Trauma
Examining the Traumatic Church Discourse, Part Three
"If other ages felt less, they saw more."—Flannery O’Connor
A Brief Note: Reponses and Future Installments
When I began this little series, it was in response to a particular question (which I’ll indicate below), but I’ve been blown away by the response thus far, with the emails and messages. I do this work as an extension of my own vocation, and it’s good to hear it resonating and finding home. Please do keep the questions and comments coming. I’m envisioning two more entries in this, though of the writing of damage in the church, there is no end.—The Management
Getting to the Roots: The Origins of the Religious Trauma Discourse
In this installment, we ask “How did we get to this place? What are some of the dynamics contributing to an increase in religious trauma discourse?”
There is no golden age of church life, one in which everything was fine and nothing hurt. From Acts 5 forward, we are treated to stories of disagreements, of betrayals, of lying liars, and of deceptive motives. We are warned, at length, that there will be wolves among the sheep, of antichrists who will deny Christ in the flesh, of the need for ongoing reconciliation.
And yet, in none of these eras, prior to ours, it was not understood that the church itself was the problem. Did people have horrific experiences with church? Yes! I can only imagine that the man turned over to Satan in 1 Corinthians 5 wasn’t the only one sympathetic to his position, and that others were affected by the ordeal! Do we think that the people who saw Ananias and Sapphira fall dead were unmarked by the occasion? Were there no disagreements or slights between Jews and Gentiles, the poor and the rich?1
Bracketing several things, what I want to get at is something of the roots of this new elision of “harm” and “abuse”, such that any and all negative encounters—both intentional and unintentional, both predatory and ordinary—are viewed as trauma-producing. It is a shrunken vocabulary of harm, and asking how this came to be will give us some sense of some possible ways out.
How did this come to be the frame?
Doing an archeology of sorts will be of limited help, as cultural movements rarely have a single source. A cursory search of online trends reveals an interesting nugget to this very recent trend: the term seems to be prevalent only occasionally between 2004-2015, corresponding with the emergence of seminal literature on the topic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the burgeoning literature predominately associated “religious trauma” with anxiety, fear, and aspects of religious practice and doctrine which inculcated these.
In these early decades, it seems to be a connotation of more “fringe” groups—fundamentalist sects, New Age communes, groupings with high social control over the members. But as the trend line increases, so the literature associates “religious trauma” not just with outsider groups, but with religion itself.
The point here is the change within religious trauma discourse. None of this is to say that religion was free from abuse prior to that point. My point is more modest: that 1) the way of describing ordinary harm has changed, and 2) that ordinary harm has become conflated, in the popular mind, with trauma, and 3) over time, thus, both abuse and harm become equated with religion itself.
So what could we attribute this rise in interest in religious trauma to?2
Possibility #1: The Relation Between Religion, Anxiety, and Change
In view of the discourse’s development—that trauma from religion is a coextensive with religion— the Venn diagram of trauma and religion just looks like a circle.
But here, a moment of clarity: step back for a moment and consider that Christianity, and in particular Jesus’ words, go pretty hard on the stakes of following Jesus. There is a way that leads unto life and a way that leads unto death, that there is fool and a wise man differentiated by whether they put Jesus’ words into practice. There is a promise of judgment for the unwise, for the inhospitable. Is there no forgiveness, or grace? Hardly! But it’s impossible to get into this conversation around anxiety and religion without being honest enough to say that some of this is intrinsic to the faith as such.
Some of this is, of course, a hyper-focus on performance: that God will hate you if you sin. This, I take to be rubbish: the whole point of sin is that it damages the one sinning and those around them, not God. For every statement that X and Y won’t inherit the kingdom of God, the assumption is not that God hates person X or Y, but that those doing these sins are persons in whom the damage of sin runs deep. But this acknowledgment that sin harms us is entirely different than saying that your religious performance is the problem.
The problem isn’t, then, on this account, religion: the claims of the Scriptures are the same ones heard by Christians since there were Scriptures. That we now name such things as trauma-inducing is not to say that they can’t produce death-dealing anxiety. But the church fathers and mothers have always known that experience was a corruption: you don’t have to read very deeply to find Cassian, Augustine, Julian, Catherine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and dozens of others to find them all shaking hands on the notion that God is gracious, and that anxious fear is the work of the Evil One.
