I do not write about religious abuse as someone who has always stood outside religion. I once stood behind the pulpit. People trusted me with their questions, marriages, grief, fears, spiritual lives, and understanding of God. I participated in a religious world that gave certain people enormous authority to interpret the lives of others, and for a long time I accepted many of its assumptions about why that authority was legitimate.
Leaving institutional religion changed my understanding of that authority. The decades since have changed it further. I have sat with people trying to recover from religious experiences that left them unable to trust their own judgment, inhabit their bodies without shame, establish boundaries without guilt, or know what they actually believed apart from what they had been taught to believe. Their stories have forced me to think more deeply about harm that does not always look like abuse from the outside.
That history leaves me unable to approach this subject with the comfortable certainty of an observer. I have been part of the religious world I am examining. I know its beauty and its capacity to give people meaning, community, courage, and hope. I also know how easily sincere spiritual conviction becomes authority over another person’s life.
This essay comes from living with that tension. I am less interested in condemning religion than in asking what any spiritual authority must never be permitted to take from a human being.
I spent years inside the world of organized Christianity, including years as a pastor. I know firsthand the enormous trust people place in spiritual leaders, communities, sacred texts, and traditions. People bring the most vulnerable dimensions of themselves into these spaces: their fear of death, longing for belonging, moral uncertainty, suffering, sexuality, relationships, hopes for their children, questions about who they are, and deepest intuitions about what ultimately matters.
That trust is not insignificant. When someone allows another person to speak into those dimensions of life, they are granting access to some of the most consequential territory of human existence.
Over the years since leaving institutional religion, I have also listened to countless people describe what happened when that trust was violated. Some experienced obvious forms of abuse. Others struggle to call what happened abuse at all. Nothing dramatic occurred. There was no scandal, criminal act, or predatory leader. Instead, something happened gradually. They learned to distrust themselves. Questions became evidence of spiritual deficiency, boundaries were recast as selfishness, and ordinary human desires became suspect. Disagreement could be interpreted as rebellion, while worth became increasingly attached to obedience, usefulness, purity, sacrifice, or belief.
Eventually, they could no longer tell where the religious system ended and they began.
This is one reason I have come to believe that religious abuse cannot be understood only by studying abusive religious leaders. We also have to examine the structures of authority that make abuse possible. A community does not need a charismatic monster at its center to become harmful. It only needs to establish the principle that spiritual authority possesses a higher claim upon a person’s life than that person’s own conscience, perception, dignity, boundaries, and capacity for discernment.
My work in existential health has made this clearer to me. Human beings need more than correct beliefs or psychological stability. We need a viable relationship with our own existence. We need enough self-trust to participate in our lives, enough agency to make meaningful choices, enough reality contact to recognize what is actually happening, and enough belonging that we do not have to betray ourselves to remain connected to others.
Religious abuse damages precisely these capacities.
What follows are ten commandments for preventing religious abuse. The language is intentionally borrowed from religion, but these commandments do not demand obedience. They are safeguards against surrendering forms of authority that should never have been taken from us in the first place.
There is nothing wrong with having teachers. Human beings learn through other human beings. We need mentors, scholars, elders, guides, philosophers, spiritual directors, therapists, artists, friends, and people whose lives enlarge our understanding of what being human might mean.
The danger begins when admiration becomes exemption.
Religious environments are particularly vulnerable to this because spiritual authority operates in territories that are difficult to verify. A surgeon’s claims eventually encounter the body. An engineer’s calculations encounter the bridge. Spiritual authority often deals in invisible realities, ultimate meanings, divine intentions, enlightenment, revelation, salvation, and inner transformation. This creates unusual opportunities for a person to acquire authority that cannot easily be challenged by ordinary evidence.
The pedestal makes matters worse. Once someone has been designated especially enlightened, anointed, awakened, called, prophetic, or spiritually advanced, their behavior starts being interpreted through their status. Contradictions become mysteries. Cruelty becomes tough love. Narcissism becomes confidence. Boundary violations become spiritual intimacy. Failed predictions acquire new explanations.
