Consider this an introduction in this series. I will be circling back around to topics mentioned here multiple times, so I hope you will stick around for the future articles. They are already written/mostly written, and in the editing phase now.
I have had it in my mind and heart to write about suffering and trials and the way that the long-term effects of abuse can make it seem like the effects of the abuse are never-ending. This is sometimes difficult for me to write about because I am a fellow survivor right alongside you all. God has been gracious and healing in my life, and I have done a lot of work in trauma therapy, but I still go through seasons, sometimes long seasons, where my wounds feel like they’re open again.
I’ve also wanted to dig into spiritual bypassing as a related topic to suffering and trials because I think many Christians use some form of spiritual bypassing to get out of various kinds of discomfort. And, I have wanted to discuss this because I think that it’s important to distinguish spiritual bypassing from searching the truth of Scripture. Applying biblical truth to ourselves in the aftermath and recovery from abuse is not spiritual bypassing, and we miss out on knowing God and his heart for us when we believe that it is.
Spiritual bypassing is a term that gets thrown around in survivor circles quite a bit, and it’s an important term to understand because it’s often used within systems of control to dominate and minimize basic emotional needs, and unfortunately it’s also used when people get out of these high control environments by Christians who mean well, but perhaps don’t have a strong, biblical theology of suffering and toss out platitudes that only alienate the person trying to heal from abuse. Sometimes, however, the term is misused within survivor communities to also mean that any kind of answer or healing from Scripture or prayer is spiritual bypassing, often putting a stigma on people seeking pastoral or biblical counseling as a way of healing after spiritual abuse or other kinds of trauma, as though the only legitimate way to heal is through a licensed therapist.
John Welwood coined this term in his book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, as “using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”1 To be honest, this definition took me back to my entire lifestyle in the cult that I grew up in, and I will be giving some examples of that in just a bit, but what stood out to me in the article that I read was the explanation of this practice as not exclusively Christian practice. Yet so many Christians are familiar with this term, and so many spiritually abusive “Christian” churches and unqualified leaders deal harshly with people struggling in the trials of this life by sidestepping the real needs and emotions surrounding the brokenness and trials of this world, slap a band aid on a gaping wound, call it healed, and think that they are doing good in the name of God. I have been told in not so many words that if I would have more faith, then I could be healed from the effects of abuse that manifested themselves in my life in the form C-PTSD symptoms, and essentially shamed for struggling with very real, very lasting effects.
Attempting to rush (because it cannot actually be done!) the healing process with well-meaning, but still spiritually bypassing use of Scripture is alienating, isolating, and keeps survivors from knowing the way that God is “near to the brokenhearted,” and depth of his love and care for us in the midst of our affliction. Psalm 103:13-14 reminds us, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” This is not a passage about a quick fix for our troubles, but about our heavenly Father who is personally compassionate toward us and with us in our weakness. He made us, and so he knows us intimately. As I will dig into in a later installment in this series, we often have wrong goals and wrong beliefs surrounding our suffering and trials, and when we have these wrong goals and beliefs, we makes things even worse for ourselves, especially thinking that we need to be totally healed or get out of our trial, in order to show that we have had enough faith in God, or that we have arrived somehow as a Christian.
Spiritual Bypassing in the Cult
I’ve mentioned before that for a number of years, I lived in the cult leader’s house with several other young women. So, to give context for this particular story, I, along with 3-4 other girls lived in the finished room over the garage (FROG). It was one large room, with three beds (we called them “cubby beds”) built into the sides of the walls with built in drawers beneath them, and shelves above where the mattresses were for things like lamps, alarm clocks, etc. When we had 5 girls living there, we also had a bunk bed in the middle of the room in front of the windows. There was one bathroom, with a single sink and stand-up shower for the 5 of us. (Perhaps this is why I still roll my eyes when people complain about having to share a sink with their spouse!) My bed was the cubby bed on the left closest to the back wall, and it would be mine for years.
Early one evening, I was feeling heartache because my first boyfriend and I had broken up, after dating for nearly a year. I laid down on my bed, heavy from sadness. Several of us girls were just hanging out in the FROG. Two of the girls asked me what was wrong, and I said that I was just sad and didn’t want to talk about it, which honestly was pretty bold of me to assume I would be allowed to have any boundaries or privacy at all. I ended up going to bed early, and everyone else went back to the main part of the house. Sometime after this, those same two girls came into the dark room, pulled me physically out of my bed, and forced me down the stairs from the FROG, where at the bottom step, they sat me down and told me that I needed to repent. This was a very forceful interaction. They’d told John that I was sad and that I wouldn’t talk about it, and he told them to do this. They told me to repent and change my attitude and rejoice in the Lord, and I knew I would be punished if I didn’t. Some of my memories of that time blur together, so I can’t remember if this time of “getting in trouble” I was told to read Psalms aloud in first person present tense, until my attitude changed, but I think I was. That was something that John often told us to do in order to get us to snap out of any emotion he didn’t’ want us to have. We also usually had to do this in front of other people so they could see us change, and we were under a lot of pressure to get back to being visibly happy and rejoicing really quickly.
