The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 20: Religious Abuse

Abuse is unfortunately common. It affects every type of community and family. I have seen numerous cases in which religious texts or elements of religious faith were used as tools to abuse innocent children. (To protect privacy, identifying details have been altered, and some examples are composites.)

This includes one of the worst cases of emotional abuse I have seen in my career.

In this case, a teenager with a gentle, intelligent, altruistic personality—living in an affluent household—was subjected to forced “family sessions” late at night. She would be made to sit for hours in her bedroom while various family members recited Bible passages in a formal, prosecutorial tone, directed by a brutal, controlling father. The purpose was not moral guidance; it was humiliation and intimidation.

The teenager was, in fact, actively involved in altruistic leadership at a church. But the family accused her of hypocrisy and of being a “false disciple,” citing passages such as Matthew 7:21–23 and Matthew 23:13–20, and repeatedly telling her, “God has abandoned you,” alongside threats that she would go to hell. 

Then the family would pivot to the Old Testament, including Deuteronomy 21:18–21, which describes a “stubborn and rebellious child” being stoned to death by the community.
Because she was religious herself, this experience was not merely frightening; it was  torturous—permanently traumatizing—especially in combination with the family’s other abuse and neglect.

These episodes were interspersed with the family’s evangelical outreach efforts in the community, “to spread the word.” As is often the case, the parents were seen as pious and respectable by others. Of course, abusive behavior has complex causes, and in the absence of religion these parents might have weaponized something else. But in this family, the abuse worsened as religious involvement intensified. Congregants who were aware of what was happening were horrified, but they did little to intervene beyond offering prayer.

In another example, children of a very religious mother experienced profound daily neglect and emotional abuse for years. Once again, members of the religious community did little to change the situation other than pray. When one of these children later lived in a different environment with the other non-religious parent, her quality of life improved dramatically. She grew into an intelligent, kind, outstanding young woman—though she still carries post-traumatic symptoms from that earlier phase of life.

In another, a family had previously been happy and well-integrated with the extended family, but as they became more involved in extreme fundamentalist religion, their personalities seemed to change. They became dark, angry, and suspicious, eventually estranging themselves from the rest of the family. Threatening posters appeared on their property with scriptural warnings about hell. Attempts to reach out with kindness were met with scolding condemnations about religious differences. A particular low point was an angry, rambling religious rant delivered during the funeral service of a family elder. These changes tracked with the family becoming more insular and more committed to extreme beliefs and practices. To this day, I feel for the children who had to grow up in that environment.

I have seen numerous examples of estrangement: religious parents ostracizing, shaming, or shunning children over lifestyle or belief differences—sometimes with these actions encouraged and applauded by the religious community. In other cases, religious adults shunned their aging parents, depriving them of access to grandchildren, again with some pious explanation. As always, there are contributing factors beyond religiosity—personality traits, trauma histories, rigid family systems—but it is hard to deny that dogmatic belief, combined with community endorsement, can make these problems deeper and more entrenched.

One phrase I have heard from abusive religious parents is: “turn or burn.” I find this a concise epitome of a belief that often lurks in the background: if you don’t follow my belief, you deserve to be tortured forever. It is offered as an “invitation,” but it functions as a threat. It may even be well‑meant in some warped way, yet it violates the moral foundations the religion claims to represent. Surely, if a way of life is divinely inspired, it should be compelling because it is beautiful and ethically coherent—not because it terrifies people into compliance.

It can be clarifying to hear accounts from people who have escaped abusive religious communities. Megan Phelps‑Roper is one example. One of her most useful insights is not a clever argument against dogma, but a relational one: what helped her most was sustained contact with outsiders who treated her with compassion and respect—people who were willing to build a human connection before trying to debate her beliefs.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 19: Object Relations

Humans have a far more richly developed capacity for imagination than other animals. We can carry internalized representations of important relationships inside the mind. In a loose way, this resembles having an “imaginary friend,” but the point is not childish fantasy—it is a normal developmental achievement: the capacity to hold another person in mind when they are not physically present. This is one of the foundations of object relations theory, one of the more insightful and useful branches of psychoanalysis.

