1.1 The Nature of Trauma

1.2 Some Varieties of Trauma

The previous section offers a general account of post-traumatic distress. But given the breadth of possible human experience, different kinds of trauma tend to have uniquely identifiable impacts. In this section, I provide an overview of three particular kinds of trauma that may overlap in significant ways with religious trauma.

2.1 Case Studies

Analytic philosophy of religion has sometimes been conducted in a highly abstract and disembodied way. Although such methodology can produce valuable insight, it often fails to capture what is at stake for real people who experience suffering and tends to obscures important aspects of the human experience about which philosophy of religion should have something to say. As an alternative Mikel Burley recommends drawing on “thick descriptions” of religious “lifeways” found in ethnography and works of literary fiction, where the philosopher confronts the “other” in all the complexity of their spiritual and religious way of life (Burley Reference Burley2020). In that spirit, I here draw extensively on thick descriptions of religious trauma from qualitative psychological studies, memoirs, survivor community blogs, and truth and reconciliation projects. Such narratives may help us to avoid objectifying sufferers by turning them into mere abstract entities–Person A and Person B–for the purposes of philosophical theorizing and help us to get a better sense of what religious trauma is like from the inside. However, lurid description can both facilitate an objectifying form of voyeurism and (re)traumatize readers. This section aims to balance faithfulness to experience with respect for the people who have lived it.

2.2 Empirical Research on Religious Trauma

Exceptionally little empirical, peer-reviewed research has been done on religious trauma in the psychological sciences. At present, no data on the frequency of religious abuse within any particular religious community or population, or on risk of developing religious trauma or symptoms of PTSD more generally following religious abuse, have been published. However, attention to the topic is growing in promising ways. At the time of writing, I have identified twelve empirical studies – six quantitative  and six qualitative – of phenomena that fall broadly into the category of religious trauma. These include three studies on spiritual abuse (Dehan and Levi Reference Dehan and Levi2009; Ward Reference Ward2011; Koch and Edstrom Reference Koch and Edstrom2022), four on clergy sexual abuse (McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin1994; Rossetti Reference Rossetti1995; Zalcberg Reference Zalcberg2017; Prusak and Schab Reference Prusak and Schab2022), two on anti-LGBTQ+ teachings and conversion therapy in religious contexts (Hollier et al. Reference Hollier, Clifton and Smith-Merry2022; Jones et al. Reference Jones, Power and Jones2022), two on “religion-related abuse” broadly defined (Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Shaver, Goodman and Qin1995; Nobakht and Yngvar Dale Reference Nobakht and Yngvar Dale2018), and one on religiously motivated physical abuse (Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Nielsen, Murray and Filipas2004).  Six focus on Christians from an array of traditions (McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin1994; Rossetti Reference Rossetti1995; Ward Reference Ward2011; Hollier et al. Reference Hollier, Clifton and Smith-Merry2022; Koch and Edstrom Reference Koch and Edstrom2022; Prusak and Schab Reference Prusak and Schab2022), three on diverse (but majority Christian) populations (Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Shaver, Goodman and Qin1995; Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Nielsen, Murray and Filipas2004; Jones et al. Reference Jones, Power and Jones2022), two on Haredi Jewish communities (Dehan and Levi Reference Dehan and Levi2009; Zalcberg Reference Zalcberg2017), and one on college students in Iran (Nobakht and Yngvar Dale Reference Nobakht and Yngvar Dale2018). Given limits of sample size and higher than ideal p-values (this value represents the likelihood of producing a false positive–that is, of mistakenly confirming the hypothesis that a variable is significant), the results of studies should be taken as suggestive rather than conclusive or generalizable.

It is difficult to summarize the central findings of such a diverse array of studies, but I mention a few particularly interesting findings here. Two studies found significantly worse mental health – including higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and dissociative identity disorder – among survivors of abuse in religious contexts than both the general population and survivors of abuse in nonreligious contexts (Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Shaver, Goodman and Qin1995; Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Nielsen, Murray and Filipas2004). For example, “42% of religion-related abuse victims, but only 15% of other victims and 20% of the control group could be classified as clinically depressed” (Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Nielsen, Murray and Filipas2004: 104). This may suggest that, all other things being equal, abuse in a religious context is more traumatic than the same kinds of abuse when they occur outside of religion. Of the seven studies (four qualitative and three quantitative) that assessed the impact of religiously or spiritually significant trauma on later engagement in religious practices (such as prayer, reading religious texts, and attending religious services), five reported decreased in engagement in survivors (McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin1994; Hollier et al. Reference Hollier, Clifton and Smith-Merry2022; Jones et al. Reference Jones, Power and Jones2022; Koch and Edstrom Reference Koch and Edstrom2022; Prusak and Schab Reference Prusak and Schab2022). Seven studies found that religious trauma is correlated with a worsened sense of relationship with God (McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin1994; Rossetti Reference Rossetti1995; Dehan and Levi Reference Dehan and Levi2009; Hollier et al. Reference Hollier, Clifton and Smith-Merry2022; Jones et al. Reference Jones, Power and Jones2022; Koch and Edstrom Reference Koch and Edstrom2022; Prusak and Schab Reference Prusak and Schab2022). And one study showed that those who had been sexually abused by clergy had less trust in God than both those who had not been abused at all and those who had been abused by nonclergy (Rossetti Reference Rossetti1995).

While this research is nascent, and causation is notoriously difficult to empirically verify, especially in matters where humans exercise personal agency, what little data we have is highly suggestive of the hypothesis that abuse in a religious or spiritual context amplifies the impact of the abuse and damages relationships to the divine and spiritual community.

2.3 Characterizing Religious Trauma

Clinicians have defined religious trauma in a few different ways, each reflecting important features of the examples provided earlier. Marlene Winell, in her groundbreaking work on religious trauma syndrome, describes religious trauma as the experience of leaving an abusive, controlling, or otherwise physically, psychologically, or emotionally damaging religious group (Reference Winell2011). Her characterization is helpful because it accurately identifies a number of contexts in which religious traumatization is likely to occur, but it is overly narrow in a number of ways. First, the trauma of leaving a religious community is, in principle, separable from other traumas experienced while in the group. One can experience religious trauma and its effects without ever leaving one’s religious community. Devorah’s story illustrates this. The assault and forced violation of religious law are spiritually traumatic for her even while she remains married to an abusive husband and a part of the Haredi community. Second, religious trauma need not conceptually depend on the religious group being abusive or otherwise damaging. An abusive person might find their way into an otherwise healthy group and inflict religiously significant trauma on people within it. Victims might be religiously traumatized even if the group responded appropriately to their disclosures. Not all forms of trauma arise from interpersonal violence or social structures. For example, one survivor of the abuse of a controlling and manipulative Sufi Shaykh describes how his early days in the abusive community involved not only a number of positive mystical experiences, but also some very dark, yet spiritually significant ones: “we interpreted the dark and scary experiences as an important block towards building deep spirituality” (Anonymous 2021). These negative and traumatic experiences were not inflicted by the abuser or any other human person, and it is not clear that they resulted from anything inherently abusive in the religious social structure. They came about in and through private spiritual practice. Thus, Winell’s characterization captures an important subset of religious trauma, but is not broad enough to capture all.

Theresa Pasquale, a survivor of religious trauma and a licensed therapist, also offers a characterization of religious trauma in her book Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma: “any painful experience perpetrated by family, friends, community members, or institutes inside of religion” (Pasquale Reference Pasquale2015: 22).  While this definition is more expansive, it in turn includes too much. Not all pain is bad for us on the whole. Donating blood is usually mildly painful but not a bad thing to do; having one’s abusive behaviors called out may be painful, but it provides the opportunity for growth. Furthermore, even painfully bad experiences do not always rise to the level of inflicting trauma. If everything negative or painful counts as trauma, then the category loses its significance. As described in the first section, current neurobiology suggests that at least many of the symptoms of trauma result from the long-term over-activation of the nervous system’s completely healthy response to a threat to life or personal integrity. One of the hallmarks of trauma that distinguishes it from lower-level negative experiences is its remainder and intrusion into one’s life and consciousness in the aftermath. Trauma is not something experienced and easily left behind, but something that, without intervention, continues to be experienced, often in ways that lead to a fragmented sense of self and diminished flourishing. Finally, not all genuinely traumatic experiences caused by something or someone in religion will be religiously significant for the survivor. One might be trapped in a collapsed Mosque during an earthquake and be deeply traumatized by the experience, without that trauma being distinctly religiously valanced. Likewise, if one is sexually violated by a clergy member without ever knowing that the perpetrator is a clergy member, the impact of the trauma is unlikely to be specifically religiously significant the way it would be if the perpetrator were one’s own priest, pastor, rabbi, or shaykh. Therefore, we need a characterization that is broader than Winell’s but narrower than Pasquale’s.

I doubt that it is possible to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the phenomenon of religious trauma, both because of the richness and variety of religious traditions and phenomena, and because the very notion of trauma involves not only a particular kind of experience, but one’s subjective appraisal of it. However, there are good philosophical and psychological reasons to delineate some common characteristics of paradigmatic cases of it while acknowledging the fuzziness of those boundaries. I suggest that religiously traumatic experiences paradigmatically include the following three characteristics.

1. 1) The traumatic experience has deep religious significance to the individual.

2. 2) It leads to religiously significant post-traumatic distress.

3. 3) The post-traumatic effects have a negative impact on the individual’s religious or spiritual life.

A traumatic experience can be religiously significant because the cause of the experience is deeply associated with the religion or because the experience is of some aspect of the religion or one’s own religious identity. This might be because the perpetrator plays an important religious role, such as a religious parent, priest, or imam (as in Lori, Devorah, Aisha, Klaudia’s, and the children’s in indigenous boarding schools cases); because the experience was justified on religious grounds, (e.g., by appeal to a religious text, as in the case of LGBTQ+ Evangelicals); because it is inflicted for religious reasons or as part of religious practices (as in Aisha’s case when the Shaykh claimed that his violation was a part of haqiqa); it arises from negatively valenced mystical or transcendent experiences (as the “dark” spiritual experiences described by the anonymous survivor earlier); or because the individual experiences the event through a deeply religiously significant frame of reference, where the religious framework makes the experience the kind of experience that it is (as in Devorah’s case). A Muslim woman whose hijab is ripped off by an Islamophobic assailant will not experience this in the same way as a nonreligious person would experience the theft of an ordinary scarf. Even if the material objects are the same, the religious significance of the hijab (to both the victim and perpetrator) makes it a religiously significant experience for the hijab-wearer but not for the scarf-wearer.

In the past, I have categorized this latter type of case (involve persecution experiences like hijab-snatching) as related to, but distinct from, religious trauma because the cause of the experience is not itself religious (Panchuk Reference Panchuk2018). Because religious persecution is often interpreted in the Christian tradition as a badge of honor, and victims and martyrs are highly respected and praised, I did not initially conceive of persecution experiences as something that could undermine one’s religious agency, but as something that bolsters it. I believe that was mistaken and that my former perspective demonstrated Christo-centrism and lack of imagination about the ways in which religious persecution might be experienced. Someone who veils out of religious conviction and who is traumatized by an Islamophobic assault may experience the trauma as deeply religiously significant. I hypothesize that the post-traumatic effects may be both more religiously significant and more severe in cases where the individual’s own religion plays a causal role in the trauma, because the victim is more likely to internalize the perspective of the abuser and because the victim is more likely to experience a sense of alienation from God and their religious community, but that some level of religiously-valanced trauma may arise in either kind of case. However, this hypothesis would require empirical validation.

