When Church Makes You Sick

How To Break Free From Harmful Religion

“Christianity is fond of saying that “the church is a hospital for sinners.” And yet every day I counsel people you became seriously ill through their involvement in religion.

Being human is not a condition or a disorder in need of forgiveness, treatment, fixing, curing, or salvation. Religion cleverly created and perpetuates a false problem to which they are the only solution. If the church was a hospital it would be sued and shut down for malpractice.

The problem is not that you need saved from yourself, but that you believed what they told you.

If truth in advertising standards were applied to religion, it would be mandatory for many churches to display a sign reading: “Warning: this church could be harmful to your spiritual and psychological health.”

- Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy

Breaking free from harmful religion is one of the most volatile, disruptive, and destabilizing experiences a person walks through in life. One’s sense of personal identity and security is tied to their religious belief-system. Leaving one’s faith can feel like a death or divorce.

For most people, the religious environment was a one-stop-shop for meeting all their major needs – social support, a coherent worldview, meaning and direction in life, structured activities, and emotional and spiritual satisfaction.

For many religious people, “relationship with God” was the axis around which one’s entire life revolved. Religion claims to offer the security of correct answers to life’s biggest questions such as the existence of God, the meaning and purpose of life, and what happens when you die. The religion-leaver often experiences a spectrum of volatile emotions including grief, doubts, confusion, anger, sadness, fear and denial. In many cases, one’s core beliefs and assumptions are shattered.

I recently published an article, detailing the experiences of many religion-leavers, Love Letters to the Recently Departed: An Ode to Those Done with Religion. I often share the personal stories of religion-leavers. This week I shared Jane Kennedy’s article that tells some of her story, The Death of Our Ideas of God: Deconstruction and Dis-integration. In a Substack Note I mentioned the need for curating more stories about the leaving religion and post-religion journey. In response, John Stokdijk graciously shared a detailed accounting of his own spiritual path out of religion.

Religion can make you sick

Religious pathology are the psychological abnormalities or maladies that are developed as a result of one’s dysfunctional religious experience. I have previously published articles abut the impact of toxic religion on mental health, including:

• Why religion can be bad for your mental health (how toxic religion sabotages mental health)

• Toxic Religitivity (exposing toxic religious sub-culture)

• The Hidden Trauma Epidemic (how toxic religion poisons everything)

• Overcoming Religious Guilt and Shame (deconstructing religious shame)

• When You're in an Abusive Relationship ... with God (toxic religion codependency)

• When Church Makes You Sick (escaping religious self-hate)

The degree of damage caused in a person’s life as a result of their involvement in toxic religion differs. Today it is recognized that many people suffer from Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), which is a set of symptoms and characteristics that are related to harmful experiences with religion. Typically they are the result of two things: immersion in a controlling religion and the secondary impact of leaving a religious group. People who were indoctrinated into high-control religion from an early age are likely to find the damage done by religion to be formidable.

Many people who have been part of a toxic religious environment for an extended time can suffer from human development deficits, including:

• delayed emotional development

• poor critical thinking ability

• knowledge gaps

• unhealthy self-relationship

• sexual difficulty

• behind schedule on developmental tasks

• difficulty belonging

Religious dynamics that damage people

The religious dynamics that are typically damaging to people’s lives include:

• Fear-based orientation toward life

Many of the doctrines and teachings of organized religion are based in fear such as: fear of God; fear of God’s disapproval, judgment, condemnation and rejection; fear of eternal hell; fear of God’s discipline or the loss of God’s blessing and protection; fear of oneself; fear of life; fear of Satan and demonic influences; fear of the world; fear of others who are different.

• Shame-based view of self

Many people internalize the destructive religious message that they are intrinsically bad, absent of inherent worth, and repulsive to God in their natural state. It’s not uncommon for traditional Christianity to teach that one’s inherent sinfulness is so bad that it left God no choice but to brutalize, torture and kill his only son. There is an intersectionality aspect to the harm toxic religion does in people’s lives. For example, women are uniquely victimized by toxic patriarchal/misogynistic culture compared to men, and the LGBTQ+ community are damaged by toxic religious homophobic culture in ways the heterosexual community is not.

