“Why Would I Believe In Something That Hurt Me So Much?”

How do you rebuild trust and faith in Christianity after spiritual trauma? | Deconversion Series

Pain Can Damage Our Sense of Belief

Since Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” Western thought has been overly individualistic when it comes to establishing our ideas about reality. But the human person is not atomized—essentially separated from its social, cultural, and physical environment. Quite the opposite. We absorb the beliefs of those around us. We understand ourselves and our reality in relationship to others and the way they understand themselves and reality. 

We are always being changed by our environment through a steady and often invisible process of osmosis. Sometimes that influence works in a positive direction—we are drawn to become more like those who surround us. Other times, however, we are drawn to oppose the beliefs of our social environment. The difference is often the treatment we have received and the models we have been given to emulate (or defy). 

The fact is that many people who take a stand against Christianity do so from a place of profound personal disappointment with the church or with Christians.

In a sense, this is the most natural of all the reasons to leave Christianity. 

The Shape of a Spiritual Wound

Humans aren’t made of diamond; we are not unscratchable. The pain we experience can leave an indelible mark. When the inevitable dents and bruises come, the marks don’t just buff out. People can do things to us that can’t be undone. Say things that can’t be forgotten. Bend us in such a way that we must contend with the resulting distortion for decades.

Our spiritual body is like our physical body; it heals many wounds without a trace, but others scar and abide. 

However, unlike physical wounds, spiritual hurts are not static. They are dynamic. They move. They transform and metastasize. They can shoot out tendrils and affect unwounded areas. They can go underground only to surface years later with the strength of lost time. They can produce an instinctual aversion to the source of the pain that goes beyond logic or language.

When we experience mistreatment from Christians, it is disillusioning. The disillusionment can apply not only to the person who mistreated us, but to everything they stand for. The damage and its effects compound when the person who hurt us was supposed to be someone we could trust, someone we looked up to, someone who purported to be following the way of Jesus.

In many cases, painful experiences in a Christian context can harden into a callous that renders the question of Christianity’s plausibility moot.

Tim Keller puts it succinctly in The Reason for God: 

“If you have known many wise, kind, intelligent Christians over the years and have seen churches that are devout in belief yet civic-minded and generous, you will find the intellectual case for Christianity more plausible. If, on the other hand, most of your experience has been with nominal Christians or with self-righteous fanatics, then the arguments for Christianity will have to be extremely strong for you to concede they have any cogency at all.”

There is no shortage of stories about domineering pastors who ruthlessly control their churches, rituals of shame cloaked in Christian language, forceful stabs at evangelism, coercion, even violence at the hands of Christian teachers, parents, and friends.

When these things happen inside a community that claims to be following the Prince of Peace, it is terribly destabilizing. A dissonance begins to grow in one’s mind. Like a broken bell, the dissonance clangs every time you return to church, every time you pick up the Bible, every time you hear that person pray. You begin to wonder whether it will ever pass. Will you have to live with it? Is there a way out? What will you have to give away to make the dissonance stop? What will you have to become?

The Church and Her Doubters

To make it worse, the church can be hardest on those who are struggling with her. 

It can be all too easy for the people who dedicate themselves to following the God of Truth to tell themselves that their community has attained the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Though Jesus said, “the truth shall set you free,” in all too many churches the “truth” becomes a shackle, a cudgel, a means of social control, or a tool for shaming. The truth can become a hammer and every doubt and difference becomes a nail.

In such a community, doubts are quickly answered and put to rest. If the answer doesn’t take, the community can move from eradicating the doubts to alienating the doubter.

Mike McHargue, author of Finding God in the Waves and co-host of the Liturgist podcast put it this way:

“My god construct fell apart and I was left with no belief and that left me feeling very frightened and vulnerable… [When I shared how I felt] the people I cared about most essentially began to shun and excommunicate me… which was a very scary thing.”

If you find yourself in the midst of a plausibility crisis sparked by church-related wounds, receiving more of the same when you are honest about your questions and experiences can send your doubts into a full-blown deconstruction. Things can get ugly fast as alienation builds upon alienation.

In some Christian communities, outliers don’t get special care, they get cast out. And so the hurting Christian teetering on the brink of some internal tipping point is sent looking for a new paradigm among the pieces of their old religion.

Church Is Broken Because People Are Broken

In most cases, such experiences do not need to be “responded to” or explained away; they need to be owned and healed, if possible.

Reality is broken and that brokenness extends even into God’s chosen world-redeeming force, his church. The pages of the Bible echo the reality that God’s people, rather than being the heroes of the story, are often the antagonists.

