This panel advances a rigorous, cross‑tradition theorization of spiritual harm as a distinctive form of injury produced through the weaponization of sacred authority. Drawing on Christian, exvangelical, Catholic, Islamic, and decolonial feminist contexts, the papers examine how spiritual harm operates through archetypal betrayal, epistemic violence, fiduciary breach, and institutional repentance practices that routinely marginalize survivors’ knowledge and agency. Panelists foreground survivors as authoritative epistemic agents while conceiving harm as simultaneously personal and systemic, gendered, racialized, and historically embedded. Together, the papers move beyond descriptive accounts of “church hurt” toward analytic frameworks capable of naming injury, locating responsibility within religious traditions themselves, and imagining non‑carceral futures of accountability. Attention to reparative practices—writing as sanctuary, narrative resistance, juridical reimagining, survivor‑centered apology, and flexible response frameworks—offers resources for ethical repair that refuse institutional self‑protection and re‑center dignity, care, and moral agency.
Spiritual harm and “church hurt” are widely invoked in survivor communities and pastoral conversations, yet it remains undertheorized within religious studies. What distinguishes spiritual harm from ordinary religious conflict, and when does theological formation become injury? Drawing on scholars such as Katie Gaddini and Beth Allison Barr, this paper argues that contemporary women’s deconversion narratives offer critical resources for clarifying the concept. Focusing on memoirs by women formed within white American evangelicalism, including Tia Levings, Shannon Harris, Glennon Doyle, and Cait West, I examine how gendered regimes of authority and sexuality structure experiences of harm. I propose that spiritual harm is operationalized through a matrix of theological, epistemic, and relational dimensions that delegitimize women’s knowledge and constrain their moral agency. Within these accounts, deconversion emerges as epistemic resistance. These narratives also model reparative futures, offering resources for reimagining accountability and healing in and beyond evangelical frameworks.
Conceptually robust and practically grounded, the proposed framework comes from both scholarly research and direct advocacy with survivors. It is designed to be intersectional, anti-carceral, contextually flexible, and feminist. It takes survivors’ voices as authoritative without presuming any individual survivor is all-knowing or infallible. It treats spiritual harm as an individual experience that is also always systemic. It recognizes that while maintaining ethical standards is paramount for communities, we need a flexible set of tools for response—there is no one-size-fits-all solution to specific instances of spiritual harm. This framework takes seriously that spiritual harm is pervasively entrenched in western modernity and also envisions societies free of it. It holds the maintenance of human dignity together with the urgency of social accountability. The goal is to address spiritual harm in a manner that, itself, models the spiritual and ethical integrity that was called for, abandoned, and degraded in that instance.
This paper argues that theories of spiritual harm and repair in religious studies would greatly benefit from Gloria Anzaldúa’s body of work on spirituality, psyche, and writing practices. A critic of the category of "religion" because of its enmeshment in colonial, patriarchal violence, Anzaldúa also unpacked how colonial epistemic violence is spiritual harm. She held these theories alongside writing practices that were reparative, indeed forms of "spiritual activism," that contested the epistemic and material violence of patriarchy and colonialism. While known in religious studies for her woman-of-color theory of "borderlands," what remains under-theorized from her three decades of writing is Anzaldúa's feminist insistence that repair of spiritual harm is formative to her theories and her expansive genre-bending writing that labored beyond academic conventions. This paper bridges Anzaldúan theory with religious studies and feminist writing pedagogies, offering transformative methods for teaching and learning that support marginalized voices and center survivors’ agency.
Recently, Catholic popes have begun a controversial practice of publicly apologizing for specific spiritual harms done by the Church. In this paper, I argue that these public apologies can be fruitful, but only if popes proceed with a robustly Christian and survivor-centered model of repentance, placing the needs of others over concern for reputation.
I argue that public apology does have a place in Catholic repentance, even apology on behalf of the whole Church, but that it must be done on the terms of the survivors and with their (self-determined) interests at heart. I suggest that the Church use its own magisterial formula for the sacrament of reconciliation as a starting script for public repentance. This should include an examination of conscience, a full confession, and an act of penance. Each of these aspects should de-center concern for self and center, instead, the voices of survivors.
Spiritual abuse has emerged as a critical term within recent Muslim discourse, yet it is most often framed as an ethical wrong. While such framing foregrounds survivor experience, it also individualizes abuse and sidesteps Islamic law—an authoritative discursive tradition through which many Muslim communities conceptualize harm. In minority contexts, appeals to institutional accountability remain necessary but insufficient: mechanisms of accountability cannot meaningfully confront practices activists deem abusive if some of those practices are simultaneously justified within prevailing legal interpretations. Avoiding Islamic law leaves this normative architecture intact. This paper argues that struggles over Islamic law are ultimately struggles over the futures of accountability. Drawing on classical legal theory, I propose conceptualizing spiritual abuse as a fiduciary breach of communally delegated religious authority. Reframing spiritual harm juridically relocates accountability within the tradition itself, demonstrating that the question of care is inseparable from how the law imagines its own future.
Spiritual harm is widely invoked in religious studies and social science literature but rarely theorized with precision adequate to clergy sexual abuse of adults. This paper introduces Sacred Relational Archetypes (SRAs) — the constellation of symbolic roles and relational expectations structuring the clergy-congregant relationship in Christian denominational contexts — as a framework for that theorization, drawing on qualitative dissertation research analyzed through the Sexual Grooming Model.
My central argument is that clergy sexual abuse does not merely occur within sacred relational structures but systematically weaponizes them. Perpetrators invert the archetype - the shepherd becomes the wolf, the confessor the interrogator of shame - producing harm that is simultaneously relational, psychological, and theological. I term this process archetypal betrayal. The paper defines spiritual harm specific to clergy abuse, examines its gendered dimensions within patriarchal religious institutions, and draws implications for repair through archetypal restoration.