When Faith Hurts: New Review Traces Religious Trauma to Leadership and Governance Failures

Religious communities have long been celebrated as sources of meaning, resilience, moral guidance, and social cohesion, yet a growing body of scholarship suggests that the same institutions can inflict lasting psychological harm when their leadership structures turn authoritarian. A new literature review published in the journal Pastoral Psychology argues that religious trauma syndrome, a condition increasingly described at the intersection of trauma psychology, organizational leadership, and institutional ethics, should not be treated solely as an individual psychological disorder. Instead, the review positions it as a leadership and governance concern, one rooted in institutional power, accountability structures, and the ways identity is formed within tightly controlled communities. The work, conducted by Antoinette Atterbury, synthesizes decades of research across psychology, leadership studies, and institutional ethics to ask a deceptively simple question: what is it about the way religious organizations are governed that makes them capable of causing trauma, and what would it take to prevent that harm?

Religious trauma syndrome was first articulated by psychologist Marlene Winell in 2011, who described a cluster of symptoms, including anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, and difficulty making decisions, that can emerge when individuals leave or are harmed by high-control religious environments. The new review draws on trauma psychology frameworks, including Judith Herman’s influential work on trauma and recovery and Bessel van der Kolk’s account of how traumatic experience is encoded in the body and mind, to explain how these symptoms develop. In authoritarian religious settings, the review argues, coercive leadership practices can suppress autonomy, shape identity, and normalize shame-based control. Techniques long associated with thought reform, from Robert Lifton’s classic studies of psychological totalism to Margaret Singer’s analyses of cultic groups, find parallels in religious environments where questioning is punished, doubt is framed as moral failure, and belonging is made conditional on obedience.

A central concept in the review is institutional betrayal, a framework developed by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe the harm that occurs when institutions on which individuals depend fail to protect them or actively violate their trust. In religious contexts, the review suggests, betrayal can be particularly corrosive because faith communities often occupy a uniquely central role in a believer’s social and psychological world. When the institution that promises unconditional love and spiritual safety instead enforces control, conceals abuse, or silences dissent, the resulting injury compounds the original harm. The review connects this dynamic to research on abusive supervision in organizational settings, including studies showing that hierarchical abuses of power in workplaces produce silence, fear, and psychological distress among those subject to them. Religious organizations, the review argues, are not exempt from these dynamics; they may amplify them by sacralizing authority and framing obedience as devotion.

Developmental vulnerability emerges as another key factor. Drawing on James Marcia’s classic work on ego-identity status, the review notes that adolescents and young adults are in the midst of forming their identities, making them especially susceptible to environments that dictate beliefs, regulate relationships, and define self-worth in theological terms. Recent dissertation and thesis research cited in the review, including a 2025 mixed-methods study of evangelicals exposed to high-control religiosity during their formative years and a phenomenological study of religious trauma among transgender and gender diverse people, illustrates how experiences during these developmental windows can produce lasting trauma outcomes. When authoritarian leadership coincides with psychologically vulnerable developmental stages, the review concludes, the potential for harm is greatest, because the individual’s emerging sense of self is built within, and often around, the controlling institution.

The review does not treat religion itself as the problem. It emphasizes that organized religion has historically provided meaning, resilience, moral guidance, and social cohesion for millions of people, and it considers the positive psychological and social functions that faith communities can offer when ethical leadership is present. Citing research on community health partnerships, such as the Triad Pastors Network’s work building health ministries within African American communities, the review points to examples of religious institutions serving as engines of public good. The distinction it draws is not between religious and secular organizations, but between governance models that concentrate power and those that distribute accountability. The same communal structures that can shelter and sustain can, under authoritarian leadership, isolate and control.

To explain this contrast, the review turns to organizational leadership scholarship. It invokes James MacGregor Burns’s foundational distinction between transactional and transforming leadership, and Robert Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership, in which legitimate power is exercised for the benefit of those led rather than over them. It also draws on Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety, the shared belief that a group is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, as a protective factor against the silence and fear that authoritarian environments cultivate. Studies of abusive supervision, including research on how bad bosses suppress employee voice through damaged leader-member relationships, are used to map organizational dynamics onto congregational life. The implication is that the tools developed to diagnose and reform dysfunctional workplaces may be equally applicable to religious institutions, where the stakes include not only professional well-being but spiritual identity and community belonging.

Accountability is the linchpin of the review’s governance argument. Drawing on Grant and Keohane’s framework for understanding accountability and abuses of power in world politics, the review outlines how weak oversight allows leaders to act without consequence, and how multiple forms of accountability, including hierarchical, legal, and social mechanisms, can constrain abuse. In many religious organizations, the review observes, accountability structures are either absent or captured by the very leaders they are meant to check. Charismatic authority, theological claims of divine mandate, and insular communities can combine to create environments where complaints are dismissed, whistleblowers are ostracized, and harm is rationalized as discipline or divine will. The review suggests that governance reform, rather than individual therapy alone, is therefore essential to mitigating religious trauma at scale.

The constructive core of the review is its proposal of trauma-informed governance models as potential mechanisms for reducing institutional harm. Such models would emphasize transparency in decision-making, psychological safety for members and staff, and servant leadership that prioritizes the flourishing of the community over the power of its leaders. Trauma-informed governance, as the review frames it, means designing institutions with an explicit awareness of how power can wound: creating channels for reporting concerns without retaliation, involving members in governance decisions, training leaders in the psychology of trauma and coercive control, and building accountability structures that operate independently of charismatic authority. The goal, the review stresses, is not to dismantle faith communities but to preserve their beneficial communal functions while removing the structural conditions under which harm flourishes.

The review also situates religious trauma within a broader landscape of institutional harm, citing research on survivors of institutional childhood abuse and their experiences of posttraumatic growth, as well as clinical work on treating former cult members with therapies such as eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing. These literatures, the review argues, demonstrate both the severity of institutional trauma and the possibility of recovery, particularly when survivors find communities that validate their experiences. Measurement tools from trauma psychology, including the Impact of Event Scale and instruments for assessing depression, provide clinicians with means of evaluating distress, while spiritually integrated psychotherapy offers approaches that address religious injury without dismissing the sacred. The review’s synthesis suggests that recovery is aided when the institutional sources of harm are named and understood, not merely internalized as personal failure.

Ultimately, the review makes a case that is likely to resonate far beyond pastoral psychology: that the prevention of religious trauma is a leadership problem with identifiable structural solutions. By reframing religious trauma syndrome as a governance concern, the work invites boards, denominations, congregations, and scholars to apply the same rigor to religious organizations that organizational scientists apply to corporations and governments. Where transparency, psychological safety, and servant leadership take root, the review concludes, faith communities can retain the meaning, resilience, and social cohesion that have made them enduring fixtures of human life, while the authoritarian dynamics that turn devotion into damage are systematically designed out. In an era when institutional trust is under scrutiny across society, the argument that how organizations are led determines whether they heal or harm may prove to be the review’s most consequential contribution.

Subject of Research: How authoritarian religious leadership and weak governance contribute to religious trauma syndrome and how trauma-informed governance may mitigate it.

Article Title: Governance and the Mitigation of Religious Trauma: An Organizational Leadership Literature Review

Article References: Atterbury, A. (2026). Governance and the Mitigation of Religious Trauma: An Organizational Leadership Literature Review. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01374-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01374-z

Keywords: religious trauma syndrome, organizational leadership, institutional betrayal, trauma-informed governance, psychological safety, servant leadership, pastoral psychology, authoritarian leadership, identity formation, accountability, trauma psychology, faith communities