When Faith Becomes Control: Spiritual Abuse, High-Control Religion, and How to Tell the Difference

Part 3 of a 5-part series on cults, control, and the psychology of getting swept up. (Start with Part 1.)

Let me say the most important thing first, before anyone gets the wrong idea: faith is not the problem, and this is not an anti-religion piece.

I've watched religious community be one of the most protective, stabilizing, life-saving things in a person's world. The casserole that shows up when someone dies. The people who sit with you at 3am. The meaning that gets somebody through a diagnosis. When I talk about "high-control groups" in a religious context, I am not talking about your grandmother's parish, or a mosque, or a synagogue, or a congregation that genuinely loves people. I'm talking about something specific — and the difference is not the beliefs. It's the control.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth this whole series keeps circling: the exact wiring that makes faith so powerful — devotion, belonging, surrender, a hunger for something bigger than yourself — is the exact wiring a high-control group hijacks. Same engine. The question, as always, is who's steering, and whether you're allowed to get out of the car.

The series: Part 1 laid out the machinery of control; Part 2 took it into the workplace. This is Part 3 — religion and spirituality. Still ahead: politics (Part 4), and the hardest question — are the people who get swept up actually bad, and do we owe them a second chance? (Part 5).

The line between faith and control

Every tool of control we've talked about has a sacred version, and that's what makes spiritual abuse so hard to name from the inside — it all sounds holy.

Robert Jay Lifton, studying coercive groups, catalogued patterns that map almost perfectly onto high-control religion: milieu control (who you're allowed to associate with, what you're allowed to read or watch), the demand for purity (you are never clean enough, so you keep striving and confessing), sacred science (the doctrine is beyond question, because questioning it is questioning God), and — the darkest one — the dispensing of existence (the group decides who counts as saved, worthy, even human, and who gets cast out). Run that against Steven Hassan's BITE model and the picture sharpens: behavior control (rules about your body, your money, your marriage), information control (don't listen to "the world," don't talk to apostates), thought control (loaded language, thought-terminating prayer, "just have faith"), and emotional control (heaven and hell, shame and shunning).

And at the center, very often, is a person. Lifton's first marker of a destructive group is a charismatic leader who gradually becomes an object of worship — the pastor, guru, prophet, or founder whose word quietly outranks the scripture he claims to serve. That's the tell I'd watch most closely: healthy faith points past the leader to the principle; a high-control group points past the principle to the leader. When the man becomes the message, be careful.

How it gets you in the door

Nobody joins a high-control group because someone hands them a list of the control. They join because it feels like home.

The front door is almost always love. The technical name is love-bombing — the flood of warmth, attention, and instant belonging that greets a newcomer — and in a religious setting it can be genuinely beautiful: people who remember your name, bring you meals, sit with your loneliness, hand you a ready-made family and a ready-made purpose in the same week. For someone who's isolated, grieving, new in town, or just quietly starving for meaning, it can feel like an answered prayer. That's not a trick you should have seen coming. It's a real human need being met — and then, in the high-control version, slowly leveraged.

Because the commitment escalates by degrees. First it's a Sunday. Then it's a small group. Then it's your money, your calendar, your other friendships, your opinions, your choices about your own body and family — each step small enough that refusing it would feel dramatic, ungrateful, faithless. This is the boiling-frog problem: no single ask is alarming, so there's never an obvious moment to say "this is too far." By the time the water's hot, the belonging you'd lose by leaving has become the most important thing in your life. That's the design. The love was real and it was the hook. Both are true.

Why it's so hard to see — and so hard to leave

If you've never been in one, the natural question is the cruel one from Part 1: how does anyone not see it? And the answer, again, is that the system is built so that from the inside, you can't — but religion adds a few turns of the screw a secular group doesn't have.

The stakes are eternal. A high-control company can threaten your paycheck. A high-control faith can threaten your soul. When the cost of leaving isn't just losing friends but — you genuinely believe — an eternity of suffering, the emotional control we covered in Part 1 is running at a magnitude nothing secular can match. Fear doesn't get bigger than hell.

Doubt gets reframed as the enemy. In a healthy tradition, wrestling with doubt is part of a mature faith. In a high-control one, doubt isn't a normal human experience — it's Satan, a "test," or proof of your own sin. So the very thing that might let you think your way out gets pathologized the instant it appears. You don't just suppress the doubt; you feel guilty for having had it.

You've bet your whole life. Sunk cost in a faith isn't three years and some stock options. It can be how you raised your kids, the person you married, the career you chose or gave up, decades of Sundays, your entire sense of what your life meant. To question the group is to risk concluding you built your life on sand — and the mind will fight ferociously to avoid that conclusion.

And the bond is often to a person. Trauma bonding works the same behind a pulpit as anywhere else: a leader who alternates warmth and condemnation, who is your channel to God's approval, becomes someone you work endlessly to please. When that same person controls whether you belong at all, the attachment gets very hard to break.