Many experiences that satisfy the first characteristic will be cases of spiritual abuse. Like religious trauma, there is no single conceptualization of spiritual abuse in the literature. Dehan and Levi define spiritual abuse in the context of abused Haredi wives as “damaging the woman’s spiritual life, spiritual self, or spiritual well-being, by means of purposely and repetitively criticizing, limiting, or forcing her to compromise or go against her spiritual conscience, resulting in a lowered spiritual self-image, guilt feelings, and/or disruption of transcendental connectedness” (Reference Dehan and Levi2009: 1303). This is a narrow, highly specific characterization. David Ward’s definition in contrast focuses on the misuse of power that is common in cases of spiritual abuse: “a misuse of power in a spiritual context whereby spiritual authority is distorted to the detriment of those under its leadership” (Ward Reference Ward2011: 901). Finally, in developing their scale of spiritual harm and abuse, Daniel Koch and Leihua Edstrom define it as “a type of emotional and psychological abuse perpetrated by a religious leader or group and/or with a religious or spiritual component, usually involving coercion or control.”  Among the categories of spiritually abusive experiences they include pressure to maintain the religious system, embracing violence, controlling leadership, and gender discrimination, but there are arguments to be made for the addition of other categories such as spiritualized ableism, purity culture, and spiritualized racism (among others). Two aspects of these definitions are worth noting. First, on the first but not the latter two, persecution cases like hijab-snatching will not count as a kind of spiritual abuse, if the perpetrator is an outsider to the religious identity of the victim. Second, on Koch’s and Edstrom’s account, any spiritual component of abuse is at least conceptually separable from the other aspects. They say, “a survivor of clergy sexual abuse, then, is understood for our purposes to have been abused both sexually and spiritually. The sexual abuse can be expected to have effects on the survivor similar to other instances of sexual abuse, while the spiritual abuse will likely affect whether or how they are able to practice their faith” (477). Although I appreciate their emphasis on the uniquely spiritual impact of spiritual abuse, I am skeptical that aspects of the abuse are so easily separable, with the sexual aspects having the usual sexual impact and the spiritual aspects having a separate spiritual impact. I hypothesize, on the basis of years of engagement with religious trauma survivors, their narratives, and the small amounts of empirical data, that in “mixed cases” the abuse will have effects on the survivor that are distinct from other instances of the same kind of abuse in nonreligious contexts. Klaudia’s story helps to illustrate this point. It is not just that she experiences her sexuality as dangerous or bad after the assault but that her negative perception of her sexuality is bound up with her perceptions of God, because God is the author of her sexuality, which she perceives as the cause of the priest abusing her.  Thus, the spiritual and the sexual dimensions of trauma are deeply intertwined. If a therapist attempted to address only the sexual dimensions or only the spiritual ones, it seems likely that Claudia’s pain would not be adequately understood.

There is also a great deal of overlap between religiously traumatic experiences and morally injurious ones. Spiritual abuse often involves betrayal by respected leaders who violate the moral and spiritual sensibilities of their followers. Community members may witness or become aware of abuse and feel unable to intervene. They may be pressured by religious leaders and teachings to engage in behaviors that violate their own conscience. They may develop a moral perspective at odds with some deeper sense of right and wrong. A gay evangelical may be morally injured by their decision to kiss someone of the same sex as themselves. A parent who violently “disciplines” their child because they have been told that God commands it may inflict religious trauma on their child and moral injury on themselves. While it is important to distinguish perpetrators from victims in individual instances, a single person can inflict or enable spiritual abuse while themselves being a victim of it. Consider a gay Christian who, despite the harm done to them, which they cannot acknowledge, encourages their fellow gay believers to undergo conversion therapy, or the woman who tries to “submit joyfully” to her husband’s abuse while simultaneously denying that his abuse of their children is abuse at all. In both cases, an individual is experiencing spiritual abuse while also enabling it or inflicting it with respect to others. As such, in addition to healing from the trauma of their own experiences of abuse, they will need to address the guilt, shame, and distress of having harmed others or from having participated in becoming people morally distressed by witnessing others’ perfectly acceptable behavior.

The second characteristic is that at least some of the post-traumatic effects have a religious object or trigger. Joel Hollier and his team report that “Nathan described how his heart began racing, and he became incredibly nervous as he stepped into a church for the first time in years. Katie spoke of her Complex [PTSD] flaring up each time she walks past a place of worship. Lisa shared that she would sit and cry on Sundays because people in her congregation had hurt her badly” (Hollier et al. Reference Hollier, Clifton and Smith-Merry2022: 281). Others experience panic attacks and vomiting induced by exposure to certain religious music, religiously significant nightmares about the abuse, difficulty in prayer and other religious disciplines, among other things.  One survivor says,

Additionally, the moral emotions that often follow from trauma and moral injury may have religious realities, community, or even God as their object. Shame may be shame before God; anger may be at the Divine, at religious leaders, or religious communities; distrust may be of God, the self in relationship to God, and of those who worship God; guilt may feel like the judgment of God rather than a “mere” moral failure.

Third, the post-traumatic effects negatively impact the individual’s ability to entertain or hold religious beliefs or engage in religious practices, or attitudes. In other words, someone is religiously traumatized when they have a religiously traumatic experience that inflicts lasting religious or spiritual harm. This is so in each of the case studies described earlier.

The removal of religious causation as a central feature of religious trauma may raise the worry that for some individuals, any trauma will count as a religious trauma, because all of life is interpreted through a religious frame of reference. I am unconvinced that this is a bad outcome. It is well-established in the literature that trauma of all kinds is spiritually significant (Pargament et al. Reference Pargament, Magyar, Benore and Mahoney2005), and that positive and negative religious coping has a significant impact on outcomes following trauma (Smith Reference Smith2004; Gerber et al. Reference Gerber, Boals and Schuettler2011). For a person who interprets any painful experience as divine retribution, any experience of a sexual assault might feel deeply religiously significant. Experiencing oneself as being punished by God through a sexual assault, especially if one cannot identify any failure that one judges deserving of such retribution, might result in religiously significant post-traumatic distress. One might feel betrayed by God. One might feel shame before God. Attempting to pray might trigger intrusive memories of the assault. I see no reason to exclude this case from the category of religious trauma.

There is no reason to worry that this entails that all trauma is religious trauma. Not everyone is religious, so not everyone will interpret experiences outside of religion as religiously significant, and not every religious person interprets every experience through a religious lens to the same degree as the person described earlier. Indeed, I suspect that such people represent a minority of religious individuals. So it is unlikely that all trauma will end up being a form of religious trauma. But even for those religious folks who interpret most of their life experience through a religious lens, there are still degrees of religious significance. Even for the person described earlier we can imagine that being assaulted by her priest would be more religiously traumatic than assault by a stranger or even a trusted person. Just as post-traumatic distress admits of degrees, we can assume that religious trauma does as well. Something may be extremely traumatic but only mildly religiously traumatic, while something that looks like a minor stressor might be extremely religiously traumatic because of its religious significance. For example, threat of rejection by close friends might be moderately traumatic for anyone, but the threat of shunning or rejection from a religious community might be deeply religiously traumatic because it represents being cut off from the divine or the community of God.

2.4 Spiritual Struggle and Spiritual Agency

As mentioned in the first section, it is difficult to draw general conclusions about the impact of trauma on agency, and even in individual cases we should exercise epistemic humility.  Nonetheless, evidence about the impact of trauma on the body and mind explored in the first section gives us reason to think that, in some cases, some of the religiously significant impacts of spiritual abuse can undermine spiritual agency in ways that excuse them from religious or spiritual obligation.

Consider someone who experiences intrusive memories of sexual violation upon entering a church, mosque, or temple. This individual might experience any subset of the following symptoms: panic, disgust, shame, guilt, fear, rage, unwanted bodily responses such as sexual arousal, elevated heart rate, trembling, nausea, vomiting, disorientation, or dizziness. It is not difficult to imagine these responses rendering the individual unable to force themself over the threshold. Even if the person could get through the door, it is not unreasonable to think that the person who chose not to try to participate in religious practices, because the cost was too high, has a religious excuse (akin to moral excuse) for this choice, even if some religious practices are usually religiously obligatory. Failing to participate in such a case might be comparable to failing to participate while one is physically injured. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the individual who, out of love for or fear of God, pushes through these barriers to engaging in religious practices would thereby achieve something spiritually valuable. In many religious traditions merely going through the motions of spiritual practice does not satisfy one’s spiritual obligations. Practitioners are supposed to love, worship, trust, and submit to God. While each of these may have behavioral implications, none (except possibly the last) is reducible to mere behavior. Some post-traumatic responses are at odds with these attitudinal and affective aspects of these religious obligations. It is difficult to trust a being before whom one feels deep shame, fear, guilt, or rage. It is doubtful that one can worship when one feels moral horror and disgust toward the required object of worship. If this is true, religious trauma survivors can be incapacitated or hindered with respect to both the practices and the attitudes of religious devotion as the result of factors outside of their immediate, conscious control.

In addition to undermining spiritual agency, religious trauma might render new religious choices and beliefs practically and epistemically rational for the survivor. It is often practically rational to avoid situations that one is justified in regarding as dangerous. Consider the story in the Tanakh [which Christians call the Old Testament] of Uzzah touching the ark of the covenant to steady it. God strikes Uzzah dead for his disrespect, and David, afraid of the risk posed by such a dangerous object, has the ark sent away. Setting aside Uzzah’s and God’s moral and religious justifications for their actions, David’s response appears deeply practically rational. The ark is dangerous! Thus it is practically rational to form the intention to stay away from the ark. Similarly, there is something practically rational about the survivor of religious trauma forming the intention to stay away from the sources of physical, moral, and spiritual injury, whether that is a religious text, leader,  practice, community, or religion as a whole. This might look like a choice to leave a particular church, no longer listening to the teaching of a certain rabbi, spending more time on secular concerns than religious ones, refusal to go to confession or any number of things. It might even involve complete disaffiliation from religion.

Insiders to the religious tradition may doubt whether such avoidant behaviors are what the survivor has an ultima facie reason to do. But it seems uncontroversial that past experience gives the survivor a prima facie reason, and a very strong one at that, to avoid such risks. And if it is a prima facie reason, it might end up being an ultima facie reason depending on other religious and personal details of the situation. An insider might also think that even if religious trauma gives survivors temporary reasons to cease engaging in certain religious practices and attitudes, the truth of the claims of the religious tradition also give the survivor strong reasons to try to recover from the impact of the trauma so that they may return. It may be true that if a religious tradition is true and good, it would be in the survivor’s best interest not to be permanently alienated from it.  However, it is important to remember that historically, clinical treatment for post-traumatic distress is a new development, and folk practices of soul care within various cultures vary from the deeply effective and healing to radically harmful. In the West, as recently as the beginning of WWI, post-traumatic distress was regarded as moral weakness and treated by dubious means, such as adversarial critique and electric shock therapy (Fassin and Rechtman Reference Fassin and Rechtman2009). Today, therapy is often expensive, not covered by insurance, in short supply in rural and marginalized communities, and not available all over the world. Treatment for post-traumatic distress has varying success rates, and evidence-based therapy for specifically religious trauma is still in its infancy. Community practices of mourning, bearing witness, testifying, and caring in the wake of traumatic suffering have and continue to exist in different forms in cultures the world over, but because these practices are often intertwined with the very religious traditions and practices that have caused harm, one cannot assume that tools for healing will be available to everyone who needs them. In other words, healing from religious trauma (whatever that amounts to) may be a valuable goal, but it is unlikely to be available to everyone, and even when it is available, healing is a slow, sometimes life-long, process without guaranteed results. As such, the philosophical and theological answer to “what about people who cannot trust God because of religious trauma?” should not depend primarily on the possibility of healing.