But though you can catch a sickness at the hospital, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a place of healing. The unfortunate, but realistic, truth about the hospital of the church is that the doctors are also undergoing treatment. In that sense, the problem with the church isn’t that it is the church; it is that it is full of people. 

If the Christian story of the pervasiveness of sin is true, bad experiences with Christians are exactly what you would expect to see. However, you would also expect to see evidence of substantially healed relationships and persons in whom God’s fullness is (ever so slowly) being revealed.

Psychologists who worked with veterans of the Vietnam war coined the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” to describe the lasting impact of trauma that the war had wrecked on the soldiers after they came home. Churches that have institutionalized spiritual abuse are producing walking wounded veterans suffering from spiritual PTSD. But there is also post-traumatic regeneration, the slow regathering of all of one’s lost pieces, the facing of the past, the exposing and healing of wounds. Though there are many examples of churches that, like a warzone, leave lasting scars on people, they are not the norm, nor the ideal. 

The church was supposed to be a place that people could see that God was real by virtue of what they saw when they looked at her. The people of God were supposed to be a living demonstration of the Living God. That was the point of the whole affair.

But the church as a whole has never lived up to that high calling. That’s also the point. We needed a Jesus loving us in our mess and we got one. We needed a Jesus who would stand alongside even our most tender wounds and walk with us into healing and meaning again. We got that too. But we also needed Jesus to clear away our mess once and for all, to put a final end to evil, and to render every hurt ended. That we didn’t get.

Yet. 

The church sits astride the “now” of the age of its inauguration and the “not yet” of its re-inauguration in the New Creation. In the meantime, it will both heal and hurt people. It will tell the truth and at times be utterly convinced of falsehoods. For now, it is a field bursting with both wheat and tares, a mixed blessing through which God’s Spirit still moves, wild and potent.

How Do You Rebuild Trust and Faith After Spiritual Trauma?

People who have experienced wrongdoing, hypocrisy, trauma, and abuse are often left with the question: How can I believe in something that has hurt me so much? 

Sometimes the answer is simple. They can’t. And they don’t want to, thank you very much. 

Others find the question harder to put to rest. As they grapple with their own experiences they find there is much that is good in Christianity that they do not want to leave behind. Perhaps there is a sense that, though Christians have hurt them, Christianity has also shaped them in precious ways. Perhaps though Christians have fallen short of his example, they know Jesus walks with them and they want to keep the long walk going.

For the latter group, the question remains: how do you rebuild trust and faith in Christianity and in the church after spiritual trauma?

That is a bigger question than can be adequately tackled at the tail end of an article like this one, but the article would be incomplete if I hadn’t raised it since that is exactly the question that so many are asking with such desperation. However, when I think of the character of God and the nature of the church, some answers do come to mind.

First, I have to imagine that the Spirit of God especially binds up the brokenhearted whose hearts have been broken at the hands of the people of God. 

Isn’t this exactly what God did when he took on flesh in Christ and ministered in a context in which people were every bit as spiritually broken as they are today?

Think of Jesus standing between the woman caught in adultery and her would-be murderers, challenging them to search their own hearts to see what they found there before they cast the first stone. 

Think of his conversation with the woman at the well. Though she expected harshness because she saw that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, his relentless, but gentle questions brought up her most tender wounds not to condemn her, but to free her. When she went back to her village she said of Jesus, “He told me everything I’ve ever done.” Strangely, it wasn’t shame that drove her report, but joy. Such was the experience when the broken and hurting came face to face with God incarnate.

Secondly, goodness, beauty, and truth experienced inside the Christian church can do much to repair our experience of their opposites, even if those experiences also came in a Christian context of Christanity.

Yes, the church can wound, but it has also been a place of healing for millennia. 

Pain can test and destabilize one’s views of reality and of God, but Christianity can be a balm and refuge for sufferers. There are massive intellectual and emotional resources within Christianity that can ground and shelter us when we experience pain—even when the pain came through the church. 

Lastly, if Christianity is true, then at the center of reality there blazes an infinite personality that is so committed to putting things to right that he took on flesh and walked among his broken image-bearers until they killed him. And if that is true - really true - does it make sense to walk away from that God when we experience pain from those same broken image-bearers? 

God knows what it means to suffer and what it means to heal. He knows what it means to bear the scars of spiritual trauma and he knows what it means to live beyond them. For millennia, hundreds of millions of sufferers have found comfort in the suffering of Jesus. They have found, almost beyond belief, that there is also resurrection in the resurrection of Christ. There is a new life in the way of Jesus that is built of both the pain they’ve experienced and the healing that has come in its wake. 

---

Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash