Since I began sharing my story of religious burnout and religious trauma on social media, I’ve been met with comment after comment of others resonating and sharing their own experiences. People enter the comment section of my videos in pain and isolation, wondering if they will ever be able to return to church. These stories are so raw and so real that they often bring tears to my eyes. It’s incredibly conflicting to have your community, your identity, and your connection to God intertwined with the same place where you’ve experienced these deep wounds. Many who have walked this road have decided that church is no longer a place they can call their home. Others sit in living rooms on Sunday mornings, watching a live stream from a safe distance. And when these precious souls take a step back, the natural “us vs. them” mindset that so often permeates Christian culture as they distinguish themselves from the world outside, leaves the wounded feeling alienated, abandoned, and spiritually homeless.
When Wounds Lead to Spiritual Homelessness
I have had seasons when I felt spiritually homeless. There are a variety of complex circumstances that can leave someone in this place, but many include some form of religious trauma. The terms “trauma” and “deconstruction” have become words that bring a bad taste to many believers’ mouths and a knee-jerk reaction of protectiveness and defensiveness for the good churches and good leaders that do exist. The discussion of these topics has become so divisive, in fact, that this post itself was very difficult for me to write.
“How can I strike a balance,” I wondered, “that makes the wounded feel seen while also affirming my genuine love for the church, despite her flaws?”
I wrestled with this question for weeks, tweaking words, rewriting sentences, and swinging from one side of the pendulum to the other until last night when I got a notification on my phone. It was another story of pain. My eyes welled up with tears. This person felt completely alone. They didn’t want to leave the church, but they felt completely burnt out, completely betrayed, and didn’t know where else to go but away.
“This,” I thought, “This is why I do what I do. This is why I write what I write. Not to bash the church or nitpick her imperfections, but to speak to every person who doesn’t know where else to go.” There’s too much at stake not to have these discussions.
The Fine Line Between Spiritual Burnout and Religious Trauma
Spiritual burnout often results from overexertion, overcommitment, and overidentification with the external aspects of one’s faith, such as ministry participation, acts of service, or even a feeling of obligation to perform one’s faith or “look the part” in a way that is no longer genuine with their inner experience of Christ and His church. Ministry leaders and volunteers can feel drained, with nothing left to give. This can seep into our internal experience of faith when we feel God’s expectations of us are too high or feel like we’ve failed Him in certain areas. This cognitive dissonance often leads to a disconnection from God, and even a disconnection from self. A mild case of burnout may require a nap and some firmer boundaries. However, the more severe this disconnect becomes, the more likely it is for the body, mind, and/or spirit to shut down and enter into crisis mode. This may cause mental or physical health issues over time.
The burnt-out person is likely not in an emotionally healthy state, which means that we can’t have a discussion about spiritual burnout without having a discussion on trauma. Burnout is one visible result that can develop from a variety of different imbalances within the soul.
For example, if someone had an overbearing parent that felt impossible to please, they may grow into an adult with raging people-pleasing tendencies and a total neglect of their personal needs. Over time, this takes a toll, and turns into burnout. Now, if we examine contexts of faith, this person may also encounter spiritual leaders who happily (and sometimes ignorantly) take advantage of their desire to serve. The wounded person may also develop a perception of God “made in the image” of their overbearing parent.
It’s always challenging to identify which traumas cause the others. Sometimes childhood trauma predisposes a churchgoer to spiritual burnout, and sometimes negative religious experiences ooze into a growing believer’s home life and determine how they relate with the most developmentally influential people in their life. This phenomenon merely gets messier in instances of spiritual abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, or any other number of distressing or traumatic experiences.
Though some people experience spiritual burnout alone, or religious trauma alone, many experience a confusing mix of both. For many, there is a fine line between spiritual burnout and religious trauma.
