Religious Trauma Research Articles

A Reading of 2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37 as a Trauma Narrative

The narrative of 2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37 (“Source B1”) recounts pre-exilic religious collective trauma surrounding Sennacherib’s military advance against Judah in 710 BCE and its aftermath. In this narrative, the Rabshakeh uses the keywords “בטח” and “נצל” to assert that Yhwh has turned against Judah. However, his claims were subverted by the withdrawal of the Assyrian army and the later death of Sennacherib, facilitated by the divine intervention of Yhwh following Hezekiah’s supplication. Despite its significance, only a few studies have examined this narrative as that of trauma. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of the social process of cultural or collective trauma, this study argues that the function of this narrative is that of religious trauma narrative. It reconstructs the collective trauma of Sennacherib’s campaign to theologically defend the Davidic kingship and Yhwh and ultimately suggests a revised identity for the Judaean community to foster solidarity, even under the ongoing influence of Assyria following the military campaign.

Construction and Validation of a Muslim Religious Trauma Scale

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale to measure the traumatic religious experiences among Muslims and assess its validity, reliability, and factor structure. Data were collected from 452 (25.9% men and 74.01% women) Muslim participants in Turkey aged 18–60 or over (the average age group was 30–33) on an online platform. Measures included an original Muslim Religious Trauma Scale comprising newly constructed religious trauma items, Religiosity Scales, the Subjective Happiness Scale, the Brief Trauma Questionnaire, the Post-Traumatic Symptom Scale, and the Dissociation Scale. The results of exploratory factor analysis revealed six factors: spiritual incongruence, spiritual disappointment, social or peer pressure, feelings of sin and guilt, sexual abuse, and corporal punishment. It was found that the association of religious trauma with general trauma, post-traumatic symptoms, and dissociation supported the assumption of concurrent validity of the newly developed Muslim Religious Trauma Scale. Additionally, it also confirmed the idea that some of the adverse religious experiences could be traumatic.

From Esoteric Religiosity to Ethical Inclusivity: An Investigation of the Detrimental Effects of Religious Trauma in The Saint of Bright Doors

In fantasy, the conflation of disparate familiar conventions and concurrent subverted delineation of the same often renders a reimagination of the essentialist socio-political norms. Such transgressions of recognizable circumstances by dint of fantastical elements also engender a feeling of ‘hesitation’, as argued by Tzvetan Todorov, which also encourages readers to eulogize the protagonists for their prowess in undertaking an arduous quest to resolve a multi-layered mystery. However, the celebration of magical environments and supernatural characters by popular imagination often surpasses the protagonists’ emotional challenges and intermittent indecisiveness to acquire empowerment. Sometimes, their objective of seeking the truth is hindered by the cognitive deficiencies induced by childhood abuse, domestic violence, the necessity of achieving belongingness, and so on. In this regard, this study attempts to analyze the detrimental effect of religious trauma on the individual pursuit of redefining fantastical traits in The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. With the seamless unification of traditional fantasy elements such as invisible ‘antigods’, lethal catechism, and magic doors, with the modern socio-cultural developments in terms of ringing phones, emails, quarantines, and social distancing, the select fiction depicts the protagonist’s journey into a world that is imbibed with both mundane and mystic implications. This study further seeks to investigate the consequences of indoctrinated religiosity in restraining agency hued with fantastical peculiarities.

Religious trauma syndrome: The futile fate of faith.

Religious trauma syndrome: The futile fate of faith.

Religious Trauma: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Impacts on Millennials

Religious Trauma: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Impacts on Millennials

Recognizing Stones and Snakes in Children’s Christian Formation: An Introduction to Religious Trauma and Abuse

Despite the growing awareness of child abuse, little academic research examines religious abuse and trauma during childhood. This paper constructs an interdisciplinary and intersectional heuristic of childhood religious trauma and abuse (RTA) by weaving together psychological and theo-philosophical literature with Rebecca Nye’s theory of childhood spiritual development. The paper argues that RTA distorts a child’s relationship with God leading to lifelong effects. It describes how America’s prejudice against children further facilitates religious trauma and abuse and outlines needed theological and structural changes from the perspective of religious education.