• Mistrust of self and the externalization of authority

Another component of harmful religion is the message that people cannot trust their own thoughts or feelings, and must accept and follow the authority of religious leaders. Fundamentalist theology damages one’s intellectual development by explicitly warning against trusting one’s own mind while requiring belief in far-fetched claims. Believers are not allowed to question dogma without endangering themselves. Critical thinking skills are under-valued. Emotions and intuitions are also considered suspect so people learn not to trust their own feelings. With external authority the only permissible guide, people lose touch with inner instincts necessary for decision making and moral development.

• Loss of authentic self

In many cases people learned to hide and suppress their true selves in their religious community, and perform an inauthentic identity of well-being and spirituality. Too often people were told that personal problems, depression, substance abuse and addiction, and other psychological struggles and disorders were an indication of a spiritual problem, lack of faith, disobedience, or falling out of God’s favor. As a result people failed to divulge and seek help for inner struggles and maladies that could have otherwise been addressed through various avenues or professional treatments. Religion is often an assault on one’s individuality by pressuring people to conform to the rules, norms, expectations and preferences of the religious group.

• Abuse of power

The abuse of power within toxic religion is a central component of the damage it afflicts in people’s lives. In many cases mental, emotional and sexual harm is inflicted in families and churches because authoritarianism goes unchecked. Too many secrets are kept. Sexual repression in religion also contributes to child abuse. The sanctioned patriarchal power structure allows abusive practices towards women and children. Severe condemnation of LBGTQ+ individuals takes an enormous toll as well, including depression and suicide. So while the religious community can appear to offer a safe environment, the pressures to conform, adhere to legalistic requirements, and submit to abuses of power, can cause great suffering.

• Volatility of discontinuing religious involvement

Breaking out of a restrictive, mind-controlling religion is understandably a liberating experience. People report huge relief and excitement about their new possibilities. Certain problems are over such as trying to twist one’s thinking to believe irrational religious doctrines, and conforming to repressive codes of behavior. However, the challenges of leaving are daunting. For most people, the religious environment was a one-stop-shop for meeting all their major needs – social support, a coherent worldview, meaning and direction in life, structured activities, and emotional/spiritual satisfaction. Leaving the fold means multiple losses, including the loss of friends and support at a crucial time of personal transition. Consequently, it is often a very lonely and stressful life event.

The leaving-religion process has a lot of moving parts, which could include:

• Making peace with your religious past

• Navigating nihilism and a crisis of meaning

• Addressing human development deficits

• Repairing and rebuilding a new self-relationship

• Prioritizing self-care and mental health

• Recovering from spiritual abuse or religious trauma

• Rooting out toxic religious indoctrination

• Reshaping of one’s relational and social world

• Navigating a crisis of faith and major life transitions

• Approaching life’s existential questions with a different lens

• Learning new tools for human growth and development

• Exploring what spirituality is for you

Making peace with your religious past

For the remainder of this article I want to offer a few practical suggestions related to one aspect of the leaving religion process, making peace with your religious past.

What does it mean to make peace with your religious past? Let me start by identifying what it is not.

Making peace with your religious past is NOT:

• Denying, minimizing or burying the damage of your religious past

• Excusing or a forced “forgiveness” of those who harmed you and were complicit in the damage you suffered

• Judging and repressing the volatility of emotions one naturally feels such as hurt, betrayal and anger

• Blaming yourself

• Doing nothing and assuming the negative impact of religion will just eventually diminish and naturally work itself out

Making peace with your religious past IS:

• A conscious decision to do your personal work to process and heal from the damage experienced through one’s ties to religion

• Owning, acknowledging and expressing the volatility of emotions that are a natural part of what one feels as result of the wounds and scars of religion

• Reflecting on the dynamics of your journey and experiences with religion to identify the lessons one can learn from

• Letting go of anger, bitterness and resentments, and coming to a place of healthy acceptance of your religious past, and holding compassion for those who were part of the system or still are

Identifying what a toxic religious past cost you

It’s important for a religion-leaver to specifically identify what their religious past cost them. Useful questions to explore include:

• How do you feel that religion most negatively impacted your life?

• In what ways did religion damage your spiritual, mental, emotional, physical and psychological health ?

• What deep wounds did religion leave behind in you?

• What do you feel your involvement in religion stole from you?

• What do you most grieve having missed or lost as a result of your involvement in religion?

