Spiritual Abuse: My Story Is One Of Many
What is is, where to go, what to do
“If I tell you people there is a purple, polka-dotted elephant in the parking lot, I don’t want any of you to get out of your pew to check. You sit there and believe it!”
— the pastor of my youth
I grew up in a spiritually abusive doomsday cult and did not make my final break until 2003, when I was 32. A voice tells me, “Who cares? It’s too unusual. It won’t benefit anyone.” Yet this story matters whether you have a similar one, you know someone who does, or you can conceive of meeting a survivor of spiritual abuse someday.
The facts are simple, as I wrote in “Why I Launched This Newsletter”: “I was born into an End Times Doomsday cult in 1971, which was an offshoot of the movement by William Branham, a mid-twentieth-century faith healer,” a forerunner of movements like the New Apostolic Reformation. In this environment, we occasionally heard warnings from the pulpit that we might soon “reenter the days of Ananias and Sapphira” (Acts 5:1-11). One day, God would strike someone dead in our church service for opposing the special “end time message” of Branham and his disciples, our pastors.
As a child, I used to wonder, “Is it me? Will God strike me dead for not being loyal enough? Is it someone else in my family?”
Because I went to public school, I did see life “on the outside” of this cult, which overlapped with evangelical fundamentalism and Pentecostal “holiness” traditions on issues that these groups referred to as “personal holiness” (like what we can wear and what kind of music we can listen to). To this, add purity culture and a “Left Behind-on-steroids” end-time scheme that, among many other things, saw the Pope as the antichrist, the Catholic Church as “the Whore of Babylon,” and the U.S. as the new “city on a hill.”
When I was five, one of our next-door neighbors had a girl my age. She and I played together all the time. Then we started kindergarten, and the teacher separated us into boy and girl groups for some activity. Tami went with the girls. The girls?!? I thought she was a boy! Why? Because women at my church weren’t allowed to wear pants or have short hair. Tami violated the code on both counts, but I assumed she was a boy since I was five and didn’t know “Tami” was a feminine name. Note that the control of women’s bodies is a prevailing theme in many cults and American fundamentalism.
Although we did not argue, I shied away from her, and we were never close again (her family moved a couple of miles away sometime around then, anyway). My little mind couldn’t handle having a close playmate who bucked God’s commands by wearing Levis and having short hair as a girl.
Later in my teens, I knew not to date or form close friendships with “worldly” girls (“worldly” = any girl not in our small sect). Although it was much more hush-hush, I also instinctively knew there would be double trouble in my church if I were seen with a worldly girl who had black or brown skin, a fact confirmed to me around age 20 when I asked a deacon why interracial dating was wrong. He said the quiet part out loud:
“Because they were meant to be our slaves.”
We were not to attempt to “re-enslave” them; we must be kind to them, not use racial slurs or anything like that, but … no to the dating.
In second grade, while playing with my friend Bob, I discovered that Bob’s family was Catholic. I didn’t want them to take the mark of the beast and burn in hell forever, so I told Bob his family was serving the antichrist and the whore of Babylon. This did not go over well with Bob’s mother. A call from his mom to my mom brought a meeting between my parents and our pastor (a disciple of William Branham), who ruled thusly: “Tell Bobby to keep these things to himself. We are so close to the end that the time for evangelism and mission is coming close. God may sovereignly bring a few more people in before Christ steps off the mercy seat, but it won’t be many. There is no use heaping persecution on yourself by casting pearls before swine.”
The particulars of my situation are rare, but the epidemic of spiritual abuse is not. If you’ve not suffered spiritual abuse, you know someone who has, or you will eventually meet someone who has. It is an emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse of power with a spiritual dimension. My current church subscribes to definitions of emotional and spiritual abuse from G.R.A.C.E. (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), which says in part:
Emotional Abuse: When a person holding power and trust, uses pattern of controlling and domineering behaviors such as shaming, insulting, degrading, intimidating, threatening, humiliating, and/or domineering.
Spiritual Abuse: a form of emotional abuse, meaning a pattern of coercive or domineering behaviors using religion, usually by a person who holds power and trust. Many acts of abuse in a religious environment will have a spiritual dimension.
G.R.A.C.E. lists examples of spiritual abuse that include “Use of religious ideology, precepts, tradition, or sacred texts to harm” and “Attempts to use the divine, sacred texts, sacred tradition, theology, or spirituality to put their leadership or decisions beyond questioning or accountability.”
