Sanctifying Harm

When suffering and injustice are framed as spiritually necessary or redemptive.

A Brief Opening Note About This Series

This is the first of a series of posts in which I’ll be covering each spoke of the Wheel of Reality-Bending Phrases in greater detail. Each post will contain specific case examples drawn from accounts of abuse and coercion across history and current events. Take care as you read. I’ve structured these posts so that you can skip the case sections if needed without missing the central arguments.

This series is not an argument against faith, Scripture, or the search for meaning in suffering. Research consistently shows that faith and spirituality can be vital resources in recovery, resilience, and healing. Many people find hope, support, and deep meaning through religious belief and practice.

What this work critiques is not faith itself, but the misuse of faith, particularly when spiritual language is imposed on another person’s suffering in ways that protect power, silence voice, or override consent. The issue is not that suffering is ever allowed to have meaning, but who gets to assign that meaning, when, and in whose interests.

Naming these distortions is not a rejection of faith. It is an effort to safeguard it. Language that bends reality in order to excuse harm ultimately corrodes the very traditions it claims to defend. Protecting the integrity of faith requires confronting the ways it can be weaponized.

Photo by Jaakko Kemppainen on Unsplash

In the previous post, I introduced The Wheel of Reality-Bending Phrases—a framework for understanding how spiritually loaded language is used to distort moral perception and protect power. These phrases do not merely end conversation, but reshape one’s understanding of reality. This post begins a closer examination of the first spoke in that wheel: Sanctifying Harm.

Before moving forward, I want to briefly return to the wheel itself—not to repeat what has already been said, but to anchor what follows. Each spoke names a recurring function of language in high-control systems. What changes across settings is the vocabulary. What remains consistent is what the language does. Sanctifying harm is where many people first lose their footing, not because the suffering is invisible, but because it has been made meaningful in all the wrong ways.

This post focuses on the first spoke: Sanctifying Harm.

One of the most effective ways reality is bent in spiritually abusive systems is through language that does not merely interpret suffering, but confers spiritual meaning upon it in a way that protects those who cause it. Rather than denying the existence of harm, the wounds are given a sacred explanation and meaning. Injustice is not confronted as injustice but is reframed as discipline, spiritual formation, faith testing, or divine purpose.

Phrases such as, “God is using this to teach you something,” “This is your cross to bear,” or “These experiences are refining you” sound, on the surface, like caring counsel. Yet when they are applied to situations of coercion, abuse, or institutional betrayal, they perform a different function. They redirect attention away from what is being done and toward what the wounded person is supposedly failing to understand, believe, or surrender.

In this way, suffering is not simply endured but sacralized. The question is no longer whether a wrong has occurred, but whether the one who is harmed is responding with sufficient faith, humility, or submission. The focus of the situation quietly shifts from accountability for wrongdoing to correction of the wounded, from power abused by authority to posture demanded of the victims.

Such language bends reality by converting injustice into spiritual deficiency and reframing the need for safety as a failure of trust. In doing so, it relieves the wrongdoer and the enabling system of the burden of self-examination. The harm does not need to be defended or corrected if it can be portrayed as redemptive, necessary, or divinely appointed.

One of the most enduring and destructive forms of reality-bending is the sanctification of suffering itself. The result is a profound inversion of right and wrong. What should be named and confronted as abuse is clothed in sacred meaning. What should elicit protection and outrage (the exploitation of the vulnerable) is reframed as formation and obedience. Pain becomes pedagogy.

The Pedagogy of Pain

One of the common reality-bending phrases I’ve seen used to sanctify harm at its earliest stages sounds gentle, even affirming, and looks something like this: “God is really using this discomfort to grow you.”

This kind of phrase rarely appears after something overtly abusive has occurred, but at the moment a person first feels uneasy, such as when a boundary is being tested, when attention feels excessive, when expectations begin to blur, or when a relationship no longer feels clean or reciprocal. The internal signals of fear and concern are real, even if boundary-crossing itself might be ambiguous. And it is precisely here that meaning is imposed.

In situations of grooming, this phrase works by intercepting the feeling that “something is not right” before it has a chance to develop into clarity. The unease is not treated as information, but as opportunity. Rather than asking what is happening or whether something is appropriate, the focus shifts inward: What is God trying to do in me through this feeling? The discomfort becomes evidence not of risk, but of spiritual formation. Growth is presumed and danger is excluded from consideration.

As the relationship progresses, the phrase can be repeated in subtle variations. A sense of confusion is no longer a reason to slow down or seek outside perspective but becomes a sign that the person is being stretched. Emotional strain is reframed as refinement and any internal resistance is interpreted as immaturity or fear. What might have been an early exit point instead becomes a test to endure.