Finally, like trauma more generally, the effects of trauma on agency are not always uniformly bad. Survivors of religious trauma are currently among the fiercest voices for reform in each of the religious traditions mentioned in this section. People living with the effects of religious trauma are often able to see the connection between theology and abusive practice and between religious structures and practices on one hand and vulnerability to abuse and misuses of power one the other with a clarity that others lack. As we will briefly consider in the last section, the capacity for dissociation sometimes developed in trauma is correlated with some valuable spiritual skills and experience, such as the ability to enter trance states and success in meditation. Trauma survivors possess skills and wisdom that they have developed in the midst of horror that they and their communities may value. However, we must not regard these as silver linings to weigh in the scales of cosmic justice against the horror of the trauma. We must bear witness both to the horror of spiritual abuse and to the wisdom and agency of survivors if we are to do either justice.

3.1 Not Knowing

Miranda Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice (“hermeneutics” has to do with interpretation of texts and discourse) as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (Fricker Reference Fricker2007: 155). By “hermeneutical resources,” Fricker means something like socially available conceptual schemes, predominant understandings of the social world, and their semantic designations. By “structural identity prejudice,” she refers to prejudices against individuals in virtue of their social identity that manifest not only in individual attitudes but in the very ways that societies are structured. Under unjust conditions, there are aspects of life where “the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation” (152). This can result, on the one hand, in members of the less powerful groups lacking the conceptual resources necessary to correctly understand and communicate significant aspects of their experience (hermeneutical injustice), or, on the other hand, in members of the more privileged group willfully refusing to learn or engage with the hermeneutical resources that marginalized communities have already developed. This is what Kristie Dotson calls contributory injustice (Dotson Reference Dotson2012) and Gaile Pohlhause calls willful hermeneutical ignorance (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012).

Consider, first, hermeneutical injustice. While Fricker herself often writes of hermeneutical injustice in terms of hermeneutical gaps (cases where a concept is completely missing from the hermeneutical repertoire), I have argued elsewhere that there are important cases where all of the relevant conceptual resources exist within the dominant community, but value-laden concepts encourage miscategorization of experiences. This miscategorization distorts understanding of one’s own experiences and keeps one from knowing or understanding its moral contours (Panchuk Reference Panchuk2020). Lani’s theological framework encourages her to believe that it “was [her parents’] God-given duty to show love” by beating her (Harper Reference Harper2013b). As a result, even though she has the concept of “abuse” and could recognize it in other contexts, her theological framework excludes her own suffering from this description. Aisha is told that the harassment she experienced – an experience she is able to recognize and name – is part of haqiqa rather than abuse. Her act of resistance in reporting harassment is re-interpreted as the sin of “backbiting a wali.” As a result, she cannot initially understand the judgment and blame directed at her by members of her community as victim-blaming. This framework causes her to doubt her initial understanding and temporarily prevents her from fully grasping the nature of her own experience. We can think of these as first-order misclassifications because the victim categorizes their experience under the wrong action or experience-type: “discipline” instead of “abuse” in Lani’s case and haqiqa instead of “harassment” in Aisha’s case.

At the second-order level, an individual may understand their own experience as falling under the correct action-type, but, for similar reasons, understand those action-types as falling under the wrong higher-order type. Both Klaudia and Devorah know that they are being sexually assaulted, but rather than understanding assault as something for which they bear no guilt or shame before God, their theological frameworks (and perhaps general cultural narratives that blame victims) encourage them to understand the abuse as something they should have been able to stop, and something for which God must be angry – as their own sin.

In each of the earlier cases, the victim is harmed as a knower, because they cannot fully understand their experiences or explain them to others. They are harmed as agents, because their lack of knowledge prevents them from acting in accordance with their true interests and values. Together these result in social, personal, and religious harms. First, if one does not know that one is being abused, or that God would want one to be protected from abuse, then one is more likely to be subjected to the abuse for longer, which in turn may increase the likelihood and severity of any post-traumatic effects. Second, abusers often target and groom people who are unlikely to be able to recognize or escape the abuse. Thus, the same religious discourse that makes it difficult for some religious practitioners to recognize abuse may make them more vulnerable to being abused in the first place.

Finally, the skewed hermeneutical resources may themselves be spiritually traumatic. Consider the examples of spiritual abuse of LGBTQ+ evangelicals described in the last section.  It is not only that believing that their sexuality is an abomination prevents LGBTQ+ Christians from recognizing practices of religious conversion therapy as abusive. The very internalization of the theological perspective is itself spiritually violent (Tobin Reference Tobin and Rossi2016), causing LGBTQ+ Christians to perceive God as disgusted with and even fundamentally against them.  Similarly, the possibility that a violation of sexual boundaries could be part of ruqya or haqiqa may be both traumatic and damaging to a Muslim’s relationship to the Divine and the religious community, whether or not one is actually subjected to any form of sexual harassment. Lani struggles in her relationship with God even after escaping her abusive family. Not only can love, divine and human, never be a source of refuge, comfort, or safety within this theological framework, but even after a person has rejected the framework, the affective resonance of those concepts may linger, causing love to continue to feel unsafe or triggering.

There are no doubt numerous other social epistemic mechanisms that can serve to harm sufferers of religious trauma in their identity as knowers. Testimonial injustice, gaslighting, educational neglect, and outright lies, among others, can all serve to undermine knowledge in ways that are themselves religiously traumatic, keep the victim from understanding that they are experiencing abuse or violence, and make escape from the spiritual environment more difficult.  I suspect that the practices of high control groups that have sometimes been called “brain washing” include a combination of just such epistemic practices. But what is crucial to keep in mind is that while “brain washing” has the connotations of a practice completely outside the control of the subject, the epistemic landscape described in this section, while hostile to knowledge and agency, does not fully undermine the subject’s epistemic agency. Rather, it corrupts agency, rendering what it is most rational for the individual to believe, given their evidence, something deeply at odds not only with reality, but with their own goals and values. It is this corruption of epistemic and spiritual agency that is so insidious, because it renders victims complicit in their own victimization.

3.2 Needing Not to Know

Victims of religious abuse and trauma are not the only ones whose knowledge is limited by spiritually abusive systems.  Enablers, communities, and even perpetrators themselves can also  manage not to know about the abuse happening in their midst.  As Judith Herman puts it,

In explaining hermeneutical injustice, Fricker notes that there are aspects of life where “the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation” (152).  They do not need to know and so do not care to name or learn names for these experiences. But in addition to not needing to know, sometimes humans need not to know. We can have an interest in not knowing truths that are uncomfortable or make moral demands on us. Linda Martín Alcoff calls this the difference between “ignorance [as a] feature of neglectful epistemic practice [and] as a substantive epistemic practice in itself” (Alcoff Reference Alcoff and Tuana2007: 39). Sometimes it is the individual who wants not to know things. These can be one-off cases of self-deception or willful ignorance, and can range in significance from merely silly (believing one’s favorite underdog team will win the next world series against the evidence) to deeply pernicious (refusing to recognize that one’s overuse of alcohol is harming others).  But in addition to cases of individual intentional ignorance, communities of epistemic practice may be constructed to facilitate willful ignorance among those who benefit from not knowing. Mills gives the example of how the conceptual framework of “savage” and “civilized” made it possible for the framers of the constitution to write of the equality of all men while simultaneously dispossessing vast numbers of men of their land and counting others as three-fifths of a free person without any sense of cognitive dissonance. An entire way of life depended on these practices, and so there was deep motivation not to know that Black and Indigenous people are members of the moral community. This unknowing required a tailor-made conceptual framework and practices of avoidance that would keep the community from facing evidence to the contrary (Mills 2007: 26–27).  Mills calls this “white ignorance.” In philosophy, epistemologies of ignorance have given most attention to ignorance related to racial and gender-based oppression (Ortega Reference Ortega2006; Fricker Reference Fricker2007; Mills 2007; Dotson Reference Dotson2012; Medina Reference Medina2012; Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012), but they occur in religious contexts as well.

In the context of religious trauma, both those holding institutional power and the general community (especially those members least vulnerable to victimization) often need not to know of the reality and pervasiveness of abuse within their communities. Knowing might threaten a status quo in which they find comfort and meaning. This need can result in conceptual frameworks and epistemic practices aimed at maintaining ignorance. Sometimes leaders who do know about religious abuse simply lie and cover up the facts in order to prevent others from knowing. More insidious are practices that facilitate the unknowing of the leaders themselves.  The very hermeneutical resources that encourage people like Lani and Aisha to misunderstand their own experience can allow their abusers and the community to convinced themselves that no one is being abused. It is fully possible that Lani’s parents did not believe they were abusing their children and that the Shaykh’s community did not believe he was sexually harassing women, because they were participating in and benefiting from epistemic systems that facilitate this unknowing. Abusers are culpable for their abuse, even when they don’t fully recognize they are doing it, because they should know that what they are doing is wrong. Furthermore, we are responsible for self-deception and willful ignorance. Theological frameworks that sanctify harm may explain how abusers and enablers are able not to know, but it does not exonerate them.

Kristie Dotson describes a specific kind of willful ignorance especially relevant to religious trauma. This is contributory injustice (Reference Dotson2012).  Contributory injustice occurs when a marginalized community has developed the conceptual resources to make their experiences intelligible to themselves and to others, but the dominant community refuses to engage with or give sufficient up-take to those resources. As online survivor communities, documentaries, and social media discourse around spiritual abuse and religious trauma have exploded over the past decade, survivors are increasingly developing the hermeneutical resources to make their experiences intelligible. The very existence of terms such as “church hurt,” “spiritual abuse,” “spiritual violence,” religious trauma,” “spiritual bypassing,” “sacramental shame,” and “deconstruction” and social media movements such as “#churchtoo,” “#mosquemetoo,” “#GamAni” (Hebrew for “me too”), and “#shultoo” all demonstrate that survivors and their allies have come together to name and describe their experience.

