When I published my first exodus model several years ago, one of the reactions I received was that it didn’t include people who left because of abuse by the church. In the first 32 case studies I considered in developing the model, I found nothing resembling a pattern of abuse or mistreatment. To be sure, some of the exodus members complained that various teachings and doctrines caused them emotional distress, but this was largely an afterthought, not what I would consider to be direct, malicious abuse from the church.
But in the years that followed, themes of abuse, religious trauma, and the “church wound” began to dominate the discussion in much the same way as Christian anti-intellectualism had in the decades prior.
In previous posts I have explored some of the lesser studied research on the topic of religious abuse, but recently I decided to go back to the origins and read the famous book that coined the term. The subtle power of emotional abuse (Johnson and Van Vonderen, 1992).
When I picked up this book, I expected it to be similar to recent literature, criticizing Christianity and portraying it as an inherently abusive institution. However, this book was written about 10 years before the rise of New Atheism and 30 years before the Deconstruction Movement. It was written at a time when the United States was still majority Christian, and it was possible to criticize certain ways of practicing Christianity without portraying the entire system as corrupt and malicious. As a result, this book, written by two Christian pastors, points out the ways in which certain religious environments abuse the spiritual authority given to them by the trust of their religious counterparts to inflict psychological harm on those people.
Both authors of this book are counseling pastors and, as such, they drew their information primarily from the many cases they saw in counseling rather than from systematic or empirical research. The pastors then provided a biblical argument for why such abuse of power is wrong and then offered biblical help and guidance to people who may be victims of such abuse.
The abuse detailed by the authors was varied. Milder abuse included using the Bible to justify their actions. Milder abuse included using Bible verses to demand that other Christians act. The authors spoke of church leaders who positioned themselves as spokespeople for God, a position whose authority was unquestionable. A nauseating number of these stories concern people who ultimately sexually abuse individuals under the pretext of spiritual authority, and, contrary to the title, some very explicit examples of abuse are presented. These people were often able to escape the consequences of their crimes thanks to the protections offered by the church. The most serious impact was dismissal from the church, often without the appropriate legal action. After leaving the church, church members sometimes blamed the pastor’s dismissal on the abuse victim.
A more subtle form of spiritual abuse detailed by the author was that in some church environments, believers tended to become spiritually over-dependent on the authority of the church and needed to report every small decision or event in their lives to the pastor in order to receive the spiritual counsel they needed to deal with the situation. After leaving the church, they often found themselves stuck when they needed to make decisions because they had become totally dependent on the church to make decisions for them.
The authors point out that such abusers can often be identified by the anxiety and avoidance they exhibit within pastoral and church environments. The solutions the authors suggest are varied, but all boil down to some form of victim regaining agency over their lives, recognizing and escaping a manipulative environment, and separating God and the church rather than identifying with them.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to list all the forms of abuse addressed in the book and the authors’ responses, but it will be interesting to examine the book in the context of my own research.
The first thing that is conspicuously absent from this book is any reference to religious conversion. Perhaps it was mentioned vaguely elsewhere in the book, but to my surprise, the authors seemed to suggest that people get trapped in such environments and that their aim was to help people realize they are being abused and move to a healthier church environment. This is in stark contrast to a similar work by Marlene Weinel, written only a few years later, which focuses on ways to help victims escape Christianity altogether, and to the current trend in deconstructionism, which tends to identify specific ways religious authorities are used to control people and generalize them to Christianity as a system. These authors presented arguments against such arguments even before they were advanced. They argued that churches can be healthy, nurturing environments that allow attendees free will while remaining faithful to the teachings of the Bible.
And unlike more recent authors like Brian McLaren, these authors did not adopt a “the only law is love” approach, in which the only way to give people true religious freedom would be to pledge very vague allegiance to the principle of “love” without defining how such love would be exercised.
Because the book was written in the early 1990s, it does not address the pressing issues that have captured public attention in the 21st century and that are the focus of much of the academic literature published on religious abuse: issues of politics and sexuality. It is difficult to gauge from the book’s contents how the author addressed these issues.
As for the theme of religious conversion, it seems that it was not featured in the work because atheism was not yet a functioning social institution. When abuse forced people out of their religious environments, their options were limited. They would often move from one religious environment to another until they found one that met their emotional needs. The world is much more secularized than it was before, and it is easier to leave the church completely.
What the book offered was confirmation of what research already suggests: that defections from the faith are most frequent in authoritarian churches, churches that erect significant barriers between their members and the world, and churches where members hold one another to strict standards and take away free will from members who might disagree with the shared ethos of their religious community.
Is this book still worth reading in 21st century America? For those who are part of the deconstruction movement and have not yet decided to abandon their religious beliefs, this book would be a valuable resource. Although the book is old, the types of abuses it covers are as relevant today as they were back then, and encompass many of the objections of modern dissidents.
The book is not particularly useful in terms of modern research, nor will it be of any use to anyone who does not subscribe to the idea that the Bible is authoritative or has anything of value to offer.
