Church Trauma and Spiritual “Knowledge”
Guest favorite Heather Griffin is still Christian, but struggling.
I welcomed back listener-favorite Heather Griffin to discuss her experiences with spiritual abuse and institutional failure in various Christian contexts. At the beginning of our conversation, I recapped the four key concepts from our previous highly popular episode (#123) that help explain evangelical epistemology:
Knowledge is Easy: Spiritual truth is accessible to any sincere believer without special training
Bible Facts: The Bible contains self-evident truths that need no interpretation
Sincerity Culture: Believers are differentiated not by what they believe but how sincerely they believe it
Sanctified Common Sense: Sincere Christians possess divinely enhanced perception
The result is that when someone sincerely believes Bible facts, they believe that they have a divinely enhanced ability to perceive reality accurately. This creates a powerful sense of epistemic certainty—the sincere believer feels they can trust their judgment on virtually any matter because God has enhanced their discernment.
This becomes particularly problematic when addressing complex situations that require specialized knowledge, like handling abuse allegations. A church leader operating under "sanctified common sense" might believe they can accurately judge a person's character or the validity of abuse claims based on prayer and intuition rather than deferring to experts in trauma, psychology, or investigative procedures.
As Griffin points out in the podcast, this overconfidence leads to undetected incompetence. When failures occur, rather than questioning their approach, leaders often attribute challenges to spiritual warfare or persecution. The certainty that God has endorsed their perspective makes it nearly impossible for them to recognize their limitations or mistakes.
Sharing from her trauma and advocacy work in different church contexts, Heather explained the structural problems within the Anglican Church of North America that make accountability difficult. Despite having a strong hierarchy of bishops, most pastors and laypeople think like Congregationalists (where the congregation itself is “in charge”). This creates an illusion of accountability through governance structures, but the reality is that dioceses are largely autonomous, bishops resist accountability, and clergy take vows of obedience to their bishops. If a bishop misbehaves, priests who speak out face career-ending consequences.
Illustrating this phenomenon, Heather shared a deeply personal story about her husband Paul's life-threatening medical emergency and how beautifully her church community rallied around her. The juxtaposition of this profound care with the same church's unwillingness to address abuse properly has been spiritually devastating for her.
In the second, patron-only half of the episode, Heather details her disillusionment with Christian leadership after experiencing narcissistic abuse from a bishop she trusted, explores her crisis of faith in light of these betrayals, and reflects on finding new pathways to spiritual connection despite her profound grief and disappointment.
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