From time to time I spot an expression on the Internet or Twitter which I immediately want to share. When I read the acronym PTCIS which stands for Post Traumatic Church Induced Stress, I knew I wanted to share it with my readers.  Obviously it is not a recognised description of a category of mental distress, but it certainly describes the situation faced by many followers of this blog.  Quite a number of individuals from around the world reach out to me as they recognise in this blog a place where their distress will at least receive a hearing.  The sufferers of PTCIS are not necessarily those who have been bullied or abused by someone more powerful.  The sufferers may be those who carry a false accusation around their neck and find that the church justice system gives them no opportunity to clear their name.  Accusations against one’s integrity are left there for ever, so that permanent stress and fear becomes part of their way of life.

My sense of the stress involved in PTCIS is probably distorted by the position of being the editor of a blog focused on church abuse.  In other words, I hear more of peoples’ bad experiences of abuse and the stress taking place in a church context than is normal.  But the fact that it exists at all is a terrible blot on our church life.  The inventor of PTCIS helpfully added a cartoon to illustrate what was meant by the term.  He suggested that one of the problems was that certain church cultures create stress for individuals by the expedient of changing church vocabulary in the way that is illustrated above.

This post is thus building on the brilliant cartoon from the Naked Pastor which I have included above.  In thinking about the seven categories that he sets out, I want to look at three examples that are vividly illustrative of what he is trying to demonstrate through the cartoon. Providing examples of what is involved in all seven would take up too much space.  There is also the perennial issue of using confidential material without the possibility of identification.  So I am going to illustrate only three of the seven practices that are routinely sanitised by ‘holy’ descriptions.  To avoid the danger of revealing private information, I am going to use the well-documented story of John Smyth and his abusive regime, written up by Andrew Graystone in the book Bleeding For Jesus.

The seven techniques of abusive coercion were probably all used by Smyth against his victims.  They are also, no doubt, common in other church settings. Each of these techniques has, as the cartoon demonstrates, a respectable face but also one that is less salubrious.  I am giving examples of the way that three of them work from the Smyth narrative.  Before that, I note that many young Christians are actively mentored by someone older.  That older person may possess considerable influence over the mentee.  Mentoring of course sounds innocent and even helpful.  In many contexts it remains that.  An experienced clergyperson might be asked to meet with a young curate at the beginning of his/her ministry to provide the opportunity to talk through the issues that can arise.  I have often wondered why such a system is not used more extensively in the Church of England, particularly as a way of using the extensive practical experience of older retired clergy.  The mentoring offered by Smyth was not benevolent.  It was the abusive kind.  The vulnerability in each of Smyth’s victims seems to have been what drew one to the other.   One obvious vulnerability was one known to many male attendees of an English public school.  This involved a fractured relationship with the birth families because of the boarding system, starting at the age of eight. In short, many of Smyth’s victims were emotionally estranged from their families.  They needed a relationship with an older mentoring male who could be used as a father substitute.  Having such a father figure was important to most, if not all of Smyth’s victims.  Smyth was happy to oblige to be the substitute parent.  This, of course, gave him the ability to exercise tight parental control over his protegees.  In turn it was to lead in many cases to an opportunity to physically abuse them in the garden shed at his home in Winchester.

The second part of Smyth’s ‘ministry’ to his devotees was in his playing the role of religious instructor or teacher.  The Iwerne camps were always a preserve of what we might describe as a highly fundamentalist version of Christian theology and teaching.  The Bible was regarded as the sole resource for all Christian teaching and living.  As with much conservative Christian teaching of this kind, underneath this understanding of the Bible was a pre-existing structure or system of theology which dictated how the Bible should be interpreted.  Iwerne theology was not read out of the Bible or the formulations of the early Christian centuries, but straight out of a rigid Protestantism and the 16^th century writings of John Calvin and his followers. The inability of Calvinism and its successors to tolerate much in the way of theological debate meant that it was always a ‘take it or leave it’ approach to faith.  Some aspects of Calvinism and ‘Iwernism’ should be open to objection and debate.  The fact that there has always been an absence of healthy questioning in the camps leads to a form of cult-type faith, one which often involves actual harm.

‘Mentoring’ and ‘Instruction’ can create a dynamic of power which could be and was extremely harmful to those submitting to it.  Apart from coming under a dynamic of control which was exploiting their vulnerability, Smyth’s victims were further softened up for abuse by the selective use of Scripture.  Andrew Graystone identifies two particular quotations from the Bible which were firmly drummed into the young Smyth acolytes.  One was from 1 Samuel 7.14 where the fatherhood of God is linked to the possibility of violent beatings.  From the New Testament a passage from Hebrews 12. 5-12 suggested the same idea.  Students of the Bible in the conservative wings of the church will also know about other mentions of fathers beating their children in Proverbs.  I will leave to one side the various passages that speak of followers identifying with the pain of Jesus on the cross in order to be his true disciples.

Smyth’s final practice, which shows him to be an expert in the art of PTCIS (even before it was invented!), was in the way that his teaching led his followers believing that pain was needed to make them holy and closer to Christ.  The reasoning goes along the lines that, if Jesus suffered as the result of our sin, we too may need to suffer to draw us closer to him.  The beatings in the garden shed began as a way of offering the young a means of atoning for their own failings.  It will be for others to determine how Smyth had such a complete lack of self-insight so as not to question his own behaviour in taking on this role.  The narrative that Graystone presents suggests that this infliction of pain became obsessional and addictive as time went on. Officially the victims of Smyth were being beaten to pay for their failings as if this was a normative godly discipline.  The maintenance of some discipline sounds to be a worthy aim in a church.  The examples in the Smyth story indicate that some administration of discipline in a church can have a deeply sinister and dark dimension.   Is the administration of discipline in a church setting sometimes a cover for abusive practice as the cartoon suggests?

Describing a well-established Christian practice with a pious sounding name may take away a desire to question and scrutinise what is going on.  Evil practices toward individuals are done in the name of Christianity.  Dubious claims that they are are ‘biblical’ are often heard.  Did you know that children are still beaten in the name of Christian discipline, even in the 21^st century?  Survivors of PTCIS still come to our churches seeking understanding and support to recover from the wounds that have been administered and which have led to trauma.  Can we offer them the experience of healing to replace the trauma that the Church has inflicted on them?