As you work on this personal inventory it’s natural to feel hurt, sadness, disillusionment, anger and betrayal.

Naming destructive messages you internalized

This second area involves specifically naming the damaging fear-based and shame-based messages you absorbed through your involvement in religion. It’s important that you identify these messages as succinctly and accurately as you felt, experienced and internalized them. Some examples may be: “I am not good enough.” “I can’t trust myself.” “I am bad.” “It’s not okay to be me.” A useful exercise would be to identify and write out the three most damaging messages you internalized from your involvement in religion.

Understanding habit-energy

There is no quick fix or magic formula for rooting out religious pathology from your life. There are, however, some skillful ways to address it.

Each of us has created a tremendous amount of habit-energy that perpetuates religious pathology in our lives. Habits can be described as connections or bonds between neurons that are strong and induce us to continue a behavior. The more that we do the behavior, the stronger the neural bonds, and the stronger the habit.

Religion encodes people with ways of thinking about ourselves, God, life, others and the world. It becomes an embedded script that we reinforce through our thoughts and actions, which only strengthens its power further. This dynamic has an energy fueled through many years of reinforcement, which keeps people stuck in their religious pathology. Even after a person becomes conscious that the messages, beliefs, mindsets and narratives they learned from religion are erroneous, the habit-energy of these deeply imbedded beliefs and their damaging impact persists.

We have all heard the phrase, “use it or lose it.” The idea is that if you don't continue to practice or use an ability, you might lose that ability. Similarly, if we choose not to operate within those false messages we internalized through religion, the power of those messages gradually diminishes. At the same time, if we operate within what we have chosen to replace those harmful messages then we start to re-pattern our lives according to more whole, liberating and empowering mindsets.

Re-Patterning Assignment

There are two parts of the assignment for making peace with your religious past.

Part 1: Changing the message

Part 1 involves choosing what you feel is the most debilitating message you adopted through religion or identify the religious mindset you feel most continues to have a destructive impact in your life today. Review your answers in the section, “Naming destructive messages you internalized”. Choose one of these messages.

With the message you chose, identify all the ways of thinking, feeling, being, relating, living and acting that you see in your life that are consistent with that destructive message. In other words, when you are operating within that harmful mindset, what or how are you thinking and feeling? What are you being? How are you living and acting? How do you relate to yourself, others, God, the world and life?

For example, let’s say the most damaging belief you adopted through religion is the belief that you can’t trust yourself. People who are impacted by religion in this way are prone to externalize the authority of their lives to someone or something outside themselves. They will typically look to a spiritual religious or spiritual guru to follow and adopt their teachings. Because religion taught them to mistrust what’s inside them and implied that they were not equipped or capable to guide their own spiritual life, they easily attach themselves to others for a sense of stability and security. Self-doubt, lack of self-confidence, low self-worth, self-judgment, shame, self-limiting beliefs, self-criticism, people-pleasing and codependency may be some of the ways this manifests in that person’s life.

Think about your life. What are you thinking and feeling inside when you are operating within that internalized religious lie? Who do you become? What does your life feel like? How does it impact your wellbeing and relationships?

Consider recording your thoughts in a journal.

Next, create a new statement for yourself that you choose to believe or that expresses what is real and true to you, and that replaces the religious lie. For example, let’s say that one of the destructive religious messages you internalized and still impacts your life is the message: “I am bad and unworthy; it’s not okay to be me.” Let’s say your replacement truth is – “I have infinite worth; being me is good.”

Take some time to reflect on what it might look like if you operated within the truth of your new message or statement. What would be different? What would your inner condition be? How would it change who you are in the world? When you are operating within that liberating place, what are your thoughts, feelings, ways of being, acting, living and relating? How would your relationships be different? Write it down. That’s Part 1 of the assignment.

Part Two: Witnessing your life

This part of the assignment involves being a student of your lived human experience. For the next few days be mindful of which mentality (religious lie or new belief) you are operating within. When you become aware that you are operating within the destructive mindset, make note of that. Look around and notice what the situation or circumstances are. Is there something to learn? Don’t judge or condemn yourself. Like I said, it takes time to diminish habit-energy and re-pattern new ways of being in your life. Have compassion on yourself. Simply being mindful and noticing when you are operating within a destructive mindset helps to diminish its sway over you. Likewise, when you become mindful and notice you are operating within that liberating place, make note and celebrate! Acknowledge yourself and the changes that are unfolding in your life.