The problem is not that spiritual teachers are uniquely corrupt. The problem is that they are human.
Human beings remain vulnerable to ego, desire, insecurity, projection, self-deception, greed, loneliness, resentment, sexual attraction, ambition, and the intoxicating effects of being admired. Spiritual development does not repeal human psychology.
We should therefore be capable of honoring wisdom without manufacturing saints. The healthiest teacher is still a person. The wisest guide still needs accountability. Any spiritual system that requires us to forget this has already created conditions in which harm becomes easier to conceal.
One of the most consequential religious ideas is also one of the least examined: that distrusting yourself is evidence of spiritual maturity.
I learned versions of this in my own religious formation. Human judgment was unreliable because human beings were fallen. The heart was deceitful. God’s wisdom was higher than ours. Scripture possessed authority that individual experience could never possess. Faithfulness therefore required learning to subordinate one’s own understanding to something outside oneself.
There is a legitimate insight buried inside this. None of us is a perfectly reliable interpreter of reality. We rationalize. We protect our egos. We misremember. We mistake desire for truth. We absorb prejudices from our culture and defend them as convictions. A spirituality built entirely around “whatever feels true to me” is no safeguard against self-deception.
But recognizing our fallibility is different from surrendering our discernment.
Every claim about reality still has to pass through a human being who interprets it. Scriptures require interpretation. Traditions require interpretation. Teachers require interpretation. Even the claim that we should distrust our own understanding requires us to use our understanding to decide whether that claim is true.
There is no escape from human participation.
A healthier spiritual posture brings our entire humanity into the process: experience, reason, evidence, intuition, conscience, conversation, history, science, and the perspectives of people who see what we do not. None is infallible. Together they form a more responsible ecology of discernment than obedience to a single authority.
The goal is not to become certain of ourselves. It is to remain participants in determining what we will call true.
We are social creatures, and numbers affect us. A packed auditorium, millions of followers, bestselling books, celebrity endorsements, a vast online audience, or an expanding movement creates an aura of legitimacy before a word has been spoken.
We assume that many people cannot all be wrong.
History should have cured us of that assumption.
Popularity establishes that someone has influence. It tells us almost nothing about the wisdom with which that influence is exercised. Human beings are drawn to confidence, narrative, beauty, certainty, belonging, charisma, emotional intensity, and people who give language to our fears and hopes. Those qualities are neither good nor bad in themselves, but none should be confused with moral character.
The digital age has intensified this problem. Spiritual authority is now produced through many of the same mechanisms that manufacture every other form of celebrity. Algorithms reward emotional engagement. Platforms favor certainty over nuance. Personal brands encourage leaders to turn themselves into products. Communities form parasocial relationships with people they have never met.
A person can appear deeply intimate to thousands of strangers while remaining almost entirely unknown to them.
The more influence someone possesses, the less impressed we should be by the influence itself. More important questions concern what that influence produces. Are people becoming more capable of thinking for themselves? Is disagreement tolerated? Does proximity to the leader require loyalty? Are followers becoming increasingly dependent upon the teacher’s interpretations?
A spiritual teacher worthy of trust should gradually make our dependence upon them less necessary.
Human beings will surrender astonishing amounts of themselves to avoid exile.
This is one of the realities about religious abuse that becomes clearer when viewed through existential health. Belonging is not a decorative feature of human life. We are relational creatures whose identities develop through attachment, recognition, family, culture, and community. Losing a religious community can therefore mean losing far more than Sunday morning. It might mean losing one’s marriage, friendships, professional network, family relationships, moral universe, identity, and explanation of reality at the same time.
That gives communities extraordinary power.
The abuse of that power often occurs incrementally. A person learns which questions are welcome and which create discomfort. They discover which parts of themselves receive affirmation and which threaten belonging. Certain feelings remain unspoken. Certain doubts stay private. Boundaries soften. Difference becomes expensive.
Eventually, belonging is purchased through self-concealment.
