Spiritual Abuse and Deconstruction with David Hayward, the NakedPastor

Back by popular demand, David Hayward, the NakedPastor returns to the Arise Podcast. 

You can listen our first conversation with David HERE.

David is a cartoon artist who uses his art to challenge the status quo, deconstruct dogma, and offer hope for those who struggle and suffer under it. After 30 years in the church, he left the ministry to pursue his passion for art. He holds a Masters in Theological Studies. He is also a writer with several books, and is based out of New Brunswick, Canada. 

We wanted to circle back with David to explore and expand the idea of Spiritual Abuse which often appears in his art. Maggie asked him to start us off with a working definition.

David said he knows religious abuse or spiritual abuse intimately and from both sides: he has been on the receiving end, that is he has been personally harmed as well as he has participated in the structures that have inflicted spiritual abuse. 

As for a working definition, David said Wikipedia’s definition is a good place to start: “Religious abuse is abuse administered under the guise of religion, including harassment or humiliation, which may result in psychological trauma. Religious abuse may also include misuse of religion for selfish, secular, or ideological ends such as the abuse of a clerical position.” There are so many forms of abuse (emotional, physical, sexual, etc.) but it can be simply said that abuse is when someone’s self is being violated in some way. Spiritual abuse is then when anything that falls under the spirituality / religious realm is used as a weapon to violate another person’s freedom, dignity or their physical or emotional self. 

Some people, he says, have a hard time accepting that Christianity, Faith, the Bible or religion can be used as a weapon. “Right of the bat, their defenses go up. ‘Impossible! Because ‘Christianity is a good thing.’” Religion, like any good thing, can be turned around and used to harm another person or people group. 

Abuse of power, like the clerical position and spiritual leaders, can be used to harm others. This is an overt and severe expression of spiritual abuse like you see in the examples from the cases of clergy with their membership, especially in the Roman Catholic Church with sexual abuse of boys by priests. There are also more subtle or as David says “mild” forms of spiritual abuse that just comes off as “uncomfortable” feeling, like “something doesn’t sit right” as would be the case in someone feeling the pressure to give of financial resources or time and energy to the church. 

Danielle says David has named that spiritual abuse is an abuse of someone’s identity, who God created them to be, and therefore it encompasses a range of things that can violated making it all the more devious. 

David says that people would categorize sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape or sexual harassment under the category of sexuality but he believes there’s something even more foundational than that and it is human dignity, their self-space, their pride and freedom is being violated. When you consider the sexual abuse of the Roman Catholic Church, it is being done under the guise that there is a spiritual union happening. This adds another layer to the abuse – it is both sexual and spiritual violations. There’s a clear abuse of power when a pastor has an affair with one of its members—there can’t be consent with the power dynamic. This is the same as a professor with a student. It’s not just rare cases, this is happening all over the place.

Maggie says she thinks of the word rampant—it’s happening all over and it’s happening all the time. One of the things that is hard to identifying is abuse when it’s subtle. She says it’s easier to identify spiritual abuse in cases like the priest sexually abusing boys-–it’s a clear misuse of power. But it’s harder to identify cases of subtle spiritual abuse where it’s more like a warping of scripture or misuse of theology. Something feels off and you may feel uncomfortable but you also want to trust the pastor or spiritual leader. “It doesn’t seem wrong; they’re using the Bible.” “They’re looking out for me.” We have all kinds of ways to rationalize away the possibility of spiritual abuse, to give the “leadership” the benefit of the doubt, when in fact they are weaponizing scripture to instill fear and self-doubt so you feel like you can no longer trust yourself. 

David says that is happening just about everywhere. He gives two examples, one in which he inflicted and one in which he was the recipient of:

When he was fresh out of seminary, 25 years old, preaching “with great zeal” to the three Presbyterian churches in his charge, he taught on the importance of reading the Bible and knowing the Bible. Afterwards he felt bad and even apologized the following Sunday for being so “pushy” and making people feel guilty about not reading the Bible. The response he got was, “No, no, no! We loved it! We want you to do more of it.” They liked the “hell, fire and brimstone that makes them feel bad.” It was a weird dynamic—people expect to be preached at, to be pressured into good things and to be made to feel guilty and shamed for falling short. David realized that he didn’t want to brow-beat people because he knew from his own life how effective that was: Zero. 

Much later in life, after he had left the ministry, he was invited to attend a “very liberal” church with a friend. God wasn’t mentioned, everyone one sharing the service, but when the pastor got up to preach, he could feel himself physically leaning back to get away from the pastor. The pastor was teaching against the dichotomy of spiritual but not religious and shaming them for not being more religious. He decided he would never go back there because he felt it was abusive. 

David says people lose sensation in their gut—their intuition—it’s been numbed and inactive for so long that people don’t know how to use it. They’ve lost the skill of even knowing what they are feeling. 

David believes that spiritual abuse is so prevalent because it’s expected on both ends and it’s common and habitual, “we’re just used to it.” You can hear within seconds the condescension in some pastors today. David said he’s become attuned to abusive behavior and attitudes. 

Danielle wonders if some of what David is talking about is the prevalence to pathological narcissism in the church, which is form of domestic violence in a domestic violence in close relationships. On top of that, Danielle says we live in a society that is drawn to narcissists; from charismatic speakers to the person who seems to have all the answers or seems to have it all together. There’s a history over centuries of silencing our bodies, through faith, culture, systems… it’s nothing new when we come to the church. There’s nothing different between the inside and the outside.