I realize that is an extreme example. I was pulled out of bed in the dark because I went to bed sad. I still sit here with this story in shock that it really happened, but it’s also not really that different from all the other things that we had said to us, and what I know many of you have had said to you in spiritually abusive environments. When my parents’ divorce was finalized, I was told not to be sad when I called my pastor’s wife crying, because my mom was evil, and it was good that she was gone. When I was caught in the middle of the custody battle for my younger siblings, between my mom and, essentially, the cult, I was told that there is no such thing as stress when I expressed that I was stressed. In fact, I was clawing my way into “rejoicing” in the Lord, whatever that could mean, because spending too long on grief or sadness was an indication of lack of faith. Trusting God meant that we would be happy and peaceful, with uplifted countenances. If we showed up to church with anything other than a smile, we were admonished to “lift up your countenance.” I was terrified of being depressed and believed that depression was a sin, and that we should just “choose joy.”
Spiritual Bypassing After the Cult
While many of us can think of times people in the church have unhelpfully prescribed spiritual bypassing as an antidote to the pain experienced after abuse in the church, I’ve also personally tried many times to spiritually bypass the work of healing after leaving the cult, and I’ve got a permanent example I’d love to share. I have this bird tattoo on my wrist. It’s black ink, kind of abstract, and it’s the perspective of looking up at a bird soaring overhead. I got it in the spring of 2018 to try to remind myself that I was free, in particular, Psalm 124:7, “We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped!” There was a lot of healing yet to go for me at that point, and I wanted so badly to internalize and believe that I was free in Christ, that my past was over, and that I was healed and just to get out of the suffering that I endured in the aftermath of abuse. I thought if someone painfully needled a reminder into my wrist, I would believe it and I would change. In the moment of getting the tattoo, I felt a catharsis, even in the pain of the process, and like I was doing something to take charge of my life, but even that didn’t last. The tattoo didn’t fix anything in my broken and terrified heart, and I was still struggling and suffering with my symptoms, and still wanting desperately to just be a normal person.
Now, I can honestly say that I experience the cessation of my symptoms a lot of the time. My anxiety is greatly diminished, and I am confident in many things, particularly, in my faith, that I was very unstable in several years ago. However, it has been over the course of years, through the hard and deep work of therapy, and, I would argue, especially the ordinary means of grace, in particular faithful gospel preaching and the administration of the sacraments in my local church, that deeply, gradually, and effectively worked this truth into my heart, and continue to do so, as I often find more places that need both repentance and healing.
When I look at my tattoo now, I compassionately laugh at myself a little bit because while it was not successful in reminding me or forcing me to internalize truth, it now actually does remind me that only God can do that, and I can rest in His care and His ways in my suffering and trials, however long they last.
Theology of Glory vs Theology of the Cross
The “Christian” form of spiritual bypassing puts the burden on the individual to pull themselves out of their circumstances by having enough faith or following a formula, focusing on life here and now, and missing the beauty of the free gift of the gospel in our lives, a more eternal perspective, and the comfort and truth that God works through our suffering to bring about his glory and our good (Romans 8:28). This kind of belief also seems to completely ignore the passages of scripture telling us that we will have hardship and trials in this life. In the Heidelberg Disputation, Martin Luther called this way of thinking and spiritual bypassing the “theology of glory” and distinguished this from a biblical and therefore more realistic, “theology of the cross,” revealing that, “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. This is clear: He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering.”2
This is a symptom of something called over-realized eschatology, which essentially is the belief that Christians have all the blessings of salvation, including those “last things” when Christ returns again in glory, right now, so we should expect to be free from hardship, trial, pain, and other difficult things that affect life on earth if we would have enough faith. Theology of glory does away with the tension of the already and the not yet.
Obvious, blatant prosperity gospel preaching makes this error, but it shows up in subtler, more common ways, too. Some people call it speaking something in faith. Some mix paganism in with their Christianity and call it manifesting, and believe we can will things into existence, that our circumstances are in our control if we would just pray or be positive enough. It is not ok to call something bad or difficult, but we must try to overcome by the power of our positive thinking or praying, or speaking life.
A theology of glory is appealing because we can see all the good things now, without the sanctifying effect of enduring through trials. At the end of the day, though, a theology of glory is a heavy weight and burden on us when our lives are not full of success and trial free, and we can then be tempted to try to bypass the reality of what life on this broken and sinful earth is actually like, misapplying Scripture, and missing the encouragement we can have of living in the reality the theology of the cross, which “calls the thing what it is.” When we are able to throw away this false theology of glory, we are able to live in the reality of our lives by the light of the truth of what God has to say to us in our sufferings, and see the example set for us of Christ’s suffering, and his reminders to us that we would see troubles, and how near God is to us in them.
Up Next in the series: Part 2: Wrong Beliefs and Wrong Goals
Thank you for your patience as I am learning how to balance many different things at once right now, and still bring articles and podcast episodes to you.