Put those together and you get people who are neither stupid nor weak — often the most sincere, devoted, conscientious people in the building — staying long past the point where an outsider is yelling at the screen. It isn't a failure of intelligence. It's a very old, very good instinct pointed at a system that learned to farm it.

The famous one: Scientology

You can't write about high-control religion without Scientology, and it's a useful case precisely because so much of it is on the public record — including in court.

In 2009, a French court convicted the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre and its bookstore of organized fraud, a conviction upheld by France's highest court in 2013, over pressuring recruits into expensive "purification" packages and courses. That's a criminal finding in a Western democracy — not an opinion.

The behavior former members describe is documented across Lawrence Wright's Going Clear and the years of first-person testimony from Leah Remini and other high-profile defectors: the "disconnection" policy that pressures members to cut off family who leave; the billion-year "Sea Org" contracts; a punishment compound former executives called "The Hole"; the designation of critics as "Suppressive Persons"; and the "Fair Game" doctrine of pursuing enemies. Every one of those is a BITE lever with a scripture wrapped around it. And the human cost of one of them — disconnection — is documented in wrenching detail by people who lived at the top: Mike Rinder, once the church's chief spokesman, described in his memoir losing his own family after he left, and spent his last years helping others get out. When the same institution that promises you belonging can order everyone you love to erase you, you're looking at emotional control with no ceiling.

Now the fairness I owe you, same as every part of this series: the Church of Scientology denies these accounts, is famously litigious about them, and — importantly — the U.S. government recognizes it as a religion; the IRS granted it tax-exempt religious status in 1993. That is exactly why I will never call it "a cult" in my own voice. What I can do is show you the court record and the sworn accounts of the people who left, and let you notice which tools are running. The word matters less than the mechanism.

When it's not a fringe group — it's the institution

Here's where I have to bring it home, literally, because the most consequential high-control religious abuse near me didn't happen at a fringe group with a compound. It happened inside one of the most mainstream institutions on Long Island: the Diocese of Rockville Centre.

I want to be careful and exact here, because these are real people and real records. In 2003, a Suffolk County special grand jury examined how the Diocese handled decades of clergy sexual abuse. Its findings are not allegations — they're an official public record, and they are damning. The grand jury concluded that "officials in the Diocese failed in their responsibility to protect children," that "not one priest in the Diocese who knew about these criminal acts reported them to any law enforcement agency," and — most chillingly — that Diocesan officials "conceived and agreed to a plan using deception and intimidation… to guarantee their silence." You can read the grand jury's own conclusions.

One priest in that orbit — matched by watchdog databases and plaintiffs' attorneys to a figure the grand jury anonymized — was Fr. Eugene Vollmer. According to the reporting and the record, he admitted to Diocesan officials that he had sexually abused numerous boys; one survivor says he reported the abuse to the Diocese at fifteen and was told he "shouldn't say this about others." Vollmer was removed from ministry and later laicized. I want to be precise: he was never criminally convicted — the statute of limitations had run, which the grand jury itself flagged as the reason predators like him escaped prosecution. So: removed, laicized, named in Child Victims Act suits — not "convicted." That distinction matters, and I'm keeping it.

The institution eventually faced the reckoning it spent decades avoiding: the Diocese of Rockville Centre filed for bankruptcy and, in a plan confirmed in late 2024, established a ~$323 million settlement trust for more than 600 survivors — one of the largest such settlements in New York history.

Why does this belong in a series about cults? Because it's the purest example of the mechanism doing its worst work. The abuse was horrific — but the cover-up is the high-control part. The instinct to protect the institution over the child, to reassign instead of report, to make the person who spoke up feel like the problem — that's the same machinery from Part 1, wearing a collar. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd has a precise name for it: institutional betrayal — the harm an institution does when it protects itself instead of the people who depended on it. The fifteen-year-old who was told to stay quiet was wounded twice: once by the abuser, and again by the institution he trusted to protect him. The second wound — the betrayal by the institution itself — is often the one that takes longest to heal.

The soulmate and the guru: spiritual abuse in newer clothes

High-control religion isn't only the old, famous names. It rebrands constantly, and the modern versions often skip the steeple entirely.

There's the spiritual-soulmate version — like Twin Flames Universe, whose leaders "assign" members a destined partner and, according to reporting and 2023 documentaries, allegedly pressured members to pursue people who'd said no and to change their gender identity to fit a doctrine. (In 2025 the Michigan Attorney General's office executed search warrants; the founders deny wrongdoing — alleged, clearly.) And there's the guru version, like the Hawaii-based group whose founder — described by scholars and former members in 2026 reporting as "an authoritarian, narcissistic leader" — allegedly exerted control over a follower's public life for years (the people involved deny it). Same machinery, new packaging: a leader elevated to prophet, a sealed reality, and a very high price for leaving.