The Phenomenon of the Cult Documentary
In recent years, many have worked hard to remove the stigma of mental health issues after watching parents and grandparents suffer in silence. We no longer live in a world where you’re expected to suppress negative emotions and pretend everything’s okay. There’s been a rise in people who openly talk about counseling and even share with friends what they learned from their therapist. Emotional health is trendy. And though the church, as a culturally conservative institution, can sometimes take a little longer to catch up, there is a noticeable increase in Christians passionate about emotionally healthy spirituality.
However, in the rise of naming our dysfunctions and disorders, there has also been a growing intolerance for communities and institutions that don’t promote emotionally healthy environments. And rather than engage in the slow and steady process of encouraging systemic change from within, it’s far more alluring to name unhealthy leaders and “put them on blast.” Though there is certainly a good time and place to call out unhealthy or abusive leaders and hold them accountable for injustices they have caused, there’s also a danger in finding entertainment from these public scandals.
Now, I am just as guilty as the next person of enjoying a good cult documentary. We, as humans, are naturally drawn to the unnatural. Whether it’s a story about polygamy or doomsday communes, we are fascinated with these juicy stories. But as we grab our popcorn, we also often forget that there is real pain at the root of each story. Not only that, but every time a new church scandal breaks on a news site or social media platform, we are rhythmically (almost liturgically) confirming the fears of those who have been wounded in similar circumstances. These stories, juicy as they may be, make it harder and harder for people in our culture to trust in the goodness of the church and the trustworthiness of her leaders.
The Perseverance of Hope
Christians are a strange bunch, to be sure. But most of us aren’t the wannabe megachurch pastors from the podcasts and documentaries who have “Kingdom-building” agendas that objectify and take advantage of the people they are meant to serve. Instead, most people within our walls are kindhearted and well-intentioned. Though some of us may experience big traumatic moments from self-serving leaders, this isn’t the only thing that leads to religious trauma. For many more people, it’s emotionally unhealthy things done by well-intentioned people in the name of Jesus that can leave wounds and barriers, making it harder to engage with their faith.
As I have witnessed more and more of these moments of distortion, whether in my own life or others, it has led me to grapple with hard questions like:
- Is it possible for the church to become better?
- Is the modern church causing more harm than good?
- Is the painful fight for a better future worth it?
- Will the exhaustion that comes as we persevere in hope rebuild or deteriorate people’s personal faith?
Religious Trauma May Be More Common Than You Think
There are so many people within our church walls and serving on our church ministry teams who quietly hold fresh wounds or well-hidden scars of church hurt. This is an equally courageous and isolating thing to do. For many, it’s far less painful to leave communities that bring them pain or leave situations that remind them of pain. And sometimes, that is the best a person has to offer when too many people have misrepresented Jesus and done evil in His name. Some have not lost faith in God, but in the church. Fighting to believe in a better future can become too much to bear when there’s no compassionate and safe community to process painful events and find healing within.
This is the case with all types of trauma. God designed our bodies and brains to survive until there is a safe place to process pain. Some churches have shown themselves not to be safe places. But other churches have become beautiful sanctuaries of restoration.
A Note to the Wounded
Before we continue our high-level discussion on the difference between spiritual burnout and religious trauma, can we first pause for a moment to grieve our losses? Whatever fallout you’ve experienced in religious settings, whatever harm has been caused by people who claim to love Jesus, whatever scars you hold, whether many know about them or not a single soul knows apart from God Himself, I want you to know that it was never meant to be this way. I mourn these scars (and open wounds) with you. But better yet, I want you to know that Jesus grieves these things with you. He feels the weight of every single tear you’ve cried, and every wound you’ve incurred within His Body and Bride. He is a just God, and though you may not have seen justice yet, know that justice is His nature. No evil deed goes unnoticed by our sovereign God, and He will make all things right so that His house will be a true reflection of His truth and love, rather than the dim and sometimes distorted reflection we often see now.
The Burnout that Comes with Pain
For those who have experienced negative things in religious spaces, the process of feeling your pain and processing it whenever similar situations arise can become exhausting. This is the same with physical pain. I suffer from chronic pain, and the worst part of my condition is not the sharpness or intensity of the pain, but the longevity of it. Longlasting pain wears you down mentally and emotionally in a way that a short and intense moment of pain doesn’t. When we feel pain over a long period of time, engaging with it can wear us out. For those with religious trauma, spiritual burnout is highly likely over time. And for those with spiritual burnout, religious trauma is probable. The two are intermingled because pain and exhaustion often go hand in hand. However, they are still two distinct conditions.
