Religious Trauma: A Child's Perspective
A seven-part series for Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month
January is Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month and while I have written extensively on this topic (see posts in the section: Religious Trauma), I have not specifically addressed the seven perspectives on religious trauma that inform my writing. That is what I hope to accomplish through this seven-part series that includes my perspectives as a child, survivor, woman, parent, educator, ministry leader, and trauma-informed advocate. While I sat in all six chairs at one time or another, not all share my story. I hope this series will be helpful to those who have not sat in particular chairs—and affirming to those who have.
A Child’s Perspective of Religious Trauma
One of the defining characteristics of childhood is—or should be—innocence. Theologies and teachings that deny the innocence of the child do great harm by placing adult thinking and motivations on the developing minds of children. A child is innocent by definition—they lack the cognitive ability to willfully and purposefully express evil in the ways that are possible for adults.
Another truth about childhood is that all children are born longing for and seeking connection. When they are well nurtured, they still can make illogical or wrong choices but it does not grow from a wicked heart as many would propose. What they need is love, comfort, guidance, and protection. This is exactly what parents and the church are poised to provide.
As a child, I fully expected the church to be this place for me and in many ways it was. The following excerpt from a published essay describes my youngest experiences:
“The people of the church smiled when the small bundle of energy with blond hair flew by on her way to claim her piece of Sunday candy from the kind usher who always waited for her at the back of the sanctuary. When she was very small, he made her stay with him until the candy was gone so she wouldn’t choke, but as she got older, there really was no stopping her. She was off to find her friends whom she had known since she was in the nursery. The church was their home. They had watched it being built from the ground up and claimed the basement as their own.”1
In that description, it is evident that I was experiencing exactly what I needed from the church: Love, comfort, guidance, and protection. I believed that the church was a safe place—until it wasn’t. When I was abused by a church member in a home daycare, my world turned upside down. The impact reached far beyond the sexual abuse because it cast doubt on the church being a safe place for me as a child. It impacted all four of the following elements.
Love: If those who profess to loving me also harm me, then my definition of what love is is marred. If humans who love me harm me, then it makes sense that God’s love also involves harm. As a child is was impossible to distinguish between harmful and healthy love.
Comfort: While displaying emotions was not culturally acceptable in the church of my childhood, without abuse, they would have been easier to control. While falling and scraping my knee likely would have received comfort, frequent tears, and explosive anger did not. I learned that both love and comfort were not unconditionally given by people or God.
Guidance: Several important church functions are to teach truths; model what it means to live like Jesus; and pass down church traditions to the next generation. All members look to church leaders as guides who embody these things. Adults can identify those who are not qualified to lead, children cannot make this distinction. As a child, I could not distinguish between healthy and unhealthy guidance—I absorbed it all.
Protection: There are so many ways that children need protection. Most churches focus on physical safety within the building. This does not address emotional protection—something many church teachings often unwittingly cause (more on this here). It also doesn’t consider how children are harmed in homes and the church simply because abusers are not held accountable—and are often forgiven and restored instead. As a child, being told to stay away from the abuser who continued to attend and serve in the church set me up for a lifetime of believing I was the problem.
In the article, What is Religious Trauma? the following explanation is offered:
Diane Langberg, a leading authority on religious trauma, stated, “Spiritual abuse involves using the sacred to harm or deceive the soul of another.”2 I appreciate this explanation because every aspect of faith and religious life is sacred by definition—every conversation, interaction, teaching, program, or space.
What happens to children’s faith development as a result of abuse, lack of compassion, harmful teachings, and lack of protection is Religious Trauma. I did my best to make sense of it all and focus on the good that the church provided in my life. As a child of a pastor, the church was all-encompassing in my life. The deepest harm was the cognitive dissonance that I explained in the published essay that began this article:
From my earliest years, I understood the church put bread on our table. The church could vote and send us out into the wilderness without sustenance. We needed to be who the church expected us to be. The church could be capricious and turn against our family. As a child, I was unable to distinguish between the church as a whole and the people as individuals. It was confusing to have to fear the people who seemed to care about me, but that kind of fit my experiences as a whole. Church, God, and the people became one indistinguishable unit. One I feared and depended on all at the same time.
I was explaining religious trauma and spiritual abuse many years before I accepted that my childhood was impacted. This cognitive dissonance that I accepted as being normal was so embedded in my psyche that it kept me trapped in abusive church-related situations that I should have escaped—because it felt completely normal.
Intentionally or unintentionally, development is impacted. What we learn to accept as normal as children will boldly live on in our faith, mindset, and the choices we make. It is the most difficult aspect of religious trauma to identify because it became part of us in the developmental process.
Without help, these childhood experiences—whether involving physical harm or not—can leave us feeling like vulnerable, powerless children in church situations where love is confusing, comfort is conditional, guidance is controlling, and protection is inadequate. It simply feels normal.
Quoted from the essay, “The Ever-Present God of Uncontrolling Love” published in What About Us: Stories of Uncontrolling Love, edited by L. Michaels (2019).
Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2020), 127. As cited in Ramsey, K.J.. The Lord Is My Courage (p. 178). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.