Contributory injustice is what happens when religious communities refuse to take up, or willfully misinterpret, the significance of these conceptual resources. This can happen when a community refuses to engage with the resources at all, by continuing to treat those experiencing the impact of religious trauma as “in rebellion against God” for their failure to engage “appropriate” religious practices and attitudes. Alternatively, communities may acknowledge the existence of the hermeneutical resources, but deny that they accurately describe reality.  One sees this when religious leaders say that the stories shared by #mosquemetoo are made up or exaggerated by people wanting to “backbite a wali,” when they claim that “spiritual abuse” is a term made up by those who do not want to submit to “biblical discipline,” that those who “deconstruct” just want to have promiscuous sex, or that talking about trauma proves the survivor is bitter. Finally, contributory injustice can manifest in the appropriation of these concepts for uses that undermine the goals for which they were developed. Consider, for example, the appropriation of the concept of “grooming” by those who oppose the exposure of children to the existence of people with non-cisheteronormative gender identities and sexual orientations in the church. “Grooming” describes the process by which an abuser targets, tests, and prepares a potential victim for the abuse.  It often involves displays of affection and care, small boundary violations, and isolation, so that when the abuse begins the victim has little recourse. Calling it “grooming” to allow queer Christians to exist openly in church serves to associate queer Christians with child abusers, to vilify those who affirm them, and to undermine attempts to deploy the concept of grooming to protect children from real harm. Similarly, it is a form of contributory injustice when pastors call demands for accountability for wrongdoing “spiritual abuse.”  All of these practices help maintain ignorance, not only of those in positions of institutional power, but also of the members of the community who need not to know about religious trauma in order for their illusions about their faith not to be destabilized. It is terrifying to face the possibility that (parts of) the community and practices that one thought nourishing are actually rotten.

3.3 Knowing Religious Trauma

While epistemic environments that foster conditions for religious trauma can occlude understanding for victims and their communities, being marginally situated within a community because of religious abuse can impart epistemic benefits. Standpoint epistemologists have long argued that one’s social situation shapes what one can and cannot know, and what one needs, does not need, and needs not to know. As Pohlhaus notes, “repeated over time, [experiences of oppression] can lead to habits of expectation, attention, and concern, thereby contributing to what one is more or less likely to notice and pursue as an object of knowledge in the experienced world” (Reference Pohlhaus2012: 717).

Consider the difference between an abusive parent and the abused child.  The abusive parent may not have an interest in, and perhaps a vested interest in not, understanding how the abuse feels to the child. The child, on the other hand, has a deep interest in understanding the moods, preferences, habits, and desires of the abuser. They need to understand how the abuser sees the world in order to placate the abuser as much as possible. The child may be forced to develop a vision of the world as it seems to themselves and a vision of the world as it seems to the abuser. Feminist epistemologists sometimes call this phenomenon “double vision,” borrowing from W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of  “double consciousness.” Thus, the standpoint epistemologist argues, the marginalized may not just have knowledge of different things than the privileged. They may have more complete and accurate knowledge in certain domains. Furthermore, such a social position can encourage one to foster an awareness of the human tendency to only see certain things. As José Medina puts it, “the realization of one’s [social] invisibility entails that one becomes to oneself – painfully, sometimes even traumatically – the living proof that there is more to be seen than what others (some others) see” (Reference Medina2012: 191–192).  He also notes that when responded to correctly, this realization can motivate the epistemic virtue of meta-lucidity – an awareness of “the effects of oppression on our cognitive structures and of the limitations in epistemic practices (of seeing, talking, hearing, reasoning etc.) grounded in relations of oppression” (192). Nothing about being socially marginalized guarantees meta-lucidity, and being socially privileged does not preclude it. Rather, Medina and most contemporary standpoint epistemologists speak of tendency and opportunities to achieve a particular epistemic stance afforded by social position. Furthermore, feminist epistemologists note that there are deep personal and epistemic costs to double vision and the epistemic labor that it requires (Narayan Reference Narayan and Harding2004).

Those who have experienced religious trauma are socially positioned as epistemically privileged with respect to spiritual abuse and religious trauma in their particular religious environment. This is the case, first, because religious trauma is a transformative experience.  According to L. A. Paul, a transformative experience is one that transforms the individual in at least two ways (Paul Reference Paul2014).  First, it transforms them epistemically, giving them access to knowledge of what the experience is like.  Second, it changes one’s values, preferences, and goals.

The person who has experienced spiritual abuse and religious trauma may know what it is like to feel as if God’s presence is woven into the very experience of abuse, to fear that God hates one’s very capacity for loving others, or to have the melanin levels in one’s skin referred to as a curse inflicted for murder.  The survivor may also develop new values, preferences, practices, and goals that directly flow from their experience. Religious trauma survivors are often especially attentive to the warning signs of abuse and to religious structures that render people more vulnerable. They may place higher value on institutional transparency, on interpersonal care, and on bearing witness to the suffering of others. This collection of knowledge, epistemic virtues, and values can place them in a position of epistemic privilege with respect to religious trauma.  This does not happen automatically. A religiously traumatized person may be deeply invested in not acknowledging their own victimization or the extent of its impact in their life. Nonetheless, the experience of trauma may be part of what places some survivors in a position to know and develop virtues that would be difficult to attain via other means.

When it comes to traumatic experience, people who have not experienced a particular kind of trauma tend not to be good at grasping what such experiences are like or at recognizing the degree to which they do not understand what such experiences are like. The deep epistemic changes that are a classic response to traumatic experiences point in this direction. How could it be that exposure to horrors radically changes our understanding of the world, and of ourselves, if most of us are already aware that sexual assault, child abuse, war, and natural disasters are common human experiences, and if we already understand what they are like? We know that they exist, and we know that they are deeply bad. But they tend only to shake our faith or cause us to question our assumptions about the justice and good in the world when we or someone we love experiences them directly. This suggests that we did not previously fully appreciate either what the experiences were like or our own ignorance of it.

One might chalk this up to a failure of empathy or to irrationality. In the introduction to his book on theodicy, Peter van Inwagen suggests that it is “just irrational” for a woman to begin doubting her faith when her own child is diagnosed with cancer when she already knew that other people’s children die of cancer and that did not cause her to doubt the existence of a loving God (van Inwagen Reference van Inwagen2006: 10). While van Inwagen rightly acknowledges that it would be stupid and cruel to say such a thing to a grieving mother, I also think that it would likely be false. A better explanation of these phenomena is that (1) there are some experiences that we simply cannot correctly imagine or cognitively model until we have had them, as per Paul’s account of transformative experience,  (2) our epistemic practices discourage us from attending appropriately to the evidence that we do not know what these experiences are like before we have had them, and (3) our social world obscures the ways in which this ignorance shapes our preferences and values. We are invested in not recognizing that our faith might have been shaken if our lives had gone differently and that our favorite theodicy might not assuage our doubts if we had suffered more or differently.

With respect to the lived experience of spiritual abuse and religious trauma, the average religious individual appears to be like a version of Frank Jackson’s Mary (a color scientist who knows all of the relevant facts about color vision but who has spent her entire life in a black and white room and has never experienced the color red for herself) who, prior to exiting her black and white room, is confident that there is no significant difference between her understanding of color vision and the painter’s, and that her values and preferences will not be significantly changed by whatever she experiences when she steps outside (Jackson Reference Jackson1986). She does not know what seeing red is like and she does not understand the sense in which she does not know what seeing red is like. Moreover, she does not understand how this lack of knowledge shapes her preferences and values. Not only does the average, religious individual who has not experienced religious or spiritual abuse not know what religious trauma is like, but religious institutions often make it difficult, via denial, deflection, or the vilification of survivors, to attend to the stories and experiences of survivors in a way that would help them recognize either their ignorance or the way their ignorance facilitates their comfort.

When we combine the potential epistemic privilege of survivors with the epistemic disadvantage and potential epistemic vices of the general community, we see why it behooves religious communities to listen attentively to the testimony of survivors, and to exercise toward them testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory justice. Testimonial justice requires that the listener ratchet up their credibility judgments with respect to survivors, knowing that identity prejudice, as well as their lack of comprehension of the lived experience of religious trauma, may make them prone to inappropriately low credibility judgments (Fricker Reference Fricker2007: 90–91).  Hermeneutical justice requires special effort to make sense of the testimony of those who may not have the full hermeneutical resources to make their experience and their judgments communicatively intelligible.  It requires working creatively with the speaker to elucidate difficult to describe reality (Fricker Reference Fricker2007: 171–173).  And finally, contributory justice would motivate the community to educate themselves in and adopt the hermeneutical resources offered by the religious trauma survivor community and their allies.  These things are required for epistemic justice not because survivors are always right or because they always agree among themselves, but because they are positioned to have the knowledge and develop the epistemic character, values, and practices with respect to religious trauma that are lacking in the community at large. They can provide needed epistemic friction to the status quo that benefits the community epistemically and spiritually.

José Medina postulates that some marginalized people who have developed the “meta-lucidity” mentioned earlier find themselves in a position to radically challenge the epistemic norms of the society at large.  These become “epistemic heroes,” not because they necessarily do more than others to challenge the epistemic environment, but because, for a combination of reasons, their actions become well-known enough to become emblematic and echoable (repeatable) in ways that result in chained epistemic action (Reference Medina2012: 229).  Medina presents Rosa Parks as an epistemic hero of the civil rights movement. For Medina, Parks’s actions are not best understood in an individualistic way as a lone woman choosing in isolation to refuse to give up her seat, but in the context of a social movement in which it had become intelligible for her action to be seen as an act of resistance, emblematic of the practices of the entire movement, and repeatable by others in joint, chained actions (234–248).

With respect to religious trauma, the world has been blessed with many epistemic heroes, and individual religious communities also have their own who function as local epistemic heroes. Within Christianity, the survivors who, like Phil Saviano, spoke out against abuse in the Catholic Church and collaborated with journalists from The Boston Globe to shed light on a systemic cover-up of abuse, became epistemic heroes. Even though we do not know all of their names, we know the epistemic work that they did. As with Parks, their epistemic courage was made possible by a number of social factors, including the emergence of stories of Catholic clergy sexual abuse in Ireland, journalists who were willing to tell their stories, and a public that was ready to listen.  A full decade before The Boston Globe went public with their stories, Sinéad O’Conner ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in protest of clergy sexual abuse. She faced severe backlash for this choice, but wrote in an open letter about it that

Hers and others’ actions were part of creating a world where Saviano and others could exercise the epistemic courage they did. They became emblems of a movement against Catholic clergy sexual abuse that has been echoed in chained actions around the world. People like Rachel Denhollender, Christa Brown, Jill and Jess Duggar, Debrah Feldman, Malkie Schwartz, Danish Qasim, and Danya Shakfeh might all be thought to play this role in their respective communities. They are epistemic heroes not because they are flawless, always right, or have necessarily done more than others, but because what they have done has received the public recognition necessary to serve as models that others may follow. Religious communities would do well to listen so that they can begin to know, and so that victims and survivors among them can more fully know their own experiences.

4.1 Evaluating Theodicies and Defenses in Light of Religious Trauma

A popular response to the problem of (moral) evil in contemporary philosophy of religion is the Free Will Defense, argued for most influentially by Alvin Plantinga, but also defended by post-holocaust theologians like Eliezer Berkovits. On this view, God does not directly cause the suffering and evil in our world. God simply creates human beings with free will and gives them the space to develop and exercise it. According to Plantinga, God cannot both create free beings and guarantee that they never use their freedom for evil (Plantinga Reference Plantinga1989: 34–44).  If free will is a great enough good, then God is justified in creating beings with it, even though doing so creates the possibility of evil and suffering. For Berkovits, God’s apparent absence to believers in some suffering is a necessary condition for the full realization of human freedom. He says, “[t]hat man may be, God must absent himself” and that “[God’s] very love for man necessitates the abandonment of some men to a fate that they may well experience as indifference to justice and human suffering” (Berkovits Reference Berkovits1973: 107–109).

