There are many reasons why someone might leave a particular faith ― or the concept of organized religion in general. Theological disagreements, life changes, a slow drift away from belief or a single breaking-point moment can all play a role.

If you talk to or follow someone on social media who has left a religious community, you might’ve come across the term “church hurt.” While it’s become a kind of shorthand for a bad experience with a religious community, the reality is deeper than that.

″‘Church hurt’ is harm experienced through or by a religious group,” Tia Levings, an author and former Christian fundamentalist, told HuffPost. “Othering, ostracizing and rejection, judgmental behavior, purity culture and modesty teachings that condition shame, feeling vilified for ordinary development or life attributes ― these are just a few examples.”

It’s a kind of emotional and spiritual pain caused by a particular religious institution, its leadership or its members.

“Church hurt, to me, is about community and expectation,” said Malynda Hale, executive director of the Christian nonprofit The New Evangelicals. “It’s the wound that comes from being let down by the people and the institution you trusted. It’s the gossip, the exclusion, the leadership that protected an abuser instead of a victim, the friendships that disappeared the moment you asked a hard question or left the church.”

She emphasized that church hurt is relationship-based, but also deeper than specific interpersonal conflicts.

“It’s about what happens when the community that promised to be your family treats you like an outsider the second you stop conforming to what they want,” Hale said.

While many people use the terms church hurt and religious trauma interchangeably, both Hale and Levings noted that they aren’t exactly the same thing. Still, they are related and have some overlap.

“Religious trauma is deeper and often more theological,” Hale said. “It’s what happens when the actual belief system itself becomes a source of harm. Being taught you’re inherently sinful from birth, that doubt is dangerous and lack of certainty is betraying God. Being taught that hell is real and that the people you love who don’t believe the right things are going there.”

She explained that this kind of theology can get embedded in your nervous system in ways that show up as anxiety and shame, and it’s less about one particular church or person that hurt you. Thus, you can experience either religious trauma or church hurt without the other.

“You can have a genuinely loving church community and still carry religious trauma from the theology you were taught,” Hale said. “Or you can hold onto a theology you still believe in while carrying real wounds from how a specific community treated you. They often show up together, but I don’t think they are interchangeable.”

Levings similarly noted that religious trauma is “significant distress that overwhelmed your ability to cope” stemming from a religious origin.

“There’s a difference between feeling hurt by a religious group and being traumatized by them,” she said. “But in my experience, the use of church hurt as a term diminishes the real harm caused by people using religion or faith as a reinforcement.”

She pointed to conservative Christian preacher and polarizing influencer Millicent Sedra, who “recently released a rant about church hurt, claiming it’s individuals who do the harm and not ‘the church’ as an entity,” Levings explained. “This clears the table of violent doctrines and dogmas that have been used to marginalize and harm, as well as organizations who systematically harm others.”

She also pointed to a structural reason why so many people end up vulnerable to this kind of harm in the first place.

“I think anyone who turns to the church for comfort, psychological need-meeting and guidance opens themselves to bad actors,” Levings said. “This, unfortunately, is the majority of people who crave belonging in a church and seek one out. Churches promise to minister to the hurting and offer belonging and safety. When they don’t deliver on that promise and fail to protect the vulnerable, they violate and harm, which is a big reason why both anything we call church hurt or religious trauma feels like such a betrayal.”

Hale said she’s seen people shunned or excluded by their church community for simply asking questions that made leadership uncomfortable.

“A lot of people are told that their pain isn’t valid or that you need to ‘forgive and move on’ before you’ve even been allowed to grieve,” she said. “Watching leadership protect their own reputation over the well-being of someone who was harmed, whether that’s abuse, racism, or just basic dishonesty, it’s painful to see. And then having your identity, whether that’s your sexuality, your race, your gender or your politics, treated as a problem to be fixed rather than a person to be loved has a significant impact.”

The fallout often extends well beyond someone’s relationship with faith itself.

“For a lot of people, church was the center of their social life and when that community turns on you or fails you, it doesn’t just affect your relationship with God ― it affects your ability to trust people in general,” Hale said. “I’ve talked to so many people who say they struggle to build community anywhere now because the place that was supposed to be safest wasn’t.”

There’s a quieter, less visible toll lurking beneath the surface as well.

“It can also create a strange kind of grief that doesn’t get acknowledged,” Hale said. “You’re not just grieving a church. You’re grieving the version of your life you thought you’d have, the friendships you thought were permanent and sometimes the version of yourself you were before you knew what you know now.”

