Hurt by Church

A lot of people who land here have been told, at some point, that what they were doing — questioning, leaving, naming a harm — was the same thing as walking away from God. It is not. The Bible is much more careful about this distinction than the people who often quote it.

These pages assume a few things up front:

• The harm you experienced is not the disagreement you should have been able to have. Spiritual abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, coverups, control — none of these are reducible to "a hard church season." They are their own category, and Christianity at its best has hard words for them.
• Jesus is not on the side of the people who hurt you. Whatever else the New Testament says, it is unusually direct about religious leaders who use authority to harm people. The harshest sustained speech recorded from Jesus is not aimed at outsiders. It is aimed at the religious establishment of his day.
• You do not have to figure out what to do next before you can read this. You can be leaving, gone, halfway back, or watching from a long way away. None of the pages below assume you have decided anything.

What the Bible itself does with bad religion

Before any of the conversation about deconstruction or leaving, it is worth noticing that the Bible spends a remarkable amount of its pages on the same subject you are on:

• The prophets are mostly furious with religion that is being performed instead of lived. Amos 5:21–24 has God saying, of religious gatherings: "I hate, I despise your festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me… But let justice roll on like a river." That is in scripture, not censored from it.
• Jesus' fiercest extended speech (Matthew 23) is a series of "woes" against religious leaders who "shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces" (Matthew 23:13). The accusation is not that they were too strict or too lax. It is that they made it harder, not easier, for ordinary people to get near God.
• Jesus on harm to vulnerable people (Matthew 18:6) is one of the most quoted lines on this subject: "If anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." Whatever else that means, it means harm done in religious authority is taken very seriously.
• And on religious performers (Matthew 7:21–23), the line is even more direct: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven… Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" The implication is that some of the people most confident in their religious identity will turn out, on Jesus' own telling, not to have been the people of Jesus.

If you have been carrying the idea that taking the harm seriously means walking away from Jesus, the Bible does not actually agree with you. The protest is in the canon.

What these pages will not do

• They will not tell you to "find a healthy church" as a fix. That may eventually be a real possibility for you, or it may not. We are not going to script it.
• They will not minimize what happened. If something was abusive, manipulative, or coercive, that is what it was. We are not in the business of softening that.
• They will not pretend that the difference between Jesus and the people who claimed to represent him is small. On the Bible's own showing, it is sometimes enormous.

A note before you keep reading

Some of what you may carry from religious harm has names — religious trauma, spiritual abuse, high-control group dynamics. These are real categories with real research behind them, and a licensed trauma-informed therapist is often the right next step, alongside (or instead of) any spiritual conversation. We are not a substitute for that, and we will not pretend to be.