Developmentally, we are initially comforted by a literal parent. Over time, we can also carry in memory an internalized representation of the parent—something like an inner sense of their presence, values, and voice—which can be comforting and stabilizing even when we are alone. This helps us develop confidence and emotional continuity, and it helps us cope with separation and, eventually, grief if a loved one dies.

For many people, religious life includes an internalized relationship with an idealized figure they call God. In much Western Christian imagery (and often in people’s mental pictures), this figure is imagined in human form—often as a bearded man, sometimes portrayed as white—despite the Middle Eastern Biblical setting of the “Holy Land” and the diversity of human appearance worldwide. Many people experience this internal figure as gentle, kind, fatherly, all-knowing, loving, wise, consistent, coach-like, or even therapist-like. Others internalize a divine figure who feels stern or frightening, poised to punish wrongdoing. Often these images reflect what people have learned to associate with authority, safety, and love in their own families and communities—whether authority is experienced as warm and reassuring, or strict and punitive.

Just like relationships with living humans, people can become fiercely loyal to these internal relationship figures—sometimes to extremes, including willingness to suffer or die in service of what they experience as sacred. And because this relationship is experienced as profoundly real, it is unsurprising that many believers feel anger or grief when someone frames it as “imaginary,” or as an internal construct rather than an external reality.

Many traditions also include a personified concept of ultimate evil—often described in devil-like terms. Psychologically, this can make moral struggle more vivid and narratively coherent: it reframes temptation, cruelty, or regretful behavior as a battle against an external force rather than as a confrontation with one’s own capacity for harm. In a tight-knit community, shared belief in external evil can sometimes make reintegration easier: if wrongdoing can be attributed to “the Devil” rather than to the person’s character, the community may find it easier to forgive—especially if a ritual of repentance, prayer, or “deliverance” has been performed. But there is a downside as well: externalizing evil can blunt accountability, and it can also encourage projection—seeing “the Devil” in outsiders, dissenters, or scapegoats—fueling fear, prejudice, or moral panic.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 18: Prayer

Prayer may mean different things to different people. For many, it is a meditative act: a type of philosophical reflection with existential themes, a kind of relaxation therapy, a “grounding” moment. The praying person may believe they are having a conversation with God. The manner in which God is understood to speak back is often taken in a broad, figurative way—for example, if the person subsequently has a new idea, an inclination, a redoubling of confidence, or a wave of emotion that feels like guidance. Other people may not expect that God will “speak back” at all; they may be content simply to vent, confess, grieve, or reflect within a reverent framework. In some ways this resembles classical psychoanalysis: the listener is largely silent, and the act of speaking—slowly, honestly, repeatedly—becomes the mechanism.

For many people, prayer is simply reflective or meditative: a grounding moment, a way to name fears and hopes, a way to feel less alone. But many people also pray for things—for an outcome to change, for an illness to heal, for a surgery to go well, for a war to end, for a relationship to mend. That kind of prayer is different. If it is literally effective, it would mean that events in the physical world are being altered—something in the normal chain of causation is being nudged off course. And if this were happening in a consistent, repeatable way, you would expect to see clear clusters of unusually good outcomes in places where people pray the most, or where the “right” kind of prayer is supposedly most common. You would expect the world to look, especially in more religious areas, as though the ordinary rules of physics are being bent on request. I am not aware of any such pattern.

When researchers have tried to test this carefully—especially with “praying for someone else” (intercessory prayer)—the results have not produced a solid, repeatable signal. A well-known example is the STEP trial in cardiac bypass patients: people were randomized to receive or not receive intercessory prayer, and another group was told with certainty that they were being prayed for. Overall, prayer did not reduce medical complications. Interestingly, the group who knew they were being prayed for actually did a bit worse: complications were reported in 59% of those certain they were receiving prayer versus 52% in a comparison group. One plausible explanation is psychological: once a person is told “people are praying for you,” it can quietly raise the pressure. What if I don’t get better? What does that mean about me? About God? About my faith? For someone already frightened and vulnerable, that extra layer—expectation, scrutiny, the sense that a spiritual “test” is underway—can add stress rather than comfort.

The moral structure of prayer often mirrors the moral structure of empathy. Many people’s prayers are genuinely compassionate: they think of struggling friends or family members, or of terrible world events, and they ask for comfort, protection, and healing. But if prayer is believed to cause divine comfort to arrive, this raises an uncomfortable counterfactual: if the prayer had not occurred, would comfort have been withheld? And shouldn’t a loving deity comfort suffering people regardless of whether someone happens to pray for them—especially since some of the worst suffering on earth occurs in isolation, unnoticed, with no one else even aware enough to pray? It suggests a troubling arrangement where God’s help isn’t based on who is suffering the most, but on who is lucky enough to be noticed.

This is also where it helps to remember Paul Bloom’s critique of empathy (see my review of his book, Against Empathy). Empathy is often biased and therefore unjust: it is pulled toward people who resemble us, toward vivid stories, toward those whose suffering is emotionally dramatic, while neglecting the quiet, the distant, the stigmatized, and the statistically larger tragedies that do not come with a single tear-streaked face. Prayer often inherits this same distortion. We pray intensely for the salient and familiar, and far less for abstract fairness, or for the invisible victims who never make it into our attention.

Many prayers are not about others at all; they are about wishing something for oneself. There are battlefield prayers. Prayers before a medical procedure. Prayers for money, for a job, for the return of an ex-partner, for relief from chronic pain, for the outcome of a baseball pitch or a hockey game. As a meditative act, this is deeply understandable. But psychologically it can set up a reinforcement loop: if the prayer is followed by a good outcome, the person will naturally feel it “worked,” and will be bolstered to pray again. If the outcome is bad, the person may conclude they didn’t pray sincerely enough, or long enough, or correctly enough—or that God was busy, or displeased, or testing them. Either way, the practice becomes insulated from disconfirmation.

This helps explain why prayer works psychologically, even if the supernatural claims aren't true. As a form of meditation or reflection, it can be calming and help organize our thoughts. But as a way to change the laws of physics or alter the course of events, it functions as a self-reinforcing loop. When a prayer is followed by a desired outcome, it is taken as proof of God’s power. When it isn't, the failure is easily explained away—either God said 'no,' or we didn't pray with enough faith. This dynamic validates the belief system regardless of the result, but it places an immense burden on the believer—creating the stressful illusion that their personal spiritual effort is the decisive factor in changing reality.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 17: Shepherding

A related religious metaphor is shepherding. Jesus is called the “Good Shepherd,” and there are many other biblical passages that liken God to a shepherd. It is a beautiful image, and as a child I absorbed it in exactly that spirit: kindly pastoral artwork, a gentle man with a hooked staff, sunny hills, a flock of woolly friends, perhaps one little sheep who has wandered off and needs to be carried back to safety.

But it is worth pausing to remember what shepherding actually meant in that time and place. Sheep were not kept as pets. They were livestock: valued for wool and milk, yes, but also raised for meat—and sometimes for sacrifice. Sacrifice would involve securing the animal using iron rings in front of an altar, cutting the animal's throat, collecting its blood in a special container, the blood then splashed against the altar; next, the animal would be hung from a hook, skinned, then various organs would be removed and burned.  

A shepherd’s role was not only protection and guidance; it also involved ownership, control, and (eventually) decisions about which animals would be killed, sacrificed, or eaten. In that light, “being shepherded” contains an unsettling double meaning: you are kept from straying, guarded from wolves, and held within the safety of the flock—but you are also being managed toward ends that are not your own.

And if we push the image just one step closer to lived reality, it gets darker in a way the children’s illustrations never hinted at. Imagine being a sheep in the flock: every so often the younger males—your cousins, in a sense—are taken away. Perhaps they are led toward a little shed at the edge of the field, or down a path behind a stand of trees, and they are simply never seen again. The flock goes on grazing. The shepherd is still “protecting” the flock. But the protection is inseparable from a system in which some members are quietly designated for disappearance.

To be fair, the Christian image in particular tries to invert the usual arrangement: the “Good Shepherd” is portrayed as laying down his life for the sheep. That is morally striking. Still, the metaphor does something psychologically and socially important: it trains us to admire a certain kind of relationship—one in which docility is a virtue, “straying” is a moral failure, and the authority to define what counts as straying belongs to the shepherd.