Possibility #2: Feeling-as-Thinking
There is, as others have documented, an emotional element of intelligence, a kind of knowing which does not comport itself to rational argument. But something which I notice, without fail, among my younger students is an elision between “I think” and “I feel”. It is one thing to say that our bodies know things in ways which slip past rational discourse, or that our emotions constitute a particular form of knowing; it is another thing to replace rational discourse with pre-cognitive arguments of feeling.
Over the course of the semester in biomedical ethics, I have to be careful to emphasize that I want them to be empathetic: they are not pure technicians. But by the same coin, I say, empathy is not an argument. Our emotions are indicators to something about our thinking, something about our knowledge, but they are not themselves yet the knowledge.
The ancients understood the value of the emotions, to ground us in our relations to one another, to help us to be attuned to that which is not yet visible to reason. But our emotions are not the finely tuned barometers we wish they were. But this is increasingly the default my students have: that which is uncomfortable is marked by the need to be avoided. “I feel” allows them to stand in a space of safety; “I think” invites them to explore whether their feelings have been wrong.
None of this is to say that our reason is inviolable, but just to say that the bundling of “harm” and “abuse” under a single psychologically pervasive effect of “trauma” is to forbid us to tell the difference between the source. The feelings of disorientation, depression, and all of the rest which come with trauma is akin to seeing that you’ve been cut, and that you need to tend to the wound. But some cuts are accidents, some surgical interventions, and some murderous.
Possibility #3: Technological Spread
The understanding of the pre-Internet Christian world was one which, I have argued, could differentiate between “ordinary harm”, that which is (frequently) unintended and the result of sin, and “abuse”, that which is intentional and malicious. Likewise, they knew the difference between healthy reverence and an overly scrupulous anxiety.
But their medium for learning was pre-digital, literary and person-to-person: you can follow the breadcrumbs as they cite one another across time, learning from those before them. In our age, the Internet is the site of common learning, and thus, the medium by which knowledge (including bad knowledge) spreads. The language of “going viral” displays this: once taken up enough, an idea will multiply, and multiply in new and mutated ways. Even if the original thought was nuanced enough to pass muster, the later iterations will lose this. Even if the scholarly literature of the early 1990s made careful distinctions, Internet influencers are competing for eyeballs, and nuance makes for a poor showing there.
Google searches spike after 2015, with the explosion of podcasting3, and after the term “religious trauma syndrome” entered the lexicon. Again, there is no singular backstory here, but the common medium of the Internet, combined with the previous elements, make for an ecosystem capable of spreading the idea far, wide, and far less nuanced.
Possibility #4: The Power of the Suffering
It is a curious kind of authority which Christians have traditionally attributed to the martyr, as those whose lives are iconic of Christ, those who are to be emulated if not in their death but also in their lives. Those who are martyred are remembered for their faithfulness and virtue, for standing fast in trial and paying for it with their lives. But the martyrs are not valued for their suffering as such, but for their virtue.
But just as the virtue of the martyrs is aspirational, a church which (rightly!) speaks about the care for victims unintentionally may create a condition in which the marks of trauma are weirdly desirable, a mark of belonging, of having passed through the fires to the healing grace of God. This is, I think, an unintended consequence to be aware of that comes with the lifting up of those who have been trampled under foot: that the way to be exalted is to first be able to name one’s own harm. Matthew Loftus’ recent piece raises some of these questions with respect to how we narrate our own stories, and is worth reading.
“Ordinary harm”, no longer understood as the regularized effects of sin within churches and renamed as a source of “trauma”, provides a new way for those who have been harmed to understand themselves.4 And as such, there is a new agency given frequently both to those who have been abused and those who have been harmed, and the verdict is still out on whether churches are in a place to be able to listen with nuance to the differentiated stories. In a situation where "ordinary harm" becomes redescribed as the precursor to trauma, then whatever right lessons there are to be learned from learning from victims of abuse now becomes democratized into places where ordinary harm needs forgiveness, judgment, and restitution, but not necessarily amplification.
Possibility #5: The Impossibility of Use
The very term abuse means that it is both possible to do a practice well and in a malicious way. If there is no possible good use of a thing, then there can be no abuse. When all uses of a thing or suspect, then all you have is abuse, either actual or potential.
This is all find a good if you’re talking about what purposes a frying pan is for: to scramble an egg is a very different thing to do than to bash someone over the head with that. But this is way trickier when you’re talking about people. Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, talks quite frankly about the use of others, by which he means the moving of others toward their good end, which is God. Some might read this as abuse, but I think it’s important to note that instruction, education, and really any question proclamation all has this view, the movement of others toward that is good, and which is God. If I try to persuade you of something, is that a violation of your will?
