When God is an Abusive Parent
The psychology of religious trauma and the doctrine of hell
When I first began writing my spiritual memoir, which ended up evolving into a personal treatise on religious trauma1, I felt like I stumbled into a secret about the Christianity I was raised in that nobody2 was saying out loud: the god you’re writing about isn’t very loving at all.
And the logical conclusion to that was: no wonder you don’t like him very much.
I was initially torn about expressing this, because I knew the doctrine forward and backward. God is love, they said. My religion was the “Good News” that people should greet with open arms once you explained to them how Jesus was the answer to all their life’s problems. The gospel is about grace and forgiveness, they said. It’s about God’s unconditional love for God’s people.
Last week I wrote about the bait-and-switch tactic of [evangelical] Christianity. Today, I will write about what might be a pretty tender topic for many, especially those active in a Christian faith tradition. This is my experience but I also know many others feel the same way I do. This is also what my personal experiences of religious trauma hinge around. If it’s not your experience, I also respect that!
First, a preamble to the post:
One 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 or might not be helpful, but in the end, we don’t know if what we say about God is really, actually true. So when I say “God” here, I’m simply referring to our ideas about g/God.
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. That’s what we call religious trauma.
Now, on to what happens to make God an abusive parent:
In the religious tradition I came from, faith was the central part of your life, as central as your own family, and something that required constant vigilance. Your eternal destiny was determined by what you believed right now. God was always there, watching you, ready to punish if you made a misstep. [They didn’t SAY that… but somehow we all felt that???] God sent Jesus to die on your behalf because God didn’t want to have to spend eternity with you if your sinful soul was the thing with which he must keep company.
And by the way, if the church truly meant it that God was gracious and merciful, why were thousands of us praying the “sinner’s prayer” over and over as kids in our beds at night, hoping it would be enough to save us from the fires of hell? I don’t think we were each an anomaly.
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).
If your relationship with God is at least as important as your relationship with your 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 watching my every move 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. Oh and also, this perfect being was THEIR SON. But if I can just 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. 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 they are all the child knows, and they are 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 because of the sheer helplessness and powerlessness, so children place the blame on themselves instead. It’s an attempt to regain some measure of control in an uncontrollable situation. 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.
If you know how to be a better parent than the god you believe in, it might be time to reconsider those beliefs about god. The freeing thing, though, is that if you change your beliefs, you can then begin the slow process of healing from those beliefs. Learning to believe in a god, or no god, that doesn’t harm you. Learning to embody your Adult Self. Learning to be the parent that you needed for yourself all along.
More on all that later. For now, I’d love if you pushed the “heart” button or best of all, dropped a comment if this post provoked thoughts or resonated with you. Let me know what else you want to hear more about, too!
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Later I discovered other people were actually saying that too, but literally, at the time, I didn’t know who else was saying these things! It felt so…verboten!
The sinner’s prayer over and over again. Yup. How hard is it to have a good sense of self esteem if you keep reminding yourself what a wretch you are?
I remember when I awakened to the realization that human parents were more loving and forgiving than the God that I was taught about. No matter what my child did, even if they were awful things, even if I had to separate myself from my child for very good reasons, I would hope for repentance and recovery. Even if I could not have the relationship that I had hoped for in this world, I would long for one in the afterlife. So the concept of Hell did not make sense to me. It only makes sense when seen through the eyes of humans who have been severely wronged by someone and want them to be punished in the afterlife. Ultimately I feel much safer with a god who would never create Hell, or allow Hell to exist, even for those who have done evil things. Thanks Christine for your well formed thoughts.