When God is an Abusive Parent
The psychology of religious trauma
Photo by Alicia Quan on Unsplash
The first thing I want to get clear on is that our ideas about God (if we believe in a god at all) are really the only thing we can speak about. We have no way of knowing if our ideas are true or false, right or wrong. We can make guesses and create complex ideas about theology that might be helpful or not, but in the end, we don’t know if what we say about God is really, actually true.
People who claim that the Bible has only true ideas about God are putting faith in that idea and those descriptions about God, but the Bible may or may not hold entirely accurate depictions of God. All of our ideas about God we might clump under the term “theology.”
Our ideas about God can have vastly important impacts on our lives — so much so that we can become traumatized by our beliefs about God, which are usually created and/or maintained by a church body or religious system.
Bad theology for the purposes of my writing is any kind of theology that causes a harmful impact on the believer. That means “good” theology to me may often be considered heretical, which is fine. There is no doctrinal loyalty to me that is worth the cost of anybody’s well-being. If it is true and worthy of following, it must also be good. If there is a God, I will only respect one that does not create rules for people that will deliberately harm them.
I still receive email updates from a very conservative Reformed church I used to attend, mostly because I am apparently a sick person who likes to read other people’s terrible theology just to make sure other people still believe this stuff. In these emails, they’ve lately been on a series emphasizing the wrath of God, and how wrath is good, and God is ready to punish His (pronoun and capital use intentional) people when they go astray. This church leader is really excited to talk about all of God’s wrath that he believes other people are due.
This God — the one perfectly portrayed in these emails, but also believed in by countless churchgoers around the world — is the abusive parent we will be talking about today.
In a previous post Why Religious Trauma is Actually Trauma, I make the case for the legitimacy of religious trauma because it causes trauma through the same psychological mechanisms that anyone can become traumatized. I’ll unpack more of that here.
In the religious tradition I came from, your faith is not just a little optional add-on to your life. It is often the central part of your life, as central as your own family. Your eternal destiny is determined by what you believe right now. God is always there, watching you, ready to punish if you make a misstep, as the church referenced earlier heavily implies. God sent Jesus to die on your behalf because God doesn’t want to have to spend eternity with you if your sinful soul is the thing with which he has to keep company.
I might sound like I’m exaggerating the theology, but it’s fair to say that “standard” theology in churches around the United States holds that salvation is achieved through faith in Jesus Christ. Salvation from what? Separation from God, which most people would probably think of as going to hell when you die (and many evangelicals like to make explicitly clear is a place of eternal conscious torment).
So if God is as important as one’s relationship with one’s own parents, let’s see how it sounds when we replace “God” with “Mom” or “Dad” in these sentences, just to see how it lands.
Mom and Dad are always around, watching me and ready to punish me if I make a misstep. Mom and Dad sacrificed a perfect being to die (whoa! What are they, barbarians?) because they didn’t want to have to spend the rest of eternity with me with my soul in its natural state. But if I believe that they sacrificed this human because they love me so much (wait… but they couldn’t stand to be with me before this), then I’m allowed to be in their presence for the rest of all time. If I don’t believe in this sacrifice — either in the person they sacrificed or the reason why they sacrificed him — then they are going to not only never see me again after this life, but they will even torture me for the rest of time.
Whoa. Mind f***, right?
If you have ever been a remotely decent parent, you probably couldn’t fathom treating your child that way. Even on your kid’s worst days, you know that even if it’s tempting to throw them out the window, you would never punish them with torture and refuse a relationship with them. (Reminder: I said “remotely decent:” this whole article is about God being like an abusive parent, because abusive parents do terrible things to their children). If you are a non-abusive parent, you love your children and try to do your best for them most of the time. You understand that punishment is not the key to behavioral change. Torture would never be an option, no matter how badly and unrepentantly they were behaving.
If you have ever been a child (I’m going to assume that’s all of us), you know that if your parent constantly threatened you with punishment to keep you in line, and did punish you whenever you did something they thought was bad, you would either be a) very scared and timid or b) eventually rebel. A parent who uses punishment as a primary method of discipline sees you as somebody they need to control, not as a mutual human being worthy of respectful dialogue. Lots of us know this firsthand, because a religious tradition with these beliefs often turns out parents who use the same authoritarian tactics as the god they worship.
As a child, you’d probably also be traumatized if you had a parent like the God we described above. I explain in my previous article how when we are children, we cannot put the blame on our caregivers when we are in an unsafe, abusive situation. To do so would be more frightening than the abusive situation itself because it leaves the child utterly unsafe and with no one to trust. The caregivers might not be good, but it is all the child knows, and it is who they rely on to meet every basic need.
Instead, children will generally shift the blame internally when in an abusive situation. It is psychologically unsafe to see the caregivers as the problem, so children place the blame on themselves instead. I must have done something bad. I am bad. I did something to make my parents mad at me. I am the reason why they don’t love me the way I need them to (or even love me at all).
The abusive parent theology we are speaking of lays all this out in explicit terms. Humans are inherently sinful. No matter what you do, you will always be a sinner. You are unacceptable to your Heavenly Parent unless you believe and ask forgiveness in a certain way.
Eager to get back into the good graces of Heavenly Parent, especially because most people carry around a general sense of shame because of — well, life — people just accept this line of theology. I often feel like a bad person, and this just confirms it. Heavenly Parent will be mad at me unless I change who I am. I can do that by believing in Jesus.
This solves the momentary psychological distress of the situation, but it leaves the remnants of all the shame and negative self-concept from the original problem. I am a bad person who is unworthy of love for love’s sake, unworthy to be loved and accepted exactly as I am.
Those are the beliefs of a person who has experienced developmental trauma. Their ideas about God reinforce — or even wholesale create! — a sense of shame and unlovability in their psyche.
At its best, I believe Christianity can help heal trauma when it offers unconditional love. When it speaks of a God whose love knows no bounds and who cares for the least and lowliest and the birds and the lilies. When it tells people who already believe they are bad that it doesn’t matter if you think you are bad: you are deserving of love anyway. When it understands that it is not punishment but empathy, compassion, non-judgment, and curiosity that brings healing to people and makes them better humans.
We must hold concepts of God to as high a standard of goodness as a good parent, because both can bring people to ruin or bring them to flourishing.