I’m not meaning to imply that the above assignment and exercises represents the sum total of personal work that will resolve the harmful impact of toxic religion. As mentioned, high-control religion often does significant damage to one’s mental health, which is why Religious Trauma Syndrome will likely become identified as a mental disorder on the next iteration of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Religious Deconstruction Myths

Religious deconstruction has become a trendy topic in recent years, but there are some unhelpful ways that it is presented. Here are five distinctions about religious deconstruction that could be useful:

1. Deconstruction is not merely swapping out an old belief system for a new one. Foundational deconstruction work involves:

• addressing human development deficits caused by a high-control religious environment

• recovering and healing from religious abuse or trauma

• identifying toxic indoctrination blind spots

• repairing and rebuilding a healthy and empowering relationship with yourself

2. Deconstruction does not require an end in mind. In other words, true deconstruction allows a person the freedom to guide their path forward with autonomy. For example, an Exvangelical isn't required to keep the Bible or Christian theism a part of their post-religion spirituality. They might do this, they might not, but they should not be pressured one way or another. Maybe an Exvangelical leaves evangelicalism and explores a path that is not in any way “Christian”. It’s their choice and what feels right for them.

3. Deconstruction is not fundamentally an endeavor of theology and philosophy. Theology, philosophy, and the philosophy of religion are personal areas of interest of mine and have been useful in my journey in countless ways. However, deconstruction does not have to be an Ivory Tower undertaking. You don't need a PhD in theology or philosophy to chart a post-religion path forward. Sometimes the deconstruction process can be portrayed primarily as a cerebral and intellectual task. But it just as well could be a path of deep self-reflection and journaling, silence and solitude, re-connecting with nature, somatic self-care, and creative self-expression.

4. Deconstruction is not a class, workshop, seminar or program. Of course, workshops and seminars can be useful in deconstruction, but it can be useful to think of deconstruction as a way of life. Specifically, deconstruction is not bridge from an old belief system to a new one, it's a way of being with oneself and one’s spiritual journey. This way of being involves maintaining an openness for one's spirituality to perpetually deepen and expand organically, as opposed to buttoning down all the answers in a new box.

5. The deconstruction conversation is one about existential health. For the past 25 years as a certified non-religious Spiritual Director, I have counseled countless people through their deconstruction process, healing and recovery from religious trauma, and cultivating a meaningful and liberating post-religion spirituality. I don't have any preference in terms of how a person works out their deconstruction and reconstruction process. I don’t prescribe or steer people toward any particular belief-structure or what meaningful part (if any) of their religious past they chose to keep. My interest is to support a person in cultivating what I have been calling “existential health”, which is:

• Cultivating and living a life of meaning and happiness

• Being at deep peace with the givens of human existence

• Embracing love and compassion as a way of being in the world

I have previously published Substack articles on the subject of religious deconstruction that you might find useful, including:

The 5 Cold Hard Truths of Leaving Religion

The Leaving-Religion Do and Don't List

The Leaving-Religion Resource Guide

The Deconstructionology Encyclopedia (Volume One)

The Post-Religion "God" Dilemma

A few useful books on religious deconstruction:

• Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion by Marlene Winell

• When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura Anderson

• No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required by Brittney Hartley

• Outgrowing God: A Beginners Guide by Richard Dawkins

In 2021 I founded the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. Through the Center we train and certify Non-Religious Spiritual Directors and EXiHealth Practitioners who are specifically trained to support people in religious deconstruction and reconstruction, addressing the harms of toxic religion, and building stronger existential health. I recently published an article about this, The Spiritual Emergency: Can we solve the meaning crisis before it's too late?

In Summary

• Not all religion is toxic, but toxic religion deeply damages people’s lives.

• 1 in 3 Americans suffer some form of trauma related to religion at some point in their life.

• The damage done by toxic religion doesn’t typically magically disappear over time, but requires doing significant personal work.

• Religious deconstruction involves the reconstruction of a more human, authentic, meaningful, liberating post-religion spirituality.

“You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”

- Cheryl Strayed