The phrase “sheep gone astray” appears repeatedly in scripture, usually as a metaphor for human misbehavior. But actual sheep that never “go astray” do not graduate into freedom; they remain in the flock under management. As a child I never thought of this. Now I think the metaphor is revealing, not because it proves anything on its own, but because it quietly captures an entire moral posture: safety in exchange for surrender—comfort in exchange for obedience.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 16: Sacrifice

Most religions have some form of sacrifice alluded to in their theology. Sometimes this involves literal offerings—killing and burning animals, or destroying valuable objects. Other times it is “bloodless”: giving money, time, obedience, or the renunciation of pleasures through fasting, abstinence, or celibacy. In all these cases, the underlying idea is similar: something costly is offered up, with the hope of securing meaning, favor, purity, forgiveness, protection, or communal belonging.

There are also sacrificial motifs that move disturbingly close to human sacrifice. In the Abrahamic traditions, for example, the willingness of Abraham/Ibrahim to sacrifice his son is presented as a peak test of obedience—and in Islam it is commemorated annually in Eid al-Adha, the “Festival of Sacrifice,” in which animal sacrifice functions as a memorial of that story.  And in Christianity, the theme of sacrifice is carried into the central story of Jesus: a dramatic moral and symbolic reframing of sacrifice into self-sacrifice, offered “for others.”

Sacrifice is, in my view, an extension of ordinary human ideas about reciprocity and gratitude—infused with magical thinking. In a community we do favors, give gifts, and care for one another. These behaviors can be altruistic, but they are also supported by norms of reciprocity. If one believes that a mystical power controls destiny, fertility, weather, health, wealth, or military success, it becomes psychologically “reasonable,” within that worldview, to give that power a gift—hoping for a return.

And once a person enters this mindset, the logic can become self-sealing. If you make sacrifices and misfortune still comes, you can conclude the offering wasn’t sufficient, wasn’t sincere enough, or wasn’t given with the right purity of heart—so you must increase it next time. If something good happens afterward, it feels like proof that the sacrifice worked, and should be repeated.  In this way, practicing sacrifice can become an escalating brutal and destructive behaviour.  The sacrificed animals—often the most vulnerable and least able to “consent” to the human story being told about them—do not get much say in the matter.  

Another motivation for sacrificial rituals likely came from the brutal necessities of ancient life: hunting animals, or killing domestic animals for food. Most humans bond to animals easily, and it would be psychologically troubling to watch an animal struggle and suffer. Ritual can function as moral anesthetic: a way to consecrate violence, to assuage guilt, and to turn a grim necessity into a story of gratitude, order, and meaning.

Sacrifice can also be political performance. Public ritual can consolidate hierarchy (especially priestly hierarchy), display power, intensify fear, and signal unity. It is not hard to see how sacrifice functions as a kind of social technology: it makes shared belief visible and costly.

This is also where sacrifice connects to group psychology. Some scholars have argued that costly rituals—things you would not do unless you were committed—operate as signals that strengthen trust and cooperation within a group, partly by filtering out free riders. A community bound together by shared sacrifice can feel safer, warmer, and more morally serious to its members. But that same mechanism can harden boundaries and intensify suspicion of outsiders.

Speaking of reciprocity: it is a strongly selected trait to favor and help genetic relatives, sometimes even in self-sacrificial ways. If there is a person who has a trait that causes them to selectively help close relatives, then that trait will tend to persist in the family line, because it helps protect and propagate the very genetic network that carries it forward. This is a simple evolutionary logic: kin altruism increases the survival and reproductive success of the shared family “pool,” even when it costs the individual something in the short run.

But humans do not walk around calculating degrees of genetic relatedness. Instead, we rely on crude, fast heuristics — cues that, over most of human history, were often correlated with kinship and shared ancestry. People who live near each other, marry each other, and raise children together will, over generations, tend to share not only genes but also language, accent, customs, dress, and social norms. Conversely, people who look different, speak differently, or practice very different customs are often from a different village, tribe, or family network — and therefore are more likely to be less closely genetically related than the people who share your immediate cultural and familial world.

The mind has evolved to be slightly more generous, trusting, and self-sacrificing toward those who are more likely to be “one of us,” so it follows that it may also be less generous, more suspicious, or more emotionally distant toward those who feel like “not us.” These tendencies are not destiny, and they are not moral justification — but they are part of the psychological and evolutionary foundation of prejudice. These are precisely the sorts of inherited inclinations we must learn to recognize, challenge, and actively override.

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