Book Review: "When Religion Hurts You" by Laura E. Anderson

Licensed psychotherapist, podcast host, and religious trauma survivor, Dr. Laura Anderson, has contributed a volume drawing from both her own experiences and trauma studies scholarship. Anderson avoids harsh and direct condemnation of high-control religions (HCRs) but, rather, describes the human experiences and biological explanations of lives immersed in fear, shame, and mistrust. Her book, When Religion Hurts You, will likely connect most with religious trauma survivors who have already left an HCR (or are on the way out) and with professionals unfamiliar with the specific biological and relational theories of trauma. Anderson provides cautious optimism, noting the time and effort needed to “live in healing bodies.”

Percentage of U.S. Adults Suffering from Religious Trauma: A Sociological Study

This sociological study aimed to ascertain the percentage of adults living in the United States who have experienced religious trauma (RT) and what percentage presently suffer from RT symptoms now. After compiling data from 1,581 adults living in the United States, this study concludes it is likely that around one-third (27‒33%) of U.S. adults (conservatively) have experienced religious trauma at some point in their life. That number increases to 37% if those suffering from any three of the six major RT symptoms are included. It is also likely that around 10‒15% of U.S. adults currently suffer from religious trauma if only the most conservative numbers are highlighted. Nonetheless, since 37% of the respondents personally know people who potentially suffer from RT, and 90% of those respondents know between one and ten people who likely suffer from RT, then it could be argued that as many as one-in-five (20%) U.S. adults presently suffer from major religious trauma symptoms.

When God Hurts: The Rhetoric of Religious Trauma as Epistemic Pain

ABSTRACT This essay examines religious trauma by introducing two critical terms to rhetoricians, especially those working in mental health rhetorics: testimonial silencing and hermeneutical marginalization. Since Marlene Winell wrote about Religious Trauma Syndrome nearly three decades ago, the emergent field of religious trauma has only grown. However, we still lack critical vocabulary to describe various types of religious harm, especially epistemic injustice. By examining religious trauma through the lens of epistemic injustice, I center marginalized bodies who have been historically harmed as knowers. I also offer epistemic associative pleasure as a digital intervention. Now, new religious speakers can create their own good words and other ways of knowing by speaking back on social media.

Christian Shame and Religious Trauma

The analysis of religious trauma is enriched by considering how it may be produced by formation in chronic shame. The testimony of those who have experienced religious trauma and severe religious shame is essential to interdisciplinary understanding of and response to this harm. The experiences of those harmed indicates that some traditional Christian doctrinal interpretations are shaming. Thus, the potential for Christian communities to create climates of chronic shame and cause religious trauma is present wherever such theological interpretations dominate. In this way, the religious teachings themselves, especially when communicated in chronically shaming environments, are traumatizing. In this approach, Christian religious trauma is not an added element to traumas of domestic, physical, or sexual abuse by a religious person or leader. Instead, the source of the trauma is formative experience of participating in Christianity. Religious trauma merits interdisciplinary study in Religious Studies and trauma studies, as well as Christian theology. Theological response to Christian religious trauma contributes to this interdisciplinary need.

Pauliina Rauhala’s Taivaslaulu as a Critique of Finnish Conservative Laestadians’ Birth Control Ban

Abstract The Finnish author Pauliina Rauhala’s award-winning debut novel, Taivaslaulu (2013; Heaven Song)—which investigates the nexus of gender, agency, and familial and religio-communal belonging—is set in the world of Conservative Laestadianism, the largest revival movement within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. This conservative pietist movement is known, among other things, for its birth control ban, which extends not only to artificial contraception but also to fertility awareness methods and, in its most extreme form, even to marital celibacy. This article argues that “continuous traumatic stress” (CTS)—a term that, unlike post-traumatic stress, focuses on chronic, ongoing trauma—and “religious trauma” together constitute a relevant conceptual lens through which to examine Rauhala’s depiction of the life of her female protagonist under the Conservative Laestadian birth control ban, a prohibition operating in the realm of religious regulation of both body and mind. More generally, this article posits that examinations of gendered and gender-specific traumas resulting from “destructive uses of religion” (psychiatrist James L. Griffith’s term; italics added) are an integral part of the interdisciplinary study of religion and gender.

