It’s become a bit of a tradition here that every Fall, I do a series that uses another set of ideas as a sort of mirror through which to better understand Christian faith. It’s become my favourite blogging tradition. In the past I’ve done Integral theory, Indigenous wisdom, permaculture design, and Bhuddhist thought (with one year using the Sermon on the Mount as such a mirror because I was so disheartened by so-called ‘Christian’ public discourse!). I had my plans for this year all lined up and we even well into the research for it, when those plans were changed on me.
As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, the theme of religious abuse and trauma has come up a lot lately, in both conversations with friends and in my reading. It seems so many people are being confronted right now with the lasting legacy, both positive and negative, or their childhood religious experiences. Because it seems so relevant on so many levels, I’ve decided to shelve my plans and explore Christianity through a trauma-informed lens.
A book that has come up often in all this is Dr. Laura E. Anderson’s When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2023). The book itself is a pretty typical work of popular psychology. It does an excellent job of discussing complex ideas from the latest research in an accessible and easily-digestible way. But at the same time, this means that it isn’t ‘doing the work’ of the research itself. As such, novices have to take the author’s word for things. This isn’t a criticism, but is part of a book being written for a general audience. On the whole, I think it’s a solid introduction, with suitably narrow and nuanced conclusions. But it’s also one of those situations where readers, especially those confronting these issues for the first time, can easily lose the nuance and come to pretty forceful reactions. (Again, that’s not the book’s fault; it’s just part of the process for folk.) So, while I’ll refer to other sources, this book’s ideas will be the jumping off point, and my primary dialogue partner for this series.
No matter what your personal experiences of faith communities may be, and no matter what you think of trauma theory going into the series, I hope you’ll join me over the next few weeks as I reflect on the important issue of religion gone wrong — and what we can do about it.
