The Gospel of Silence

A survivor’s manifesto on religious abuse, sexuality, and coercive control.

Religious abuse rarely begins with shouting — it begins with silence. Not the peaceful kind, but the kind enforced through fear, doctrine, and emotional exile. When the people meant to guide you toward truth instead teach you to distrust your own mind, your nervous system becomes the first casualty. You learn early that survival depends on compliance, and compliance depends on disappearing into whatever version of you keeps the peace.

As my sexuality became harder to hide in early adolescence, the walls began to close in. The gospel I was raised under was not a gospel of love — it was a gospel of correction, secrecy, and control. My mother’s religion did not care about my soul; it cared about my obedience. And obedience, in our house, meant self-erasure.

How Religious Abuse Co-opts the Nervous System

People often misunderstand spiritual abuse as a series of dramatic events. In reality, it is a slow neurological conditioning that teaches the body to fear honesty, desire, pleasure, authenticity, and autonomy. A child’s nervous system is wired to detect threat — but in a spiritually coercive environment, the threat becomes the parent themselves. So the child learns to internalize the threat and call it “sin.”

Over time, your body becomes fluent in suppression. You monitor yourself for “impure thoughts,” “rebellious emotions,” or any internal spark that might lead to punishment. This is not faith development — it is trauma adaptation.

Coercive Control Disguised as Spiritual Authority

Coercive religious environments rely on three tools: fear, isolation, and divine endorsement. If your abuser can convince you that God agrees with them, the abuse becomes self-sustaining. You begin policing yourself. You begin erasing yourself. You begin offering up your own voice as a sacrifice to keep the peace.

My mother’s greatest weapon was not scripture. It was her ability to speak with absolute certainty. Her interpretations were not interpretations — they were ultimatums. Her authority was not questioned — it was consecrated.

And because children are neurologically wired to trust their caregivers, I accepted her voice as divine truth long before I had the ability to question it.

When Identity Becomes the Battleground

By the time I reached my teens, my sexuality had become a theological crisis in my household. Not for me — but for her. I was taught that love was conditional, safety was conditional, and belonging was conditional. Anything that deviated from her idealized version of me was treated as both a moral defect and a personal betrayal.

She rewrote my identity using spiritual language:

“Your feelings are lies.”
“Your attractions are attacks from the enemy.”
“Your truth is rebellion.”
“Your autonomy is sin.”

This wasn’t moral guidance; it was psychological colonization. I wasn’t being protected from corruption — I was being groomed for silence.

The Body Keeps the Score Even When Scripture Is Weaponized

Trauma researchers have long shown that chronic emotional suppression leads to physiological consequences: dysregulated stress hormones, hypervigilance, digestive disorders, inflammatory conditions, cardiovascular strain, and a fractured internal sense of safety. Religious abuse operates directly through these pathways.

When a parent tells a child that their body is dangerous, their emotions are sinful, and their intuition is untrustworthy, the child’s nervous system collapses into lifelong patterns of self-surveillance, shame, and somatic distress.

I lived in those patterns for years — believing they were spiritual discipline instead of trauma symptoms.

My Liberation: Reclaiming the Voice I Was Trained to Silence

Leaving a spiritually coercive system isn’t as simple as walking away. You have to rebuild the parts of you that were never allowed to form. You have to learn how to trust your own body, your own perception, your own desire, your own intelligence. You have to re-parent the self that religion punished.

And you have to name what happened — without euphemism, without apology, without fear of who might be offended by your survival.

Because truth is not disrespect. Autonomy is not rebellion. Healing is not heresy. And reclaiming your voice is not sin — it is resurrection. D. Robert McDowell- 2024