In her recent book God, Suffering, and the Value of Free Will, Laura Ekstrom challenges the notion that free will is a great enough good to justify the kinds and degrees of suffering caused by it (Reference Ekstrom2021). Many, including Plantinga, assume without argument that free will is a very great good. But Ekstrom herself seriously doubts this. Religious trauma emphasizes some of her points in a particularly poignant way. If both free will and commitment to God are very great goods, then it is reasonable to think that freely loving, worshiping, and submitting to God is a great good. But religious trauma undermines some people’s ability to freely choose to love and submit to God. As Melissa Raphael has argued in response to Berkovits, the free will defense entails that free will is such a great good that it is reasonable to sacrifice the human dignity and free will of some (those whose agency is undermined by abuse and suffering) so that others may freely exercise theirs (those who choose to abuse them) (Raphael Reference Raphael, Anderson and Clack2004). For Raphael, Berkovits’s account makes the degradation of women, children, and men “feminized by their powerlessness” the price of  “masculine becoming” (Raphael Reference Raphael, Anderson and Clack2004: 136). In the context of religious trauma, it seems that the very great good of some people’s religious and spiritual agency is sacrificed for the “good” of some people being able to freely choose to abuse them.

Such considerations are not conclusive arguments against the free will defense. The defender might insist that as long as the number of people who get to exercise free will in relationship to God outweighs the number of people whose free will is undermined, then God might still have a morally sufficient reason for allowing the suffering associated with loss of the religious and spiritual agency. Alternatively, one might think that those whose spiritual agency is so thoroughly undermined by religious trauma that they cannot engage in relationship with God are like anyone whose disability undermines their capacity for spiritual agency or interpersonal connection. If this is right, then religious trauma might be thought to constitute no more (or less) of a defeater for the defense than other kinds of disability. I think it is right to consider post-traumatic distress under the rubric of disability, and I am strongly committed to the view that, all other things being equal, people whose capacities for morally and spiritually responsible agency are limited or nonexistent due to disability can have lives worth living.  However, responding to the problem posed by religious trauma by pointing out the goodness of lives where agency is significantly diminished is unlikely to be a promising approach for the proponent of the free will defense.

Others have thought that it is not enough for one person’s suffering to be outweighed by a good experienced by someone else. Eleonore Stump, for example, develops a Thomistic response to the problem of suffering. She argues that, for Aquinas, the deepest desire of the human heart and the greatest good for humans is union with God. Flourishing as a human is distinct both from flourishing in mind and in body, because flourishing as a human involves obtaining the highest good and the deepest desire of the human heart. As such, suffering, even great suffering, can be compatible with human flourishing if it promotes the highest good. Furthermore, she argues that it is possible that whatever suffering God allows each person to experience is the best available means to bring about the greatest good for that person: to bring her into (greater) union with God.  “Suffering,” says Stump “is a means to human flourishing either because it is medicinal for those things disturbed in the psyche of a human person that keep him from being willing to let God be close to him, or because it is healing and instrumental in bringing a human person to greater closeness to God, or both” (Reference Stump2010: 457).

Similarly, a traditional view in Islam is that human suffering is not a theoretical problem to be solved, but a necessary aspect of human spiritual development (Rouzati Reference Rouzati2018).  This is illustrated by a famous passage from the Sufi poet Rūmī’s Mathnawī, which tells of a chickpea crying out to the woman cooking it in a pot, begging for relief from its suffering.  The cook responds by saying, “I do not boil you because you are hateful to me; nay, ‘tis that you may get taste; this affliction of yours is not on account of you being despised. Continue, O chickpea, to boil in tribulation, that neither existence nor self may remain to Thee” (Rouzati Reference Rouzati2018: 10). This last bit of the line refers to the Sufi understanding of annihilation in tawhid – union with God so complete that the self ceases to exist as a distinct entity.  The final end of suffering is union with God.

There is much to commend about Stump’s and Rūmī’s view. If anything can justify God’s allowing the horrendous suffering of human persons, those sufferings being the best available means to give a person the greatest good and the deepest desires of their heart – union with God or tawhid – would be a strong candidate. It is also true that some kinds and degrees of suffering make us better people.  No one develops virtues like courage, tenacity, and resilience without facing adversity. The question is, even if it is not logically impossible for the aforementioned accounts to obtain (there are no inconsistencies in the propositions), is it plausible to think that suffering of the kinds and degrees seen in the actual world tends to produce these outcomes when responded to correctly by the humans who experience them?

We  know from the first section that traumatic suffering tends to have a dis-integrating impact on the self, undermining agency and the capacity for interpersonal relationship.  I argue elsewhere that the nature of traumatic suffering in general undermines the plausibility of Stump’s defense (Panchuk Reference Panchuk2023), but the evidence from religious trauma is particularly poignant. If the deepest desire of the human heart and what is truly best for us is union with God, and religious trauma does, in fact, undermine our capacity for engaging in relationship with God and in the religious and spiritual practices that facilitate that relationship, then it looks deeply implausible that religious trauma could be God’s best means to give someone what is truly best for them or that it is something that could facilitate the achievement of tawhid. Of course, both Stump and the Sufi tradition affirm that human persons are imperfect. We do not always think, act, desire, and intend as we should. After briefly acknowledging the possibility of a “negative re-organization of the self” in the wake of suffering, Stump points out that just because any suffering that God allows has the power to be medicinal or healing, this alone cannot guarantee that the suffering will actually bring about the avoidance of the worst thing or the achievement of the best thing the human person can experience, because they can choose to exercise their free will otherwise (459). Thus, on Stump’s view, those who do not spiritually benefit from their experience of religious trauma are personally responsible for this failure.

Such a response to apparent counter-evidence seems to defend the ways of God to man at the expense of (unintentional) victim-blaming and gaslighting. The view not only entails that victims are at fault for not benefiting from their suffering, but may make them doubt the veracity of their own experience of the trauma and its aftermath as something they could not have chosen to spiritually benefit from. Of course, no survivor can prove that they have not chosen not to heal and be reconciled to God. Nor can they prove with certainty, while they are alive to do so, that the religious trauma will not have spiritually benefited them by the end of their life. But to insist on believing that they have, or that it will, in the face of their testimony to the contrary and in the absence of very strong evidence, simply because it would vindicate God, seems cruel and unloving. Such claims may compound the guilt and shame of existing religious trauma or even constitute a new instance of it.  Little is more traumatic than to face unspeakable abuse in the name of God only to be told that one’s own account of the impact of that abuse is untrustworthy because it conflicts with the community’s theology.

Another theodicy that may perpetuate religious trauma is the divine intimacy theodicy.  Michael Harris, for example, draws on Rabbinic teachings to argue that the concept of yissurin shel ahavah, “the afflictions of love,” is best understood not as a punishment theodicy or as a soul-making theodicy, but as a species of divine intimacy theodicy. According to Harris, intimacy with the divine may be experienced not only through suffering, where God is present to the individual as they suffer, but in suffering. When intimacy is experienced in suffering, (1) God directly causes the suffering, and (2) the very act of inflicting the suffering is an expression of divine love. God’s is a “crushing, loving embrace,” like a friend’s whose hug is so tight that it hurts (Harris Reference Harris2016: 81). However, God only visits such suffering on those who accept the suffering with love (82). In a footnote, Harris cites the Schottenstein translation of the Talmud as saying that yissurin shel ahavah “are visited upon a person only if they are accepted with consent” (82).Footnote ³

It is important to note that Harris is neither trying to give a complete theodicy nor does he actually endorse yissurin shel ahavah as theodicy. He only claims that the concept should be understood in a certain way and that it might explain some instances of suffering. However, the picture of God inherent in such an account seems problematic. It paints God in the image of a human abuser. In truth, we only feel loved by the friend’s overly tight hug if it does not actually harm us and if we know the friend is not intentionally hurting us. As soon as the discomfort turns to harm or is intentionally inflicted, the embrace ceases to be an expression of love and becomes an act of abuse. If such a person were to declare, “I only hurt you because I love you,” we would rightly condemn them as an abuser. One might think that the requirement for consent removes this concern. However, it is unclear whether in the context of the general Jewish ideal “of accepting divinely-imposed suffering with love and joy, or at least without complaint” (82), the belief that rejecting the suffering necessarily involves a rejection of the rewards of suffering (87), not to mentioned the infinite power differential between God and humans, that such consent could be sufficiently robust. Full-throated consent is undermined in a context where submission and consent are idealized in relationship to God and where refusal amounts to a refusal of intimacy.

Harris does not write about scenarios of religious trauma, so I cannot say if he would consider them candidates for instances of the afflictions of love.  However, encouraging people of faith to perceive certain instances of suffering as having been caused directly by God, not as punishment, but as a pure expression of love, could itself be a source of religious trauma, particularly for people who have experienced abuse at the hands of human abusers who described the abuse in similar ways. Additionally, in suggesting that inflicting suffering is a legitimate way of fostering intimacy, Harris’s theodicy may unintentionally render those who embrace it more vulnerable to and less likely to escape abuse coming from humans who claim to love them.Footnote ⁴

4.2 Evaluating Skeptical Theism in Light of Religious Trauma

Skeptical Theism is a different kind of response to the problem of suffering. According to the skeptical theist even if an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God has morally justifying reasons for allowing horrific suffering, finite beings like us should not expect to have epistemic access to those reasons. When presented with an atheistic argument from suffering, the skeptical theist will say that humans are not in a position to infer from their inability to see or imagine a reason that would justify God in allowing suffering that there is no such reason. Michael Bergmann suggests that skeptical theism is committed to the following skeptical theses:

Although skeptical theism has primarily been used as a response to the problem of suffering, Michael Rea also offers a version of a skeptical response to the problem of divine hiddenness (Reference Rea2018). According to Rea, the problem of divine hiddenness is primarily a problem of violated expectations. Just as we expect good human parents to be present and available for relationship with their kids if they can, so too we expect God, as a perfect heavenly parent, to be present and available for relationship with us. Rea thinks that our human expectations are unjustified, particularly in light of the Christian doctrine of divine transcendence. According to Rea, we should not expect divine love to be similar to perfect human love, only ideal and unlimited, because humans are neither the proper object of, nor capable of enduring, unlimited union with the divine. So while it might be a form of neglect for human parents to be apparently absent, it cannot be rationally inferred that God’s apparent absence is a sign of neglect or nonexistence.

The skeptical response may feel deeply familiar to survivors whose abusers told them that they were too immature, bad, or stupid to understand why the abuse was justified: “Just because you think you are being abused doesn’t mean you are.” “You may not understand now, but trust me. One day you’ll understand that this is for your own good.” “God says to do this, and God’s ways are higher than your ways.” Skeptical Theists claim that our ignorance of possible goods and evils and their entailment relations render us unwarranted in making the judgment that God lacks good reasons. Human abusers sometimes claim that a child’s ignorance of possible goods and evils render them unwarranted in making the judgment that their abuser, and often God through the abuser, lacks justification for their behavior. But abused children sometimes do know that they are being abused, despite having reasons to accept that there is a moral knowledge gap between them and their abuser. Moreover, only their abusers, and those who may benefit from their abuse, wish them to accept that they are unwarranted in forming this belief. For a survivor who has had to work to overcome the epistemic injustice of being deprived of knowledge of their own abuse in this particular way, skeptical theism may suggest that their former self-doubt was not an injustice at all, but an appropriate manifestation of epistemic humility.