Religious trauma and moral injury from LGBTQA+ conversion practices

Religion-based LGBTQA + conversion practices frame all people as potential heterosexuals whose gender aligns with their birth sex (in a cisgender binary model of male and female sexes). Deviation from this heterosexual cisgender social identity model is cast as curable ‘sexual brokenness’. However, research shows conversion practices are harmful, and particularly associated with increased experiences of abuse, mental health diagnoses, and suicidality. This paper explores their contribution to the particular harms of moral injury and religious trauma, drawing firstly on the foundational moral injury literature to offer a unique conceptual framework of spiritual harm and moral injury, and secondly on a rare qualitative 2016–2021 study of the spiritual harms reported in semi-structured interviews of 42 survivors of LGBTQA + change and suppression practices in Australia. The paper examines the survivors' support needs around the nature and extent of religious trauma and moral injury, to inform services working towards supporting their recovery from such experiences and their resolution of conflicts deeply bound in their sense of self and belonging. It argues that impairment of conversion survivors' relationships with religious communities, and religious self-concepts, point to the need for additional improvements in pastoral practice.

Mechanisms of religious trauma amongst queer people in Australia’s evangelical churches

Christian communities teaching traditional theology and ethics, which treat diverse sexualities and gender expansive identities as sinful, can be places where faithful LGBTQIA + people are subject to spiritual abuse. This paper explores the complex dynamics and multilayered mechanisms of this abuse in Australian Evangelical Christianity. It is based on a qualitative research project using 24 semi-structured interviews with LGBTQIA + people who have spent two or more years in Evangelical church settings. The project found that participants were subject to mischaracterization and viewed as a moral threat, and consequently experienced erasure, social distancing, and suffered psychological trauma. The paper uses minority stress and micro-aggression theory to conceptualize these experiences and inform social work practice. It also shows the rich resilience and spiritual growth of participants who navigated trauma and sometimes emerged with a more nuanced and deeper faith. These findings will help queer people coming out in Evangelical churches to understand their experiences, and provide clinicians and others supporting people that have experienced spiritual trauma with conceptual tools and practical examples to aid in therapy and informal recovery settings.

Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives

Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives

Affirming, intersectional spaces & positive religious coping: evidence-based strategies to improve the mental health of LGBTQ-identifying Muslims

ABSTRACT The interplay between Islam, sexuality, and mental health is complex. In large population studies, religiosity is associated with positive mental health outcomes. However, the data among LGBTQ populations is mixed. Structural, interpersonal, and individual forms of religious trauma may adversely affect the mental health of queer people in religious households, but robust social support can remedy these effects. In particular, the dual-identities of LGBTQ-identifying Muslims complicate their relationships with both religious and queer communities. Here, we present models of LGBTQ-inclusive Muslim spaces as intersectional pathways to positive mental health outcomes, simultaneously offering networks of social support and opportunities to engage with healthy religious coping mechanisms.

Spiritual trauma as a manifestation of religious and spiritual struggles in female victims of sexual abuse in adolescence or young adulthood in the Catholic Church in Poland

Specialists on issues of sexual abuse in religious institutions unanimously stress that this kind of experience significantly affects the victims’ spirituality. Particularly devastating and distorting for their spirituality is sexual abuse committed by clergy. In order to explore this issue for the first time in Poland, the authors conducted a qualitative study in the form of semi-structured interviews with five women who had experienced sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and/or religious in adolescence and young adulthood. The interviews were analyzed using the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and narrative methodology. The results showed that four respondents experienced or had experienced religious struggles in three areas: interpersonal, intrapsychic, and relationship with God. These struggles are complex and intense enough to be referred to as “spiritual trauma” (Doyle, 2009, 2011; Kusner & Pargament, 2015), “religious trauma” (Panchuk, 2018), or “spiritual violence” (Tobin, 2019). The results of the study may be of importance for people helping or having any other kind of contact with victims of clergy sexual abuse.

‘That’s hard’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Trauma of Reprobation

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is generally treated as a soteriological riddle: is Faustus damned, and if so, when, and why? This essay argues that such approaches miss the overwhelming emphasis (in both surviving versions of the play) on Faustus’s reprobation. Faustus, instead of presenting a puzzle waiting to be solved, is better appreciated as an incomparable portrait of the experience of reprobate living. Even more, via its textual and performance history, Faustus sheds light on the collective and collaborative practices of real Renaissance actors and theatregoers coming to terms with the post-Reformation religious trauma they shared with the lonely doctor.

Distorting Concepts, Obscured Experiences: Hermeneutical Injustice in Religious Trauma and Spiritual Violence

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma (RT) and spiritual violence (SV). In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice (HI) that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of religious trauma and spiritual violence. In section II, I describe the role normatively laden concepts play in shaping our social experience. I then elucidate how they can contribute to HI. In section III, I provide a brief overview of the history of some significant identity prejudices in the history of Christianity and argue that children can properly be understood as victims of HI within some religious communities. I then return in section IV to the examples of religious trauma and spiritual violence offered throughout the article and demonstrate that HI plays an important causal role in each of them. HIs sometimes constitute spiritual and religious harms; at other times they create an epistemic environment conducive to spiritual abuse.