This is how boundary erosion often proceeds. The offender can engage in taking small liberties and subtle innuendo to determine whether they are free to push the boundaries further. By keeping these interactions obscure and ambiguous, the more powerful person retains the control needed to stop, go back, or proceed. The targeted person is put in the position of having to interpret these advances with the knowledge that any response might increase their risk, either of being the target of more boundary-crossing behavior or of the more powerful person’s displeasure. The person learns, slowly and sometimes unconsciously, to reinterpret their own hesitation as a failure of faith rather than a signal of danger. The fear is no longer something to listen to but something to overcome. And because the meaning has been spiritualized, questioning it begins to feel not merely cautious, but disobedient.

The same dynamics can be seen in workplace settings, particularly under controlling or abusive leadership. An employee may be told that the anxiety they feel under constant scrutiny, excessive demands, or unpredictable behavior is part of their growth: that their professional competency and skill is being developed through pressure. The harm is not named as harm but framed as leadership development. Endurance then becomes a virtue and expressing concern becomes a sign of fragility and weakness. Leaving becomes a failure to persevere and learn from difficulties.

What makes these phrases so effective is that they do not deny the discomfort. They acknowledge it and then immediately reassign its meaning. The feeling is allowed, but only under one condition: the person must not locate the cause of that suffering outside themselves.

Over time, this reshaping of meaning trains people to distrust their earliest instincts. The body’s warning is overridden by a spiritual explanation. And because the phrase is delivered in the language of growth and care, the process can unfold without force, without threats, and often without the person realizing what is happening until the confusion has deepened.

This is one of the ways harm becomes sanctified before it is ever fully visible. The suffering is small at first. The meaning is imposed early. And the path away from clarity is paved not with cruelty, but with holiness.

The Imposition of Meaning

One of the reasons sanctifying harm is so powerful is that it exploits a very real human need: the need for meaning in suffering.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed that despair is not simply suffering itself, but suffering without meaning. Human beings can endure extraordinary pain when they are able to make sense of it as they see their suffering connected to a purpose, a future, or a larger story that gives it coherence. Meaning does not remove pain, but it can make pain survivable.

This insight, however, carries a danger that can be overlooked.

In the preface to Man’s Search for Meaning, psychologist Gordon W. Allport offered a crucial clarification. Allport paraphrased Frankl this way: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.” But he immediately added an ethical boundary that matters deeply for our purposes here: “No man can tell another what this purpose is. Each man must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.”

Meaning, in Frankl’s framework, is not something that can be assigned to another person from the outside, especially not by someone in a position of power over them. Meaning is best discovered, not delivered. It must emerge from the individual’s own agency, not imposed as an explanation that serves someone else’s interests.

This is where spiritually abusive systems cross a line.

When harm is sanctified, meaning is not simply offered as a possibility. Rather, it is imposed as the approved interpretation. The person who is suffering is not invited into a careful and supported process where they can reflect deeply, discern quietly, or reclaim meaning at a pace that works for them. They are told what their suffering means. And the meaning they are given almost always benefits the meaning-giver: typically the person or community who caused the harm or allowed it to occur.

“You’re suffering because God is refining you.”

“This is happening for your spiritual growth.”

“You need to learn submission.”

These are not neutral attempts to help someone endure pain. They are acts of narrative control. They take the deeply personal work of meaning-making from the one who suffers to the one who holds power. Their suffering is explained in a way that closes questions rather than opening them. If meaning helps a person to survive suffering, then taking that meaning-making away by prescribing it from above is not a kindness, but another form of domination.

In abusive systems, this imposed meaning functions strategically. It silences voices by reframing injustice as purpose-filled. And because despair is so painful, people might want to trust in a meaning-making and sense-making narrative offered to them, even one that requires their own silence, endurance, or self-blame.

The Baptism of Violence: Some Case Examples

We can see imposed meaning at work with devastating clarity in real cases where harm, abuse, and violence were not only permitted, but theologically justified and baptized in the appearance of righteousness. The examples that follow—religious corporal punishment, the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth, and the theological reframing of slavery—each reveal how suffering can be given sacred meaning in ways that protect power and silence protest.

This pattern is especially visible where physical harm or coercion is justified as discipline, training, or discipleship. In these settings, the gravity of what is being done is not denied outright, but is transfigured. What would otherwise be recognized as abuse is presented as a means of spiritual growth.

In his Plea for Christians to Stop Hitting Children, Victor Vieth describes how religious language is often used to legitimize the physical abuse of children, particularly in communities that equate authority with divine mandate and suffering with sanctification. Scripture is invoked to turn violence into obedience, pain into purification, and submission into virtue. If suffering produces holiness, then those who inflict suffering can present themselves not as abusers, but as instruments of God.

Vieth describes experiences he had as a child abuse prosecutor encountering children who were bruised, bleeding, and scarred—while parents often insisted the blows were delivered in “Christian love.” He describes how pastors of these parents would sometimes visit his office and concede that someone “went too far,” yet still defend violence as essential to godly parenting.

Although the protestant pastors of these parents would sometimes visit my office and concede a parishioner had gone too far, they were also quick to claim Christian parenting must involve some level of violence. Of course, the pastors wouldn’t call corporal punishment an act of violence. They would call it smacking, swatting or spanking. I’m not sure any of the injured children who came to my attention understood this distinction. The insistence on hitting children in the name of God also has a spiritual toll. Long after bruises fade and wounds heal, the blows may continue to influence the child’s view of God causing some children to struggle, even abandon their faith.

The harm was minimized linguistically even as its physical and spiritual toll endured. Long after wounds healed, many children are left struggling with their faith itself, as the language that justified the violence shapes their image of God.

A similar sanctification of harm appears in the case of John Smyth, a prominent figure in evangelical circles in the UK who subjected young men to severe beatings under the guise of spiritual discipline and moral purification. Smyth reportedly used Scripture to justify his violence, quoting passages such as Hebrews 12:4 and Isaiah 53:5—altering the latter to tell victims that by their stripes they would be healed. One victim explained that Smyth framed the beatings as the next stage of their spiritual growth, evidence of proper repentance and seriousness.

The violence was ritualized, prayer-saturated, and framed as obedience. What should have been immediately recognized as criminal abuse was instead cloaked in the language of discipleship. The harm was not merely denied; it was baptized. The more extreme the suffering, the more it could be interpreted as evidence of holiness.

Sanctifying harm also operates at the level of collective and historical violence. One enduring example is the theological claim that slavery was “turned for good” because it supposedly led to the spread of Christianity and other benefits for the enslaved. Similar claims have resurfaced repeatedly, including in a 1996 pamphlet Southern Slavery as It Was, in which two Christian leaders described slavery as producing “mutual affection” between races—an argument widely condemned by historians as morally and historically indefensible.

In each of these cases, the logic is the same. Suffering is not treated as a signal that something is wrong. Rather, it is reinterpreted as evidence that something is working. Pain becomes proof of purpose, endurance becomes virtue, and silence becomes spiritual. Those who inflict harm are shielded by narratives in which they are not perpetrators, but shepherds; not violators, but instruments of formation.

This is what it means to sanctify harm. The concern that should arise in the presence of injury is quieted by the claim that the injury is holy. The language of faith does not just soften and minimize the blow, but consecrates it. And once suffering has been declared sacred, those who suffer are left with a terrible choice: accept the harm as God’s will, or risk being cast as unfaithful for naming it as harm at all.

Who is Protected When Harm is Sanctified

The perpetrator has the most to gain from this arrangement. If suffering can be framed as redemptive, then harm does not need to be stopped. If pain has a divine purpose, then accountability becomes unnecessary. The system is stabilized not by denying suffering, but by giving it an explanation that protects those responsible for it.

This is why sanctifying harm is not simply about theology. It is about power. It is about who gets to define reality and who is required to live inside that definition.

For perpetrators, sacred framing supplies something profoundly enabling: the excuse that denies any ill-intent. This is one reason sanctifying language is so durable. It allows abusive individuals to be cast as faithful, courageous, or even sacrificial. They are not harming others, but doing what is necessary. They are holding the line. They are being obedient. Once harm is given sacred meaning, perpetrators can act with increasing certainty and decreasing self-doubt. The language insulates them from the accountability that might otherwise interrupt their behavior.

Institutions, too, benefit from this arrangement. When suffering is sanctified, the system is spared the costly work of self-examination, repentance, and repair. Patterns of abuse become unfortunate but meaningful hardships. The institution does not have to change if the pain it produces can be portrayed as spiritually productive.

Bystanders are shaped by this language as well. When harm is framed as holy, witnessing it becomes disorienting. Intervening or questioning might feel irreverent or risk being seen as opposing God’s work. Over time, silence becomes normalized as the dominant language of the atmosphere trains people to distrust their own unease, discomfort, and ethical concerns.

In this way, sanctifying harm creates a shared reality-bending language in which perpetrators are protected from accountability, institutions are protected from criticism, and bystanders are protected from responsibility. The price of that protection is paid by the vulnerable, whose suffering must be continually sanctified in order for the system to remain intact. This is how injustice persists without appearing unjust. It is not enforced primarily through threats or force, but through a meaning-imposed story that allows everyone involved to feel at peace with what is happening, even when that peace is purchased at the expense of another’s safety and well-being.

Looking Ahead

Sanctifying harm rarely operates alone. In most spiritually abusive systems, it is reinforced by a second, closely related pattern: the recasting of control as care. Language that sanctifies suffering often works hand-in-hand with language that presents coercion, surveillance, and domination as protection, love, or spiritual maturity. Harm is not only explained away but is actively administered under the banner of concern.

In the next post, I’ll turn to that second spoke in the wheel and examine how phrases like “We’re just worried about your soul,” “This is for your own good,” and “We’re holding you accountable” function to normalize intrusion, override consent, and make resistance feel unloving or unsafe.

If sanctifying harm teaches people to endure suffering, recasting control as care teaches them to trust the hands that cause it.