Even if the skeptical theist rejects a strong analogy between the two cases (the knowledge gap is greater in the divine case), it is still worth considering the moral significance of the resonance here. Should encouraging people to form true beliefs about God’s reasons really involve making such similar arguments to those commonly made by abusers? The skeptical theist might respond that there are all sorts of things that are abusive when humans do them that are perfectly legitimate for God to do (e.g., requesting worship). But this misses the force of the objection. In both the divine and the human case, the central theses are reasonable.  Humans have no good reason to think that all the goods they know of are representative of all the goods there are. A child has no good reason to think that all the goods they know of are representative of all the goods there are and about which their abuser knows, even if the child is in fact more morally perceptive in many senses than their abuser. The issue here is the way that genuine ignorance and reasonable epistemic humility are deployed to undercut warrant for taking oneself as a competent interpreter of one’s own experiences of suffering.

Rea’s skeptical response to the problem of divine hiddenness avoids this particular problem. Humans are not transcendent, and so we can evaluate human love according to the standard norms even though the concept cannot be applied literally to God. For Rea, a central question, then, is what makes it apt to apply the term “love” to God, when the concept diverges so greatly, when applied to God, from its sense when applied to humans. Rea sensitively answers this question in reference to those whose relationships with God are marred by religious abuse. One way the Christian God shows love to such people is by authorizing not only lament, but also protest directed toward God (a tradition of protest toward God is also prominent within Judaism). Rea writes,

Following Walter Brueggamnn, he further notes that relating to the divine in the mode of protest may help to strengthen the survivor’s sense of self and personal agency following trauma.  In a similar vein, Marilyn McCord Adams endorses “praying angry”:

I cannot overstate my appreciation for Rea’s and Adams’s work on this topic. Lament and protest in personal and corporate prayer are powerful and therapeutic tools for survivors and their communities to bear witness to suffering and to doing healing work (Panchuk Reference Panchuk2023), and so I see Rea’s contribution as in the spirit of Griffieon’s call for therapeutic theodicy.

However, given a strong tradition in Christianity of modeling human love on the image of divine love, I fear that viewing God’s apparent absence to those abused in the divine name as compatible with divine love may be harmful both to survivors and to religious communities. If God can love us while remaining silent and failing to intervene while we are being abused in God’s name, and humans are to love as God loves, then those who, for their own comfort and ease, fail to protect the vulnerable, follow a divine example. It may be difficult for survivors to accept that those who failed to intervene on their behalf at little cost to themselves were failing to love them as they should, but that God’s very same refusal is not evidence of the same failure of love. Of course, the philosopher can give myriad reasons why the reasons and obligations humans have differ from those God has. God may be justified in inaction while humans are not. But this approach, along with Rea’s, challenges the popular idea that we should be “imitators of God.” When humans imitate God, they may behave as moral monsters. The degree to which this is revisionary at the level of popular Christian thought, even if not in theological discourse, must be acknowledged and addressed.

5.1 Religious Trauma as Religious Experience

If religious experience is understood in the broadest possible sense as any experience of religion, then, of course, all religious trauma will count as a sort of religious experience, almost by definition. On the aforementioned narrower definition, a smaller but still very large proportion of religious trauma will count as religious experience, as it often involves experiences (as) of priests, religious practices, rituals, spiritual beings, and divine beings. Klaudia’s story in section two illustrates a putative experience of God in line with Alston or Plantinga’s perceptual models. Klaudia has an experience as of divine presence to her while being sexually abused by her priest. However, unlike most of the examples in contemporary philosophy of religion, she experiences God’s presence as judgmental and cold. Some Jewish scholars have interpreted the holocaust as an experience of God’s abuse of the people. Most notably, David Blumenthal argues that God’s absence in Auschwitz is the absence of a complicit parent who is themself culpable for the abuse.  “God is abusive, but not always… in this [abusive] mode, God “caused” the holocaust, or allowed it to happen” (Reference Blumenthal1993: 247). In a similar vein, Former Hasidic Jew Deborah Feldman recalls her grandmother, a survivor of Borgen-Belsen, saying, in response to the new mandate from their rabbi that women shave their heads in addition to wearing wigs and headscarves, “Zeidy tells me that the rebbe wants us to be more ehrlich, more devout, than any Jew ever was.  He says that if we go to extreme lengths to make God proud of us, he’ll never hurt us again, like he did in the war” (Feldman Reference Feldman2012: 25).  Blumenthal and Feldman’s grandmother both express a desire to remain in relationship with and to please this abusive God, but also experience some level of distrust.  Indeed, Blumenthal endorses protest against God’s permissive abuse in the tradition of the prophets. Others, including child abuse survivor Diane, and feminist theologian Wendy Farley, have argued in correspondence with Blumenthal that if these experiences of God as abuser are indeed veridical, then neither the Jewish people nor anyone else should continue to worship and remain in covenant relationship with God. Diane says, “God, omnipotent and uncaring, is someone whom I would never wish to encounter again. I would stay as far away from Him as possible, forever. He would not be deserving of my company, comfort, praise, and love.  Furthermore, I could not force myself to give anything to Him because fear, once felt can never be forgotten (Blumenthal Reference Blumenthal1993: 205–206).

Other experiences of God in religious trauma seem to be mediated by other spiritual realities that the individual experiences as an embodied being. When someone experiences awe as they gaze on a mountain vista, their religious experience is occasioned by their sensory experience of the view.  Other times, religious experience is mediated in an even more profound way, as when the scent of frankincense in liturgy is experienced as smelling God, or the taste of wine on one’s tongue is the taste of the Divine. Still other religiously traumatic experiences may be absence experiences, as the post-holocaust theology mentioned in the previous section suggests. And finally, religiously traumatic religious experiences may be of some other religiously significant reality that the individual closely associates with God. Nivedhan Singh describes the physical abuse that he experienced as a child at the hands of his father, an Episcopal Bishop, saying, “when I was a child, Bishop Singh was more than my father: he was my priest. When he beat me, God was beating me” (Singh Reference Singh2023). Similarly, clergy sexual abuse survivor Barbara Blaine says of herself and other survivors, “Many of us feel as if we had been raped by God” (Doyle Reference Doyle2009: 247).

Just as one might experience the priest offering the host in the Eucharist as a mediated experience of Christ offering himself to the church, so Singh’s experience of God beating him is mediated by his experience of his father beating him, as a priest.  Lori, in contrast, does not experience her father’s beatings as performed by God, but as performed at God’s behest. Thus, for Lori, all other religious experiences will likely be mediated by her hermeneutical framework in which God is the kind of being who commands beatings. Consider the employee who is told by their immediate supervisor that the boss has told the supervisor to reprimand them for some minor infraction. Even though the employee does not have a direct perceptual experience of the boss, subsequent interactions with the boss will be mediated by the employee’s understanding of the boss as unreasonably demanding. Similarly, Lori’s belief that physical abuse is commanded by God will serve as part of the background from which she experiences God and other aspects of Christianity in the future. That is, the initial experience of abuse may be a negatively-valenced religious experience, but it may also shape the way Lori experiences God in all sorts of contexts in the future. Similarly, Aisha experiences the sexual harassment as sexual harassment by a wali, and at least temporarily as part of ruqya.  Such an experience may shape her future experiences of both.

Finally, some kinds of religious trauma are experiences of other religiously significant realities. Consider the Haredi women who are abused by their husbands, the indigenous American children, and the LGBTQ+ evangelicals from section two. While there certainly may be some aspects of their experiences that are experiences of God, to a large degree the traumatic experience is religiously significant because of how it causes them to experience the self as a spiritual or religious being. The Haredi husband forces his wife to perform a violation of the religious law. The indigenous child is convinced that the Christian God views him as dirty. The LGBTQ+ Christian experiences their sexual urges as disordered or as abominations. Insofar as the human being is created by God and, in the three religious traditions considered in this volume, a being who is to live in relation to God, an experience of one’s self as a spiritual being is itself an experience of a religiously significant reality – that is, a religious experience.

That there is a “dark side” of religious experience is fairly uncontroversial, even if not widely discussed in the philosophical literature. William James acknowledges as much in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience when he points out that religious mysticism is only half of mysticism. The other “lower” half he describes in terms of mental illness, while acknowledging their deep similarities to the religious kind (James Reference James1902). While mental illness may cause negatively-valenced religious experiences, even deeply religiously traumatic ones, mental illness is not the primary locus of the kinds of religious trauma we have explored in this volume, nor are all the kinds of religious experiences prompted by religious trauma pathological.

The content explored in this volume is heavy and troubling.  The effects of religious trauma reach the very core of the self and the very source of meaning and life. No words are adequate for such harm. Nonetheless, for many who have experienced religious trauma, the trauma itself has not had the last word.  Survivors have found ways to exercise agency, free themselves, and rebuild new belief systems within or without religion in its aftermath.  No doubt the paths forward will be as diverse as the survivors forging these paths.  Nonetheless, in this final section, I suggest, however tentatively, two potentially agency-enhancing ways of thinking about religious trauma as religious experience: the connection between dissociation and mystical experiences and a therapeutic theodicy.

5.2 Dissociation and Mystical Experience

Recently, work in psychology and sociology suggests future directions for research into a connection between religious trauma and religious experience: the relationship between experiences of dissociation and the trait of absorption.  Absorption is a personality trait described by psychologists as a “tendency to become deeply engrossed in sensory or imaginative experiences” (Lifshitz et al. Reference Lifshitz, Van Elk and Luhrmann2019: 2) or “the capacity to become absorbed in inner sensory stimuli and to lose some awareness of external sensory stimuli” (Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2005: 142).  Dissociation, in contrast, is described by the American Psychological Association as a disintegration of integration of memory, perceptions, identity, emotions, and behaviors with one’s sense of self, and is strongly associated with experiences of trauma. Classic symptoms of dissociation are amnesia, depersonalization, and derealization. Yet, absorption has been found not only to correlate strongly with the tendency to have religious experiences, from a more mundane sense of the presence of God in daily prayer to the likelihood of having intense and spiritually meaningful trips while on psychedelics (Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2004; Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2005; Lifshitz et al. Reference Lifshitz, Van Elk and Luhrmann2019), but also with measures of dissociation (Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2004; Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2005; Lifshitz et al. Reference Lifshitz, Van Elk and Luhrmann2019). While the explanation and significance of the overlap between absorption and dissociation remains highly controversial (Lifshitz et al. Reference Lifshitz, Van Elk and Luhrmann2019), a number of studies have been done that are significant in considering the relationship between religious trauma and mystical and religious experiences.

In two provocative articles, Tanya Luhrmann argues that the frequency and character of dissociative symptoms in the wake of trauma that were common at both the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, but which all but disappeared in the intervening period, emerged from an interplay between the effects of trauma and the valorization of absorption and trance-like practices in American religious culture. That is, according to Luhrmann, people are more likely to respond to trauma in a dissociative way when non-pathological dissociative experiences, such as highly absorbing prayer, hearing God’s voice, and or sensing God’s presence, are normalized and celebrated within one’s culture.

