Untangle the Web of Spiritual Abuse

When victims of spiritual abuse walk into my office for biblical counseling, they’re often disoriented and confused, full of shame and self-blame. These precious people have been caught in a web they didn’t weave. The long-term effects of spiritual abuse can often be worse than the abuse itself, because so much trust is lost.

One of the greatest losses due to spiritual abuse is clarity. To maintain control, abusers obscure what they’re doing from victims, witnesses, and helpers. They deploy a multitude of manipulative tactics. Confusion is essential to their success.

In Understanding Spiritual Abuse: What It Is and How to Respond, Karen Roudkovski, a licensed professional counselor and assistant professor of counseling at Ouachita Baptist University, offers clarity about spiritual abuse. With compassion and care, she provides clear definitions, concrete assessment methods, and recommendations for prevention and healing.

What Is Spiritual Abuse?

Roudkovski defines spiritual abuse as “a misuse of power in a spiritual context in which a person or a group uses various coercive and manipulative methods of controlling the victim, resulting in the abused individual experiencing spiritual, emotional/psychological, physical or relational harm” (15). Her definition includes both the abuser’s behavior and also the victim’s suffering.

This definition highlights the devastating effects of spiritual abuse. However, focusing on the victim’s experience presents two potential problems. First, measuring damage done to an individual introduces subjectivity. Second, as Roudkovski notes, not all harm results from abuse.

We’re more likely to recognize abuse when we also understand what perpetrators gain. For example, their abusive behavior might shield them from criticism, enable them to get their way or continue in sin, or feed their need for admiration.

Roudkovski’s assessment helps us see spiritual abuse’s effects. She wisely asks victims if they were isolated, exploited, or monitored; if they were allowed to question teachings without retaliation; and if obedience was required to avoid negative consequences. Yet other questions about feeling damaged, spiritually neglected, and blamed for causing trouble require more detail when evaluating abuse claims than the survey indicates. For example, a congregant may feel ignored by her pastor, but not because she was the target of punitive neglect. Her pastor might be busy.

The assessment is a way for people to self-evaluate their experience but requires careful follow-up. For example, good practice for a counselor requires soliciting concrete examples of potential abuse, which the evaluation itself does not prompt. This practice helps a counselor understand, for example, whether the alleged victim was grotesquely shamed for sin or confronted with gentleness as Scripture commands us to do (2 Tim. 2:25). The more information we have, the more precise we’ll be in understanding what occurred and in helping those in need.

Spiritual Abuse Ensnares

No matter how good the assessment tool is, identifying spiritual abuse is hard because abuse involves deception. “Like a spider web, the experience of spiritual abuse can be difficult to see coming and complex to escape,” Roudkovski observes. “Intricate spider webs are difficult to see and appear deceptively delicate” (63).

The church often struggles to recognize spiritual abuse unless it’s “paired with other forms of abuse” (45). Spiritual abusers tend to be well-spoken and trusted by their communities. The communities’ first reaction is often to doubt any accusations. Further, spiritual abuse exists on a spectrum and rarely begins by looking like abuse. No two cases present the same way. These realities create barriers to getting help.

But spiritual abuse exists according to Scripture. In Matthew 23, for example, Jesus exposes religious leaders for their self-serving tactics. They abused by “emphasizing their authority, not practicing what they teach, tying on legalistic loads, seeking self-promotion and praise, exhibiting dangerous hypocrisy, misusing the name of God, focusing on the outward appearance, and instilling fear” (85). These self-indulgent leaders exploited those in their care and led them away from God.

The Pharisees’ exploitation grieved Jesus. Since we love Jesus, what’s on his heart should be on ours. Spiritual abuse should have our attention because it obscures who God is and exploits his people.

Roudkovski contrasts the Pharisees’ abuse in Matthew 23 with healthy and humble servant leadership. She also reminds readers that though much of the book (and the contemporary discussions) focuses on damaging relationships in spiritual settings, “a large body of research indicates that spirituality and religiosity correlate with well-being” (175). We need to understand the threat and combat abuse with measured wisdom; we can do harm of a different kind when we label someone abusive when they are not.

Our Call to Rescue

Based on her clinical experience, Roudkovski frames spiritual abuse in terms of the broader religious community. Not all her applications are distinctively Christian. Furthermore, she uses therapeutic categories and recommends therapeutic interventions, which will raise suspicion among some Christians. Yet there’s a great deal of overlap between Roudkovski’s diagnosis and what Michael Kruger describes in Bully Pulpit [read TGC’s review], which examines spiritual abuse within the local church through the lens of Scripture.

As a biblical counselor, my approach to healing differs from Roudkovski’s. Biblical counseling is Christ-centered, and Scripture is the primary lens used to understand and address life’s struggles. Licensed professional counselors like Roudkoviski often describe difficulties and treatment in psychological terms. Yet we both recognize the physical and emotional distress caused by spiritual abuse. Furthermore, we both affirm the importance of the resulting trauma in outlining goals for care.

Understanding the trauma of spiritual abuse is especially important for biblical counselors. Abusers often twist Scripture so it feels like the abuse is coming from God. This human abuse distorts the victims’ understanding of God’s goodness and the blessing of his Word. As a result, biblical counselors must anticipate how people’s particular wounds may have affected their ability to engage with God’s Word. There are times when we must be cautious as we appeal to Scripture.

Awareness of spiritual abuse isn’t optional. Pastors are especially called to protect God’s sheep, and they can’t be effective without other people also being alert for abuse. In Understanding Spiritual Abuse, Roudkovski offers concise assessments that detail the methods of control spiritual abusers use and concrete ways to respond. This book is a valuable tool for the church because it helps us see the web of abuse and recognize the tactics of abusers so we can work to set victims free.

A review of Understanding Spiritual Abuse: What It Is and How to Respond by Karen Roudkovski. Available wherever books are sold.

Darby Strickland (MDiv, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a counselor and faculty member for the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation. She is the author of Is It Abuse?: A Biblical Guide to Identifying Domestic Abuse and Helping Victims and the children’s book Something Scary Happened.