I value inclusiveness and tolerance, but I’m increasingly worried about the horrible things we can end up enabling in their name. Religion, along with pseudoscience and conspiracy madness, can get a remarkably gentle reception when we’re anxious to show how open-minded we are. We can end up tolerating harm to people who have no voice and power in the matter. How considerate of us, volunteering someone else’s safety. Doesn’t our willingness to call harmful beliefs harmful matter far more than whether the ones holding them feel sufficiently respected?
Too often, religious upbringing crosses into abuse, because belief is used to intimidate, control, humiliate, isolate, exploit, or physically endanger a child. Abuse also occurs when religious beliefs and institutions enable sexual violence, medical neglect, or coercion over a child’s developing identity. These harms deserve the same scrutiny as abuse in any other setting. Humiliation is destructive and a child’s need for protection should have the same urgency in any circumstance (Bottoms et al., 1995, 2015; Simonič et al., 2013).
First of all, religious upbringing teaches you to distrust your own mind. A child is taught that anger is wicked, doubt is dangerous, sexuality is shameful, and obedience determines whether they deserve love. Those demands become internal prohibitions: you may continue to condemn yourself long after the people who taught you to do it have lost their authority over you. Clinical accounts of religious emotional abuse describe how it can affect your sense of self and your relationships, including your understanding of God (Novšak et al., 2012).
Look at what the beliefs and practices require of a child, especially what happens when the child resists. Calling abuse a distortion of religious teaching doesn’t let the teaching off the hook. If a teaching justifies domination or makes a child responsible for an adult’s violence, we need to question the teaching itself. Calling it sacred settles absolutely nothing. An adult can sincerely believe every word and still be dangerous to a child.
What research shows about religious abuse
We have research documenting religion-related abuse in families, congregations, and institutions; this is hardly something critics of religion have dreamed up. Recurring forms include withholding necessary medical treatment, harming children in attempts to expel supposed evil, and abuse by people whose religious position gives them exceptional access to children and authority over them. These patterns appear both in reports to mental health professionals and in cases encountered by legal and social service agencies (Bottoms et al., 1995, 2015).
Within families, religion can also give adults the language to intimidate children and justify harming them when they need care. Clinical accounts describe how religious emotional abuse can leave people struggling to manage their feelings and caught in dysfunctional relationships, with the harm continuing across generations (Simonič et al., 2013). Research measuring spiritual harm identifies familiar features of these environments and their effects: protecting the religious system, controlling leadership, endorsement of violence, gender discrimination, a threatening image of god, and personal distress. The measures cover both abusive environments and psychological distress (Koch & Edstrom, 2022).
Research among Christian adults has associated biblical literalism and some combinations of religious motivation and social conformity with greater scores on a measure of child abuse potential. That’s a measure of characteristics associated with risk, so we can’t use it to claim that someone has actually committed abuse (Rodriguez & Henderson, 2010). Broader findings linking religious involvement with better adolescent adjustment (Hardy et al., 2019) offer no defense of an abusive practice. A population average can’t tell you whether the child in front of you is being harmed.
Emotional degradation and spiritual intimidation
Religious emotional abuse can involve persistent humiliation, threats of divine punishment, enforced submission, and the suggestion that ordinary feelings reveal an evil or defective self. A parent’s disapproval can become, supposedly, God’s judgment. Now you’re in trouble with the creator of the universe, which is quite a lot to put on a child. If you’re taught that the authority condemning you can also read your thoughts, even the privacy of your own mind offers no escape (Novšak et al., 2012; Downie, 2022).
Guilt can concern a specific action you can take responsibility for. Shame can become a judgment on your whole self, leaving you feeling defective even when you can’t identify anything you’ve actually done wrong. Critical analysis of Christian shame describes how teachings about human unworthiness can contribute to an enduring sense of personal defectiveness (Downie, 2022). In an abusive upbringing, you may get little help distinguishing harm you’ve actually caused from a thought or feeling an adult has forbidden. Wanting something can become an offense all by itself. You haven’t done a damn thing, and you’re already guilty.