Healthy community asks something of us. Relationships require compromise, patience, responsibility, and concern for others. Individuality does not mean treating every personal preference as sacred. But there is a profound difference between relational compromise and existential self-betrayal.
You should not have to disappear to belong.
Any community that requires the systematic suppression of your humanity has confused conformity with communion. Belonging worthy of the name must leave enough room for an actual person to belong.
People who have experienced religious abuse often tell me that some part of them knew long before they acted upon what they knew.
Something felt wrong.
The difficulty was that they had been trained to reinterpret the signal. Discomfort meant conviction. Anger meant rebellion. Suspicion meant cynicism. A boundary meant selfishness. Resistance meant pride. Doubt meant weak faith. The very responses that might have alerted them to danger were absorbed into the religious system and returned as evidence against them.
This is a remarkably effective form of control because eventually the authority does not need to silence the person. The person learns to silence themselves.
Inner intuition is not infallible. Trauma, anxiety, prejudice, fear, and past experience influence our perceptions. But fallibility is not grounds for dismissal. A warning from within deserves curiosity. It gives us reason to slow down, gather information, consult people outside the system, establish distance, and examine what is happening.
This capacity is closely related to what I call reality contact in my work on existential health: the ability to remain in meaningful relationship with our actual experience rather than allowing an interpretive system to continually overwrite it.
Abuse flourishes where interpretation becomes more authoritative than experience. Recovery often begins when a person permits themselves to notice what they have been noticing all along.
One of the best ways to understand a religious community is to watch what happens when someone says no.
What happens when a member disagrees with the leader, questions a teaching, establishes a boundary, changes a belief, ends a ministry commitment, or decides to leave? The response reveals the actual structure of authority beneath the community’s stated values.
Fear is especially powerful because religion possesses unusually large threats. Hell, divine judgment, spiritual deception, apostasy, demonic influence, eternal consequences, loss of salvation, and disappointing God operate at a scale few secular institutions could reproduce.
When these ideas are used to prevent questioning or departure, spiritual conviction has crossed into coercion.
Shame works differently but reaches just as deeply. It does not merely tell us that we have done something wrong. It teaches us that something is fundamentally wrong with us. Once shame becomes embedded in identity, control no longer needs to arrive from outside. We police ourselves.
An existentially healthy community does not require fear to maintain membership. People should be free to reconsider, disagree, evolve, and leave without being psychologically terrorized or socially annihilated.
Belonging that depends upon captivity is not belonging.
Religion often takes our deepest human longings and attaches conditions to them.
You are loved, but. You belong, provided. You are accepted, if. You are worthy, once.
The conditions vary among traditions, but the existential structure is familiar. Something essential about our worth becomes contingent upon performance. We pray harder, believe correctly, serve longer, give more generously, suppress forbidden desires, demonstrate devotion, pursue purity, or become useful to the mission.
There is always another spiritual mile to run.
I am not arguing against discipline, commitment, ethical responsibility, or transformation. A meaningful life asks things of us. The problem begins when growth becomes the price of human worth rather than an expression of it.
Performance-based spirituality leaves a person especially vulnerable to control. When an institution gets to decide whether I am acceptable, worthy, faithful, or spiritually secure, it gains extraordinary leverage over how I live.
Existential health begins somewhere deeper. Our worth cannot depend entirely upon successfully performing an approved identity. We require enough ground beneath us to change, fail, question, mature, and take responsibility without interpreting every imperfection as evidence that our right to exist, belong, or be loved has been revoked.
Religious institutions often speak eloquently about truth until the truth threatens the institution.
Then other virtues suddenly become more important.
Loyalty is invoked. Forgiveness is emphasized. Unity becomes urgent. Reputation must be protected. Outsiders will misunderstand. The leader has done enormous good. The community must not be destroyed because of one mistake. Matters should be handled internally.
Each of these arguments might contain legitimate considerations in another context. Together, however, they have repeatedly created environments in which institutions protect themselves while injured people carry the consequences.
My years in human…