And at the far, historical end — where the "dispensing of existence" runs all the way out — sit the names we use as shorthand for how bad it can get: Jonestown, Heaven's Gate. Those aren't warnings about belief. They're warnings about what happens when a charismatic leader owns a group's entire reality and no one is allowed to leave. (The academic archive on Jonestown is sobering, careful reading if you ever want it.)

The everyday version: purity culture, shunning, and "deconstruction"

Most people reading this were never in Scientology and never near a compound. The version that touches the most lives is quieter and closer to home: the ordinary high-demand religious environment. You might recognize pieces of it.

Purity culture — the intense shame built around bodies and sexuality, the teaching that your worth (especially a young woman's) is tied to what you haven't done, the self-monitoring and fear that can follow people for decades, right into their marriages and, eventually, my office. Shunning and disfellowshipping — the practice, in some high-control groups, of instructing the whole community, including immediate family, to cut off anyone who leaves or questions; it quietly turns your own parents into an enforcement arm. Control over the most personal choices — who you may date, marry, befriend, read, watch, or become. None of that requires a famous villain. It runs on the same BITE levers, just distributed across an entire culture instead of concentrated in one guru.

And there's a reason "deconstruction" is suddenly a word you hear everywhere — the ex-evangelical spaces, the former–Jehovah's Witness communities, the endless online threads of people carefully taking apart what they were raised in. That whole cultural wave is the exit process from Part 1, happening at scale: people who genuinely loved their faith, noticed the control woven through it, and are now trying to keep what was true while setting down what was a cage. If that's you: you are not alone, and asking honest questions is not a betrayal of anything that was ever actually good.

The aftermath: religious trauma

I'll be straight with you: this isn't a big part of my caseload — I'm not seeing a wave of religious-trauma referrals. But I'm aware of it, I take it seriously, and it's worth naming, because the people carrying it are so often the ones nobody around them quite believes.

Leaving a high-control faith is not like quitting a club. You're not just losing a building. You're losing a cosmology — the entire framework you used to understand life, death, right, wrong, and your own worth. You're often losing your whole social world in one stroke, because everyone you love is still inside and has been taught to shun you. And you're frequently carrying a specific, corrosive fear that most people around you won't understand: that leaving has damned you.

Clinicians who work with this describe a recognizable cluster. Dr. Marlene Winell named it "Religious Trauma Syndrome" — the anxiety, depression, difficulty making decisions, identity confusion, and grief that can follow leaving an authoritarian, high-control religion. I'll be straight about the science: RTS is a clinical description, not a formal DSM diagnosis. But the suffering is real and specific, and it overlaps heavily with what Judith Herman documented as Complex PTSD — the aftermath of prolonged control, which she explicitly noted includes survivors of some religious groups.

If any of that is you — the free-floating dread, the guilt you can't argue yourself out of, the grief for people who won't speak to you anymore, the strange task of rebuilding a self and a moral compass from scratch — please hear this: you are not weak, and you are not "backslidden." You had your deepest instincts pointed at a system that used them. Getting them back is real work, and it's the kind of work that goes better with help.

Recovery, when it comes, tends to run along a few tracks at once. Rebuilding a moral compass that's yours — figuring out what you actually value now that "because the leader said so" is gone. Grieving — the people who won't speak to you, the years, sometimes the God you thought you had. Relearning how to trust your own mind after being taught for years that your own judgment was the enemy. And, quietly, making peace with uncertainty — sitting with "I don't know" about the big questions, which is terrifying at first and, for a lot of people, eventually a relief. Good therapy here does not touch what you believe. It's not in the business of talking you out of God or into anything. It's in the business of giving you back the ability to choose.

So how do you actually tell the difference? Watch what the group does with your freedom. A healthy faith can hold your doubt and still hold you — you can ask the hard question, disagree with the teaching, even walk away, and you're still loved, still welcome, still yourself. A high-control group can't. It needs your certainty and your silence, and it makes your belonging conditional on both. The real test isn't the beliefs on the sign out front; it's what happens the first time you say "I'm not sure about this" out loud — and whether leaving would cost you your God, your family, and your whole sense of who you are, all in one stroke.

And if the honest answer keeps landing on the wrong side, that isn't a crisis of your faith. It's information about the group — and the two are not the same thing, no matter how hard you may have been taught to believe they are.

If it's not you but someone you love who's still inside, the instinct to argue them out of it almost always backfires — remember Part 1, contradiction alone tends to make people dig in. What actually helps is staying connected: being the outside relationship the group can't quite explain away, keeping the door open without conditions, and resisting the urge to make them choose. You can't reason someone out of a place their whole heart is invested in. But you can be the person still standing there, warm, when the doubts finally get loud enough on their own.

Next time, we take this into the least-examined, most-socially-acceptable groupthink there is: politics.