It gets especially damaging when the threats keep coming and your safety or belonging depends on doing as you’re told. A child who is repeatedly terrorized with damnation, compelled to confess private thoughts, or punished for questioning authority may learn to monitor their inner life as a source of danger. The child’s age and dependence on the adults making those threats matter, along with the wider pattern of treatment. We-all-grew-up-with-it is a statement about how common a practice is. And it tells us nothing about whether it is harmless.
Physical abuse and medical neglect
Beatings and other harmful punishments remain abusive when adults describe them as religious duties. God doesn’t get to sign the permission slip. Retrospective research has associated religion-related physical abuse with poorer later psychological functioning than physical abuse without a religious component. Science doesn’t establish that religion independently caused the difference, but it gives us reason to examine what being told the violence is divinely sanctioned adds to the experience (Bottoms et al., 2004).
Religious beliefs can even motivate adults to withhold necessary medical care or subject a child to dangerous practices intended to remove supposed evil (Bottoms et al., 1995, 2015). Child-protection research documents severe injury and deaths in cases involving accusations of witchcraft or spirit possession (Briggs & Whittaker, 2018). The adults may describe themselves as fighting evil while the the one being (sometimes brutally) hurt is the child they’re supposedly saving. The child is treated as the source of the danger. You end up needing protection from the very people you depend on to survive, while being told that something inside you is to blame.
Coercive conformity and attacks on identity
Religious control can reach into friendships, education, sexuality, and the freedom to consider a different life. And nobody has to hit you for disagreement to become dangerous; the threat of losing your family or community can do enough. Research with survivors of religious conversion practices describes entrapment sustained through spiritual, social, and practical dependencies (Roguski & Atwool, 2024). When you’re dependent on the people making those threats, agreeing with them may be the safest option available. Calling that a freely chosen commitment is quite a stretch.
LGBTQ people may encounter teachings that portray their sexuality or gender as evidence of corruption, brokenness, or moral danger. Survivor research describes erasure, rejection, psychological distress, and profound conflicts over belonging in religious settings. Research on conversion practices also identifies religious trauma and moral injury associated with efforts to change or suppress identity (Hollier et al., 2022; Jones et al., 2022). The demand can make acceptance conditional on rejecting an intimate part of yourself. You get to belong as long as you agree that something about you needs erasing.
Teachings about a woman’s duty to submit can also make it harder to refuse abuse and give the people demanding her obedience a religious justification for it. Research in Zimbabwe’s Johanne Marange Apostolic Church describes religiously protected practices of forced and teenage marriage to old men (Dudzai et al., 2023). Research in white evangelical settings shows how purity culture makes girls and women responsible for male sexual behavior while limiting the language and support available to identify abuse (McKinzie & Richards, 2022). In these settings, talk of religiously prescribed submission answers the question on what happens if she says no. You know the answer.
Sexual abuse and institutional betrayal
When the person sexually abusing you has been presented as a god’s representative, making sense of the betrayal comes with an additional, grotesque complication: you’ve been taught to revere them. Population research has documented childhood sexual abuse by adults in religious organizations, while survivor research shows how reverence for authority and community silence can obstruct recognition and disclosure (Hunt et al., 2024; Chowdhury et al., 2022). The religious setting can give an abuser access to a child and make the abuse harder for that child to recognize. Being presented as God’s representative is a considerable advantage when you want your authority to go unquestioned.
Purity teachings can deepen self-blame when survivors have been taught to regard their bodies as temptations or to understand sexual contact primarily in terms of lost purity. In the evangelical settings examined in survivor research, institutional and ideological pressures restricted survivors’ ability to name what had happened and seek help (McKinzie & Richards, 2022). You may end up experiencing someone else’s violation of your body as evidence that you are contaminated or have done something wrong. The perpetrator gets the protection; you get the shame.
