Browsed by
Category: Spiritual Trauma

Why All Churches Are Vulnerable to Sexual Abuse: A Call to Action

Why All Churches Are Vulnerable to Sexual Abuse: A Call to Action

This week a report broke that the scope of Catholic clergy’s abuse of children was much, much larger than was previously thought, at least in Illinois. Almost 2000 children were abused by clergy since 1950 in that state. This report is shocking in some senses, but not really in others. Which is to say, it certainly seems to be yet another large set of additions to the #churchtoo canon, showing how much previously unspoken of sexual abuse happens in churches….

Read More Read More

The Haredi #MeToo and the Dangers of Not Gossiping

The Haredi #MeToo and the Dangers of Not Gossiping

By Kirsten Porter, Guest Blogger This week’s guest blogger brings us an intriguing dispatch from the world of Jewish thought on how necessary gossip can be under the right circumstances. I hope you enjoy it. This relates to a previous piece I wrote, which you can find here. Cheers, DS Leiter Written in 1873 by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, the Chofetz Chaim is a magisterial multi-volume work on the various religious prohibitions against gossiping (lashon hara in Hebrew) in the…

Read More Read More

When Affirming Becomes a Devil Term

When Affirming Becomes a Devil Term

With so many states creating laws demonizing LGBTQ+ identities and conservative Christians supporting so many of them with their votes, I’ve been thinking a lot about a dimension of the ways “Christian Nice” subtly theologically demonizes LGBTQ+ people lately. And when I saw a picture of a church sign that flat out said “we are welcoming but not affirming” I knew I had to take on the topic of the way that a church becoming (LGBTQ+) affirming is seen as…

Read More Read More

The Unhealthy Rhetoric of Spiritual Bypassing

The Unhealthy Rhetoric of Spiritual Bypassing

“Everything happens for a reason.” “She’s in a better place.” Some of us find these kinds of statements helpful, but others of us shudder when we hear them, especially when paired with other spiritual language. In this blog post I plan to unwrap some of the dynamics of why the thing termed spiritual bypassing can be toxic and harmful to a lot of people even when the same techniques and phrases help others. My Background and Standpoint As always, I’ll…

Read More Read More

On Sin-Leveling and Classified Documents

On Sin-Leveling and Classified Documents

Wow, we’ve been hearing a lot about classified documents in the US news lately. If you’re not paying attention to the rhetoric closely enough, it seems like it’s suddenly this huge problem that EVERYONE in government has. AND, significantly, like everyone ON ALL SIDES of US government is equally guilty of mishandling classified documents. In this piece I plan to unwrap why that simply isn’t so, and how this kind of largely right-wing rhetoric mirrors nature and the effects of…

Read More Read More

When Shame–Er, Purity Culture—Becomes a God Term

When Shame–Er, Purity Culture—Becomes a God Term

So this week I had the strange experience of re-reading the book Pure by Linda Kay Klein when an article came out suggesting that Evangelical missionary, martyr, and purity culture icon Jim Elliot seems to have longed for death at the end of his life because of struggle against something unspecified that he deemed a (sexual) sin. Considering Pure is an ethnographic study of the damage and trauma caused by the Evangelical purity culture movement that was in part pioneered…

Read More Read More

When Women Use Abortion as a Devil Term

When Women Use Abortion as a Devil Term

This week an AS follower came to me with a request. She had been engaged in a lot of recent discussions with right-wing women, specifically, about the questions around abortion rights. She was very frustrated with these discussions and wanted my take on them as well as my encouragement and advice. In today’s blog post I plan to talk about some breakthroughs in understanding I had in the process of analyzing these situations with her, specifically understanding better why and…

Read More Read More

When LGBTQ+ Identity Becomes a WEC Battleground

When LGBTQ+ Identity Becomes a WEC Battleground

So yeah, in recent months and years, it’s been increasingly clear that the litmus test for whether you were a “real” white Evangelical Christian has surrounded the question of where you stand on the Culture Wars, and has been stunningly similar to the question of what made a “true conservative” in the US. And let’s be clear—the issue this has consolidated around in recent years and decades, beyond the question of whether you support abortion being illegal, is the question…

Read More Read More

When Therapy Becomes a Devil Term, Especially in Church

When Therapy Becomes a Devil Term, Especially in Church

So I know so many people who grew up Evangelical who grew up with the overt message that therapy is terrible. I grew up with a more covert stigma about it in my right-leaning moderate neck of the woods, but it was effective all the same with me for a long time. As I’ll explain a bit later, I even see symptoms of this lingering in some progressive Christian spaces. In this piece I’ll unwrap some of this and how…

Read More Read More

Millstones and Such: The Gospel of Mark as Anti-Abuse

Millstones and Such: The Gospel of Mark as Anti-Abuse

Editor’s Note: This guest blog piece by Matthijs Kronemeijer was written before the recent horrific anti-trans legislation was passed in Texas. This legislation accuses healthy loving parents and caregivers of trans children of child abuse for affirming trans children’s identities and trying to protect them from the disturbingly high suicide rates among trans folx. I hate the fact that I even have to write a note about how much it is NOT ABUSE to affirm children who don’t fit pre-existing…

Read More Read More

Why Christian Nice Gets All Complicit with Bullies

Why Christian Nice Gets All Complicit with Bullies

So as I write this it’s Black History Month. Which has me thinking again about Christian White Person Nice and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s words in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” about how “white moderates” are almost a bigger threat to equity and justice than the extremists are. (I previously talked about this here and here.) In this week’s blog post I’d like to parse some more of this out in terms of communication and conflict theory. So I’ll…

Read More Read More

Beyond Thoughts and Prayers: A Spirituality of Equitable Tangible Support

Beyond Thoughts and Prayers: A Spirituality of Equitable Tangible Support

Okay, so probably many, if not most, of the people reading this blog KNOW they get super frustrated when they hear the words “thoughts and prayers.” If you are in this group, you may have even developed an allergy to the phrase. You probably even know that it bothers you because of a combo platter of hypocrisy and a lack of action. But you may not understand why you have such a visceral reaction to it, or why and how…

Read More Read More

The Toxic Side of “States’ Rights” & The Electoral College

The Toxic Side of “States’ Rights” & The Electoral College

Okay, so in the wake of the anniversary of 1/6, I find my mind increasingly drawn back to the disruption of the counting of electoral votes. Which makes me think about bullying regarding representation overall, including this conservative political rhetoric we’ve long had about STATES’ RIGHTS! As you’ll see, this often ties back to the Electoral College. In this blog piece I plan to unwrap this conservative rhetoric both from personal experience and my scholarly training to help us process…

Read More Read More

Assertiveness in an Age of Herod(s)

Assertiveness in an Age of Herod(s)

So as I write this, it’s Advent, a time when traditionally people have focused on the time of waiting in the midst of deep and dark tension for good things to arrive. But speaking of darkness, bits of the Christmas story itself are remarkably dark and horrific, as the story of when Joseph and Mary have to flee the country because Herod saw a potential baby born to be the Messiah as a huge threat to his power. This week’s…

Read More Read More

When Conservative Christians Demonize Deconstruction

When Conservative Christians Demonize Deconstruction

This past week an intense Twitter war has been raging between conservative Christians (mostly white Evangelicals) and their critics over the nature and value of those who are “deconstructing.” In this blog piece, I plan to unwrap some of the messaging these white Evangelicals—mostly men—have been using to demonize those who claim the term deconstruction by those who have been leaving white Evangelicalism, especially since the 2016 election in the United States. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the rhetoric of…

Read More Read More