Many of my thoughts on this topic were occasioned by a newsletter which declared that all religious indoctrination of the young was tantamount to abuse. I really don’t know how to even begin to respond to that, except that that leaves us with a version of religion which is unable to even be thought without being abusive, an affront to the development of the self. If I tell my child the name of God, and that the Ten Commandments have been revered as morally binding of God for millennia by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is that abuse because they did not arrive at it themselves? If I tell my child that this is the Bible, and that Christians for two millennia have trusted in it as the guidance of God, am I doing damage to my children?
I think ultimately, this is the end, toward which we are forced if all use—all guidance of persons to the good that is God—is ultimately just abuse in waiting. There can be no exchange of religion, much less of anything of meaning or value, without the constant worry that I am imposing my thinking, and that which I love, upon another person. That seems like the worst kind of prison: to have something which is good, and which I love and which has changed me in innumerably good ways, and to never be able to share it.
One question that has come up in the responses is this: “Is abuse simply a matter of intent? Can someone abuse others and not intend it as such?” It’s an excellent question, and one I’ll take a shot at next time. This one, I think, gets to the heart of the problem, namely, that we can deceive ourselves with respect to our intent to harm or heal, and the damage remains.
Book Club: Welcome to the new subscribers! And to those of you who have written in response to the first two installments: I’m so grateful for your support. It’s a great thing to know that your writing is helping reframe or articulate something that has real resonance in so many congregations. For our paid subscribers, the next Zoom book club, on January 30th, will be Basil the Great’s Sermon to the Rich. It can be found in this wonderful collection of Basil’s moral sermons, or as a standalone online here. Details will be sent out soon.
Reading: All the class prep things. To that end, I’m reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for my biomedical ethics course, in which Singer makes the provocative argument that humans should be morally evaluated like all other animals. It’s left an indelible mark on biomedical arguments, particularly around questions of euthanasia. Reading Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses for an additional project, as well as John Cassian, Benedict’s Rule and Augustinian monastic rules for a class on Christian community. Lots of commentaries for a Winter Bible Study that I’m leading for a church in Little Rock at the end of the month.
Any time you have power differentials within church, ordinary disagreements take on new resonances, because disagreements between perceived unequals takes on the cast of injustice, of unrealized equality of grace in Christ, of unalloyed prejudice. These are topics for a later date.
An obviously non-exhaustive list. Here, I defer to the literature of religious trauma, which catalogs the possible material reasons. One possible reason here, unenumerated, is of course that we’re simply more aware of religious abuse, and are no longer willing to tolerate it. I take this to be a good thing: there is no prize in suffering for its own sake, no good to be had for grinning and bearing it. Scripture links our unearned suffering, our “trials and tribulations” to Christ’s own presence, that even in the dark, God has not forgotten us and is with us, beneath the cloud. But this is not in any way to say that abuse needs to be tolerated. When my own cousin Baptists, the Southern Baptists, are finally being proactive as a denomination about sexual abuse, you know that this sea change is finally happening.
It was ruled in 2013 that podcasts were not a proprietary medium, opening the door for the mechanism of podcasting to be more or less open-access. I had no idea! Of course, people had been podcasting for years before this—you old school listeners of the Ricky Gervais Show, I see you. But the 2013 ruling meant that no one could have a patent on “podcasting”.
This, controversially, has been named as the rise of victimhood, and there are good reasons for being careful with this line of argument. Victims, as I have stressed already in previous installments, are real, and religious abuse is true. This being said, the pervasiveness of naming things as potentially trauma-inducing is related here: when all things are potentially trauma-inducing, all persons undergoing harm (ordinary or intentional) are potentially victims, creating difficulties in differentiating damage. Saying things like “we’re all suffering” negates the acute and grave suffering some undergo in contrast to the ordinary suffering all persons experience as dying creatures. Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s recent book is one which I hope to read soon, as it seems to name the dynamic here, though undoubtedly they will get at this question differently.
Some types of Christianity involve no indoctrination, no terrorizing with hell, none of the things that you think are essential to Christianity. I was raised in this tradition. Belief is not coerced, it is always a matter of choice. You are also not induced by reward either. It is difficult for you to imagine a child could be introduced to Jesus’s words without any threat or promise of reward and a person would believe for life because your tradition requires fear for people to believe. Given your preferences, you would reject this type of Christianity but one can certainly transmit it as a religious faith.
"When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about our not. When we do not know, or when we do not known enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts." -- T.S. Eliot (1920)