Then there’s what the institution does when someone tells. Disbelief, protection of leaders, and hostile responses to disclosure may undermine the survivor’s trust in the community and in their own judgment. Research on clergy sexual abuse describes harm that extends into meaning, identity, and the person’s relationship with the sacred, alongside other psychological consequences (Durkin et al., 2025). An institution that protects its leaders at a child’s expense has made its priorities clear.
Understanding the continuing harm in psychoanalysis
In psychoanalysis, we look at how an authority you once had to obey can become a part of your own thinking. Different concepts help us examine that process, without assuming everyone’s experience follows the same script (Novšak et al., 2012; Stone, 2013).
Psychoanalysis has a term for an internal moral authority that keeps attacking you: the punitive superego. With that kind of authority, admitting a mistake and making amends may never feel sufficient. In a religiously abusive upbringing, your parents’ condemnation can take on god’s supposedly permanent, all-knowing authority. You can reject the doctrine intellectually and still feel that wanting something, or disagreeing with someone, puts you in danger. Disbelief doesn’t cancel years of indoctrination. In psychoanalysis, we examine whose prohibitions you still feel bound by and how obeying them became a condition of feeling good or lovable.
Recognizing abuse gets especially complicated when you love the person responsible. A child depends on caregivers and usually loves them regardless of anything, including abuse. Blaming yourself can be a way to keep believing that the person you depend on is good. Religious explanations of sin, disobedience, and deserved punishment can make that response seem morally necessary. In adulthood, acknowledging abuse may consequently threaten a bond that once made life feel survivable. Loving the person who hurt you doesn’t make the harm insignificant, although it makes acknowledging it considerably harder.
Then there’s anger, which may have landed you in trouble long before you had any idea what to do with it. If anger at parents or religious authorities was condemned, you may have learned to suppress it or turn it against yourself. Exaggerated compliance can also conceal anger you couldn’t afford to show. We can explore whether these responses once helped keep you safe, then examine what they cost you now, including difficulty setting limits or recognizing exploitation. We work out together how this fits your experience.
It can be hard to recognize abuse when you’ve been taught to see it as discipline, care, or religious duty. Philosophical analysis of religious trauma shows how a community’s concepts can obscure the meaning of harm, including harm to children (Panchuk, 2020). When humiliation is considered humility and protesting gets you accused of sinful rebellion, the vocabulary has been arranged in the abuser’s favor. Psychoanalysis can help you distinguish your experience from the explanation you were required to accept.
These expectations may also enter the relationship with your analyst through transference: expectations formed in earlier relationships can shape how you experience this one. An interpretation may feel like a verdict, and disagreeing may feel like disobedience that could get you rejected. The analyst therefore pays attention to their actual authority, including their own wish to be trusted or agreed with. You need to be able to question an interpretation and expect mistakes to be acknowledged. You’ve had enough practice with supposedly infallible authorities.
Restoring the capacity to think and choose
Through all of this, we keep sight of what was actually done to you. Your unconscious expectations don’t make you responsible for an adult’s abuse or an institution’s failure to protect you. If you’re still being harmed, getting you safe comes first. Research with conversion-practice survivors underlines the importance of support both in leaving coercive environments and after departure (Roguski & Atwool, 2024).
Recovery often involves learning to distinguish your values from inherited threats and to allow any thoughts and feelings without treating them as moral failure. You may also need to mourn lost relationships or years spent trying to please an authority that promised protection while causing harm. You get to be angry about that, including when somebody would much prefer you to say it made you stronger. Forgiveness is optional, and nobody should require you to reconcile with the people who hurt you or produce an uplifting account of the experience to prove you’ve made progress.
Religion warrants direct criticism wherever its teachings or institutions enable abuse. Understanding how you adapted to that abuse can help explain why it still holds authority over you, even after you’ve rejected the beliefs that justified it. Psychoanalysis gives you space to say what happened and how you feel about it, without having to excuse anyone or having to distort your feelings. By talking about those experiences, we work through. That can be painful work; cleaning a wound often is, but it’s what allows it to heal.
Sources
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