Others draw further connections between dissociation in trauma and in religious experiences. Some suggest that survivors of childhood trauma are more likely to become priests and priestesses in spirit-possession religions, although not all priests and priestesses have experienced trauma (Suryani & Jensen Reference Suryani and Jensen1993; Castillo Reference Castillo1994; Chapin Reference Chapin2003, cited in Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2004: 103), some studies find a correlation between past experiences of abuse and neglect and tendency to have religious or mystical experiences in one’s religious practice (Kennedy and Drebing Reference Kennedy and Drebing2002; Parra Reference Parra2019), although other studies have not found the same correlations or have found mixed results, depending on type of abuse (See for example, Kroll et al. Reference Kroll, Fiszdon and Crosby1996; Allen et al. Reference Allen, Fultz, Huntoon and Brethour2002), and one study of Iranian college students found that, after recent trauma, previous religious abuse at any point in one’s life was the strongest predictor of dissociative experiences (Nobakht and Yngvar Dale Reference Nobakht and Yngvar Dale2018).  Moreover, Yochai Ataria shows that there is a deep experiential and conceptual overlap between traumatic experience and both mystical experiences and mindfulness practice. By presenting the first personal descriptions of both those who have had mystical experiences and those who have survived trauma, Ataria argues that both mystical and traumatic experience share the paradigmatic qualities associated with mystical experience: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity, unity, timelessness, and loss of sense of self.  The trauma survivor writes:

While the mystic reports:

Such research is inconclusive but deeply suggestive. Further research would be needed to say anything with confidence, but it is worth investigating whether the occurrence of trauma in a context where absorption has been cultivated by spiritual practices, and perhaps even trauma in moments of absorptive spiritual practice, as in many cases of religious trauma, may be part of explaining why spiritual abuse and other forms of religious trauma are so deeply spiritually impactful for the victim. Positive religious and mystical experiences tend to have a deep emotional and epistemic impact on the individual who has them. This is emphasized by recent research on the potential for psychedelics, which tend to produce mystical or transcendent experience, to reduce anxiety after terminal diagnoses, as treatment for PTSD, major depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorders (Pollan Reference Pollan2019). It is unsurprising that dissociation in traumatic experience, the neurobiological and psychological foundations of which are similar to mystical experience, would have a similarly global impact on one’s beliefs and emotions. Moreover, myriad conversations with, and narratives from, religious trauma survivors provide anecdotal evidence that many survivors of religious trauma enjoyed a rich spiritual awareness and low-level religious experiences while in the abusive spiritual environment. Many took the burden of abuse to God in prayer; sought comfort in nature, or in spiritual practices such as singing hymns and songs of praise, receiving the Eucharist, or speaking in tongues; felt comfort or a sense of God’s love and presence; heard God’s voice; or sensed the leading of God. Others experienced a sense of God’s judgment, conviction for spiritual or moral failings, or condemnation. Some experienced a confusing mixture of both. In either case, they were not strangers to religious experience. But there is, similarly anecdotal, evidence that the process of healing from trauma, which often involves the reduction of dissociative states and symptoms, also sometimes coincides with a reduction in the subjective sense of God’s presence and care (as well as judgment and anger). This loss of a sense of God’s presence sometimes leads to a feeling that one has been abandoned by God upon escaping abuse, as proof that the abusive community is right in their condemnation of outsiders. Alternatively, it can be experienced as a normal part of a deconversion process (i.e., once one stops believing in God, one stops experiencing the world as if God is in it). However, the opposite is sometimes true. Anecdotally, many religious trauma survivors have left spiritually abusive environments and found comfort and healing in spiritual practices more focused on mystical experience and other altered states of consciousness, such as druidry, Wicca, Buddhism, Norse paganism, various ancestral traditions of land-based spirituality, and other forms of New Age spirituality.  Indeed, some view the ability to dissociate learned in trauma as a skill taken with them into their future spiritual practice.  Further research would be needed to say anything scientific about such claims, but it is coherent with the account provided in the first section that trauma sometimes imparts skills and enhances aspects of agency.

5.3 Therapeutic Theodicy

Prior to her deconversion and subsequent rejection of the view, Laura Ekstrom argued that in addition to experiences of a putative objective reality that has religious significance, we might also include in the category of religious experience those experiences that “are of the same sort as experiences of a divine agent” (Ekstrom Reference Ekstrom, McBrayer and Howard-Snyder2014: 269). This provided the foundation for her version of a divine intimacy theodicy.  According to Ekstrom, when one suffers, one simultaneously undergoes a religious experience because one is undergoing an experience of the same sort as Jesus does at the cross. This similarity provides the grounds for a certain kind of intimacy. For Ekstrom, God allows us to suffer “in part because (i) this enables us to share in experience of God himself, where within the Christian tradition the focus is on appreciating deeply the passion of Christ; and (ii) this enables us vividly to experience the loving presence of God” (Ekstrom Reference Ekstrom, McBrayer and Howard-Snyder2014: 272).

As a theodicy, I find her account unpersuasive. One’s child need not experience religious trauma to experience intimacy with a religiously traumatized parent. Indeed, a good parent would pray that their child’s faith be unmarred by such pain. To wish otherwise is nothing more than abject cruelty. Like Harris’s, Ekstrom’s view strikes me as painting an abusive picture of God. However, that need not discredit her insight that experiences of the same kind as a divine agent constitute a kind of religious experience.  Indeed, a rich tradition exists of finding deep comfort in such resonances of experience. Black Liberation theologian James Cone finds meaning and hope in the face of Black suffering under white supremacy by drawing connections between the cross and of the lynching tree (Reference Cone2011). Jürgen Moltmann offers comfort after Auschwitz by presenting the image of the crucified God (Reference Moltmann1993). Even if the resonance between human and divine suffering is a poor theodicy, in the traditional sense of epistemically justifying the ways of God to man, it might still constitute a theodicy in Griffioen’s sense of providing a way of imagining God that provides solace to those in the midst of suffering from religious trauma.  In what follows, I argue that those who experience religious trauma, particularly in the form of spiritual abuse, experience something like what, according to the Christian and Jewish traditions, a divine agent experienced, and in Islam,  a spiritually significant role model experienced. As a Christian scholar, I feel the freedom to engage in the construction of theology, offering a new reading of the passion narrative and its significance for Christian faith. I do not, however, have the expertise or the religious positionality to do theology in Judaism and Islam. As such, I do my best to present the scholarship of others within these traditions and to suggest applications of their work that might serve a similar therapeutic function.

First I must clarify a few points. The passion narratives in the Christian scriptures have been used throughout Christian history to justify antisemitism and violence by Christians against Jewish people (Levine Reference Levine and Reinhartz2018; Edwards Reference Edwards2023: 3). But Jesus was a Jewish man executed by Rome, a settler Empire, not by “the Jews.”  Furthermore, establishing the authorship, motivation, and  historicity of the various gospels is the source of deep scholarly debate (and far beyond my expertise to comment on). It is, therefore, difficult to say exactly what, if any, role Judas, the Sanhidrin, or Caiaphas played in Jesus’s arrest and ultimate execution by the state.  Even if Jesus was betrayed by a Jewish friend and handed over to Rome by the Sanhidrin, as the Gospel narratives describe (See Edwards Reference Edwards2023 for an account of potential anti-Semitic motivations of the gospel writers), such actions cannot be attributed to the Jewish community as a whole any more than any case of religious abuse described in this Element should be attributed to the entire religious tradition in which it took place.

It may  nonetheless be notable for Christian survivors of religious trauma that whether one considers Jesus experience as depicted in the canonical gospels or an alternative where Jesus’s execution is solely the result of State violence against a perceived threat, Jesus’s suffering and death satisfy the characteristics of religious trauma as I have described it throughout this volume. First, according to the canonical story, Jesus and his teaching are contentious within the Jewish community, leading not only to many embracing his spiritual and political message but also to others rejecting it and resenting his ministry to the point of wishing his death (Luke 4, Matthew 12, Mark 2–3, Luke 6, John 10, Mark 14, etc.). He is betrayed by one of his closest friends, and throughout his trial and execution, he is abandoned by the followers with whom he shared a deep spiritual connection. That is, the Bible portrays Jesus as experiencing spiritual and religious betrayal and abuse when (some) religious power aligns itself with state power.  If, on the other hand, Jesus was executed by Rome as a perceived Jewish threat to Roman authority without  any involvement from his own community, he is nonetheless likely targeted for this abuse not only because of his ethnicity, but also for his revolutionary, and deeply religious and spiritual teachings. Put differently, Jesus is described in Christian scriptures as having experienced religious abuse in the primary sense that I explore in this Element (inflicted by someone or something connected to one’s own religious tradition), but could alternatively be understood to have experience it in the secondary sense of a persecution experience (inflicted because of one’s religious affiliation) that I acknowledge in Section 2 as a possible source of religious trauma.

Second, after his arrest, Jesus is beaten, mocked, sexually humiliated, possibly sexually assaulted, and ultimately killed via the slow, painful torture of Roman crucifixion. The claim that Jesus was sexually humiliated and possibly assaulted may shock some readers. However, there is historical support for reading the repeated stripping of Jesus’s clothing when he is mocked and beaten prior to a (likely) nude crucifixion (the soldiers cast lots for his clothing, including his undergarments) as a form of public sexual humiliation. Crucifixion was a form of state terror, intended not only to punish and humiliate the condemned, but to serve as a warning to others, and forced exposure was a common method of displaying dominance and forced submission in the ancient world. Furthermore, historically, Roman crucifixion often involved sexual violence and genital mutilation. Although we have no direct evidence that Jesus was sexually assaulted in addition to being sexually abused by forced exposure, it is a live historical possibility (Tombs Reference Tombs1999; Tombs 2023).

All these forms of abuse may well have occasioned the neurobiological processes that lead to post-traumatic distress. As Preston Hill argues in dialogue with Rambo, Jesus had a human body that would have “kept the score” of his trauma (Hill Reference Hill2022), satisfying the 2nd characteristic of religious trauma.  Third, and most poignantly, during the crucifixion, Jesus cries out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” There is significant theological debate over the metaphysical import of these words.  But according to  one way of reading this vignette, there is a moment on the cross when the human nature and person of Jesus has an experience as of abandonment by God. On this read, it may well have been that the experience of spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse occasions a disruption in Jesus’s own sense of relationship with the Divine. While Hill and Sartor follow Stump in presenting the cry of dereliction as a moment when Jesus only empathizes with the stains on the soul caused by trauma, one could alternatively read it as something stronger than mere empathy: a real, first-personal experience as of alienation from God occasioned by religious trauma.  Although merely a possibility rather than something that we can affirm as certainly a part of the experience of the incarnate God, this would satisfying the third characteristic of religious trauma.

Finally, even after the resurrection, Jesus bears the residual effects of trauma in the form of physical wounds. Indeed, these marks become a central witness to Jesus’s identity in the Gospel of John. Sometimes referred to as “scars,” the Biblical narrative is actually rather vague about the nature of the marks left on Jesus’s hands, feet, and side. The Greek word Thomas uses can refer to a mark, an imprint, or a scar.  But Jesus invites him to put his hand into his side. This might suggest an open, gaping wound, rather than a fully healed scar, and Shelly Rambo notes that “the Johannine gospel does not tell us whether they are open or closed, exposed or sutured” (Rambo Reference Rambo2017: 18).  Regardless of the precise stage of healing, Jesus is unashamed that the marks in his flesh testify to the lasting impact of his suffering (it remains and returns like all trauma) and to his identity (his trauma is a central part of how his followers recognize him).

