The Tentacles of Spiritual Abuse
+ white christian hegemony
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It was 2020 when some of the most currently well-known books on spiritual abuse began sprouting up—books like DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to Church, Langberg’s Redeeming Power, McKnight and Barringer’s A Church Called Tov, and Mullen’s Something’s Not Right. Though not spiritual abuse specific, Wilder and Hendricks’s The Other Half of Church is another book I recommend that published in 2020. The 1991 book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse has also experienced a revival, coming to the forefront of the current conversation. With the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017 (though, it really began in 2007) and the subsequent rise of the #ChurchToo movement, these books are a natural response to our a cultural moment and a way to speak to the corruption in the Body of Christ.
To go further, from 2020 into 2021, the public learned of the credible allegations against the well-revered evangelist Ravi Zacharias. In 2021, Christianity Today launched The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Podcast, highlighting Mark Driscoll’s abuse of power while he pastored Mars Hill Church and founded the Acts 29 Network. My own spiritual abuse story is connected to an Acts 29 church in Houston. In 2022, the documentary Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed was released. A few months later, the Sexual Abuse Task Force team released their report on the widespread abuse occurring within the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2023, The Secrets of Hillsong, another documentary on the world-wide church, was released on FX, just days before the June 2nd release of Shiny Happy People, a documentary highlighting the abusive teaching of Bill Gothard and the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP), the latter made well-known by the Duggar Family and their show 19 Kids and Counting.
These are not isolated incidents. Abuse in the church is a spiritual epidemic.
Othering and ostracism is a byproduct of the poison in our faith-based spaces.
Because spiritual abuse ruptures our relationship with God, we—as image bearers—lose our link to the One whose image we are to be like. We struggle to put the pieces of ourselves together because the puzzle box that kept us and held us was taken away. Spiritual abuse leaves you without a model for what it means to be complete because it fractures every aspect of our faith.
The books, podcasts, and documentaries mentioned above—as well as other unmentioned media—have been personally transformative because they’ve helped me remap wholeness. In them I’ve found some of the pieces that help me reclaim the truth—that I was made in the image of God. However, if I draw only from this new well of wisdom, from only the works listed above, my map is incomplete. My ability to continue to piece together what the church broke will be heavily debilitated because I would only be looking at the fruit and not at the toxic soil it rose from. And I might miss what new fruit might be rooting in the same soil.
If spiritual abuse is abuse of power within the church and if it diminishes and minimizes the image of God in other human beings, then any effort toward healing and wholeness should have us remember the voices crying out for healing and wholeness throughout history. We have to listen to voices who have been historically victimized by ecclesial and spiritual power.
To help this land, let me point to the #MeToo movement. Actress Alyssa Milano is lauded for bringing the #MeToo movement into public focus after posting a series of tweets on social media, but fewer know that #MeToo was originally coined ten years prior by Tarana Burke, a Black woman who had long been serving and working with young Black girls and survivors of sexual abuse.
While this may not be a spiritual example, something similar is not only capable of happening within the Western church. It is happening within the Western church. It is also happening within survivor spaces and advocacy groups leaving the church.
Lauding majority culture voices over global majority voices is a recurring problems in the Western church. White Christian hegemony has a very long history of taking voice away from the global majority, which is comprised of the communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who are Western culture’s most visible minorities.
If the wisdom we seek primarily comes from experts and advocates who are members of the Western cultural majority, is it possible that we’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle? If the ones we primarily listen to and learn from are those who do not hold minority identities, could our vision for wholeness actually be tainted by the same harmful ideologies and foundations we claim to have left behind?
Could majority culture advocacy and deconstruction be excluding and othering those who are a part of the global majority?
Yes.
*The rest of this post is on the other side of a paywall.*