About the Artist: Adam Cooper-Terán: Multimedia Designer and Performer in the Time of Disaster Capitalism

About the Artist: Adam Cooper-Terán: Multimedia Designer and Performer in the Time of Disaster Capitalism Eva Karene Romero (bio) Adam Cooper-Terán <antral.net> is a Tucson-based artist of Mexican, Yaqui, and Jewish heritage. He struck me as the best artist to feature in this volume published on and in global pandemic and disaster capitalism, because his body of work is focused powerfully on two specific movements that are productively put into dialogue; decolonializing death and the grieving process, and doing a type of artistic archaeology of power on a specific landscape. Cooper-Terán refers to his Mexican and Yaqui heritage when it comes to growing up with a kind of understanding and respect for the dead that he credits with fueling his involvement with The All Souls Procession. Cooper-Terán extends this work by incorporating his art into ceremony to express grief around his father’s passing in 2013. “There was a very strong sense of creating some kind of way to process his life and my grief that wasn’t through any typical or rote systems of processing grief,” Cooper-Terán explains, while describing a process that involved scanning efemera and objects, such as pieces of his father’s hair, rocks he collected, even his ashes. Cooper-Terán sees art as a vessel to conduct spiritual practice through, and credits building his own toolkit for this practice through his interest in the occult, nature and healing from religious trauma that may have been thrust upon people. Cooper-Terán also refers to the importance of The American Book of the Dead in his six-year process, building various performances around “confronting the clear light,” culminating in what Cooper-Terán refers to as “a digital send-off” for his father. When asked about how his process around art and grief is relevant today, he responds, “For those who are dealing with death, there’s a lot of work that can be done through prayer, ceremony, creative work . . . every person that dies is connected to someone, and every life has some level of work required for transiting the soul.” He also refers to the privilege of the period of reflection that we’re in; This moment is special in that regard, in that once the basics are there, you gotta go within . . . and it’s not going to be pretty. What you thought was normal—we’re never going to go back to that. How do you make something new? Any time there’s a paradigm shift everything gets reset to zero and people have to go to these places to think about where they want to express their identity from. Some of it’s ugly and painful, but in those dark places there’s also always a peace and a solace that can be very comforting and strength-building, that can build up your will and sense of survival. [End Page 4] ANNIA JEKKA (a rough translation of two Yaqui words that mean shadow world) is another one of Cooper-Terán’s tours de force, connecting Tucson’s past and present in a mediatic collage juxtaposing generational trauma with natural and human flourishing. Contrasted with mainstream denial about for-profit detention facilities, the existence of a brown migrant underclass on which the national economy is built, the United States’s history of slavery, the reality of mass incarceration and the prison industrual complex, ANNIA JEKKA excavates Tucson’s colonial history, placing it side by side with today’s real estate developments, which so often add to gentrification, the erasure of past culture or even its outright cooptation and comodification. The show is a three-channel music and video event centering the Tucson Mountain Range as a scene that changes over time. The event includes the Mercado Annex, the Caterpillar building, other video timelines of construction being done around downtown, Tucson’s settler past. Cooper-Terán describes animating the landscape with a referentiality to historical moments and events, to historical trauma, but also to this landscape as a place where megaflora bloomed and the O’odham farmed. “The show is not meant to be calling-out directly or...

Religious Faith in the Unjust Meantime: The Spiritual Violence of Clergy Sexual Abuse

Clergy sexual abuse is both sexual and psychological violence, but it is also a paradigmatic case of spiritual violence that rises to the level of religious trauma. In this paper I argue that the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse diminishes, and in some cases may even destroy, a survivor’s capacities for religious faith or other forms of spiritual engagement. I use and illustrate the value of feminist methodology, as developed and advanced by Alison Jaggar, for generating and pursuing philosophical questions about religious experience. Feminist methodology’s sensitivity to theorizing situated subjects who stand to each other in relations of racialized male dominance helps us see the ways in which clergy sexual abuse is gender-based violence in both its causes and effects. It also helps us both ask and answer questions about religious faith in the unjust meantime from the perspective of those who endure spiritually violent faith communities.