“Shame seems to work. It’s a fast remedy,” David says. “Shame is used a lot in the church, but it’s used a lot in the home when we’re growing up. We think it modifies behavior, it might temporarily but It doesn’t change character.” Many people believe that shame is a valid method to modify behavior but David doesn’t. He thinks it’s abusive. 

Narcissistic people find people who want to be led. And what allows for that philosophy is a church structure that is set up to have leaders and followers. This is a template for abuse that’s passed on from generation to generation. It’s hierarchy and servitude, leadership and adoration. 

Maggie said David’s most recent post on Instagram speaks to this very thing. The cartoon is of two people talking and one says “Hey, who gave you permission to do that?” And the other person is thinking, “Me.” It is depicting this dynamic of authority. The church structure is set up for the pastor or spiritual leader to have all the authority and the followers to think they don’t have any authority on their own. 

David said he tried for many years to change this from the inside as a pastor, to break the template of bosses & workers, masters & slaves, shepherd & sheep. He said most people don’t want that because it doesn’t feel like church. They want to go to a church where they can listen to a charismatic dynamic speaker. 

One of the hard things for people who have suffered from spiritual abuse is our own complicity in the system of abuse: we stayed and we even enjoyed it. David remembers serving spiritual leaders to the deficit of his family and he loved it because he was getting recognition and attention. Many people struggle with their participation in abusive structures until their eyes are open and they realized, “holy shit! I’m being abused here.” Then they took all the risks necessarily to leave. We chose to be there at first and then we couldn’t figure out how to get out fast enough. 

Another part is that it’s a part of the culture; we’re grown to expect it as a part of the church experience. It’s cultural and it’s religious dynamics at play. It’s very complicated. This is why so many people who leave an abusive church situation need therapy – it takes a long time to untangle the “rats nest” of threads.

Danielle adds, there are so many hooks that get inside our souls. She thinks about trying to leave church, it’s not just about leaving church. It’s often leaving a community that will likely shun you, it’s collective practices of harm and abuse. It affects your kids. It affects the people you regularly get together. She calls after she had left a church situation for a couple of years she wanted to go on a hike with two of friends; and one said yes and other said they prayed about it and they thought they shouldn’t go on a hike with her. I thought, well she may get converted on the hike because “I might be a Marxist right, you know because I’m an anti-racist.” She laughs. It did sting, though it didn’t linger. Leaving a church is also leaving a community and not knowing where to start again. 

David said he has many stories like that too. Leaving a church is like a woman leaving an abusive husband – it takes a lot of planning, secret sneaking around getting a bag ready… 

When David left the ministry, he walked away from community, support (babysitters to mechanic, to meals when you’re sick and prayer). They lost their friends, some things to do during the week, he lost his income and sense of meaning and purpose in his life. It was a major mind fuck. It’s really major and very complicated. For him I was always ugly and traumatizing to leave a ministry settings. 

Being a pastor he has helped many people through separation and divorce and he some patterns—some people would prepare on the inside for months, maybe even years, and then after talking it through with others would eventually leave. Others leave and then sort out all the rest. He’s experienced being fired with the suddenness of a forced departure as well as spending time preparing for months, having a plan and then leaving a ministry. 

David says spiritual abuse gets trivialized because spirituality, religion and Christianity get trivialized when in fact it is very significant to many people. 

Maggie said we’ve talked a lot about the external losses of spiritual abuse such as the losses of community and friendships, she wonders what the impact of spiritual abuse is on a person’s faith. Understanding that we have our agency and authority is a part of that, as well as this idea of deconstruction. We have been fed a specific set of rules and beliefs that are built up against us (to contain us inside the abusive structure!). When we start to feel the discomfort and pain of spiritual abuse it is as if our brains start to wake up and we start to ask questions and slowly start to take a part and analyze these beliefs and structures. 

David has a theory about deconstruction; there are two basic kinds; one is theological deconstruction and the other ecclesiological. Theological deconstruction is about deconstruction your beliefs, right down to is there a God. Ecclesiological deconstruction is deconstructing your relationship to the church. His experience is that when people theological deconstruct is often effects their relationship to the church, they no longer find a safe space to process their theological deconstruction. It’s not that they find the church meaningless, it’s mostly that the church doesn’t give them room to continue growing. Ecclesiological deconstruction is around something happening, whether that is spiritual abuse or boredom or whatever, and you change your relationship to the church. His observation is that most people who deconstruct from the church don’t necessarily deconstruct theologically. A lot people who experience spiritual abuse don’t necessarily deconstruct theologically but they do deconstruct from the church. 

Danielle wonders if we’re even deconstructing anything lately. It’s been fragmented pieces that don’t even connect. She thinks it wasn’t even together, it was already broken and now we’re just looking at the fragments. 

David says deconstructing is about deconstructing your own conditioning, which includes beliefs that we’ve inherited. Some of the more mystical religions demand that we deconstruct our conditioning all the way to the roots. David has done this for years, like trying to put together a 1000-piece puzzle. In 2009 he had a mystical moment when he saw with clarity that we’re all one, we share one reality, we’re all connected. For him, this is what brought it all together and he’s had peace since then. It wasn’t formula, it wasn’t answers. 

Maggie says this goes along with his motto “questions are the answer.” Questions are welcomed and needed. She says she appreciate the community his building through his art and conversations like these and sharing his own experiences. He is leading the way in idea of “questions are the answer,” making space for others to do so. It is good and healthy to have these conversations, it’s progress and growth! Let’s normalize deconstruction! 

Connect with David at nakedpastor.com 

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.