In 1938, British playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote Gas Light, a suspense drama in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she’s going insane. He does this by subtly dimming the gaslights in their home and denying that the change is real. The play was adapted into the 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. In it, her character begins to doubt her memory, perception, and even her sanity—not because she’s unwell, but because someone she trusts is intentionally distorting her reality.
From that story, the term gaslighting entered the psychological and cultural lexicon. It first appeared in scholarly research in 1969, in an article titled “The Gas-Light Phenomenon”published in The Lancet by Russell Barton and J.A. Whitehead.1 This article presented three case studies where individuals were manipulated into appearing mentally ill, often to facilitate their involuntary institutionalization.
Gaslighting describes a form of manipulation in which a person is made to question their own mind. Their instincts are invalidated. Their memory is rewritten. Their clarity is shamed. Gaslighting is not simply lying. It’s lying with the intention to disorient and destabilize.
And while we often associate this tactic with individual relationships, it can scale. It can become culture. And when spiritual authority is fused with this kind of distortion, we enter the realm of what I call the Gaslight Religion.
What is the Gaslight Religion?
The Gaslight Religion uses the language, ritual, and authority of faith not to liberate, but to control. It may not have a formal name or structure. Often, it’s a set of unspoken rules and reactions—a climate of confusion cloaked in sanctity.
It thrives in settings where spiritual trust is weaponized. Where questions are treated as threats, and doubt is labeled rebellion. Where image management is valued over truth-telling, and comfort is granted only to the powerful.
Gaslighting in this environment can take many different forms, but here are some examples:
Spiritual framing of abuse: Harm is reframed as divine discipline. You’re told, “God is using this to grow you,” or “You need to forgive and move on.”
Moral inversion: Moral inversion is when good is framed as evil and evil as good—truth-telling becomes treason.Those who expose harm are portrayed as the problem. Victims are cast as divisive. Moral clarity is recast as arrogance.
Erasure of agency: People are told their suffering is God’s will, or the result of their sin. They’re stripped of choice and voice. Agency—the capacity to act, decide, and assert one’s will—is seen not as a human right, but as a spiritual threat.
Image management cloaked in righteousness: Leaders don’t name wrongdoing; they deliver sermons on unity. They don’t confess; they call for prayer.
This is the devastating power of religious gaslighting.
It doesn’t just destabilize your sense of truth.
It corrupts your understanding of trust, love, justice, and mercy.
It confuses trauma with sanctification.
And it leads you to believe that naming harm is the true sin.
In these environments, gaslighting doesn’t just confuse—it sanctifies confusion. Doubting what you see becomes a spiritual virtue. Silencing yourself becomes submission. And over time, people stop trusting their discernment—not just in others, but in themselves and in God.
A Hall of Mirrors
This distortion isn’t bound to the stage—it spreads through every space the leader occupies, from private counsel to organizational decisions. It also influences the entire ecosystem and begins to shape the culture of a community.
In a gaslit spiritual system, the tactics of the leader are often adopted by the community. Bystanders become participants in the fog. They absorb the leader’s language, posture, and framing—and mirror it back.
What begins as one person’s manipulation becomes a social reality—a hall of human mirrors in which truth is bent, then lost altogether.
Often, this happens because followers attach their own identity to the leader’s perceived greatness. They bask in the reflected glory of proximity to power. To preserve that sense of specialness, they will defend the leader’s image at all costs—including at the cost of truth.
And so, spiritual gaslighting becomes communal gaslighting.
Truth isn’t just denied. It’s drowned.
The Fog of Confusion
Gaslighting thrives in confusion. Not confusion as a side effect—confusion as a strategy.
People become vulnerable when the truth is kept from them. Without clarity, they are set up to hesitate and doubt themselves. And in that fog, they become easier to control.
In the Gaslight Religion, truth is kept:
In the shadows — obscured by holy-sounding abstractions
Underground — hidden by loyalty pacts and spiritual hierarchy
Blurred — diluted in a culture that calls conviction pride and clarity-seeking rebellion
Leadership may claim transparency, but what they offer is obscurity disguised as openness. Answers are partial. Disclosures are managed. Stories are spiritualized until nothing is verifiable. The more you ask for clarity, the more you’re told that asking is the problem.
And so, confusion becomes a form of control.
Escaping the Fog
If you’ve been in such a system, you may have felt the need to shrink—to become smaller for the comfort of others. You may have been told that naming harm was sinful, that seeking clarity was divisive, that trusting your instincts was dangerous.
In systems where gaslighting is spiritualized, people often feel the need to shrink—not by choice, but as a means of survival. It’s important to name this distinction: there are times when stepping back, staying quiet, or leaving the system is an act of protection, a necessary response to sustained harm.
But what becomes damaging is when a person’s agency is erased—when they are urged or coerced to stay small for the sake of appearances, unity, or someone else’s comfort and need for power over others. Over time, the line between wisdom and fear, consent and coercion, fades.
This is one of the more subtle injuries of religious gaslighting: it does not simply silence truth; it redefines it. It persuades people to equate sanctification with self-erasure. It encourages them to interpret clarity as pride, and moral courage as divisiveness. In such an environment, it’s easy to feel disoriented—to second-guess what you saw, what you heard, what you know. That disorientation is part of the tactic. It isolates.
But there are steps that can help restore a sense of clarity. One I often recommend is to take an inventory of what is true. This can include writing down events as you remember them, revisiting emails or messages, or simply noting how your body responded in certain situations. Sometimes, this process is best done with a trusted friend, therapist, or advocate—someone outside the system who can help you re-anchor your reality.
You don’t need to rush to label everything or understand it all at once. Sometimes, simply returning to what is true is a radical act of resistance.
Because confusion is the weapon, clarity is the necessary defense. It is not rebellion against God to see clearly.
Faith does not require confusion.
Truth does not demand silence.
Justice does not grow in the dark.
Barton, R., & Whitehead, J. A. (1969). The gas-light phenomenon. Lancet (London, England), 1(7608), 1258–1260. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(69)92133-3