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Emotional and Spiritual Abuse in the Church: the Systemization of God
The systemization of God leads to harm being done to people in the areas of sexual ethics, emotional dependency, and communal justice.
In the previous installment of my two-part series on emotional and spiritual abuse in the church, I discussed a foundational thought-pattern in many religious communities related to divine authority. I called it the Divine Authority Syndrome, partly tongue-in-cheek because I’m not a mental healthcare professional but a theologian. So I am not qualified to identify something as a syndrome.
Yet, from a theological vantage point it is clear that religious authority is connected with so many harmful ideas and practices that it probably makes sense to use the term. I suggest the issue of divine authority is a syndrome because it is marked by a complex set of phenomena that are all related to the central issue of divine authority.
It is these phenomena that I would like to address in this article. I’ve singled these phenomena out because they are most prominent not because they are the only patterns of abuse that stem from a wrong notion of divine authority. I will look at absolutized sexual ethics, emotional dependency, and immoral justice.