What’s the Difference Between Religious Trauma and Spiritual Burnout?
Though the two are frequently interconnected, the terms are not interchangeable. Religious trauma occurs when an individual’s innate sense of safety, autonomy, or security is disrupted. Often, this is accompanied by a felt loss of personal agency. Religious trauma is often multifaceted. It can happen through a singular event that inflicts lasting harm on the individual or can be incurred over time through a series of internalized beliefs or negative experiences. Some religious trauma occurs through malicious acts by people in power that prey on the vulnerabilities of the young, the weak, or the disadvantaged in their community, often in the name of Christ. This is considered spiritual abuse. However, trauma can also be inflicted by well-meaning people, communities, or institutions. When an individual has spiritual experiences that are experienced too fast, too much, or too soon, it overwhelms their ability to cope in healthy ways and increases the likelihood of religious trauma. This is why things like church camps, youth conferences, or altar calls can lead to traumatic experiences if not handled with discernment. In such scenarios, participants often internalized intense amounts of information, felt pressure to feel certain emotions, and felt a loss of agency as they were persuaded to respond in the “right” way.
Spiritual burnout is distinct from religious trauma because, though it can accompany traumatic experiences, the burnout often happens through the individual’s own efforts and overexertion rather than the inflicted actions of another. The individual may overwork themselves because they feel they must to gain the favor of spiritual leaders, but this burnout is often a reflection of the reaction this person had based on the ideas they internalized and the actions they chose to take. People can experience spiritual burnout without having religious trauma, and people with religious trauma don’t necessarily also face spiritual burnout. However, because the two are frequently caused by similar circumstances, the discussion on the terms should be intertwined.
Is it important to distinguish between my Spiritual Burnout and Religious Trauma?
Not necessarily. The important thing it to identify whether you are dealing with one, or both. And if you’re experiencing both, it may be important to identify which came on first, and what the initial cause was. Religious trauma, spiritual burnout, or even compassion fatigue which I mentioned in a previous post, can be, “mangled up in tangled up knots” (as the lyrics of the Grinch song so appropriately describe.) The objective, then, is not to identify each thread and each intersection between them, but to observe the tangle as a whole and look beyond the knots to the underlying reasons which caused your faith to become entangled with pain in the first place.
What Does Healing Look Like?
In the end, the deconstruction movement impacts all of us. We may not be on the trajectory to throw out our faith entirely, but we may have experiences that we need to unlearn and untangle to find the truth. Though the word deconstruction is often used to describe this search for truth, it is far too often associated only with those who have concluded that truth is outside of the bounds of orthodox Christianity. Those, then, who need to untangle some experiences but wish to remain within the church sometimes have mixed feelings about using the same word to describe their process. Some have proposed using the word “reconstruction” as a partner term to describe the process of rebuilding what is good and true after dismantling what was not. Others have proposed a word like “disentangling.”
Finding Delight After Destruction
Whatever the cause of your burnout or trauma, it likely caused instability or destruction in your life and faith. You were hurt, exhausted, or disillusioned. Many people feel like their faith is tarnished after such experiences – that they’ll never again have the fervor of a new believer or the trusting temperament of a Christian “on fire for God.” But just like a marriage, there are ways to reinvigorate your faith and keep the flame alive. No, you may not have the innocent hope of the honeymoon period anymore, but there is a beauty and a depth available to you precisely because you have been through what you’ve been through that can bring your faith to a whole new level that feels deeper, freer, and more meaningful than ever before. It may take intentionality to feel your feelings and process the emotions that got you to this point, but it is possible. And when you do, you’ll realize it was so worth it. Because someone who was hurt and is now healed has an experience of our Savior that many people in our world are hungry for. And that is powerful!
