Spiritual Abuse is Hard to Prove

I'm working to change that. You can help.

Many survivors of spiritual abuse share this experience in common: I tried to speak up, but they didn’t believe me. Or they told me to forgive and move on. Or, I was blamed for causing trouble and making a problem out of nothing.

The reality in our Christian world is that most people don’t understand how spiritual abuse works. “They lied to you?” becomes “it was all a miscommunication” or “he didn’t mean it that way.” The abuser offers an explanation for his or her behavior, and we are quick to explain away their offenses. Why?

Maybe it’s because we don’t want to believe that the people we trust to lead us in the faith aren’t who they say they are.

Maybe we don’t want to believe we could be that wrong in our judgement of someone’s character.

We tend to give our spiritual leaders the benefit of the doubt. That puts the people who try to speak up about being spiritually abused on trial. It becomes their job to “prove” that the leader is abusive. They must provide evidence and airtight explanations of what they’ve experienced, only for it to be analyzed and picked apart by a body of skeptics. It’s one of the most frustrating and demoralizing aspects of spiritual abuse.

Victims of spiritual abuse find themselves trapped by the subjectivity of their experience. You feel this way? You interpreted that statement as condescending? Even well-meaning people will respond, “there’s two sides to every story,” or “she didn’t mean it that way,” or “Jesus tells us to forgive.”

Allow me to explain spiritually abusive leadership like this:

You have a senior pastor and a staff member. They meet together privately and the senior pastor tells the staff member something. When the staff member shares this with an elder, the elder brings the senior pastor in. The senior pastor says “No, I never said that.”

The staff member is concerned and shares her experience with a few other people in the church. Word gets back to the elders and senior pastor. Now the elders are saying that this staff member is slandering the senior pastor. She is told she must apologize.

Who are people in the church more likely to believe? The word of the senior pastor, or the staff member?

Can this staff member prove that the senior pastor is the one who is not being truthful? These interactions usually happen in a one-on-one setting, so victims must retell their version of events while the leader tells his. Inevitably, it becomes “he-said” versus “she-said.” For other leaders and church members, this can be very difficult to sift through.

That is what I am working to change.

Why focus on leadership behavior?

To evaluate spiritually abusive leadership, we need to separate the question “have you been abused?” (which is important for individuals and the larger body to understand) from “has this person or group behaved abusively?” (which is important for institutional accountability). The victim’s feelings still provide relevant data, but the focus shifts to what the leader might be doing to cause those feelings. For example, if you’ve felt humiliated or denigrated by your leaders, that points to something unhealthy about their behavior, rather than something you might need to work on.

In organizational psychology there is a whole sector dedicated to understanding leadership behaviors. People want to know what makes a good leader—what do they say and do? How does their behavior affect a team’s productivity, morale, or psychological safety? How can we replicate good leadership and move away from the bad?

It starts with identifying specific traits of healthy and unhealthy leadership. Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School created a measure for team psychological safety. She says “what gets measured gets improved.”¹

You can’t change what you can’t see. That’s why we need an assessment tool that focuses on observable patterns of behavior that add up to spiritual abuse.

The behavior of leaders is something we can see—but only if we look at the complete picture. Abusive leaders will change their behavior depending on who’s in the room. There may be very few people who witness their harmful side. In my survey assessment, I’m looking for observable patterns of behavior that accurately predict spiritual abuse.

Here’s why I find behavior a helpful frame:

• Behavior is separate from intentions. “A person may think their own ways are right, but the Lord weighs the heart” (Proverbs 21:2, NIV). No one can judge another person’s heart or intentions. That is only God’s place. But we are responsible for our own behavior, especially when it causes damage to others.

• Behavior is observable. You can’t see someone’s heart, but you can observe how they act and respond in different situations. Do their words and actions align? If they say they are open to feedback, but dismiss every suggestion brought to them, that tells you something about how open they really are.

• Behavior can change. We all have blind spots we can’t see without outside feedback and the Spirit. If we don’t give our leaders clear and specific feedback, is it fair to expect them to change? Arguably, the most loving thing we can do for leaders is to show them how they can stop spiritually abusive patterns and become good shepherds.

That is the beauty of a survey assessment: not only does it identify unhealthy or abusive environments, but the survey will tell you what can be improved. Under appropriate circumstances, we can give our leaders an opportunity to embrace healthier practices. And if they profess to be open, willing to listen, or changed, we can see for ourselves whether the unhealthy patterns have changed.

Survey feedback enables us to hold our spiritual leaders accountable without condemning them.²

What about other spiritual abuse surveys? Can’t we just use one of them?

There are currently 3 other validated surveys for spiritual abuse:

1. The Spiritual Abuse Questionnaire by Dr. Kathryn Hope Keller - available in her doctoral thesis³

2. The Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale by Dan Koch - available online⁴

3. The Spiritual Abuse Assessment by Dr. Karen Roudkovski - available in her books Understanding Spiritual Abuse and Spiritual Abuse Assessment⁵

All three surveys were developed by psychologists to understand an individual’s experience of harm. In other words, if you want to answer the question “have I experienced spiritual abuse?” these surveys are excellent tools. They can apply to many different contexts where spiritual abuse takes place, including personal relationships, families, and religious communities.

My survey differs as a leadership and organizational assessment. I’ve named it the Spiritually Abusive Leadership and Climate Survey, or SALC Survey for short. It will capture people’s experiences with a leader or group of leaders in a specific church or organization. The SALC Survey helps people answer the question “is this Christian leader or institution behaving in a spiritually abusive way?”

How do you validate a survey measure?

I want to ensure that the SALC Survey meets the highest level of academic rigor and testing. My first step was to create a large pool of survey items based on the existing research and interviews with survivors. My survey items were then evaluated by leading experts in the field of spiritual abuse and modified or dropped according to their feedback. A small group of participants took the survey to check for errors.

I am now conducting two rounds of large-scale testing to (a) internally validate the survey, (b) select the strongest items through statistical analysis, (c) identify prevailing themes and subscales, (d) re-test the final survey items to confirm internal consistency, and (e) test this measure against other validated scales, such as traumatic stress and psychological safety. In the end, this research will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publishing.

So, what can I do?

Here are a couple ways you can help:

1. Take the survey. If you have had direct experience (good or bad) with Christian leaders, you can participate in the pilot study here.

2. Share the survey. You can forward this article or salcsurvey.com to anyone who may be eligible to participate.

3. Learn more. You can listen to the Broken to Beloved podcast Episode 22 where I explain more about the research process.

4. Give. My goal is to provide open access for any individual to take the SALC Survey once it is validated. You can support this research by becoming a paid subscriber of Good Shepherding, or visiting www.salcsurvey.com/support.

1. Fearlessorganization.com

2. There are situations where it may not be appropriate or wise to allow a leader to remain in their position of authority. This is something I will be parsing out based on my assessment data and with experts in spiritual abuse investigations.

3. Keller, K. H. (2016). Development of a spiritual abuse questionnaire. Texas Woman's University.

4. Koch, D., & Edstrom, L. (2022). Development of the spiritual harm and abuse scale. Journal for the scientific study of religion, 61(2), 476-506.

5. Karen’s books are based on her doctoral research: Roudkovski, K. (2022). The Development of the Spiritual Abuse Assessment: A Modified Delphi Approach. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.