This painful experience can manifest in a range of physical and psychological symptoms. Levings pointed to nervous system dysregulation, anxiety, panic, nightmares, flashbacks, reactivity and more.

“Often, it takes tracing symptoms backwards to the cause before someone can identify and name the source,” she explained. “This is part of why that process is called ‘deconstruction,’ because it’s not just a cognitive breakdown of beliefs. It’s a process of connecting symptom with source. For example, a chronic fear of abandonment can manifest in adult relationships but have childhood roots in rapture teachings and heaven/hell doctrine.”

Both Levings and Hale emphasized that there’s no single template for recovery and that pacing matters.

“I find a lot of grace in remembering that complex trauma calls for a complex recovery,” Levings said. “Because faith experiences impact our relationships, upbringing, inner messaging, physical health and decision-making, so will our process of understanding and healing harm caused by those same faith experiences.”

Hale highlighted the importance of giving yourself permission for your recovery to look however it needs to look.

“Some people heal by stepping away from organized religion entirely, sometimes permanently,” she said. “And some people heal by separating the two things completely, holding onto a personal faith or spirituality while having no interest in ever walking into a church building again.”

Healing isn’t just about leaving a harmful environment but reclaiming a sense of self that may have been suppressed for years. Levings explored this in her memoir “I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma.”

“Being in control of the pace and timing for naming experiences, detangling complicated theology, extricating from dysfunctional groups and relationships ― these are all part of selfhood and individuality,” she said. “It’s the opposite of the broad strokes used in religious systems or the sweeping dismissal of spiritual bypassing.”

According to Levings, that kind of inner work also has a protective effect that extends well beyond any one decision about faith.

“Healing the wounds allows someone to participate ― or not ― in organized religion without being vulnerable and needy in environments that want something from them or to exploit them, while maintaining their ability to think critically,” she said. “Being a strong individual who knows themselves and has the capacity to serve or give from a healthy place also reduces the chances they’ll be manipulated by groupthink.”

Professional support and the outside community can also be important resources in recovery.

“Therapy definitely helps, especially with someone who understands religious trauma or church hurt, and also finding community outside of religious spaces matters too,” Hale said.

Her organization, The New Evangelicals, was built with that need for community and education in mind.

“We’re trying to build spaces where people can hold onto faith, or walk away from it, without having to choose between their humanity and their beliefs,” she said.

[T]he thing I want people to understand is that questioning your faith, your church or the things you were taught doesn’t make you weak or unfaithful.

As for whether people can return to organized religion after church hurt and religious trauma, Hale noted it depends on the person and the church.

“I’ve seen people find genuinely healthy, affirming, honest faith communities after years of stepping away,” she said. “I’ve also seen people realize that their faith was always more about the institution than about something they actually believed, and once they separated those two things, they realized they didn’t need the institution at all.”

For Levings, what started as something she minimized eventually revealed itself as something deeper.

“What I once thought was just hurt feelings at church deepened into religious trauma as I realized the scale of manifestation and internalization that stemmed from religion in my life,” she said. “There wasn’t an area of my life or psyche that wasn’t impacted. Because I’d been religiously indoctrinated in childhood, I had no real sense of self as an adult. My locus of control was external. I had very little autonomy or agency, which nearly cost me my life.”

She describes what she lived through in her first marriage as “church-sanctioned domestic abuse” because her family’s churches permitted and even recommended “very abusive practices that maintained the high level of control I lived in.”

After escaping this high-control environment, Levings recalled feeling physically sick as complex PTSD manifested in her mind and body.

“Learning to name my experiences was a massive, pivotal shift,” she said. “Naming corrected gaslighting and bypassing, and demystified harmful cycles and dynamics. Naming experiences correctly also helped me identify systemic harm, hold perpetrators accountable and contend with the impacts I was left holding. I feel like finding adequate language restored sanity.”

Ultimately, both Levings and Hale want people to feel less alone in what they’ve experienced and more empowered to name and talk about it.

“I think the thing I want people to understand is that questioning your faith, your church or the things you were taught doesn’t make you weak or unfaithful,” Hale said. “We also don’t talk enough about how church hurt and religious trauma intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Telling a queer person they are broken or telling a woman she needs to submit or telling a Black congregant to stay quiet about racism for the sake of unity all falls under that umbrella.”

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