Shame keeps survivors of spiritual abuse in hiding. After all, it’s not physical or sexual abuse. I would never compare my experience to a rape survivor, for instance. For that matter, others have suffered more spiritual abuse than me. We were not locked away in a compound with weapons. The pastor had no sex slaves. He was a farmer who loved his family and friends and, in many ways, was a typical Hoosier who would help a neighbor in need. I never doubted the love of my parents, grandparents, and other family members who were just as much victims of the con that began with William Branham as I was. I have more cherished childhood memories than I can count.
But the comparison game is a worthless one. Spiritual abuse leads to spiritual trauma. Beth Kiraly defines this as “The involuntary biological, psychological, emotional, and behavioral responses and reactions that develop within a person as a result of experiencing one or more traumatic events in spiritual or religious contexts.”
She goes on to explain how trauma response develops and lingers over long periods. What does it do to someone like me? Oh, I can tell you:
It makes it hard to trust others, hard to be open and vulnerable, hard to form deep relationships, and easy to suspect ulterior motives in all kinds of interactions.
It makes it hard to trust yourself and believe in your ability to reason or intuitively discern even in basic life situations.
It makes it hard to share your faith, even when you have a faith worth sharing and the communicative tools to do it in loving, non-coercive, respectful interchanges.
It means even when you attempt to write your story two decades after leaving, you wonder who will disown you, lash out, or try to minimize your experience.
G.R.A.C.E. lists common emotional, physical, and mental responses to the trauma of spiritual abuse like humiliation, powerlessness, loss of sleep and appetite, headaches, substance abuse, self-harm, PTSD, loss of a sense of safety in any church environment, and feeling a sense of betrayal by God and anyone perceived to be a spiritual leader. I have experienced some of these things, and I have known other spiritual abuse survivors to suffer all of these and more harmful effects.
How do we heal? Slowly. We respond with empathy to ourselves and to others who have been hurt. We seek trauma-informed care. One mark of spiritually abusive systems is their disdain for any form of therapy or counseling. At the church of my youth, I often sang a song that included this verse:
I don’t need my name in neon lights
And I don’t need a doctor messing with my mind
And I don’t need to hear your get-rich plan
’cause my investments are in glory land.
The insidious and non-sensical attempt to connect therapy with things like get-rich-quick plans and “neon lights” keeps people from getting the help they need.
Last, find a trauma-informed community marked by God’s grace, where people live by what Scot McKnight calls the Jesus Creed: “love God and love people.” If it is within your power, play a part in creating a trauma-informed community with and for others, whether a church community or some other community. G.R.A.C.E. says that these communities support healing by doing things like giving survivors agency over when and to whom they tell their stories, encouraging lament rather than suppressing negative emotions, and avoiding spiritual platitudes to bypass the healing process. Beth Kiraly writes,
“Becoming ‘trauma-informed’ means that we can ‘bear one another’s burdens’ by bearing witness. It means that we work to become more comfortable leaning into relational connection through pain and tragedy, rather than distancing ourselves from it. Bearing witness to someone’s trauma validates and honors their experience while providing a redemptive one.”
Good people are out there. I think of the famous Mr. Rogers quote: “Look for the helpers.”
Over the next few weeks, I will have much more to say about the Branham movement. I will show the connections from this small cult to broader problems within conservative evangelicalism, particularly relating to misogyny and racism, and direct relationships between Branham and figures from the Kardashian family to Jim Jones (the poison Flavor Aid guy), to William Jennings Bryan (of the Scopes Monkey Trial) to the founders and precursors of NAR and White Christian Nationalist groups. Next Monday, we begin with an overview. Besides my recollections and observations, I will draw from several sources, primarily two books:
You may not have heard of Branham before today, but a broad section of American Christendom has drunk from the same well. Theological positions vary widely, but there is a coherence to the ideology that is hard to deny. Seeing the poison in one branch of Christendom will help you spot it in others.
If you haven’t subscribed to my Substack, do so now, and you’ll get my article next Monday.
This is so powerful, Bobby. Thank you for sharing this so openly. It's amazing to me that you held on to your faith, and have pursued it so robustly, in spite of the ways you suffered from the abusive use of God's name for many years. Your clear-eyed testimony will shine a light for many people, people who may just need this kind of light to shine on a path they were about to take. Thank you.
Wow! I am so fascinated to see all of the connections you bring out over the next few weeks. From one cult survivor to another, I’m glad you got out and that you are telling your story and connecting the dots. I’m particularly interested in the way you connect this to the NAR which in my opinion is one of the most dangerous things going on in modern Christianity. Thanks for sharing!