While it must be done with care and caution, I believe that Christians can simultaneously acknowledge the historical and moral ambiguity of this aspect of their tradition, while still find it significant that the tradition has not considered spiritual abuse, in either the primary or secondary senses, something to which their savior would necessarily be immune. Theologian David Tombs writes, with respect to seeing Jesus as victim of sexual violence, that these claims

The same could be said for religious trauma. We do not know the degree to which the passion was religious traumatic for Jesus. But to assume a priori that Jesus could not have experienced the impact of religious trauma may be to deny Jesus’s full humanity.

On Ekstrom’s proposal, people who endure religious trauma and a sense of alienation from God in its aftermath may be having a religious experience. They may be having an experience of the same kind as a divine person has had. While I deny that the experience is inherently good because it is “Christ-like,” or that it provides a God-justifying reason for allowing the trauma to occur, it seems plausible that some who remain or become Christians in the wake of religious trauma may find it therapeutic to identify with Jesus in this way. That God knows or could know intimately what it is like to experience the pain of religious trauma may make that pain easier to bear. Furthermore, the cry of dereliction could counteract any guilt and shame that accompany the sense of alienation from God. Both Christian communities and survivors themselves tend to think that the spiritual impact of religious trauma is the result of moral or spiritual failure.  If only they responded correctly, trusted God more, forgave, or tried harder, they would not feel alienated from God or God’s people in the wake of the abuse. Perhaps Jesus’s words give the lie to this perspective. Jesus, according to tradition, is sinless and perfect. His sense of abandonment by God cannot be the result of any spiritual failure. The church dare not tell Jesus to buck up, get over it, or move on – that if he just fixed his theology, he would feel God’s loving presence. If Jesus could experience alienation without fault, Christians should be slower to blame those who have similar experiences.

Some theological positions maintain that Jesus’s experience at this moment in salvation history is utterly unique – that the trinity is broken and that Jesus is literally abandoned by God as he becomes the object of God’s wrath – something that no genuine believer will ever experience. On this view, Jesus’s experience on the cross could not be understood as resulting from religious abuse, and could not provide grounds for the claim that one can feel abandoned by God without any wrongdoing, guilt, or lack of faith on one’s own part (on this view Jesus is abandoned precisely because he bears human guilt). While I think this view is both morally and metaphysically mistaken, even if it were correct, literal abandonment by God and literally bearing the punishment for human sin could itself be a spiritually traumatic experience for Jesus. Even if  Jesus really was abandoned by God and no other Christian will ever experience similar abandonment, the fact remains that it seems to some victims of religious trauma that they are being abandoned in the same way, and this may be enough to find some source of comfort in the knowledge that Jesus experienced the same, and worse.

Finally, thinking of religious trauma as the same kind of experience had by a divine person may be instructive for churches who have survivors of religious trauma in their midst.  Traditional Christian theology teaches that Jesus freely chose to take on human flesh, “to live and die as one of us,” and to accept the spiritual abuse and religious trauma that came with it. Likewise, deep engagement with the experiences of religious trauma survivors and activism on their behalf may itself subject some Christians to actual or vicarious spiritual trauma.  If unconflicted faith and a sense of closeness with God unmarred by symptoms of post-traumatic distress are the height of the Christian life, then deep empathetic engagement with those experiencing religious trauma may be too risky. It puts everything at stake. But if the heart of the Christian faith is being like Jesus, then perhaps the risk of caring for survivors and of bearing witness to their experiences is justified, while still remaining a deep, existential and spiritual risk. Genuinely entering into it may hurt us deeply. It may well shake our faith to its core. We, unlike Jesus, may not be able to predict whether our faith will weather such a storm. But perhaps being willing to endure this pain with those impacted by it is how we may come and die like our Lord.

For Jewish survivors there may be a different sense in which religious trauma is the same kind of experience as one had by a divine person. In The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, Melissa Raphael suggests such an approach to the suffering of women in the camps (Reference Raphael2003).  Raphael draws on the Jewish Feminist theological tradition of interpreting Shekinah – God’s glory manifest – as a feminine face of God-she, who cares for Israel as she wanders in the wilderness. She suggests that the care women gave to each other in the face of death is where God was in Auschwitz. Acts of care in the face of death are acts of the same kind as those performed by the divine person. If it was difficult to perceive the face of God in Auschwitz, Raphael argues, it was because the personhood of God’s people, who manifest God to the world, was itself obscured by dehumanization. “The face of Shekhinah was hidden only in so far as the Jewish faces that imaged her were de-faced by their profanation; burned and dispersed as ash” (55).  Raphael is careful to distinguish her picture of God as present and suffering with her people in the camps from the Christian image of the suffering God, because in Judaism God suffers with, but not vicariously for, her people. The suffering of the people and of God is not necessary to fulfill any spiritual or moral debt.  It is simply the care of a lover for the beloved.

I do not wish to suggest that suffering religious trauma, just as such, is morally on par with the suffering of the Shoah. However, insofar as it was genocide of a people for whom spirituality is bound up with ethnic identity, it is inconceivable that the trauma of the Shoah did not have explicit spiritual and religious dimensions, as Raphael and her interlocutors make clear.  As such, they may be read as grappling with a certain kind of religious trauma. With great care and humility, survivors of other forms of religious trauma within Judaism may find guidance in Raphael’s work for grappling with the reality of religious trauma.  Perhaps the love and care Jewish survivors and their allies offer one another, affirming humanity and dignity in the face of abuse, is the face of God-she in religious trauma, because it is the same kind of experience/action as one that the divine person has.

Sanctifying suffering when pointing to anything positively meaningful in it, particularly within traditions that present Jesus as a model for others to follow, is always a danger. When embracing (vicarious) suffering as Christ-like, and being Christ-like is an expression of holiness, it is easy to draw the conclusion that one ought to embrace rather than flee abuse. Delores Williams argues that such thinking has often played a role in the way women of color have repeatedly been placed, either by force or by cultural expectation, in surrogacy roles where they bear the weight of the sufferings, labor, and struggles of wealthy white people in their own bodies. For Williams, traditional interpretations of redemptive suffering offer meaning and hope in the face of suffering at the cost of sanctifying oppression, and at the cost of telling those who have already sacrificed the most to keep on sacrificing.  It is one thing to tell the privileged that sacrifice is Godly; they already have more than they need in terms of the integrity of the self and material resources. But to tell this to those already suffering the most is to preclude their liberation. She argues that, as an alternative, the Black religious experience should be read through the lens of Hagar’s wilderness experience. Hagar is an enslaved woman, forced into surrogacy, driven out of her home into the wilderness. There she encounters God as a God who sees (Williams Reference Williams1993:141–148).  For Williams, a wilderness experience is “a symbolic term used to represent a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her to make a way out of what she thought was no way” (Williams Reference Williams1993: 108).  Interpreting the Black religious experience as one primarily of God making “a way where there is no way,” she calls this the “survival-quality of life tradition” in contrast to the tradition of liberation.  God does not liberate Hagar. In fact, for the sake of her survival, he initially sends her back to her oppressors, and she is eventually sent away by them.  For her there is no liberation, only survival.

Raphael’s account largely escapes Williams’s critique. Raphael denies that redemption comes through suffering. God-she is not present in Auschwitz in order to redeem them or anyone else through her suffering. She is present there because her people are present there. Further, Raphael insists that suffering and abjection are not the preconditions for spiritual or ethical virtue, to be sanctified and praised for their own sake. They are simply the sites where community manifests in the camps, given conditions beyond the community’s own control.  However, while Williams emphasizes survival and quality of life (while also acknowledging that entire generations of enslaved people do not survive), Raphael talks about care and presence even in death. She tells of an “almost iconic nameless old woman with ‘hair white as snow’ who is remembered for holding in her arms a motherless 1-year-old child as she stood at the edge of the communal pit, about to be shot with the rest of her village by Nazi troops. The old woman sang to the child and tickled him under the chin until he laughed with joy. Then they were shot” (Raphael Reference Raphael2003: 58).  Neither offer hope for liberation after trauma.  Instead, they suggest finding ways of seeing God even in the face of death.

Williams’s reflections on Hagar also suggest a framework for an Islamic therapeutic theodicy. Although Hājar (Hagar) is not mentioned in the Qur’an, her story plays an important role in Muslim tradition. During hajj (religious pilgrimage), pilgrims to Mecca commemorate and ritually reenact Hājar’s running back and forth between Safa and Marwa in search of water. According to Islamic tradition, when Ibrahīm takes Hājar and Isma’il and abandons them in the desert, Hājar repeatedly asks him why he is doing this, but he remains silent. Finally, Hājar asks if God has told him to abandon them here, and he responds affirmatively. Hājar then declares that God will not allow them to perish.  In conversation with Williams, Muslim feminist scholars amina wadud and Jerusha Lamptey argue that in a “Hājar Paradigm” (Wadud Reference Wadud2008; Lamptey Reference Lamptey2018) Hajar’s life and faith offer a critique and expansion of traditional Islamic theological anthropology. Lamptey points out that Hājar’s position as “the foremother of the Islamic tradition … does not erase the abuse, abandonment, and struggle she faced and endured” (184).  Hājar herself was an enslaved person required by people of God to bear the child of her master’s husband, abandoned in the desert in the name of God, and left to provide for her family alone, all of which allows us to see her as a survivor of religious abuse and trauma. Lamptey gestures at this possibility when she notes critically that “any intimation that her situation of abandonment and suffering was problematic can be taken as an assault on the broader narrative of origins” (186).  Even if, on the traditional account, Hājar trusts God absolutely and has her active partnership with God rewarded by a miraculous spring of water, hers is faith in the midst of struggle and abuse in which God is implicated. Lamptey asserts that her “faithful and deep reliance [did not] remove her fear, pain, struggle, and even anger” (186). If this way of receiving Hājar’s story is plausible, then at the heart of Islam, a central spiritual practice honors the actions of a vulnerable, abused woman who experiences religious trauma and yet became the foremother of the faithful.  This may be a source of comfort to religious trauma survivors like Aisha who struggle to trust God after being mistreated by spiritual leaders in their communities. Perhaps, then, we can expand Ekstrom’s account of religious experiences to include experiences like those of divine agents and other religious figures and role models such as prophets and holy women.

5.4 Concluding Thoughts

There is still much unknown, philosophically and psychologically speaking, about religious trauma.  But what we do know is that it is common and that it should no longer be ignored. It is difficult to make progress without first understanding the nature of such experiences.  That is what this volume aims to offer.  But moving forward, the question of post-traumatic spiritual flourishing is one of pressing importance.  Countless survivors have come forward.  Many communities are, slowly and much too late, taking steps to acknowledge past wrongs and to prevent future harm. But for many, the harm has already been done. Philosophical and psychological investigation into the sorts of community structures and practices that enhance and repair spiritual agency, that foster flourishing in the midst of religiously significant post-traumatic distress, and which include and center the needs of survivors are all necessary if religious communities and philosophy of religion wish to respond appropriately to past wrongs.