** Content Warning: homophobia, transphobia, psychological abuse, very brief and undetailed mentions of sexual assault, conversion therapy, self-harm, and suicide ideation.
Many of us in Canada come from a religious and/or spiritual background, and this can impact our present-day lives just like any other childhood experience. Whether or not religion and/or spirituality is an important part of your life today, you probably have or have had some problems with at least some aspects of your religion and/or your religion’s structure and leadership. When we are indoctrinated in childhood, we tend to believe what we are told without thinking critically about these messages, which usually leads to a period of disillusionment at some point in our lives when we realize that not everyone who believes the same way that we do is perfect, and perhaps the religion that we are a part of is itself imperfect.
For some of us, this realization resolves itself without much publicity or pain, and we simply choose to 1) leave our religion, 2) compromise where our opinions do not align with our religion, or 3) look for a different subsect or group within our religion that aligns better with our opinions.
For those of us who do not just question, but act and/or exist in some way outside of the expectations and guidelines laid out for us within our religion, this process can become a public, painful, and abusive one regardless of the outcome.
The example that first comes to mind, as it is a personal example, is growing to identify as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community when this is not condoned by your religion/religious background. There can be many other examples depending on your religion and which denominations or subsects you grew up in within it, such as having children as an unmarried person, working with an addiction, or even getting tattoos.
If this resonates with you, or if this post reminds you of the experiences of a friend or family member, you may have been the victim of or witness to Religious/Spiritual Abuse (RSA).
There are Seven Types of RSA:
- Leadership Representing Deity/Ultimate Spiritual Authority: religious leaders phrasing their messages so that it sounds like their higher power is speaking through them, making their words infallible and leaving no room for critical thinking or argument.
Example: a religious leader saying something like “God says that we should hate the sin and love the sinner,” or “Jesus said to dress modestly to honour Him and your brothers in Christ,” when those are not actually direct quotes from religious texts or from the deity in question.
- Spiritual Bullying: overt and direct abuse to accomplish conformity to the norm.
Example: someone directly telling another person within their religion that they are “going to Hell” or that their higher power has rejected them because of who they are or their actions. More extreme examples include “corrective rape,” or forcing heterosexual sex on someone in the hopes of changing them into a heterosexual person, and “conversion therapy,” a practice of attempting to change a person’s gender and/or sexual identity using psychological, spiritual, and/or physical methods. Note that the physical abuse that was once commonly used is now illegal, but that many queer adults in Canada are survivors of this physical abuse.
- Acceptance via Performance: you are only accepted if you do as you are told, and you will be punished if you do not.
Example: being overtly encouraged to take on a highly prescribed social role, like the “good Christian girl” within Christianity. A “good Christian girl” dresses modestly, does not swear, does not engage in sexual activity outside of marriage, does not pursue romantic relationships with other girls, etc. Someone who either chooses to live outside of these boundaries or someone who simply exists outside of these boundaries, like a queer person, must hide and/or repress these parts of themselves to avoid getting gossiped about, ostracized, and bullied.
- Spiritual Neglect: ignoring physical or mental health concerns of someone who does not fit within the prescriptive roles of their religious community because what they are going through is presumed to be a judgement on them from their higher power.
Example: someone going to their religious leaders for advice and healing being turned away because their religious leaders disagree with them about who they are and/or choices that they make. Instead of being turned away, they may also be privately and/or publicly questioned in an invasive and humiliating way about their “sin,” and may be overtly and cruelly blamed for their physical or mental health concerns.
- Expanding External/Internal Tension: the unbearable tension and cognitive dissonance experienced by someone who has compartmentalized themselves in order to avoid facing the conflict within them: they are who they are and are unable to change, but fully accepting who they are may mean that their higher power is either not real or an unloving entity. This tension is built and reinforced by conflicting messages within a person’s religion and religious community, and leads to anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, and dissociation. It can lead to urges to self-harm and to thoughts of suicide.
Example: a person attempting to “pray the gay away” and then blaming themselves when they are unchanged rather than questioning why they would need to be changed at all.
- Manifestation of Internal States:the unbearable tension on the inside, along with the suffering caused by experiencing other forms of RSA, manifests somehow on the outside.
Examples: panic attacks, headaches, stomach aches, fatigue, chronic pain, etc.
- Microaggressions:
There are 3 types of RSA microaggressions:
A) Microassaults: subtle discrimination carried out in overt contexts without much thought in order to reinforce the opinions of the majority. It often looks like a person just assuming that everyone around them agrees with them, like an off-hand and incorrect statement in a sermon about how “there are only 2 sexes.”
B) Microinsults: something said with or without malice in order to reinforce the fact that someone is different, an outsider, like someone telling another person that they stilllove them, or worse, that their higher power stillloves them.
C)Microinvalidations: something said for the purpose of invalidating another person’s identity, like saying “hate the sin, love the sinner” in reference to someone’s sexual orientation and/or gender orientation.
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Whether or not religion and/or faith has any relevance in your life today: if you grew up in a religious community but were not a perfect match with your community’s expectations, I encourage you to consider how this experience has had an impact on your life and if you have formed unhealthy ideas from this that you can let go.
If you are currently suffering any form of RSA, or are yourself on a journey to either acceptance or rejection or yourself because of your current unhealthy relationship to religion, I encourage you to seek perspectives outside of your religious community. These perspectives can come from others within your religion who are more affirming/less judgemental than your community, or from outside of your religion entirely. Even if your religion and/or spirituality is extremely important to you, outside perspectives in both of these areas can be helpful for you to have a more complete picture and know that you are not alone. Odds are that you have been taught that outside perspectives are dangerous, because isolating you from other people and perspectives is key for your religious community to maintain power over you, but if your beliefs are solid they will not crumble when faced with a different opinion. You can only benefit by continuing to understand that humanity in general, and your religion in particular, is full of diverse people and perspectives.
If you are physically unsafe in your situation and unable to leave it, or even if you would simply like to explore some of these other perspectives, I highly recommend that you call a local crisis line and speak to a trained volunteer who can listen and perhaps help you in a practical sense:
Interior: 1 888 353 CARE (2273)
This blog was written by friend and colleague Rachel Riemer. You can connect with them at www.landmarkcounselling.com